Act of Faith
For years, Karla Cameron, a retired Dr Pepper executive in Georgia, taught Bible-study classes to teen-agers, a task that became more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. She wanted to show videos to her students, but most of the Biblical movies she found had cheesy writing, bad acting, and costumes with visible zippers. One day, she learned about a new television program that told the story of Jesus and his disciples. It was called “The Chosen,” and blog posts praised the show for its authenticity and its humanity. That evening, Cameron and her husband put on the first episode. It was not at all what she had expected. Many of the actors were not white, and Jesus didn’t appear until the end of the episode. Instead, the focus was on a frantic and demon-possessed Mary Magdalene, played by Elizabeth Tabish; the show intimated that she’d been sexually assaulted by a Roman soldier. The first-century world felt, to Cameron, lived in and at times confounding. There was a lot of talk about arcane dietary laws, and no zippers to be found. Cameron and her husband watched for hours. Afterward, they got out their Bibles and talked about their faith late into the night.
In the course of 2021, “The Chosen” became a kind of companion for Cameron. Her daughter, who had been crazy about “Game of Thrones,” had begged to go to Iceland to visit filming locations. Now Cameron understood the lure of fandom. She recruited the members of her Tuesday-evening church meeting to watch the show, and led discussions after. She joined Facebook groups where people matched plot points to Bible verses, and she posted a scriptural study guide for each episode. The show wasn’t yet available on any of the major streaming platforms—you had to watch it on a proprietary app—so she printed out cards with a QR code to help people find it.
“The Chosen,” then in its second season, was already getting noticed, as much for its fund-raising as for its relatable depiction of Jesus and his followers. Thousands of supporters had contributed roughly ten million dollars to produce the first season, making it the biggest crowdfunded television project ever. The show’s creator, director, co-writer, and executive producer, Dallas Jenkins, regularly appealed to fans on live streams, reminding them that the program wouldn’t exist without their support. By 2021, he was collecting a million dollars, on average, from each live stream.
Early that year, word began to travel through the fan community that the show’s next season would culminate with the feeding of the five thousand, an event in which Jesus feeds a crowd with just five loaves of bread and two fish. Fans who contributed at least a thousand dollars would have the chance to be an extra. In a YouTube video, Jenkins called it “one of the signature moments” of both the Gospels and of the television program.
Cameron was newly vaccinated but still nervous to travel. But, after months of isolation, she longed for the collective uplift she used to get from a Christian concert or a particularly electric church service. She and a friend made their donations, bought plane tickets, and booked a hotel. Extras were responsible for their own costumes, so she ordered a rustic-looking tablecloth on Amazon and fashioned it into a shawl. That June, she headed to Midlothian, Texas, where the show is filmed, some thirty miles southeast of Fort Worth. Before dawn, she was swabbed for a COVID test. As the sun rose, the extras gathered in a large, buggy field. It was the first time Cameron had been in a crowd in months; more than ten thousand extras would ultimately be involved. Strangers hugged one another, giddy at the physical contact. During breaks between takes, people pulled out portable fans and opened umbrellas to shade themselves from the sun. Cameron spread out a blanket and hosted a spontaneous Bible study. “Joy, sadness, exhaustion, heat,” she told me. “And all of us, shoulder to shoulder, as a family.” After filming, Jenkins stuck around until he’d high-fived or fist-bumped every extra.
Nearly four years later, Cameron wore a slightly more elegant shawl to ChosenCon, the show’s annual fan convention, where it provided protection against the aggressive air-conditioning at the Charlotte Convention Center. Thousands of enthusiasts filled the hallways. A man in a cloak with a rope belt strode by—a cosplayer, I assumed, but in fact he was a Franciscan monk. A gift shop sold trading cards, canvas jackets, and coffee mugs branded with catchphrases from the show. Off a long corridor, in what was called the Last Supper Experience, a mannequin presided over tables set with fruit bowls and electric-flamed candles. In another room, attendees wrote prayers on fish-shaped pieces of paper: “For the restoration of Christianity in North Korea”; “my mother needs salvation.” The atmosphere was saturated with a friendliness that occasionally tipped into intrusiveness. My shoes came untied, which I noticed only when a stranger bent before me to tie them.
