As you likely well know, 2014 has been the year of films by and for Christians. Some add Darren Aronofsky’s Noah to the list, but that film wasn’t exactly faithful to the Bible, and Aronofsky is a Jewish agnostic, so it doesn’t really count. The latest offering, in theaters now, is Moms’ Night Out, a comedy that soft-sells its Christian assumptions, and it is doing decent business at the box office.

Christians haven’t exactly been known for artistic excellence in recent American history. A plausible reason for this is that Christians at some point last century decided to leave large swaths of American culture to the heathens (a complicated and interesting story), and basically started communicating with themselves in the arts, entertainment, education, media, etc. Because it was an insulated community the demand for excellence that competition brings hasn’t existed, thus mediocrity was more often than not the result.

At some point in the last ten years Christians, along with other conservatives, started coming out of their isolation and have seen the importance of areas of the culture that profoundly influence how Americans think and see the world, one of those being entertainment. This is a welcome phenomenon, and not just because I’m a Christian and want to see my worldview represented and respected in our popular entertainment. It is important because monolithic anything is not good, not healthy for a society. Modern liberals are fond of something called diversity, as long as it is not diversity of thought. And this different perspective in film, especially because it affirms the traditional and religious, is especially gratifying because it so annoys liberals.

So I find this movie is something of a cultural Rorschach test, and a very good example of this can be found at Rotten Tomatoes. At that website they have a graphic that shows how film critics rate a movie compared to how the website users, aka audience, rate the movie. There is always a disparity because those who watch movies for a living have a different lens through which they watch movies than your average audience member. Mom’s Night Out is an especially stark example of this.

The family and I saw God’s Not Dead, and the critics/audience divide is just as stark. We loved the movie, and not because it was the greatest piece of movie making ever, but because it was done well, professionally, and it’s one of the few times on the big screen that our faith and worldview are not mocked, dismissed or ignored. Hollywood is a bottom line place, and in that sense studios and producers are not nearly as ideologically liberal as critics, who can afford to be. They may be just as secular and liberal as the critics, but when a two million dollar investment (God’s Not Dead) brings in almost 60 million at the box office, ideology gets thrown out the window. And Hollywood is finally waking up to the box office potential of conservative evangelical and Catholic movie goers.

Critics absolutely hate such movies, while audience members love them. Part of this disparity is likely due to the makeup of the audience for this type of movie, generally people who are Christians and want to like it. I haven’t seen Mom’s Night Out, but I most definitely will because I want to see where I might fit on this spectrum. The problem is not only that critics are predisposed to dislike such a movie, but overwhelmingly secular and liberal that they are, they simply cannot be anything approaching objective.

For them a movie that celebrates motherhood, the family (not the “modern” kind) and faith is just too grating on their sensibilities. As you can see, audience members who likely celebrate motherhood, the family and faith loved the movie. Is it the job of a movie critic to be so beholden to their ideological predispositions that they lose all sense that some people might enjoy what they don’t like? Are they at all able to get beyond their condescension to people of faith and judge a movie fairly? In this case, and others, it doesn’t look like it.