Religious themes are now thoroughly mainstream on screen
It’s a screen drama, due for release in three weeks’ time, that seems likely to stand as one of the cultural highlights of 2022. And its title has a double meaning: Mass relates both to fatalities from an American school shooting and to the service at the Episcopalian church that is the film’s single location, where a meeting room has been hired for a truth and reconciliation session between two couples whose children were centrally involved in the massacre.
Full discussion of the film, featuring extraordinary work by debut writer-director Fran Kranz and actors Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Ann Dowd and Reed Birney, should wait until its release this month; but a film that deals with the issues of forgiveness and redemption in a Christian context (albeit with broader application), and in which a crucifix on the wall is visible in most scenes, confirms the continuation of a striking recent trend.
Because those who lament modern secularisation often cite a decline in religious broadcasting. So-called “God slots” – reserved, through internal and external (the regulator Ofcom) rules, for faith programming – have progressively reduced. Holy programming is now almost wholly a BBC preserve, and mainly on Radio 4 (Sunday, Sunday Worship, Something Understood, The Moral Maze). BBC TV has Songs of Praise in a slot of reduced prominence and, for the festival seasons, a fecund supply of travelogues in which moderately well-known people undertake quasi-pilgrimages.