Cameron was meeting up with a group of extras she’d come to know in the past five years. Since her experience at the feeding of the five thousand, she has appeared on every season of “The Chosen.” Starting in Season 4, she was asked to be a background actor, which means that she now gets paid. This has given her a status that she took pains not to flaunt. “This is just like a family reunion,” she told me, smiling beatifically. Cameron, who is Catholic, said that she particularly appreciated the show’s interdenominational fan base. Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus, is a devout Catholic; the executives include both evangelical Christians and Latter-day Saints. “I’m used to being at my Catholic church, going to Catholic conventions, being in my bubble. To be out with Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Protestants—it just doesn’t matter,” Cameron said. “If your passion is Jesus, you’re good.”
“The Chosen” is a powerhouse that retains some of the charisma of an upstart. When the first two episodes of Season 3 were shown in movie theatres, in November, 2022, most box-office analysts didn’t include the screenings in their forecasts. It had the second-biggest opening that week, outperforming every film in wide release on a per-screen basis, apart from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” The show has grown only more popular since, spending dozens of weeks in the Top Ten on Prime Video, where it now streams. More than a hundred thousand people donated over seventy million dollars to produce Season 6, which will be released this fall.
Jenkins is a tall, chiselled cold-plunge devotee in his early fifties. He presides over the world of “The Chosen” with a pastoral approachability, sometimes speaking of his audience as if it were made up of children that he is both responsible for and accountable to. At ChosenCon, fans sought him out to tell him about their cancer diagnoses, their wayward offspring, and their “church hurt”—the ways that faith leaders have let them down. He is treated as the community’s earnest, goofy, overworked dad. At one point, an elderly couple watched him make silly faces as he posed for selfies with a group of fans. “He looks tired,” the woman said tenderly. “He always looks tired,” the man replied. Jenkins was trailed by Steve Nohava, a longtime friend he’d hired as his executive assistant and security detail, who deftly intercepted gifts from fans—rosaries, handcrafted dolls, drawings. “People mean well, but they don’t realize that if we kept it all we’d need a warehouse,” Nohava told me.
Only Roumie, who plays Jesus as at once hunky and sexless, was in higher demand at the Convention Center. When I saw the volunteer in charge of the Last Supper room pull Jenkins aside with a pained look, I expected to hear another story of hardship. Instead, she said, “Since I’ve been here, I’ve been telling hundreds of people that I just want to meet Jonathan, and I didn’t even get to see him. So will you just tell him that Pattie the volunteer was looking for him?”
Although the United States has become a much more secular country since the nineteen-nineties, the majority of Americans still identify as Christian, a fact that Hollywood regularly seems to remember, forget, and then remember again. In 1999, after the success of the apocalyptic thriller “The Omega Code,” Entertainment Weekly devoted a series of articles to the faith-based film industry. Five years later, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” inspired a flurry of Biblical epics, none of which had the same draw. After “God’s Not Dead,” a triumphalist account of campus evangelicals outdebating atheists, grossed sixty-five million dollars—it had been made for two million—the Washington Post declared 2015 “the Year of Faith-Based Cinema.”
The popularity of “The Chosen” has helped spur another round of enthusiasm. Mel Gibson is at work on a sequel to “Passion” that will be released next Easter weekend. Two seasons of “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” a docuseries narrated and executive-produced by the filmmaker, have aired on Fox Nation. 2025 was arguably the best year for Biblical content in decades. Prime Video had a hit with “House of David,” an Old Testament-inspired fantasy epic complete with giants and soothsayers. (Like “The Chosen,” “House of David” has a prestige-TV feel, many nonwhite cast members, and enough drama to draw in secular audiences.) An animated musical called “David” became one of the highest-grossing Biblical films in more than a decade. In April, there were three Jesus-themed projects in the box-office Top Ten—two were theatrical releases of “The Chosen” episodes, and the third was the South Korean animated film “The King of Kings.”
The success of media projects is increasingly driven by devoted fan bases rather than by widespread appeal. With the decline in churchgoing, observant Christians are now members of a distinct subculture, one that can be targeted by marketers who speak the idiom of faith. “If you can identify a niche that you can overserve that feels underserved in the market, then you can have a successful business,” Matt Belloni, a founder of the media company Puck and a former editor of the Hollywood Reporter, told me. “We’ve seen it in horror, we’ve seen it in anime.” Christian audiences, both sizable and primed to evangelize to others, are in some ways an ideal market.
