Curated by It’s That Part™ — Originally published by Faith and Proverbs on .
Sinners, the new film from Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), is a box-office smash and critical hit. Already the highest-grossing original film in many years, Sinners has been heralded as a welcome sign of creative life in a Hollywood landscape rife with retreads, remakes, and IP-dependent tentpoles.
Drawing from various genres (Southern Gothic, gangster films, vampire horror, black cinema), the film is undeniably original and well made. But what should Christians think about it? With a title like Sinners, the film is predictably gritty (rated R for violence, language, and a few sexual scenes) but also interested in theological questions. Since it released on Good Friday, Sinners has sparked much discussion—particularly among black Christians—about how the film subverts, interrogates, and challenges Christianity.
From the movie’s opening scene in a church and throughout its 2 hours and 17 minutes, Sinners frequently grapples with Christian religion, church, spirituality, and moral ideas about evil, sin, and temptation. But how does the film view these? What is Coogler’s posture toward Christianity?
Insights About Temptation
From start to finish, Sinners is largely structured around moments of temptation: invitations and lures wherein some vice is dangled in front of a character or some turn toward ruin is taken because of a devilish deception.
The film follows a pair of criminal brothers, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), as they return to Mississippi after working for years with Al Capone’s gang in Chicago. Their names evoke the opposite of the aroma of Christ (2 Cor. 2:15–17)—they exude the aroma of hellfire and tend to bring damnation to everyone they touch.
From start to finish, Sinners is largely structured around moments of temptation.
In the film’s first half, we watch Smoke and Stack recruit various acquaintances to staff a new juke joint for the local black community. These invitation/recruitment scenes evoke Edenic temptation (note the scene of a snake early in the film). Smoke and Stack promise money, power, freedom, and glory to would-be collaborators. All say yes, sealing their doom in the process.
When the film’s second half veers into a vampire-horror direction, the temptation motif continues, even as the demonic activity becomes more explicit. One thing the film gets right about evil is how it gains a foothold because we let it in, opening the door in small ways that might seem innocuous or even virtuous. This idea is emphasized by a “rule” related to the vampires in the film: They can’t force themselves on victims without first being invited in or brought close.
It’s an idea expressed early in the film when a pastor (Saul Williams) shares this wisdom with his son Sammie (Miles Caton): “You keep dancing with the Devil, one day he’s going to follow you home.”
This proves true. Most of the characters who “dance” with sin in the juke joint end up literally letting the Devil in. Like in so many other vampire movies (I thought of the recent Nosferatu remake but also the aptly titled Let the Right One In), the horror in Sinners is largely self-inflicted because of naive dalliances with darkness that let evil gain a foothold.
If Sinners were just a straightforward cautionary tale about this dynamic of evil’s encroachment, it would be a refreshingly clear-eyed Hollywood warning. Unfortunately, the film’s view of sin is murkier.
Confusion About Sin
While often insightful about the way we’re tempted and how evil can be naively trifled with, Coogler’s movie doesn’t have a robust view of indwelling sin and moral culpability. Smoke and Stack are clearly unrepentant sinners—murderers, swindlers, and philanderers devoted to organized crime—but the film doesn’t condemn them. It rather situates their transgressions within a narrative of empowerment: a valid response to the wrongs done to them.
Meanwhile, various scenes of sexual immorality (including between Sammie and a married woman) breeze by without any sense of their being sinful. The sexual scenes alone—though brief and with no nudity—are enough of a reason for discerning Christian viewers to avoid Sinners. It’s not just that the scenes are there; it’s that they aren’t portrayed as sinful as much as freeing and joyful. This goes for most of the other vices in the film too.
What Christianity labels “sin,” Sinners wants to call “freedom.” For the film’s one night of debauched excess, fueled by corn liquor and blues, the characters declare they’re experiencing real freedom, in the form of cultural expression and group identity unhindered by the impositions, policing, or appropriations of white culture.
Their night of joy is ruined, however, when white Irish folk music–singing vampires want to infiltrate their space. Touting good intentions (“We believe in music and equality”), these banjo-picking ghouls say they want all people to be a “family” bound by “fellowship and love.” They entice black characters to join them in a “new clan” based on love and a realization of “heaven on earth.” In the film’s view, this is the most insidious deception of all: the pushing of a post-racial “utopia” built on kumbaya faux unity achieved via melting-pot erasure. In Sinners, this is the most egregious sin.
