So both of these are correct as far as they go but they're describing the cultural-theological side of the thing and not the part I find more interesting, which is that "Christian media" — the specific commercial category, the genre signal — is downstream of a piece of physical retail infrastructure that no longer exists.
The Christian Booksellers Association was founded in 1950. 219 stores. By the 1990s there were thousands.
In 2017 Family Christian Stores, the largest Christian retail chain in the country at 240 locations across 36 states, declared bankruptcy and closed everything, laid off three thousand-plus people. In 2019 LifeWay — the Southern Baptist-affiliated chain, 170 stores, in operation since 1891 — closed every brick-and-mortar location and went online-only. Cokesbury (Methodist-affiliated, 38 stores) had already gone in 2013. The whole physical retail layer is, as of right now, basically Mardel (which is owned by Hobby Lobby) and a long tail of dying independents.
This matters more than it sounds.
Because the thing wariteres is describing — the McGee and Me / VeggieTales / Adventures in Odyssey / Focus on the Family Radio Theatre / christian rock and metal moment — was not just a cultural moment. It was a distribution channel.
The Christian bookstore was the infrastructure that made the category possible. The bookstore is what defined what counted as "Christian media" in the first place: it was Christian media if it could be sold at the Christian bookstore, which meant clearing whatever de facto content standards the store buyers (mostly evangelical, mostly suburban, mostly trying to keep parents from complaining) were applying that quarter — no smoking, no drinking, no sex, no excessive violence, no demons-as-protagonists, no Catholic mysticism, nothing that would get them yelled at by the local pastor whose congregation made up half their customer base.
The Exorcist could not be sold at the Christian bookstore. The Exorcist therefore is not Christian media, in the operative sense, regardless of who wrote the source novel. The classification is not about the work. It's about the channel.
(This is exactly the same dynamic as why "exploitation film" doesn't mean what you'd think etymologically — it means a film that played the grindhouse circuit, regardless of its content, which is why you have like Bergman-tier art films that are technically exploitation because of where they distributed and Roger Corman pictures that technically aren't. The category is the venue.)
So the OP's exploitation-film comparison is even sharper than they're making it. Both categories are defined entirely by their distribution infrastructure. Both have a reputation for being mostly low-quality because the channel had specific economic logic — high volume, low budgets, audience that would buy product because they wanted the genre signal itself and not because the work was good. The rare prestige outlier is held to have transcended the genre, which is another way of saying the genre is defined by the channel and not by the content.
VeggieTales is the cleanest case. Phil Vischer was specifically trying to make something that could be sold at the Christian bookstore and be actually good, which created the famous tension that bankrupted Big Idea — the production values got high enough (they tried Jonah in 2002, it underperformed) that the unit economics of CBA-channel distribution couldn't support them anymore. Big Idea collapsed in 2003 and got bought by Classic Media for $19M, then DreamWorks Animation in 2012, then NBCUniversal/Comcast in 2016. Vischer had built the thing for the bookstore. The bookstore couldn't carry the thing he'd built.
Anyway, here's the thing. The bookstore collapse happened during the same five-year window — 2013 to 2019 — as the Christian media industry was also trying to figure out what it was supposed to be in the streaming era. So you get this very specific period of institutional thrashing where the old infrastructure dies faster than the new infrastructure can replace it.
What replaces it is interesting and not what you'd guess.
Two things, mostly. First, the major studios figure out there's enough money in the niche to keep an in-house faith-based shingle. Sony has Affirm Films, set up in 2007, which has put out Heaven Is for Real, Risen, Miracles from Heaven, War Room. Lionsgate has its partnership with Kingdom Story Company (the Erwin brothers' outfit, the I Can Only Imagine / Jesus Revolution people). These are Hollywood divisions that figured out a $5-15M faith-targeted picture with church-group buyouts and a built-in audience is one of the most reliable ROI structures in the post-streaming theatrical economy.
