Showing the movie is AMC's Christmas nod to us Christians, no doubt.

The film is enough to make a politically correct person wretch. Marshall was a decent man with lofty principles, and is portrayed as a positive role-model. In one scene he tells the congregation at his church that salvation though Christ is the most important message there is. When he prays, it is in Jesus' name.

Who would produce such a decent movie? 20th Century Fox!

When you view the film, you realize how America has disintegrated as a culture. The values people fought and died for in WWII are certainly not the values of today. Would they have been so willing to spill their blood if they would have had a premonition of present-day America?

Today, New Line Cinema is pushing "The Nativity Story" on Christians. With envy over Mel Gibson's success with "The Passion of the Christ"  and the success of "Lord of the Rings," which they financed, they are trying to fob off this rather plain movie as something special.

Reviews of the film were decidedly mixed, according to a survey by abpnews.com. For instance, the New York Times' A.O. Scott praised the film's "quiet, unassuming professionalism" in faithfully retelling the ancient birth narrative. But Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post labeled it a "drab exercise in glum piety" that "slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality."

On two websites that compile and average ratings from a number of film critics, the average review for the film was middling. On Rottentomatoes.com, for instance, The Nativity Story ended up with an average rating of 5.5 out of 10. On Metacritic.com, the film received 52 out of 100 possible points, abpnews.com reported.

The film has also been tainted in the minds of some by the revelation that the 16 year-old girl who played Mary, New Zealander Keisha Castle-Hughes, is pregnant by her 19-year old boyfriend.

In a real affront to many Christians, Marty Bowen, producer of The Nativity Story said that she was dismayed that the movie only pulled in $8 million during it's opening week.

She said, "“Now finally a Hollywood studio has stepped up and put their money where their mouth is and has committed to making and releasing a movie, not on a couple of screens but rather on a very big very large fashion – more than three-thousand screens around the country -- and giving the audience what they say they want and yet that sense of urgency in that audience isn’t there to go and see it."

Bowen really tried to lay on the guilt by saying, "What is disappointing is you hear people talk about how we can make movies better but if you don’t go see them when they are presented to you, Hollywood’s never going to do it again."

What a load of... hype. If she wanted better box office, she should have made a better movie.

In my view, people like Bowen are like the Sorcerer in Acts 8:14-25. They see the power and they want to buy it. But they don't understand it cannot be bought and sold, so of course they fail, then they complain.

They think they have it made by lining up "big name" evangelicals and selling tickets en masse to churches. But we Christians are not as dumb as movie moguls like to think. No amount of hype is going to get us to see a so-so movie.

Evangelical leaders who helped hype this movie hurt themselves and did a disservice to evangelicals at large.

And filmmakers who think they can produce stuff like this and think we'll rave about it just because of its Christian content should think again. We Christians are people, not just another "target market."

--DLH