In the past few years, viewers worldwide have been binge-watching a new TV show with an old story—the ministry of Jesus. The Chosen has been seen by millions of people, becoming one of the most beloved pieces of contemporary Christian media in decades.
Dallas Jenkins, the creator, director and co-writer of the show, spoke with Outreach editor-at-large Paul J. Pastor to discuss his rocky path to Christian filmmaking, the inspiring crowdfunded success of a show about Jesus, and how all of us can tell better stories.
Dallas Jenkins: The Interview
Dallas, I’m grateful you’d make time to speak to us in the middle of filming the next season of The Chosen.
Absolutely. I’ve really appreciated Outreach [the parent company of Outreach magazine] over the years. Honestly, The Chosen was birthed at a church. I’ve always had a heart for the local church and a marriage between church and media. This feels very natural.
Let’s start with your personal story. Talk to me about your background, your early faith and what led to you entering creative work.
Well, many readers will know that my dad is Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind books. His work has been if not formal ministry, at least a Christian calling his whole life. I was raised in the middle of that, with a very strong, evangelical, conservative upbringing for home, church and school. But when I got to middle school and high school, my dad opened up a bit of a wider side of himself that he wanted to share. He revealed to me that he was a huge movie buff. Up until that point, he didn’t emphasize that much. In fact, he kind of protected me from it because he was trying to raise me in a safe, innocent environment as much as possible—and young kids aren’t ready for a lot of what’s on the big screen.
But once he believed I was old enough to start being introduced to some of the great movies, it became a great time of bonding between us. Over one summer he started showing me some of the real cinematic classics, like The Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde, which had remarkable stories at their core, even though they had elements in them that required some discernment. And when I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that’s when the direction of my life changed.
I am intrigued. Go on.
Well, at the time I was a big sports freak and wanted to be a sports broadcaster. And we got to the scene in Cuckoo’s Nest where Jack Nicholson is denied the opportunity to watch the World Series, so he broadcasts a fake game just to get himself and the other inmates excited. The scene was so moving. It was so powerful. I was completely overwhelmed. I wanted to tell stories that move people like that one moved me.
So that was the beginning of me asking, Wait a minute. How come there’s nothing like that that actually comes from a faith perspective? There had been like one movie every five years that would come out that churches would watch. Movies like The Hiding Place or a Billy Graham movie or things like that. But I remember they were never nearly as good as “the good stuff.” So, I thought, Boy, that would be really cool if you could make stuff that was that good but also came from a perspective of faith or telling my story or telling Christian stories of some kind.
What shaped your thinking about the integration of your faith and your moviemaking?
I began a kind of a parallel path to try to figure it out. I went to a Christian college. I never left or strayed from the roots of my faith, but I was also trying to figure out how to incorporate media and entertainment into that faith in a balanced, nuanced way.
I noticed that in evangelical spaces there’s often very little room for not only the encouragement of creating quality media or entertainment as a calling, but even for watching it. I discovered that my family had been a bit of an outlier in that my dad just truly loved well-made movies and TV. When I went to college, I was finding that not only was there not a whole lot of encouragement toward doing it, there wasn’t even much encouragement toward thoughtfully watching it.
Now, there are reasons for that. I mean, I understand that there are lots of movies and television shows that are great, but if watched improperly or unthoughtfully can be damaging to the mind. They can violate some of the standards of the Gospels and of Paul’s letters about filling your mind with things that are good. But I do think that there are ways to engage maturely with complex media as Christians.
I remember realizing while in college that if someone’s going to be a missionary, they don’t just go and quote Bible verses and preach. They understand the culture. They absorb it as much as possible. They’re in the world but not of it. There are so many classes and chapel services and books on how to understand and work within any culture that you’re trying to influence. And it became very clear to me that the most influential medium in the world was film.
I thought, The most important message in the world deserves the most influential medium in the world. I began to think of myself as a missionary to the culture of media. Any real missionary will find themselves amidst settings, circumstances, people and conversations that typically they might not engage in within Christian circles. But proximity and relationship are what it takes to have an impact while not compromising the message or the gospel. I wanted to do the same thing in media. I wanted to study the greatest influencers in film, and understand what it is that makes their work powerful.