Home Christian News ‘Redeeming Love’ Movie Releases—But Should Christians Go See It?

‘Redeeming Love’ Movie Releases—But Should Christians Go See It?

The rest of the movie tells the story of Michael loving and pursuing Angel, no matter how much she lashes out at him from her trauma or runs away from him to return to her past life. No matter what Angel does or how circumstances work against him, Michael always forgives people and always loves his wife. He remains steady, even when at one point he learns that his brother-in-law, Paul, pressured Angel into sleeping with him in exchange for Paul giving her a ride back to town. 

In the end, Angel learns to trust in God again. She escapes from a life of sexual slavery and returns to Michael, who never stops waiting for her, even years after she makes a new life for herself in San Francisco.

“Fiction is a tool, really, to draw people to the real thing—to a relationship with the Lord,” said Rivers in an interview about the film. “It’s really a picture of God’s love for us—the passion He has for us.”

Concerns About ‘Redeeming Love’

Phylicia Masonheimer is an author, blogger, and Bible teacher. In her podcast episode, “Should Christian Women Watch Redeeming Love?,” published Wednesday before the movie came out, Masonheimer did not push listeners to avoid the film. She did, however, outline serious concerns about “Redeeming Love” based on Scripture, her own experience, and stories she has heard from women about how the book has impacted them.

Masonheimer shared that she grew up in a solid Christian home, but was exposed to erotica at a young age. She struggled with an addiction to that type of pornography for some time before finding freedom from it. “I’m sharing my personal background and my passion for healthy, vibrant, confident female sexuality, because I am not a prude,” said Masonheimer. “I’ve been writing about this for years and I’m very open online both about my story and about positive female confidence and sexuality. And I believe that that’s God’s heart, and he’s a healing God and a redeeming God and his love is a ‘redeeming love.’ But I do have some very significant concerns with ‘Redeeming Love,’ the book and the movie.”

One of Masonheimer’s primary concerns about “Redeeming Love” is that it “qualifies as soft pornography.” The same can said for the film, which is rated PG-13 for “mature thematic content, sexual content, partial nudity, and strong violent content.” First, Christians should be aware of this if they are susceptible to struggling with pornography. And even if they are not, they need to ask themselves if they should be watching that type of content.

“Something to think about,” said Masonheimer, speaking specifically to women, “is if this scene were filmed, and it were taken out of the context of the story, and you found it on your husband’s laptop or your boyfriend’s laptop, how would you feel? Would you still justify it?” While Masonheimer said this before the movie’s release, it turns out to be a fair question to ask regarding two scenes in the film where Angel and Michael consummate their marriage.

“I have to tell you,” said Masonheimer, “it is so intriguing to me that the rise of Christian romance novels and soft pornographic content in such novels [in the 1990s] was coinciding with the reign of purity culture, in which we didn’t talk about sex and we didn’t have a healthy view of sex, and we didn’t even have a healthy view of our bodies for the most part. Yet these two things coincided. And I think that is not a coincidence at all.”

Secondly, Masonheimer voiced a concern that the book romanticizes trauma. As noted, Angel was sexually abused as a child. Particularly disturbing was a scene at the end of the film that occurs after Duke has recaptured Angel. Viewers hear Duke abusing two young girls off-screen while Angel recalls going through the same violence herself as a young girl.

When sexual trauma is part of a plot line meant to depict God’s love, the message conveyed can be confusing, said Masonheimer, particularly when Angel’s physical beauty is repeatedly emphasized. In the novel, Michael and Angel are both attractive, and so are the actors who portray them in the movie.