As with other recent movie narratives, “sin” in Sinners is understood less in terms of vertical violation of divine commands as much as in horizontal violations of freedom and autonomous identity. The worst wickedness controls us, and the best virtue frees us. And so whatever is done in the name of “freedom” in Sinners is justifiable or even hallowed, while anything experienced as restriction, imposition, or control is condemned. Tragically, this dynamic also informs how the film views the church.
How ‘Sinners’ Views the Church
Coogler bookends the film with scenes in a black Christian church. But how he depicts the church is deeply conflicted. On the one hand, there’s appreciation for the cultural space the African American church provides. It’s a space of safety and freedom. But the film pits the church in opposition to an even more cultural “safe space”: music.
The character at the center of these two opposing worlds—the pastor’s son Sammie —is told by his father that he must choose between faith and blues music. Sammie carries his beloved guitar (or what’s left of it, by film’s end) as a holy object akin to a Bible or a cross. Where other vampire movies deploy the crucifix as a weapon against evil, Sinners positions Sammie’s guitar as the central weapon against evil. It’s a subtle iconographic shift that reflects the film’s view that black culture (specifically music) is a more potent source of transcendence and defense against evil than anything Christianity can offer. One character sums up the film’s perspective when he says, “Blues wasn’t forced on us like [Christianity]; we brought this from home.”
Sinners takes the view that Christianity is a white cultural imposition on black folks—a nonnative dressing that whitewashes African culture (notice the congregation’s all-white clothing in the church scenes). Meanwhile, the film’s most sympathetic character is a hoodoo priestess (Wunmi Mosaku) whose proficiency in African ancestral spirituality makes her the movie’s most respected pillar of wisdom. Like the blues that was “brought from home,” African spirituality is portrayed as more authentic, pure, and freeing than the stiff, world-denying legalism of Christian religion, as Sammie’s character arc demonstrates.
Commenting on the film’s “anti-Christian propaganda” on Threads, Christian hip-hop artist Lecrae wonders if Coogler is “working through some church hurt” in Sinners, where Christianity is portrayed as “either irrelevant or oppressive,” and “power is found in African spiritual practices.” Lecrae concludes that Coogler is “fighting evil with evil in the movie, and unfortunately Christianity takes the L for the sake of cultural empowerment.”
What ‘Sinners’ Reveals About Contemporary Culture
As a cultural artifact, Sinners highlights the fact that believing in the supernatural—gods, ghosts, vampires, hoodoo—tends to be less challenging for people today than joining an institutional church. Much like in another recent “Christian vampire horror” narrative, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, the church in Sinners feel less like a refuge and more like an enabler of bad people and bad ideas—an apparatus of power and manipulation.
The reasons for contemporary church-disenchantment are wide-ranging (Brad Edwards chronicles some in his new book) and should be thoughtfully considered. Coogler hints at some of the racial dynamics of dechurching in Sinners, and we’d do well not to diminish these factors.
Coogler hints at some of the racial dynamics of dechurching in Sinners, and we’d do well not to diminish these factors.
But Sinners suggests in its title a more foundational, universal reason people deconstruct or turn away from church: sin. If a church community challenges your sinful lifestyle or pricks your conscience, one way to resolve that tension is to just leave the church (perhaps calling it a “controlling” or “traumatic” environment on the way out). When, at the end of Sinners, Sammie leaves his church for a life of music in Chicago, he’s positioned as a noble hero for choosing moral and artistic freedom over institutional deference and commitment. Sadly, it’s a common move in today’s freedom-exalting, sin-affirming, anti-institutional age.
Is this move heroic and noble? Does it lead to happiness? Even Coogler’s film feels unsure. The alternatives to Christianity (e.g., moral autonomy, hedonism, pagan spirituality) don’t satisfy. And for all its faults, the Christian church is still the best place for sinners to ward off darkness (the world, the flesh, and the Devil) and grow, together, in Spirit-empowered holiness.
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Originally sourced via trusted media partner. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/sinners-christian-movie-review/
