Father Stu Is a Rare Faith-Based Film for Men

How Father Stu crafts (and doesn’t craft) a vision for integrating spirituality and masculinity

This is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.

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It’s long been noted that Western Christianity has a problem drawing in young men as documented in books like David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church, and Leon Podles’ The Church Impotent and Losing the Good Portion. While men continue to occupy the majority of the pulpits, women continue to occupy the majority of the pews and have done so for longer than most of us have been alive.

Unsurprisingly, the same has been true for faith-based films, which have a largely female audience. Whether it’s movies War Room by the Kendrick Brothers, I Can Only Imagine by Kingdom Storybook Company, or The Chosen by Angel Studios, the viewership of these films has largely been women. And–as all my friends in the faith-based film industry have told me–this means that the movies are made and marketed to appeal to women, particularly married Christian moms. (A demographic that is often overlooked or demonized in Hollywood.)

Obviously, it’s a great thing that churches and faith-based films are speaking to women. But this creates challenges for men who are spiritually curious and looking to understand how to combine their masculinity with Christianity. How do they find a vision for Christianity that they resonate with? How do they find one that speaks to their questions and gives them answers they will find compelling?

One of the films that best speaks to the spirituality of men in recent years is Father Stu. The film follows the life of Father Stuart Long (Mark Wahlberg) who goes from boxer to actor looking for his purpose until he meets a Catholic woman named Carmen (Teresa Ruiz) who convinces him to become Catholic. After an intense encounter with God, Stu decides to become a priest, leading him on a journey to reconcile with his father (Mel Gibson) and mother (Jackie Weaver) and achieve his purpose.

Father Stu was a passion project by its producer and star Mark Wahlberg, who wanted to finally make a movie that reflected his Catholic faith. (As I discussed in my original review of the film when it first released.) It was written and directed by actress and screenwriter Rosalind Ross, girlfriend of Mel Gibson, who also starred in the film.

The film stands on its own as a really good movie, and an exceptionally good faith-based one. Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson give it their all as a stubborn father and son who need to grow from their flaws while trading insults at each other. Jackie Weaver embraces the intense mess of being a loving dysfunctional mom. The film is simultaneously heartbreaking and deeply funny and is uplifting while still feeling gritty.

But one thing that is not often talked about is how well it captures integrating faith and masculinity. It’s so good in fact–though not perfect–that it’s always at the top of my list when trying to recommend visions of Christian masculinity. Whether that’s to spiritually curious men or the families and friends who love them.

The first big thing that the film does is simply tell the story like it’s a story in a male genre. In Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, he explains that one of the reasons that boys and girls get addicted differently to the online world is because men and women–cross-culturally–prioritize different values. Women prioritize what he calls “communion” (i.e., relationships), and men prioritize what he calls “agency” (e.g., going from weak to strong, overcoming obstacles, enemies, and trials). That’s why girls are more likely to get addicted to social media and boys are more likely to get addicted to video games.

This is also why the different genres of movies appeal more to men or women. Romances and Hallmark movies are built around the hero overcoming barriers to communion. This means the average plot revolves around people resisting a relationship with each other or needing to reconcile with each other. Typically that means humbling yourself of your pride and self-sufficiency to remove those barriers to communion in a relationship. (This is also why women apologize differently than men; when men say “I’m sorry”, it typically means, “I was wrong”. When women say “I’m sorry” it means, I will give up being right to restore this relationship.”)

Meanwhile, men love sports movies and action movies because they appeal to the values of agency. A hero has a threat or obstacle to something he wants, but he’s too weak to get it. So he has to overcome his inner weaknesses–often with the help of a mentor–to become strong enough to overcome his external opponent and take his place in glory. Women have a harder time resonating with this story. So much so that, as film YouTuber Dan Murrell pointed out, men are much more likely to go to even female-led action movies than women are.

Most faith-based films follow the narrative beats of the rom-com. The hero is in a broken relationship with God–or with someone else in their life. The conflict is whether or not they will let go of their pride and self-sufficiency enough to gain or restore that relationship. Like a rom com, the story is over once the hero has humbled themselves to give themselves over to the relationship–whether by becoming a Christian or submitting to God’s work in their life.

This is also why men and women tend to respond to different things in church. Women tend to resonate most with the Christian doctrine of “justification”, whereas men tend to resonate more with the Christian doctrine of “sanctification”. “Justification” is about what Jesus has done for us because of how he loves us, and the grace he’s given us that he can’t earn. The only thing wrong we can do is resist his love, and the only thing we need to do is let our self-reliance and accept his love, and he will make us Holy. “Sanctification” is growing to become more Christlike, which you do by partnering with God to overcome your weaknesses enough to become who he’s called you to be, and to save the world from the darkness of The Devil. Churches trying to appeal to women tend to stress justification while ones appealing to men stress sanctification. The former accuse the latter of “works based righteousness” and the latter accuse the former of “cheap grace”.

What makes Father Stu fascinating is it starts out as a rom-com plot that halfway through morphs into a sports drama plot. Stu is resisting God’s love by trying to be his own man for the first half of the movie, and–like in a rom-com, repeatedly makes a fool of himself in the process. But once he accepts Jesus, the movie becomes more like a sports drama, where he has to fight himself and others in order to follow God’s call. He has to fight his girlfriend and his family who want him to not let him be a priest, he has to fight the head of the seminary to attend and stay there, he has to fight other students who don’t see him as worthy. And most importantly, he has to fight his own doubts and God himself as more and more roadblocks are put in his way. God becomes like a transcendent coach, pushing him to be his best self even as he puts him through pain to do it.