Hollywood is coming to realize the fragility of “the economic model where you’re making these hundred-million-dollar bets that are binary—either they succeed or fail,” Ash Greyson, the C.E.O. of Ribbow Media Group, a marketing company that specializes in faith-based media, said. The faith-filmmaking world has long made movies for small budgets and specific audiences while exploring alternative means of financing, promotion, and distribution. Greyson worked on “God’s Not Dead,” which was produced by a small Christian company called Pure Flix. According to industry tracking data, the movie should have had a terrible opening weekend: general audiences were not aware of, or excited about, the film. “It was, like, This movie is going to make five hundred thousand dollars in its opening weekend. And then it made ten million. There was no mechanism in place to measure people who weren’t frequent moviegoers,” he said. “Traditionally, to be top of mind for audiences, you have to spend an incredible amount of money on awareness. With ‘God’s Not Dead,’ there was exactly zero dollars spent on TV ads, zero dollars spent on broad awareness. We surround the core audience and we fire inward, and we don’t care if anyone else knows it exists.”
As Hollywood courts Christians, the distinctions between religious and mainstream productions are increasingly dissolving. In 2023, a faith-based film producer named Jon Erwin co-founded Wonder Project, a production company aimed at “the faith and values audience,” with a former Netflix and YouTube executive named Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten. Wonder Project, the studio behind “House of David”—which is co-produced by Amazon MGM Studios—aims to be the A24 or HBO of “clean content,” Hoogstraten has said. The company’s seed investors include Jason Blum, the founder of the horror-centric studio Blumhouse Productions. “There’s nothing quite like the power of an affinity audience that is underserved with programming options,” Blum has said.
In December, I met Jenkins at “The Chosen” ’s production complex in Midlothian, an exurban community where stubbly hayfields are interspersed with new housing developments. During the first season, scenes were filmed at a replica of a small Biblical village on a ranch west of Fort Worth. It was a popular spot for field trips for homeschoolers, but its grassy hills were dotted with cottonwood trees, making it an imperfect stand-in for the Holy Land. The show now has a dedicated set in Midlothian, on a large swath of land that serves as a Salvation Army camp in the summertime. Jenkins walked me through cavernous soundstages, past Roman sitting rooms with red curtains and gold statues. Then we drove by a field of grazing donkeys to a two-acre outdoor filming complex, which includes a Roman quarter, a synagogue, and a scaled-down version of Capernaum, a fishing village where Jesus briefly lived. A pond, enhanced with C.G.I., serves as the Sea of Galilee. (Some scenes are filmed in Utah, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a set built to look like ancient Jerusalem; “The Chosen” is one of only a few non-L.D.S. productions that has been granted permission to film there.) Jenkins paused before a building that had a pair of weathered wooden doors with elaborate patterned carvings. A retiree who lives in the area made the doors for free. “People really, really want to be a part of this,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins is built like a football player—he sometimes gets mistaken for Tom Brady in airports—but he comes off as guileless and geeky, with an obsessive’s bottomless enthusiasm for talk. I had been watching him and his wife, Amanda, on “The Chosen” ’s many promotional YouTube videos, during which she’d roll her eyes affectionately when he put his foot in his mouth. The more I watched, the more he reminded me of Kermit the Frog with biceps. On this afternoon, though, he seemed drained; he’d been up until three in the morning working on edits for Season 6. For the first time, “The Chosen” had filmed overseas, in an Italian village called Matera, a frequent backdrop for Biblical projects, including “The Passion of the Christ.” “We’re spending forty-five minutes to an hour of screen time with Jesus on the Cross,” Jenkins explained. “If we did all that with visual effects, it does start to feel a little fake.” The work had been gruelling. Filming in Italy meant ten-hour days with no lunch breaks and coördinating with a crew of garrulous strangers. “Just non-stop Italian chatter. They do not stop talking,” Jenkins said. “And then there’s the content.” Roumie was hoisted with ropes onto a wooden cross and spent hours dangling there, as the actors around him wept and wailed. This season, more than any other, felt “risky,” Jenkins said. “We’re boxed in by plot. All these things need to happen in a short amount of time, and we’ve seen it dozens of times before,” he went on. “Our task is: What do we want to say that hasn’t been said before?”
