Early on in the movie A Great Awakening (Sight & Sound Films, 2026), there’s a scene that unexpectedly brought tears to my eyes. The characters are a young Ben Franklin, around age 12, and his father, a candle maker. Mr. Franklin tells Ben (who is helping with the candles even though it clearly bores him) that among his 17 children, Ben’s birth order is special to him. He says something to him like, “Ben, you are my tenth son, my tithe given to the Lord. When you were born, I dedicated you to God.” By which he means that he’s hoping Ben will become a minister or preacher, but Ben doesn’t want to do this. Soon after, Ben is offered the chance to move to Boston to work in his brother’s print shop—and the rest is quite literally American history.
I cry pretty easily at movies, but even so, I wondered as I watched this scene: Why am I even getting weepy over this? It wasn’t because of the tender, well-acted incident between father and son, or the fact that Ben would soon be allowed to “follow his heart,” or that his father was kind and understanding rather than harsh or domineering.
No, it was simply this: Mr Franklin was talking to his son as a Christian father would talk (especially back in the 1700s). He was speaking about God, his relationship with God, and promises that he had made to God in sincere, unapologetic, unironic, and non-cringy ways. It was an everyday conversation that you could easily imagine as just one of many similar conversations held in the Franklin household.
Just think about that: God was a part of the Franklins’ everyday life. Jesus was a person they knew and discussed. Prayer was brought up often. How they lived their lives and made their decisions took God, the Bible, and their spiritual lives into consideration. So I cried a little, because—finally, sitting in a movie theater—I could identify with this aspect of the people on the screen.
Modern media of all kinds has serious issues with Christian representation. Christians are either entirely absent (everyone is living their lives without one single reference ever to God or anything related to God) or the portrayal is negative (the “Christian” character can be relied upon either for comic relief or to be the most hypocritical or generally offensive character in the story). The conspicuous absence of Christians, or the negative stereotypes portrayed, do not represent my own life, or the lives of almost any Christian I personally know.
While there have been great strides lately in the quality of Christian-made or Christian-friendly films (besides A Great Awakening, I’d add Jesus Revolution and Soul on Fire to that list), it’s still hard to find a mainstream movie that resonates with me as a Christian. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy many secular movies—I do. But I’m so accustomed to not “seeing myself” or “hearing myself” on screen (in the diversity sense: seeing or hearing characters that reflect my own experience) that I just take it for granted that I’m not going to see anyone praying, talking about Jesus, reading the Bible, going to church, acknowledging God at life’s critical moments, or using Christian phrasing that I use and hear frequently in my own life.
We can’t expect to see accurate depictions of Christians in movies from secular (and quite often anti-Christian) Hollywood movie makers—that’s never going to happen, and it’s probably just as well. It’ll take actual Christians who create actually good movies to get more characters on screen who resonate with real-world Christians and their families today. Characters who naturally use words like “tithe” (as Mr. Franklin did), or who naturally pray or read their Bibles, or who go to church or talk about faith in a genuine way with one another.
So yes, when I heard the way that Mr. Franklin talked to his son in this movie, I got a little teary. Finally, here was someone who reflected the everyday kind of Christian speech, beliefs, and family life that I could identify with … more than 250 years later in the country that Ben Franklin himself helped to build.
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The photos above are screenshots of Mr. Franklin and young Ben in the scene that was minor in the movie, but that made a big impact on me. Also, the movie is historically accurate in most ways, including the fact that Ben Franklin himself was a deist, but not necessarily a Christian. His specific religious beliefs are left somewhat ambiguous in the movie, just as they were in his life.
Great and Noble Tasks 