By going from a more female-centric narrative style to a male-centric narrative style, Father Stu subtly associates becoming more Christlike with becoming more manly. Christians will often say “The true way to be a man is to follow Jesus”. And yet, the stories they tell will all be ones where embracing Christ involves the man going from a male-centric narrative structure to a female-centric narrative structure. (He goes from being an overcomer to laying that all down to be a reconciled lover.) This subtly reinforces the fear that becoming a Christian means giving up your manhood. Father Stu does the opposite.

This is another place where faith-based films often falter, but Father Stu succeeds. As I wrote in my review of Reagan, faith-based industry films typically minimize struggle and conflict. They will often imply the struggle off-screen, keep the scene short, or reduce it to a montage. But because men love agency, they also love movies about struggle and find movies without it boring. The fight scenes are the parts of movies men like the best. Father Stu embraces struggle explicitly. Stu justifies this theologically when he says “It’s the struggle that brings us closer to God, and I ain’t never walked away from no fight.” But the movie shows this rather than just tells this. The movie spends its time lingering in the struggle, watching every fall, every rise, peppering them with some of the best jokes and one-liners. The verbal fights between Stu and his father are some of the most fun scenes, and bring the two of them closer to God. The movie revels in its “sanctification” focus in the narrative and shows how that’s beautiful and fun, rather than a drag.

Likewise, most faith-based films tend to take for granted the superior spiritual wisdom of women. Whether it’s I Can Only Imagine, American Underdog, War Room, Jesus Revolution, or Unsung Hero, faith-based movies overwhelmingly portray the male protagonist as spiritually behind the female character and needing to apologize and submit to her wisdom. (As I wrote about in my review of Unsung Hero.) While Father Stu starts out that way between Stu and Carmen, once he gives his life to Christ, she and his mom are the ones trying to hold him back from pursuing the priesthood, and he must reject their pleas to follow God This means that it provides an example of how following God is not just a backdoor way of submitting to women.

There’s also a dignity given to male-centric forms of social bonding. As I wrote about in my review of The Forge, women and men largely build relationships differently. Women build relationships by looking at each other and trading vulnerable feelings. Men build relationships by standing side by side accomplishing a task. In faith-based films–and church culture–there’s often an association between “healthy community bonding” and feminine community bonding. Hence, in The Forge, when Isaiah is playing basketball with his friends or playing video games, these things are pulling him away from mature manhood. But when he’s sitting in a circle talking to men about his feelings, he’s growing spiritually. But in Father Stu, playing basketball with friends is explicitly portrayed as a good thing, and much of the male bonding is male-coded in other ways, such as verbal sparring and bantering, or working toward a goal together–such as becoming a priest. Even Stu and his father begin to bond over his father helping him as his illness takes further hold.

One of the most controversial sides of the film was its R-rating for language. This was a turnoff to many traditional Christian audiences, who associate being a Christian film with being family-friendly. But as author Mike Duran points out, this is not largely a turnoff for most men. In fact, having a genre that is too clean can be a turnoff to men.

It doesn’t take an expert to conclude that men prefer less romantic and emotive fare for the more visceral, gritty, action-packed content. Which creates a potential problem for the Christian fiction market. For if ‘clean fiction’ is one of the defining elements of Christian literature, much ‘masculine’ content won’t make the cut.

The problem isn’t a movie being clean, per se. It’s that when asked to choose between a story that feels authentically gritty and a clean story that feels too safe, men will choose the authentically gritty one every time. This makes Father Stu perfect for men, who won’t be turned off by the language but will find the story appealing. (It’s also worth noting that a priest tells Stu to “clean up his language” and he starts swearing less.)

The movie isn’t perfect. Theologically, one line in the film is shockingly heretical. At one point Stu says–to his Monsenquir–“We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, we’re spiritual beings having a human one. This body don’t mean nothing to God therefore nor should it to you,” and he isn’t corrected. To say that the body–and physical world–doesn’t matter is actually an official heresy called Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed the physical world was bad so Jesus couldn’t actually have become a real human, but only the appearance of one. This was rejected by the church because Christ created the world and loves it, and his agenda is to restore it not destroy it. So it’s weird that they would put a line in there so wrong–particularly in a movie that’s so explicitly Catholic.

Narratively, the movie doesn’t quite land in helping us see how beautiful God is the way Stu tells us he feels He is. Stu tells us that God has become the most important thing in the world to him. But the filmmakers don’t quite give us the same–or similar–revelation about God. That means that when he gives up his relationship with his girlfriend, we’re left more disappointed than anything. This creates an emotional distance between Stu and us on his spiritual journey, which is not ideal. It also means it doesn’t craft a vision for men as to why God might be worth giving up everything for. Obviously, getting across God’s beauty is a difficult thing, which is why so few movies do it.

This leads to another weakness in this movie’s usefulness for most modern men. While the movie does a great job of giving a vision for how to integrate many aspects of masculinity with Christianity, it doesn’t do the same for sex. Stu has a very stereotypical masculine–if relatively wholesome–view of sex and relationships before converting to Christianity. He is shown to have an eye for the ladies and an implied willingness to sleep around at the beginning of the movie. But he’s willing to wait to have sex with Carmen until marriage because that’s something she wants. Once he has his religious experience and starts his true journey of sanctification, he gives up sex and marriage entirely. There is no vision of integration for his sexuality as he grows into the stature of Christ because that’s something he gives up as he does.

To be clear, this is not a flaw in the film. This is based on the true story of a man who became a celibate priest. And singleness is a beautiful and holy vocation. But it’s worth noting that men who are looking for how to integrate their sexuality with their sanctification, will have trouble finding it here. The degree to which that’s important to him will depend on how big an issue that is for them.

Father Stu’s limits aside, the movie is a rare example of a film that earnestly wrestles to integrate masculinity with Christianity. It’s worth investigating for anyone who is earnestly wrestling with that as well or loves someone who is.