Jenkins takes his cues less from other faith-based projects and more from prestige television. “If I said to you, ‘I love “Friday Night Lights” because it’s so human,’ you’d be, like, ‘Well, yeah, it’s about human beings.’ That’s not typically a unique thing, but in Biblical storytelling it is,” he said. “You think of ‘The Ten Commandments’—it’s big, formal, epic, you know? Staged, distant, reverent. I always say we’re taking Jesus’ apostles down from the stained-glass windows—down from artifice, down from the churchy formality—and trying to tell this story with real human beings.” Early seasons show Jesus attracting followers while Roman élites and rabbinical leaders regard the growing movement, some with suspicion and some with sympathy. The tone is loose and intimate, and the events proceed at a leisurely pace: the entirety of Season 5 is devoted to Holy Week, and the seven episodes of Season 6 will cover the twenty-four-hour period surrounding and including the Crucifixion. “People are spending hours with Judas. They love Judas,” Jenkins said. “He commits suicide—this isn’t a spoiler, it’s in the Bible—and that’s going to be devastating for our viewers, because they’ve spent hours with him.”
The creators of “The Chosen” work hard to make the ancient world accessible. Story lines pulled from Scripture are supplemented with subplots that touch on miscarriage, addiction, autism, and the difficulties of small-business ownership. Characters’ traumas are revealed in flashbacks. There is betrothal drama, an oblivious husband, and inter-disciple squabbling. Roumie’s strapping Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount, but he also broods, dances, makes jokes, and does poorly at a game of catch. Mary Magdalene, played with luminous intensity by Tabish, goes to a hair salon. Characters exchange banter in a way that would not be out of place in a Marvel movie. (In a gesture toward authenticity, Jenkins has asked his actors to speak in an approximation of a Middle Eastern accent, which is pulled off more effectively by some than by others.) The show’s first episode introduces the future disciple Matthew, a publicanus, or Roman tax collector, played by Paras Patel; perhaps for the first time in Biblical media, someone makes a “public anus” joke.
Jenkins carefully skirts issues of doctrinal division—for example, whether Mary was a lifelong virgin (as Catholics hold) or whether she bore children after Jesus (as evangelicals tend to believe). But the show’s abiding sensibility is identifiably evangelical, according to Patrick Gray, a professor of religious studies at Rhodes College. “The image of Jesus for my generation—I’m fifty-six—is from this six-hour miniseries, ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ by Franco Zeffirelli,” Gray said. “Jesus is this really pale white guy, very ethereal.” (Zeffirelli, who was Catholic, instructed the actor to blink as little as possible.) In contrast, “The Chosen” depicts “a very relatable Jesus,” Gray said. “It feels a little . . . colloquial. He’s pretty earthy.”
Another evangelical tell is the show’s emphasis on the Jewish roots of Christianity. Characters eat challah and are married underneath a chuppah; the Last Supper is portrayed as a Seder. (Some of these customs were likely not part of first-century Jewish practice.) The traditional Passover song called “Dayenu,” which means “It would have been enough,” has been repurposed by the show as a paean to Jesus. The program is sometimes said to have a rabbi as part of its Biblical advisory panel, which also includes a Protestant theologian and a Catholic priest. But Jason Sobel, the adviser in question, is more accurately described as a messianic rabbi, a member of what is generally considered a Protestant sect that recognizes the divinity of Christ. Peter Chattaway, a freelance film critic for Christianity Today who also writes a Substack about Biblical media, said, “Because of ‘The Chosen,’ some Christians are going around saying dayenu. If I were Jewish, I don’t know how I would feel about that. They made a T-shirt that says ‘It would have been enough.’ I’m not the kind of person who uses expressions like ‘cultural appropriation,’ but I will confess that the phrase comes to mind sometimes.”
“The Chosen” is more nuanced and less aggressively didactic than many Christian films of recent vintage. The divinity of Christ is part of the ground truth of its world, rather than something that needs to be asserted or justified. It does not require a fluency in Biblical stories to understand; indeed, the show’s press team claims that a quarter of its viewership is not Christian. Yet I did not find the show as bingeable as its core audience does. Some crucial element of the experience—perhaps a feeling that what I was watching was providential and urgent and true—was inaccessible to me as a nonbeliever. Instead, I was left with the sense that this was a narrative that had stakes but little suspense, since it is never in question how this story is going to turn out.
When Jenkins was in eighth grade, his father, Jerry, decided that his son was mature enough to be initiated into the world of mainstream entertainment. It was the late eighties, and the Jenkinses, a family of five, lived in suburban Illinois, where Jerry was a prolific writer of as-told-to biographies of athletes and religious figures. The family was middle class, and fundamentalist Baptist “in a pretty hard-core way,” Jenkins told me. He and his younger brothers went to church twice a week, attended Christian schools, competed in Bible-memorization contests, and consumed largely faith-based media. Among their evangelical cohort, secular films and television programs were “something to be avoided or shunned,” he said. But Jerry was a storyteller at heart, with a soft spot for Hollywood classics. That summer, father and son watched a new movie nearly every night: “The Godfather,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Jenkins was troubled. Most cinematic depictions of Jesus felt like eating vegetables—why were these movies so delicious?
