In 37 years of writing for the Deseret News, I have never specifically stated in a column or review — or any other kind of story — whether I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And why would I? It’s irrelevant to the work I do.
True, the Deseret News is owned by the LDS Church, but one needn’t be a Mormon to work there. In fact, during all the years I worked in the Salt Lake offices of the newspaper, fully half — or more — of the staff was made up of employees who either were not Mormons or were nonpracticing members.
Of course, because I write about movies and express my personal opinions, and since I occasionally opine on films and TV shows with Mormon aspects of some sort, it’s been pretty easy to connect the dots.
Anyway, given the subject of this particular column, I’ve decided to out myself: Yes, I’m LDS, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
It only seems fair to do this before I complain about a new movie that is based on the true story of a faithful LDS Church member but is apparently distancing itself from that affiliation.
“Just Let Go,” which opened last weekend, is the story of Salt Lake area resident Chris Williams and how he embraced the biblical commandment to forgive after a teenage drunken driver crashed into the car Williams was driving, taking the lives of his wife, their unborn child, and another son and daughter. (They also had another young son in the car who survived and a teenage son who was not with them.)
As a film, “Just Let Go” has a lot of problems, not the least of which is the decision by directors/co-screenwriters Christopher S. Clark and Patrick Henry Parker to rely on technical tricks they’ve apparently seen in too many other movies — shuffling the timeline, using home movies as a sort of found-footage/memory device, and falling back too often on slow-motion, jump cuts, blurry shots, etc., all of which undermines any intimacy they were hoping to achieve.
As a result, “Just Let Go” is aloof and sometimes annoying. Which is too bad because Williams’ message of forgiveness is an important one. This is a movie I fully expected to embrace.
But what really puzzles me is the decision to make Williams’ character a faithful member of some other unnamed church — one that is obviously, even aggressively, not LDS.
In real life, Williams, who wrote the autobiographical book “Just Let Go,” on which the movie is based, was a Mormon bishop overseeing an LDS congregation, and among his duties was counseling members of his flock in times of distress and grief — an unpaid position that he held in addition to working a full-time job.
In the movie, Williams does have a job of some sort. We even see him attending a business meeting, though his workplace and what he does are never identified.
There’s also a brief scene of Williams in a suit and tie, sitting at a desk with a Bible, offering counsel to someone. And there is also a moment when he refers to himself as a “preacher.”
Eventually, the real giveaway arrives: We hear the ringing of bells as the front of Williams’ church is shown with a large cross on the building.
Mormons do not use or display the cross, and there are no clanging steeple bells to be heard. And at the end of the film, when the credits roll, there’s a thank-you to a Presbyterian church in Utah County.
Williams’ faith and the decision he made to forgive the young man who brought him such extreme trauma and grief is so intertwined with his membership in the LDS Church and his role as a congregant leader that it seems weird to leave all that out.
But to then show a church that is obviously not LDS is just misleading, and perhaps an indication that the filmmakers are indeed embarrassed by the Mormon connection.
One might argue that they simply wanted to reach a wide audience with the important gospel message that to forgive isn’t just divine but is in fact a commandment for followers of Jesus Christ, and that they felt the Bible Belt crowd might avoid the film if it was revealed to be Mormon-centric.
If that’s the case, there are ways to be subtle without switching faiths.
T.C. Christensen’s “The Cokeville Miracle,” to name one example, never identifies any of the characters as LDS, although the events depicted in the film happened in a largely Mormon community. And late in the film when people are shown attending church, the meeting and the building are clearly LDS.
Clearly, that is, to LDS Church members. Others might take it to be any Christian church. But at least in “Cokeville,” there is no deliberate misdirection to make the audience think it’s a different faith.
If “Just Let Go” had decided to go in that direction, I’d have chosen another subject for this column. But to say that a faith film is true (which it does at the beginning) and then switch out one religion for another, that’s something else.
Maybe these guys should watch some of the Christian movies made by the Kendrick Brothers, especially “War Room” and “Courageous,” arguably the most successful of the many independently produced faith films.
Their movies don’t dwell on the characters being Baptists, but they also aren’t afraid to have their films say so.
Chris Hicks is the author of "Has Hollywood Lost Its Mind? A Parent’s Guide to Movie Ratings." He also writes at www.hicksflicks.com and can be contacted at hicks@deseretnews.com.