‘Redeeming Love’: Evangelicalism’s Toxic Patriarchal Tale Gets the Hollywood Treatment

One surefire way to desiccate a steamy romance is to reveal that it’s a literary chastity belt. This may not be evident in the trailer for Redeeming Love, coming to theaters Friday, but make no mistake: between the Western’s corseted bar girls and the brawny gold miners is a cult classic of evangelical sex education.

It was the late-aughts when my generation of church youth discovered Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love (1991), which re-emerged on evangelical shelves when it was repackaged in 2005. For both quivering teens and languishing church ladies, it was the most salacious novel to clear religious censorship—and it was consumed as more than fiction. The book sold 3 million copies and offered a six-week “companion study” to teach Christian women what to expect of men, of marriage, and of themselves.

The book’s cover features an illustration of the heroine that accentuates her thin arms and the bodice of her billowing, scarlet dress—her head, however, disappears over the top edge of the book. For a church kid, the image seemed captivating and elusive, an apt representation of the jaded beauty. I now see that the spotlit body and faceless figure reflect the unsettling undertones of an evangelical sex zeitgeist.

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From the names of the harlots to the color of the heroine’s dress, Redeeming Love’s big screen, pop culture crossover remains devoted to Rivers’ novel. Though shot in Cape Town, South Africa, the film establishes the lonesome landscapes of California’s frontier and the muddy streets of the debauched mining town Pair-A-Dice. The town’s name alludes to the canons of both American Western literature (e.g., Bret Harte’s 1869 “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”) and Christian classics (its pronunciation—par-a-dise—suggesting the carnal temptations of Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim’s Progress).

And the film, like the book, faintly references the Old Testament Bible story from which it is inspired. In the ancient book of prophecy, God calls a man, Hosea, to marry a wayward woman who will routinely abscond for lovers; Hosea is to remain faithful to her regardless. The dynamic is an instructional allegory for God’s relationship with the ancient nation of Israel. Though the ruse encompasses only two pages of Scripture, Rivers’ California Gold Rush retelling is nearly 500, and the film adaptation stretches two hours. The Western’s hero, like God’s, is named Hosea.

The movie gets straight to the point with its allegorical hero: Michael Hosea (Tom Lewis, Gentleman Jack) wants a wife. The blue-eyed farmer is on his knees in a bucolic hillside chapel, supplicating to God for someone to share his life with. The request comes with two footnotes, however, about what he prefers in this life partner: maybe she’ll like to fish and maybe she’ll have long legs. He’s a man of sophisticated tastes. But he concedes to whatever plan the Almighty has for him, acknowledging that God knows “the kind I need.” Rather than terms like “woman” or “person,” a wife is framed as a “kind” to suit his “need.”

Our holy farmer is in town when he sees Angel (Abigail Cowen, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina). He remarks, instantly and incessantly, on her appearance: slender arms, porcelain skin, golden curls. She’s deemed the most beautiful woman west of the Rockies (the book adds: “east of the Rockies, too”). As Michael marvels, a zing through the Heavens zaps his heart to confirm that this woman is going to be his long-legged fishing counterpart. She is his to claim. He’s delighted that the Heavens confirmed his “kind” to be the hot kind—until he learns that his kind is a prostitute. Michael is baffled that God would select, as he states in the book, “a soiled dove” to be his wife.

More than cringey, this attitude is an expression of the “prosperity sex gospel” movement, a late-1990s wave of Christian sex education that asserts the Almighty has a titillating plan for Christians who abstain from extramarital sex—a movement that coincided with Redeeming Love’s publication. The promise suggests that God has an erotic future with a hot spouse planned for those who devoutly follow His rules, primarily if they abstain from premarital copulating.

This conjugal reward is enticing, but must be earned. And in a patriarchal system—as many evangelical expressions tend to be—the spotlight is on the man’s reward; as suggested in the faceless figure on the cover of Rivers’ book, the spotlight is on the woman’s body.

Though the film follows the trajectory of the biblical allegory, the plot is propelled by this evangelical sex ed. Michael is earnest in his desire to give Angel a life of “color, warmth, beauty, and light.” But his sincerity is undergirded by a presumption of authority that’s evident from the relationship’s start. When Michael purchases 30 minutes with Angel, during which his belt remains buckled, he tells her—doesn’t propose—that he’s going to marry her. She responds that her lifestyle is none of his business to which he declares, “It became my business the minute I saw you.” He is confident God has called him to “redeem” Angel, and his obedience to this call mutes anything Angel may say. Evangelical men and women alike are expected to not only find this romantic, but should also admire Michael for his commitment. The film’s success will consistently require the audience to admire him too.

Angel’s eventual consent is offered only after the brothel bouncer beats her to a pulp, incapacitating her from work. The romance of the tenuously consensual marriage kindles in a montage of her farming and, as promised, fishing—all nice things Michael likes. He confirms that he loves her and didn’t marry her because she’s beautiful, but he never seeks to know much else about her. Any theological themes that suggest he’s being obedient to the divine command to “redeem” her are suffocated in the film’s obsession with Angel’s beauty and the implicit patriarchal power dynamics.

For the film to function as a romance, the audience must accept that the only problem with the arrangement is Angel’s inability to receive love due to her litany of past traumas: murder, forced sterilization, incest, sex trafficking—there’s no trauma stone left unturned for the heroine. She consistently runs away, and Michael consistently remains committed despite his heartbreak. And when she eventually overcomes her trauma, by becoming a Christian, Angel returns to Michael—the film concludes with the hero earning his prosperity sex gospel reward. By his devotion to God, Michael gets the hottest woman any cardinal direction of the Rockies, they have hot sex on his farm, and the final scene is the couple fishing with their child, another growing in Angel’s round belly.

“Angel’s journey reminds us that healing happens through love and acceptance, never through judgment or force,” the film’s director D.J. Caruso told Deadline. And there’s plenty for historical romance fans to enjoy about this on-screen journey. The kisses are sweet and the temptations are many. And for a church movie, the adaptation is surprisingly generous in that it gives the audience two whole sex scenes, though all tender curves are screened with long hair and wandering hands.

But a journey to “love and acceptance” that ultimately suggests that all along the heroine just needed to submit to a man should not be looked to as a model—as evangelical girls were once expected to do. Especially when the fates of the harlots who didn’t catch the farmer’s eye, or even God’s as the story could suggest, confirm the correlation between beauty and a woman’s prospects—the unredeemed are consumed in a hell this side of death when they perish in a fire at the brothel. Angel, instead, enjoys her happily-ever-after, redeemed.

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