An Open Letter: the Blasphemy of Hollywood’s Christ

the Blasphemy of Hollywood’s Christ

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” – Mark 8:36

A Lament for Minds Lost

Mr. Charles McNulty,

Your recent effusion over Cynthia Erivo’s portrayal of our Lord at the Hollywood Bowl provokes not so much righteous indignation—though that would be warranted—as it does a profound melancholy at witnessing the theatrical equivalent of a man drowning while proclaiming himself Neptune’s chosen ambassador. One observes in your review not only a critic celebrating a performance, but rather the breathless testimonial of a soul so thoroughly marinated in the fashionable heresies of our age that he mistakes sacrilege for sophistication.

Your opening gambit—that Erivo “established God the Savior as a queer Black woman, as many of us suspected might be the case all along“—reveals with startling clarity the theological poverty that masquerades as cultural enlightenment. This is not artistic interpretation, sir; this is a man attempting to improve the Mona Lisa with a crayon. The casual assumption that the eternal, unchanging God of scripture might be reconceived according to the sexual and racial preoccupations of Beverly Hills betrays such a fundamental misapprehension of God’s nature that one scarcely knows where to begin the remedial instruction.

The Ironic Dispensation of God’s Judgment

You write of “divine dispensation” allowing you to witness this travesty, apparently unaware of the irony embedded in your statement. Indeed, there is a divine dispensation at work here, though not the one you imagine. For God, in His wisdom, often permits men to be given over to the lusts of their hearts and the delusions of their minds—particularly when they have “changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man” (Romans 1:23). What you mistake for cultural progress is the latest iteration of that ancient rebellion whereby fallen men fashion gods in their own image rather than recognizing themselves as made in God’s image.

The spectacle you describe—complete with “pilgriming hordes” bearing wine for “Sicilian weddings” and jokes about the “Second Coming”—reads less like a review than an anthropological report from some postmodern Babylon. I suspect, based on your glowing review of this blasphemous tragedy, yourself and your ilk would have enjoyed Belshazzar and his “great feast” (Daniel 5). Drunk off your opportunity to virtue signal in its grandest form, your irreverence has become indistinguishable from worship. Furthermore, I presume, you refuse to see the handwriting on the wall.

The Tragedy of Inverted Values

Most heartbreaking of all is your evident delight in what you perceive as the production’s subversive power. You celebrate Erivo’s Jesus as “unmistakably modern yet incontestably timeless, abstract yet never disembodied,” apparently oblivious to the contradiction embedded in your own praise. How can something be simultaneously timeless and modern? How can the abstract avoid disembodiment? These are not only philosophical quibbles but indicators of a mind so thoroughly colonized by fashionable confusion that it has lost the capacity to distinguish sense from nonsense. I recognize this was your attempt at revealing both the divine as well as human nature of your new found theatrical deity, but you would not be the first son of the morning to fall short when attempting to counterfeit Christ.

The real tragedy here is not that Hollywood has produced another piece of theatrical blasphemy—one expects little else from that quarter—but that educated persons such as yourself mistake this poverty for richness, this confusion for clarity, this rebellion for revelation. You have become “men without chests,” capable of sophisticated technical analysis while remaining morally and spiritually perverse.

The Evangelical Imperative Amidst Cultural Decay

Yet even as one surveys this cultural wasteland, one is compelled not by hatred but by love—the same love that prompted our Lord to weep over Jerusalem when He beheld its approaching destruction. For behind your celebration of theatrical innovation lies a soul created in God’s image, a mind designed for truth, a heart fashioned for worship of the true and living God.

The Lord Jesus Christ whom you have seen caricatured upon the Hollywood stage is not some malleable cultural construct to be reshaped according to the prevailing prejudices of each generation. He is “the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8)—the eternal Word made flesh, who “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2). He is not seeking your approval of His casting choices; He is offering you forgiveness for your sins through His atoning sacrifice.

A Plea for Sanity

The Christ of Scripture—not the manufactured Christ of Hollywood’s vain imagination—stands ready to receive all who come unto Him in faith. But this requires acknowledging that He is who He claimed to be, not who we might prefer Him to be. It means recognizing that the Gospel is not subject to editorial revision by theater critics, however distinguished, and that truth is not determined by consensus among the cultural elite, however unanimous their approval.

One can only hope that you might one day experience the same “divine dispensation” that converted a persecutor named Saul on the Damascus road—not through theatrical pyrotechnics and cultural validation, but through the quiet, transforming power of truth piercing through the accumulated layers of fashionable deception. Until then, those of us who have found Christ to be “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) can only pray that God might grant you repentance unto the acknowledging of the truth, and that you might recover yourself out of the snare of the devil, having been taken captive so freely. The true Jesus Christ awaits your sincere inquiry, not your review.

In Christian charity and evangelical concern,
A Heartbroken Pastor

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” – Mark 8:36

Pastor Thomas Irvin
George County Baptist Church
Lucedale, Mississippi

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Note:
This article critically engages with and references Charles McNulty’s review, “‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ transcends in starry Hollywood Bowl celebration led by divine Cynthia Erivo,” published in the Los Angeles Times on August 4, 2025 (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-08-04/jesus-christ-superstar-review-hollywood-bowl-cynthia-erivo).

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