The Chosen Is Delightful, Actually
In the darkest days of a world war, as England braced for invasion and conquest, a unique opportunity was presented to two great Christian writers. The BBC asked them to develop radio programming for listeners who had never before been so hungry to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was in response to this, of course, that CS Lewis broadcast the talks which would later become famous as the book Mere Christianity. Less well known is The Man Born to be King, a cycle of radio plays written by the brilliant novelist and scholar Dorothy L. Sayers. Produced and broadcast around Easter, these twelve plays dramatised the life of Christ in contemporary language, depicting the disciples who followed Jesus and the enemies who crucified him as ordinary people, just like us. Written with a formidable weight of theological study and insight, the plays are also engaging dramas that bring the Bible characters to three-dimensional life. Reading them, even after all this time, is both edifying and a real pleasure, and it’s easy to imagine listeners who had only ever encountered Jesus Christ through the archaic language and stuffy ritual of the Church of England suddenly meeting him as a living, breathing person, relevant to their own lives and struggles.
Fast forward eighty years to another dark moment in world history, during a pandemic which has to date killed half a million people worldwide, and we have The Chosen, a television series fictionalising the life of Jesus, now distributed by VidAngel. You may have heard of the show by now, but if you’ve hitherto discounted it as yet another unbearable, cheesy Christian production, I’d encourage you to think again. I can give no higher praise than this: Dorothy Sayers would have loved this show. The Chosen is this generation’s The Man Born to be King.
Season One consists of eight episodes, focusing on the early ministry of Jesus around Capernaum. In the first episode we are introduced to the focal characters, whose stories unfold across the course of the entire season. Lilith, a poor prostitute, is tormented and driven to the brink of suicide by mental illness and demon possession. Jairus, a wealthy and respected religious leader from Jerusalem, struggles with doubts in private even as he continues to preach Pharisaical orthodoxy in public. Matthew, a conscientious young tax collector who finds the work an outlet for his love of numbers, must face the scorn of his community as well as the corruption and self-interest of his Roman employers. And Simon, a reckless young fisherman in deep financial trouble, can’t seem to help digging himself deeper with every attempt to escape.
All of them, of course - together with others, like a couple of caterers at a Cana wedding, or an outcast Samaritan woman who dares not draw water in the cool of the day - are ultimately going to meet Jesus, and their lives will never be the same. If you’re a Christian watching the show, you already know how these climactic meetings will play out; but one of the things The Chosen excels at is showing you the long path leading up to those moments. The scriptwriting, by the way, is meticulous in laying the groundwork so that the big moments pay off with extraordinary emotional resonance. I should note that I am not well-placed to speak to the show’s production values, since I don’t have expertise in those areas, but purely in terms of writing, the show is beautifully done.
Naturally, this fictionalisation involves taking a deal of creative liberty, in terms of imagining backstories and personalities for the different characters - in Sayers’ plays, Matthew is a cheerfully vulgar Cockney (or in her own words, “a contemptible little quisling official”), while in The Chosen, he’s a puppy with Asperger’s - but the really brilliant thing this achieves is the same thing Sayers’ plays achieved, in terms of making the Gospel message relevant. The saviour of The Chosen comes to promise deliverance from sin primarily, but also has practical help for those suffering from mental illness, financial difficulty, marital problems, systemic misogyny, the strictures and hypocrisy of religious dogma, or simply the difficulties of doing business in a world where things go wrong. Jesus doesn’t even appear until the end of episode one, but I loved that the long wait is full of ordinary people having ordinary-people problems.
Jesus himself, like the rest of the characters, is wonderfully portrayed. (Insert obligatory disclaimer that no, the second commandment does not prohibit artistic depictions of the Incarnate Word, please catch up on the Second Council of Nicaea if that confuses you). VidAngel may be a Mormon outfit, but The Chosen pulls no punches in depicting Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God. Meanwhile, actor Jonathan Roumie plays Jesus with the kind of warm humour, pensive sorrow, and flashes of authority that readers of the Gospels would expect, and overall I was tremendously impressed with the standard of theological insight on show here. This becomes even more impressive when you realise that the show’s director and producer, Dallas Jenkins, is the son of a co-writer of the Left Behind books. Really. Apparently a number of different theologians were consulted in the making of the series, but I was impressed by the fidelity with which the show leans on Scripture to interpret Scripture, mining Jesus’ use of Old Testament passages to add all sorts of thematic richness to the story. The result is a rare work of religious art that never seems shallow or facile - and when you realise that the story is literally about God Incarnate going about healing and delivering people, that’s quite an achievement. I loved the moment in one episode in which Jesus cuts himself while working on a carpentry job. He quietly wraps up the injury and returns to work. There’s not a single line of dialogue, but it’s first of all true to who Jesus actually was (e.g., Matthew 4:1-11), and second of all an extraordinarily theologically rich moment with implications for such topics as the purpose of miracles and the nature of the Incarnation.
