When Jesus walked in Leicester Square

As the The Chosen’s latest series premieres, Natalie Garrett analyses the TV show’s appeal.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A group of actors walk together at a film premiere

Jonathan Roumie, centre, with the cast of The Chosen.

So, I’ve met Jesus twice before. Over 20 years ago, I joined the cast of The Life of Christ at Wintershall, the epic outdoor drama experience that takes you through the story of Jesus’ life (and it’s still going strong). As well as being Crowd Person 176, with glorified tea towel on head, I was cast as the bride at the wedding at Cana. Apart from Jesus, the rest of the cast were local, normal people (as in not professional actors) and I rather shyly attended the first rehearsal knowing no-one. I had been sitting on my own for a bit when Jesus walked in and caught my eye. He walked straight over to me and shook my hand, “You must be Natalie,” he said. For just a moment, I forgot that he was an actor and I thought, “You really are Jesus, you know me by name!” But then I remembered that I was the only new addition to the cast, and he was just a really nice guy welcoming me to the company.

Some eight or so years later, I was involved with the Oxford Passion, a Passion play written for and produced by Creation Theatre company in Oxford. I helped write the script and played the role of Mary Magdalene. The actor, Tom Peters, who played Jesus in that production was incredible. As an actor and as a Christian, it was an extraordinary experience, sharing some powerful scenes with Jesus. Each night for several weeks, I had to watch my beloved Christ being crucified all over again. I wept deeply, every night.

Then fast forward to Monday 22 January 2024, and I’m at the cinema UK cinema Premiere of season four of The Chosen in London’s Leicester Square and I see Jesus walk the red carpet. Surreal.

So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus.

In case you haven’t come across The Chosen, it’s a ground-breaking historical drama series. Created, directed, and co-written by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, it is the first multi-season series about the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Primarily set in Judaea and Galilee in the first century, the series centres on Jesus and the different people who met and followed or otherwise interacted with him. The emphasis is on portraying the “authentic Jesus” through the point of view of the people who spent time with him, asking the question, what did it really look like to be a follower of Jesus? It has quickly become a highly successful crowdfunding project, with episodes viewed 700 million times and a big vision to reach a billion viewers by the end of season seven.

Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, says,

“Our fanbase was entirely Christian at first, but because of its popularity the show has attracted people from all faiths and no faith to the character of Jesus. We’re trying to really portray his message of love and tender mercy.”

To raise awareness for the show, which can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime (or for free on The Chosen app), season four was launched with a cinema release in Leicester Square. So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus. And I had to pinch myself. When did Jesus become a world-wide celebrity with people whooping and whistling and jostling for his attention? Well, it happened when he rode a donkey into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, but not so much in the last 2,000 years, especially not in recent years in the West.

What have the creators of The Chosen got so right that millions of people tune in to binge watch the narrative of the gospel story?

First up, Jesus laughs. A lot. He smiles and he hugs people. He is intensely personable and bloke next door-y (he’s not very good at ball games for one thing). But he also, when necessary, exerts huge personal authority. There is a confident, courageous, generous, humility to him that is hugely attractive. When the going gets tough, you think, he’d be good to have around. But also, he’s great company around the dinner table, telling stories and listening, too.

Because of the way the story is told, through the eyes of those who knew Jesus, we get drawn into the personal dramas of the Twelve Disciples as well as a wider group, including several women. It even includes some Romans, who are clearly the “bad guys” but drawn equally plausibly as the other more sympathetic characters. In the lives of these people, we find the domestic reality of the human experience – working hard to put food on the table, relating to family members, suffering illness and even miscarriage. And then we see the difference that it makes to have the Son of God around. And that’s the hook, that’s what means the viewer becomes deeply invested in the show because it turns out the people in the Bible aren’t super spiritual giants, they are people just like you and me. They struggle with the day-to-day realities of life, they’re confused, and they mess up. And then they meet Jesus.

It’s a huge risk creating a show when everyone knows how it ends. As we watch, even the early seasons, we know where the narrative arc is going. And yet, somehow, we still want to find out what happens. Because: we are invested in the stories of the Roman Centurion who looks as if he might come over to the light side; we’re keen to find out how Simon Peter and his wife get over their marital difficulties; we’re cheering for the success of the olive oil business set up by Zebedee (that’s James and John’s Dad) along with the help of some shrewd businesswomen who are also numbered amongst The Chosen.

