Photograph by Will Crooks for The New Yorker
Jesus Christ, as he is portrayed by the actor Jonathan Roumie in the TV series “The Chosen,” dances and makes plenty of jokes. The show, which premièred in 2019 and streams on Amazon Prime (and on The Chosen app), tells the story of Jesus and his disciples. A sixth season (which covers the Crucifixion), will be released this fall, and was funded by a hundred thousand people, who donated more than seventy million dollars to the production.For a fascinating piece in this week’s issue, Rachel Monroe dives into the world of “The Chosen,” which is helping to usher in a new era of Christian filmmaking. When the first two episodes of Season 3 were shown in movie theatres, in 2022, they outperformed every other film—apart from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”—on a per-screen basis.During her reporting, Monroe visited ChosenCon, the show’s annual convention, and met some of the thousands of fans who attended. She also spoke with its creator, director, co-writer, and executive producer, Dallas Jenkins, who gave her a tour of the show’s sprawling production complex, in Midlothian, Texas. The sets include a scaled-down version of the fishing village where Jesus lived for a while and a pond that serves as the Sea of Galilee. Jenkins is “a tall, chiselled cold-plunge devotee in his early fifties,” Monroe reports, whose father became an evangelical celebrity for writing the “Left Behind” series of novels about the end times, inspired by the Book of Revelation. On social-media live streams, Jenkins and his wife connect with fans and solicit donations.“With the decline in churchgoing,” Monroe writes, “observant Christians are now members of a distinct subculture, one that can be targeted by marketers who speak the idiom of faith.” Fans are invested in what shows get made, and are convinced of their mutual dependence. “They couldn’t make it without us,” a woman in her eighties tells Monroe at ChosenCon, “which is why I bought a shirt, and a cup, and another cup.”Jenkins is at work on a series based on the Book of Acts, and another about Moses, whom he envisions as “a reluctant Tony Soprano” with a speech impediment. The enthusiasm for religious content has prompted more of the same: Mel Gibson’s sequel to “The Passion of the Christ”; two seasons of “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”; an Old Testament fantasy on Prime Video. Hollywood seems to be realizing that, as Monroe writes, “Christian audiences, both sizable and primed to evangelize to others, are in some ways an ideal market.”Read or listen to the story »This Week’s IssueCover by Mark Ulriksen