As a work of dramatic fiction, in fact, The Chosen is uniquely well placed to communicate the truth in a way that hews close to actual Biblical theology. The fact that the show appeals to people from all over the Christian spectrum (it has a vigorous Roman Catholic fandom!) is a feature of its artistic quality, not a bug. In her brilliant Introduction to The Man Born to be King, Sayers argued:
From the purely dramatic point of view the theology is enormously advantageous, because it locks the whole structure into a massive intellectual coherence. It is scarcely possible to build up anything lop-sided, trivial, or unsound on that steely and gigantic framework. Always provided, of course, that two conditions are observed. It must be a complete theology; never was there a truer word than that “except a man believe rightly he cannot” - at any rate, his artistic structure cannot possibly - “be saved.” A loose and sentimental theology begets loose and sentimental art-forms; an illogical theology lands one in illogical situations; an ill-balanced theology issues in false emphasis and absurdity. Conversely; there is no more searching test of a theology than to submit it to dramatic handling; nothing so glaringly exposes inconsistencies in a character, a story, or a philosophy as to put it upon the stage and allow it to speak for itself. Any theology that will stand the rigorous pulling and hauling of the dramatist is pretty tough in its texture. Having subjected Catholic theology to this treatment, I am bound to bear witness that it is very tough indeed. As I once made a character say in another context: “Right in art is right in practice”; and I can only affirm that at no point have I yet found artistic truth and theological truth at variance.
...Accordingly, it is the business of the dramatist not to subordinate the drama to the theology, but to approach the job of truth-telling from his own end, and trust the theology to emerge undistorted from the dramatic presentation of the story. This it can scarcely help doing, if the playwright is faithful to his material, since the history and the theology of Christ are one thing: His life is the theology in action, and the drama of his life is dogma shown as dramatic action.
Novels, dramas, and films have a significant role to play in the communication of dogma, and The Chosen is another perfect example of a story in which dogma and drama support one another.
Which is not to say that the series shies away from issues of a somewhat more fraught contemporary relevance. One of the many delightful and refreshing things about the show is its sensitive and thoughtful treatment of women and people of colour.
Let’s take the female characters. First of all, there are a lot of them - from Mary Magdalene to the woman at the well, from Mrs. Jairus to Simon’s wife Eden. All of them unique characters - with, oh my goodness, unique fashion profiles! The women in this series are wives, mothers, friends, businesswomen, disciples, outcasts, businesswomen, socialites, prostitutes, businesswomen...did I mention the women in this series who do business? Including the ultra-high-class wine merchant? (Heck, did I mention that there are prostitutes in this series, and that the wedding at Cana is not merely wet but positively inebriated? This ain’t your Baptist grandmother’s religious programming, but don’t worry - it’s still perfectly family friendly).
As with the other messages in this series, there are no anvils dropped about feminine worth. When Mary Magdalene invites Jesus to preside at her Shabbat dinner, he gently encourages her to go ahead with the readings herself as the head of her own household. When Simon’s wife puts on a brave face as she prepares to farewell the family breadwinner, Jesus stops to make some practical arrangements for her welfare and says, “I see you” as an explicit callback to a previously-told story about Hagar. The Samaritan woman Jesus meets at the well is depicted with sympathy as an outcast in a patriarchal society, rather than with cold judgement as a sinner. Even Jairus’ wife, one of the most unsympathetic female characters in the series, is given room to share her motivations and fears. The way the series makes space for women, for their unique personalities and backgrounds and style, for women who don’t fit the mold, for women who reject Jesus as well as follow him, is both wonderfully subtle and wonderfully refreshing.
The series also moves beyond traditional white Christian storytelling in a second important way, which is its strongly diverse cast. There’s mental health, neurodivergent, and disabled representation (one disciple shyly admits that he met the Incarnate Word building a disabled toilet; while another, not healed during the course of his meeting with Jesus, is blind). Beyond that, there’s strong racial diversity, based on the historical Capernaum’s location on a major trade route. Semitic characters are largely portrayed by a Semitic cast, but Indian and Black actors are also represented. Only the Romans are distinctively white, though there are nods to diversity here as well: one says he comes from Germania, while another very audibly hails from Australia.
Over the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly common to see historically white characters played, anachronistically, by people of colour. Of course I’m glad to see people of colour becoming more of a fixture on our screens; and yet I fear the practice of anachronistic casting might lead audiences to assume that racial diversity in medieval, ancient, and mythological settings could only ever be a goodwill exercise in fantastical casting. The truth is quite different, and as I watched The Chosen I wondered if it was employing its diverse cast out of intentional, self-conscious historical accuracy; or simply as a goodwill gesture. With that in mind, I was delighted when the show took a moment to explain the backstory of a Black character as hailing from Ethiopia. The Black Jewish presence in Ethiopia goes back centuries if not millennia, and the few lines of backstory given to this character served to emphasise that the diversity of the cast was a sober expression of historical fact rather than an unsubstantiated gesture.
It’s traditional to include some negative comments in a review, and I fear you might not take this one seriously if I don’t. But in truth, I loved every episode of The Chosen, from its naff dad jokes to the slightly cheap-looking Roman helmets. See it; throw money at the people who made it. There are more seasons to come, and if all of them are as thoughtful and beautifully-written as this one, we are in for a treat.