When I see a dramatized version of any book I’ve read, I usually get quite angry – “that’s not what he/she looks like! That’s not how they talk!” And dramatizing part of the bestselling book of all time, the four Gospels of the Bible, is quite a risky choice for a TV programme. But I recognise the Jesus in The Chosen as the Jesus I know and love. And there is no higher accolade I can give than that.

The extraordinary success of the show is that millions of people have watched it and been drawn in. Millions of people have invested not just their time and viewing commitment, but also their own money. The show is entirely crowdfunded, and the show’s makers are deeply committed to building community around what they’re doing. Fans are invited to participate in the crowd scenes (being the 5,000 who get fed, for example) and there is almost as much behind-the-scenes content produced as the show itself. There’s a buzz around what they’re doing and it’s spreading way beyond the homes of a Christian fanbase.

When Jonathan Roumie arrived for the season four premiere in Leicester Square, it was like a rock star had stepped out of the car, such was the reach and excitement around his portrayal of Jesus in The Chosen. For hundreds of years, Christian artists have used the creative arts at their disposal – stained glass windows, music, fine art – to try to convey the authentic Jesus to the world. In our time, TV programmes are the artform of greatest impact and the digital distribution now available to the makers of The Chosen affords unprecedented access to their material around the world, as they aim to dub it into 600 languages ensuring 95 per cent of people worldwide can watch it spoken in their native language.

Is it too soon to suggest that The Chosen may be the Sistine Chapel of our age? It’s certainly too early to try guess the impact that this cultural phenomenon will have on the world’s faith journey. But if the reaction on the red carpet at Leicester Square last Monday night is anything to go by, Jesus seems to be making a comeback.

Episodes 1&2 of season four of The Chosen are showing in UK cinemas from Thursday 1 February 2024 - with other episodes being released later in the month. This is the first time ever that a full season of a streaming TV show will be released exclusively in cinemas.

Review

Books

Culture

22 March 2024

6 min read

The beliefs that made Jane Austen and her world

A ‘fashionable goodness’ lay at the heart of the author and her writing.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A woman in 18th century clothes sits within a windowsill reading a book

Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen in Becoming Jane.

‘There just wasn’t a comprehensive book on Jane Austen’s faith’, Brenda Cox told me when I chatted to her recently, ‘That’s why I decided to write one’. She’s right. There are a handful of books that treat Austen’s Anglican faith seriously, even extensively. Irene Collins’ two books on Austen, Jane Austen and the Clergy (1994) and Jane Austen: The Parson’s Daughter (1998), as well as Laura Mooneyham White’s Jane Austen’s Anglicanism (2011) are excellent examples. But they’re also very academic. On the other hand, Cox’s new book Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen’s England (2022) achieves something truly remarkable: it’s both highly accessible – assuming no prior knowledge of Austen’s life, of theology, or of Regency history – and highly insightful. It’s a true labour of love (Cox told me she spent years on reading and research), and it shows. Before I say anything else about Fashionable Goodness, let me urge you to read it. If you want to understand the way Austen and her characters saw the world around them, this is the book to pick up.

I’ve spent the last ten odd years reading, thinking, and writing about Austen, and yet Cox has made me see her novels in a new light. What she does best is to help us immerse ourselves into the daily life of Regency people, detailing in the first part of her book how the Church of England functioned in Austen’s times. She explains the difference between a vicar, a rector, and a curate; what tithes were; what exams a young man had to pass to become an ordained priest. As I was reading Cox’s book, Austen’s characters gradually came alive in my imagination like never before. Learning more about how they lived their faith day to day helped me to better grasp their motivations and their behaviour. For example, how many readers (myself included!) have been left confused by the passage in Persuasion where Anne judges her cousin Mr. Elliot for his habits of ‘Sunday traveling’? It only starts to make sense once we know that traveling on a Sunday would have likely meant missing church attendance, of which Austen disapproved. Similarly, in Mansfield Park Mary Crawford’s scoffing remark that Edmund Bertram will become ‘a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists’ will mean little to us unless we know that in the early 19th century Methodists were often treated suspiciously and looked down upon as overly emotional and ‘enthusiastic’. To my surprise, even my opinion of Austen’s most notoriously silly clergyman, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins, improved. Cox points out that Mr. Collins writes at least some of his own sermons, at a time when many clergymen would simply pick ready-written sermons out of a sermon book; he is also resident in his own parish of Hunsford after marrying Charlotte Lucas, when non-residence – the practice of a priest delegating all duties to a curate and living away from the parish – was common. Mr. Collins may be irritating and obsequious to a fault, but if we judge him by the standards of his own time, not of ours, he emerges as quite a respectable man after all.