Second thing, and this is the one I find most interesting from the institutional angle. Angel Studios. The Chosen, Sound of Freedom, His Only Son, Cabrini.
Angel Studios is the rebranded VidAngel.
VidAngel was a Utah company (the Harmon brothers, four of them, Mormon) that started in 2013 as a content-filtering service. You bought a DVD through their system, they applied filters you selected (no profanity, no nudity), they streamed you the filtered version for a dollar. The family-friendly market wants Hollywood content but with the Hollywood parts taken out, and there's real consumer demand for this but no legal way to provide it without studio cooperation, which the studios will not give because their directors hate it. CleanFlicks tried this in the early 2000s with physically re-edited DVDs and got sued out of existence by the DGA in 2006. VidAngel was the digital descendant.
In 2016 four major studios (Disney, Warner, Fox, Lucasfilm) sued VidAngel for DMCA violation, VidAngel claimed protection under the Family Movie Act, the courts disagreed, VidAngel went into Chapter 11 in 2017, settled in 2020 for $9.9M (down from a $62M judgment), and emerged having pivoted out of filtering and into production and distribution. Angel Studios is a Christian media company because the original Christian media company they'd been trying to build — a filtering layer over secular content — got destroyed by the secular content owners.
So they had to make their own content. They fund it through equity crowdfunding — the Angel Guild, retail investors who buy in for a few hundred bucks at a time, the same Reg CF / Reg A+ structure used for startup biotechs that can't raise from VCs. The Chosen's first season was the largest crowdfunded film project in history when it raised $10M+ in 2018. Sound of Freedom's P&A budget — $5M in two weeks from seven thousand investors, paid back at 120% within three months because the picture grossed $250M worldwide.
This is structurally a different industry from the CBA-bookstore model. The bookstore was B2C retail with gatekeeping done by store buyers. The Angel model is direct-to-investor crowdfunding with gatekeeping done by Guild members voting on trailers. Same audience. Different infrastructure.
And once the channel changes, the content that fits the channel changes, because the gatekeeping function moves. The old gatekeeping was "will this offend the suburban evangelical mom shopping at Family Christian on a Saturday?" The new gatekeeping is "will the Angel Guild approve a trailer?" These are not the same filter.
Cabrini, Angel's 2024 picture about the Italian Catholic missionary saint Frances Cabrini, would not have cleared Family Christian. It's a Catholic hagiography. The Catholic stuff is on the screen. The Angel Guild approved it on the trailer because the trailer showed nuns running orphanages in tenements, and that reads as "moral content" to the new gatekeepers in a way that didn't matter to the old ones, who would have been hung up on the Catholicism. (Bonhoeffer, 2024, Lutheran. His Only Son, weirdly grim Old Testament theology that would have made evangelical bookstore buyers nervous in like 1995.) The post-bookstore Christian media industry can be substantially more ecumenical than the bookstore-era one could, because the bottleneck is in a different place.
Which loops back around to The Exorcist.
Friedkin's film could not have cleared the CBA channel in 1973 and cannot clear it in 2025 (which is mostly defunct anyway). But it could probably clear an Angel Guild vote, if it were being pitched today as a debut, because a Catholic horror film in which the priests win is exactly the kind of thing a contemporary investor base of religious retail-investors would actually want made, and they would not be screened by a midwestern bookstore buyer anxious about complaints from her pastor.
What's changing isn't the theology of the audience or its willingness to watch difficult content. The audience for The Passion of the Christ in 2004 is basically the same audience that watches Angel Studios pictures in 2024. What's changing is which institutions sit between the audience and the work, and what those institutions are trying to optimize for. The bookstore was trying not to lose customers. The studio shingle is hitting a quarterly box-office target. The crowdfunding platform is maximizing Guild member engagement and reinvestment.
These optimize for different things. They produce different content.
Same as it ever was, sort of. The Protestants pick a vernacular, the vernacular wins, and a generation later you can't tell where the religion ended and the entertainment industry began.
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