THE GOSPEL IN FILM: “SELMA”
There are some films that do more than tell a story; they lift the viewer into a moment, into a struggle, into an amazing weight of history. Well done historical films are the closest thing we have to a Time Machine.
Selma is one of those rare works—so vivid, so honest, so human—that it feels less like cinema and more like stepping through a doorway into 1965. “Transportive” may not be a common word, but it is the right word; this film transports the soul.
Much of Selma was filmed right there in Selma and Montgomery—the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the tight streets, the courthouses and red-clay Alabama corners that still carry the shadows of the civil rights movement. You recognized the places because the film did not hide behind Hollywood scenery. It walked the real ground, where real people marched, bled, prayed, and sang. And sitting in a theater, watching those scenes unfold, felt like going back with them.
David Oyelowo’s performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remains one of the most deeply inhabited portrayals ever put on screen. He did not merely imitate King’s cadence; he seemed to enter King’s calling, the heaviness in his voice, the private wrestling behind the public courage. There were moments he spoke and you could almost feel the pulpit tremble beneath him. His humility, his fire, his sleepless determination—it was all there. You walked out thinking, “That wasn’t acting; that was something bigger.” And in a sense, it was. It was a kind of stewardship of memory.
I went to see it again and again—twelve times—back when a few more dollars allowed for repeat pilgrimages to the theater. But more than that, I brought people. Especially the young. I wanted them to feel the cost of dignity and justice, the price real people paid so others could vote, speak, and be treated as image-bearers of God. I wanted them to hear the gospel in those streets—that deep gospel thread running beneath the marches: a longing for righteousness, a refusal to return violence for violence, a love for neighbor expressed through endurance, truth, and sacrificial courage.
For where the gospel lives, it calls us to stand with the oppressed, to seek justice without hatred, to walk humbly before our God (Micah 6:8). And Selma, in its own way, preached that—through images, through history, through an actor who carried a pastor-prophet’s voice with holy reverence.
It is good to remember films like that. Good to feel them again. Good to let them stir the heart toward mercy, conviction, and the steady, Christ-formed courage to love in hard places. Selma is one of my favorite films, and I regard it as one of the greatest films ever made.
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