‘The Chosen’ director to Latter-day Saints: Loosen up

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‘The Chosen’ director to Latter-day Saints: Loosen up

The director of the indie streaming hit “The Chosen” recently gave Latter-day Saints a bit of tough love when it comes to their worship style and portrayals of Jesus.

“I feel like it’s OK for me to say this because, as you know, I’m the honored evangelical mascot of the LDS Church,” filmmaker Dallas Jenkins said in an interview on the podcast “followHIM.” “I would say that there’s such a reverence and there’s such a genuine respect for Christ, which is great. You guys probably do that better than evangelicals do.”

Then came the pivot.

“But,” Jenkins told his Latter-day Saint hosts, popular authors and speakers Hank Smith and John Bytheway, “sometimes it can lead to a formality.”

The director didn’t say this kind of formality can be alienating. Nevertheless, the subtext was there, The Salt Lake Tribune reports.

“I’ve seen it in paintings,” Jenkins said. “I’ve seen it in some of the LDS videos and portrayals of Christ. … He looks and sounds like he’s quoting the King James Bible, which he is. And again, this comes from a good place of honoring scripture.”

In contrast, it’s the human moments — he and his hosts agree — that have made his show, a retelling of the New Testament’s Gospels, meaningful to a global audience who have taken up the challenge to “binge Jesus.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ view of reverence is hardly new, nor is it by accident. For decades, its youngest members have sung “reverently, quietly, lovingly we think of thee.”

The church’s handbook for lay leaders uses “reverent” to describe how meetings ought to be conducted, connecting the term to “quiet prayer and pondering.”

According to the late historian Ardis Parshall, then-apostle Spencer W. Kimball once complained that the Saints were guilty of singing church hymns too fast.

Church-approved paintings of Jesus, meanwhile, for years were largely limited to the unsmiling and statuesque.

That might be changing, with church-owned Deseret Book increasingly adopting diverse and down-to-earth portrayals of the religious figure and the adoption of a handful of spirituals into the faith’s ever-evolving new hymnbook.

Apostle Patrick Kearon, a convert, has also prodded his fellow members to permit themselves a bit more, well, exuberance in meetings.

“We are members of the church of joy!” the British leader encouraged listeners in a 2024 General Conference sermon. “And nowhere should our joy as a people be more apparent than when we gather together each Sabbath in our sacrament meetings to worship the source of all joy!”

Jenkins agreed, especially when it comes to Christianity’s holiest day, Easter, the celebration of the resurrection.

“I would say it’s OK to express as much joy, or more, in the resurrection of your Savior as it is the student that hit a half-court shot that I just saw at the [Brigham Young University] game on Friday,” Jenkins said. “I saw all these LDS folks just going crazy. So I know you can do it. It’s OK to do it in the context of the greatest moment in the history of the world.”

This story was produced by The Salt Lake Tribune and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.