this is stuff you like and before we talk about Jesus Bro we need to talk
about pureflix and I kissed dating goodbye and old-fashioned you're so
excited I can tell the topic of the next video will be the patron requested Jesus
Bro which is a spoof of pureflix movies made by Brad Jones the cinema snob you
might have heard of him so if you want to be notified when the next video goes
up the subscribe button is down there right
but for Jesus bro to make sense for those of you fortunate enough never to
have heard of pureflix we're gonna need to do some explaining
pureflix is a producer of family-friendly and Christian
entertainment based in Arizona they do everything from films about Samson to
Christian mingle the movie which is still better than How to Lose a Guy in
10 days fight me they are also responsible for Old
Fashioned voted Christian movie of the Year 2015 by Focus on the Family
because apparently being inexplicable and creepy makes one wildly popular
though given the mainstream movies which are ditto and also wildly popular I
suppose I can't hoik my judgy pants too hard so to give you an insight into the
pureflix attitude to well everything we're gonna need some cultural
background I'm not part of the US evangelical Christian subculture
although I am a Christian but there is a part of it that I know a little bit more
than most about and that is the enduring cultural influence of seminal Christian
dating work I kissed Dating goodbye and it's follow-up boy meets girl
say hello to courtship. old-fashioned is romance in which the main male character
used to be a horrible woman exploiting softcore porn producer who's now an
antique shop owning supposedly women respecting Christian he rents out the
apartment above his shop to the main female character and over the course of
the movie they fall in love the old-fashioned way by which I mean he
refuses to be in a building alone with a woman he's not married to. also there are
work books. see I don't know if you know where this movie is getting its weird
ideas from but I do Billy Graham slightly but mostly Josh Harris I kissed
dating goodbye was a phenomenon in u.s. Christian circles. it was published
in 1997 and the author was 21 year old Joshua Harris who didn't really feel
comfortable with the way he had been conducting dating in his
teenage years he wanted to figure out how to spend his time as a single person
constructively and he also wanted to you know find a woman that he would like to
spend the rest of his life with and marry and he didn't think that dating as
he saw it practiced was a particularly good or efficient or well...godly way
to do it. which is fair enough I guess and it wasn't the worst book ever or
anything but it was taken up very enthusiastically by some churches to
give to the youth as a one true way of doing the dating. except it's not dating
anymore it's courtship. again Josh Harris was 21 years old when he wrote this book
it contains some weird stuff and it contains some ideas which were pretty
sensible but a lot of it was just common sense as in a lot of it was just the way
I saw my twenty-something Christian friends conducting relationships
generally this whole movie is very much in the vein of I kissed dating goodbye
which doesn't necessarily advocate that you are never alone in a room with
someone that you might like to smush faces with but might ask you to consider
leaving the door open or something. I kissed dating goodbye also advocates and
mercifully that is not present in the movie that you ask a girl's dad before
you court her. that last one is weird to a mainstream audience heck it's even
weird to mainstream Christian audience but to the subculture for whom these
movies are made it's you know maybe a little unusual but nothing really out of
the ordinary. As a British Christian who read this book in her early 20s because
we had a copy in the chaplaincy library it was weird
in fact the whole book was culturally weird to the point that I used to read
out the particularly hilarious parts to anyone within earshot. Now it's been a
really long time since I read either book but I'm pretty sure the red amber
green thing showed up in the sequel book it was more about the sort of things
that you were or weren't willing to do before you got married with someone that
you might be dating / courting like holding hands green snogging amber having
sex red you might be wondering what on earth this has to do with Jesus Bro but
bear with me. The point of the seeming digression is that I kissed dating
goodbye was and in some ways continues to be a huge part of the cultural
landscape of the people at whom this film is aimed
so while the books aren't referenced directly there are a few things in there
which will half remind an audience who half remembers the books or at least
half remembers hearing something about the books and promote a warm glow of
cultural belonging. red amber green I remember that! not being alone in a room
with a woman who wasn't your wife! yeah sorta remember that! being manly and
taking charge of dates! pretty sure I've heard that a lot of places but the film
borrows all of this I kiss dating goodbye type stuff without actually
thinking it through in a logical fashion and that is pureflix in a nutshell
really. our hero will not be alone in a room with a woman he is not married to
or related to but he's perfectly happy to be alone in a car with her or alone
in the great outdoors with her far away from other people. pureflix movies are
kind of like having Christian doctrine and culture explained to you by a bunch
of six-year-olds playing telephone. they play on this theme of old-fashioned
romance by putting in a rule about this guy who won't be alone in a room with a
woman he's not married to because they vaguely remember there was a book 10 15
20 years ago they might have read which had that in it I think but they don't
actually understand the rule or the reason for it. it's just window dressing
Christian window dressing but hey that's hardly unusual in entertainment right
you don't need logical plots or likeable characters or interesting conflicts you
just need to signal your surface level understanding of the culture you're
trying to attract because people are stupid right? it would have been really
easy for Jesus bro to do the exact same thing but for a different audience it
would have been easy to make it a shallow reference heavy spoof which
makes fun of the tropes without actually doing anything interesting with them it
would have been easy to make it a film which mocks Christians rather than the
dumb movies that people sell to Christians but it isn't it doesn't or at
least not very much so I'll see you in two weeks and we'll talk about that