Far from being in ignorance of these changes in religious sensibility, Austen observed them, and they gave her hope.

And that is something else that Cox does brilliantly: she shows us that the past is indeed a foreign country, with different moral standards. Instead of trying to find ways in which we’re similar to the people of Austen’s England, Cox helps us to realise that the values and assumptions of Austen’s England are radically different from ours. Even our language is different. Focusing on what she identifies as key ‘faith words’, Cox shows us that we cannot understand just how deeply English society was steeped in the Christian faith, unless we recognise the religious significance that many words had in Austen’s times. For example, when Elinor Dashwood cries to her sister Marianne, ‘Exert yourself’ in Sense and Sensibility, she doesn’t simply mean that Marianne should be less emotionally affected by Willoughby’s betrayal. Rather, she’s reminding Marianne of her religious duty of ‘exertion’, meaning not giving in to despair. Or, when Anne Elliot engages in ‘An interval of meditation, serious and grateful’ after her engagement to Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, we should not understand Anne’s ‘serious meditation’ as mere reflection; Austen would have expected her readers to know that, in this passage, Anne is examining her conscience and specifically praying. Even the word ‘manners’, often mentioned in Mansfield Park, had a deeper meaning than simply social graces, pointing to a person’s religious principles. Cox encourages us to notice these differences, and to let the past change our way of seeing the world through its alienness.

Lastly, Cox also presents an England whose religious sensibilities were changing fast. The Church of England faced pressure to address its problems. Pluralism, the practice of one clergyman serving several parishes, meant that some members of the clergy were very well off, while others struggled to make a living. In turn, this encouraged non-residence – especially if the parishes were far from each other – and led to the non-resident parishes to be neglected. But at the same time, the Church of England was also being infused with newly found religious fervour. The Evangelical and Methodist movements, still officially part of the Anglican Church at this point, were spreading at a rapid pace thanks to figures like George Whitfield and the Wesley brothers, championing many worthy causes in the name of the Christian faith. The abolitionist movement heralded by Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Hannah More was gaining momentum just as Austen was beginning to write novels. By the time Sense and Sensibility, her first, was published, the slave trade had been abolished in England. Sunday schools were opening up which would educate thousands and thousands of children in the 19th century; the prison reform movement was gaining popularity, as were efforts to combat animal cruelty and ensure better conditions for factory workers. Goodness, as Cox puts it, was becoming fashionable in England.

What about Austen herself? Cox tells us that she mentions reading the works of abolitionists with pleasure in her letters, as well as remarking on the newly emerging Evangelical movement with somewhat like cautious admiration. Far from being in ignorance of these changes in religious sensibility, Austen observed them, and they gave her hope. As Cox quotes in the final chapter of Fashionable Goodness, in an 1814 letter to her friend Martha Lloyd, Austen describes England as ‘a Nation in spite of much Evil improving in Religion’. Austen was confident that faithful Christians could rise to the challenges placed before them, and this confidence is reflected in her heroines and heroes, whose storylines trace their growth in virtue. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that 1814 is also the year Austen started working on Mansfield Park, a novel whose heroine, Fanny Price, is famously the most ardent in her moral principles. Fanny’s ‘goodness’, however – which the narrator often explicitly mentions – is no longer fashionable. Contemporary readers of Austen tend to dislike her seriousness and her outspoken religiosity. But perhaps, if we join Brenda Cox in immersing ourselves in the alien country that is Regency England, we can learn to judge the ‘goodness’ of Austen’s characters by different standards from our own. Perhaps we can free ourselves of our prejudices, and appreciate earnest characters like Fanny, as well as witty ones, like Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet. Perhaps we too, like Austen herself, will gain hope that ‘goodness’ can be made fashionable once more in our time.