Some folks wonder why someone with a pick-and-mix magpie set of religious/spiritual beliefs like me is willing to come to the defense of Christians, especially evangelical Christians, so often. Well, here's why. Look through that site. Watch the trailer. Play the game. See what I mean.

Saved may be about high school seniors, but the take on Christianity is simply sophomoric. Sure, there's a lot of Christians who are overbearing in their faith--especially in high school. My middle school was right across from a Baptist church, and more often than not there was a man there handing out New Testaments to any kid who would take one, just the proper distance away from school property. One of my high school English teachers became very suspicious of me when I argued that the correct answer for Mephistopheles on a matching test could not be Satan. (I'd read Marlowe's Faustus, not just the class excerpt.) Believe me, I can go head-to-head in a "silly stories about Christians" contest with anyone who hasn't attended Bob Jones University. (Though most stories are going untold here because some of my high school friends may be reading.)

But here's the thing: no one I knew in high school, be they Christian, Jewish, Pagan, or atheist, was particularly wise in the ways of the world: we were teenagers. I look back on the screed I wrote in those days and can't escape the immediate realization that, completely without any form of divine intervention whatsoever, I was an insufferable tosser. (Plus ça change...--Ed.) And what's worse, I was an insufferable atheist tosser.

Now, Hollywood is never going to put the character that was me into a movie. There's never going to be a movie with the worldly-wise nerd who was oh-so-eager to 'disprove' any argument based on faith that ever came my way. No bigwig producer will ever bother to have Macaulay Culkin spout half-understood (and consistently misspelled) Nietzsche to people who were just trying to get on with their spiritual lives. And it wasn't just me: no scene will ever be written with students doing 'pagan' ceremonies around the flagpole just to mock other students who honestly wanted to hold prayer meetings. The Christians weren't the only folks who were nuts back at my alma mater. These days, I try to explain the memory to myself as raging hormones and insecurity.

I grew with time and the benefit of a lot of patience from some very good people of a type who don't seem to get a look-in in Saved. They were patient, accepting, and 'tolerant' in a real way, not the nihilistic, valueless sense in which the word is so often thrown about. So when I see that kind of lampooning--the kind that wouldn't be acceptable in a major Hollywood movie for just about any other group--I'll admit it gets my back up. I guess that Brian Dannelly and Michael Urban, the pair who brought us this concoction, just never got out of high school.