I suppose you could call me an Ex-Vangelical. I was a (lousy) Christian from the time I was 5 to the time I was 30. At 30 I thought: "Why am I doing this to myself? I don't particularly believe these things and I've never been happy or felt accepted at church." So I left. I now consider myself agnostic / atheistic.
When I was in middle or high school, I started noticing that all the stuff targeted towards Christians kinda fucking sucked. The Christian media world is full of horrible movies, music that all sounds the same, songs that could either be about your boyfriend or Jesus, and books that made even little baby Faint roll her eyes and stick her nose back into Dracula. (I was an odd child and I convinced my mother to let me read it somewhere during elementary school and she said yes because it was a classic.)
I was reminded of this earlier this month while watching Andy King's playlist on Christian "filmmaker" Donald James Parker.
Donald J Parker's movies are, well, bad. From the dialogue to the production quality to whatever the fuck DJP believes Christianity is, it's bad all the way down to the bottom. And it makes for some of the worst media I have ever experienced. The movies are full of Christian nationalist propaganda (he made a Trump fan movie that has a frankly generous one star on IMDB), racist rhetoric, and theology that I'm going to call "doctrinally unsound." They're slop, dangerous slop, but slop nonetheless.
I've also been watching a lot of Microwave Society lately because I love them. They're a group of former church kids who watch shitty kids media and make fun of it. Two recent gems have been We Couldn't Finish Finding Jesus... and We Watched AI Bible Slop... Finding Jesus is the lowest of low effort movies seemingly made in blender with mild contempt for its audience and AI Bible Slop is what seems like a fun new way to commit heresey. Either way, two more examples of Christian media that's low quality and fucking sucks.
But why? Christianity has always been very popular in America. Why can't they seem to make any good media? Luckily for you, dear reader, I've got some theories!
Note: This is very much only from my perspective and experiences growing up Northern Baptist. I welcome your takes and polite discourse / discussion via my email: faintlymacabre[at]proton[dot]me
Theory one is really simple: Christian children are encouraged to dedicate all of their endeavors to God and give Him all the credit. So, if you're going to be an artist, you're going to dedicate all of your work to your religion. This can cause stagnation because you're never branching out and learning new things, you're always making something under this strict framing.
I remember being a teenager and telling my mother that I was writing a scary story. She replied with: "Why don't you write something Christian?" [sic] (I don't remember her exact words, but this was the gist of what she meant.) And I fired back with: "I don't want to, why don't you?" and the conversation kinda degraded from there. I love my mother and she's since come to terms that I'm much more at home writing about vampires than I am about angels; but this conversation has always stuck with me because it shows how the arts are sometimes framed in Christian settings. They've gotta always be about Christianity in some shape or form.
In my opinion, this narrow worldview causes Christian artists to stagnate and not realize their full potential. There are exceptions. The always wonderful Wolfy is extremely talented and often uses their talents to draw scenes and people from the Bible. I'm especially fond of their art depecting Jesus and the disciples having fun during their travels. But for every Wolfy, there's a Donald J Parker.
Theory two has more to do with the content of the media than with its artistic expression. A lot of Christian art serves only one purposes: be a Christian alternative to secular media. You see this a lot in children's media. Going back to Finding Jesus, this is clearly meant to appeal to fans of Finding Nemo. Disney, of course, has its own problems and there are a myriad of reasons you wouldn't want to support them that don't involve being a Christian; but a lot of Christians are butt-hurt about Disney including diverse characters in their movies. YouTube is full of right wing grifters wailing at the top of their lungs that the trans guy buying pads in that one Baymax episode is the END OF EVERYTHING AS WE KNOW IT INCLUDING THE WORLD!!!!!! And parents who agree with them are looking for things their children can watch.
Enter Finding Jesus, a non-Disney alternative. I haven't watched the entire movie myself, but it was so bad that Microwave Society,a YouTube channel that made it through The Master of Disguise mostly unscathed, couldn't finish the it.
This is where theory two comes in: Find Jesus doesn't have to be good. It just has to be Christian. It only needs to exist as an alternative to media that contains messages that Christian parents don't want their children to see. Kids are stupid, right? They don't understand when things are good or bad, they just stare at their iPads and consume mindlessly.
(Okay, in 2026 that last statement is actually kind of true. But kids deserve better than whatever slop YouTube Shorts are serving up these days.)
"It just has to be Christian" has unfortunately led to a veritable sea of slop churned out yearly to appease the Evangelical masses. Since it has a built in fanbase of people who will buy it mindlessly just because of that one fact, it makes money and things that make money get made. Christians are left with the dregs of the media world because they settle for it. Because it's Christian. And that's all it needs to be.
In conclusion, yes there are good examples of Christian media. A lot of us fondly remember The Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis was Catholic and not Evangelical so that could have something to do with that) and other TV and book series from our childhoods. I still have a lot of love and nostalgia for Veggie Tales despite everything that I've been through during the process of deconstruction. But I didn't love it because it was Christian. I loved it because it was good.