Jenkins has taken on the task of accustoming his audience to such directorial flourishes as nonlinear storytelling. “The core audience of ‘The Chosen,’ the early adopters, they tend not to watch as much film and television, and they’re not as familiar with some of the more challenging or nuanced storytelling techniques. And I’m not saying this in any kind of negative way,” Jenkins told me. “I do think, Let’s push them, let’s challenge them. And if they become a little bit more—I’m trying to avoid using the word ‘sophisticated,’ because it sounds condescending—but if they’re watching maybe with a little more nuance, a little more care, that’s going to increase the depth of the experience they have with the show.”
Jenkins went on to study media at a Christian college in Minnesota. While he was there, Jerry published his hundred-and-twenty-fifth book, “Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days,” the first in a series of eschatological novels inspired by the Book of Revelation, co-written with Tim LaHaye. The book was an unexpected hit; the “Left Behind” series has since sold more than seventy million copies. In midlife, Jerry became an evangelical celebrity, a status he accepted with humility, according to his son. “I don’t claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them,” Jerry once told an interviewer. “I wish I was smart enough to write a book that’s hard to read, you know?”
In 2000, “Left Behind” was adapted into a film that this magazine described, somewhat grudgingly, as “strikingly professional.” It was released directly to video, but, after sales outperformed expectations, the filmmakers pushed for a theatrical release. They recruited church groups who sponsored screenings, drumming up publicity in exchange for discounted tickets. In keeping with the series’ militant tone, these promoter-fans were called “commandos.” Ticket sales were middling. Three years later, however, a similar mobilization of congregations helped to earn “The Passion of the Christ”—a violent, R-rated, subtitled Christian movie with dialogue in Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic—a worldwide gross of more than six hundred million dollars.
In the two-thousands, Jenkins took low-level jobs on “Left Behind” and its sequels and worked his way up the ladder in the faith-based filmmaking world. He eventually directed a handful of independent films, to varying degrees of success. Several of them trace a similar arc—a selfish, successful man unexpectedly finds himself in a Christian context, whether by the intervention of an angel or by the terms of his probation. He resists, succumbs, is transformed. In 2015, Jenkins got what felt like his big break when he received studio financing to direct “The Resurrection of Gavin Stone,” a Christian rom-com. The film, which Jenkins now describes as “like a really good Hallmark movie,” was a flop.
The story of what happened next is a well-worn part of “The Chosen” ’s lore. With his career in tatters, Jenkins stopped striving for worldly success and fully surrendered to God, in the form of making a twenty-minute movie for his church’s Christmas Eve service. The short film, which was about the birth of Jesus from the perspective of the shepherds, found its way to Jeffrey and Neal Harmon, marketing prodigies based in Provo, Utah. The Harmon Brothers, as their agency is called, had recently had a viral hit with a trippy rainbow-and-unicorn-themed YouTube campaign for a product called the Squatty Potty. They saw promise in Jenkins’s short. When he pitched a show about Jesus and his disciples, they agreed to finance and distribute the project.
The Harmons, who are Latter-day Saints, have built an empire rooted in innovation and in antagonism toward institutional media. In 2013, Jeffrey and Neal, along with some of their other brothers and a cousin, founded VidAngel, a service that allowed viewers to skip or mute “the bosoms, blood and bad words” in streaming content, as Neal put it at the time. Eventually, VidAngel hired workers to flag popular movies for potentially objectionable content—a sex scene, say, or a character using the Lord’s name in vain—then made a filterable version available to stream on the VidAngel platform.
In 2016, a consortium of Hollywood studios sued Angel for copyright violations. The Harmons used the legal battle as a fund-raising opportunity, collecting more than ten million dollars in five days—not donations but investments in what the company called a “mini I.P.O.” When VidAngel filed for bankruptcy the following year, the fund-raising cache served as the seed money for the Harmons’ next venture, the production house Angel Studios.
The company, which is now called Angel, continues to find new ways to monetize its relationship with its supporters. More than two million people belong to the Angel Guild, a membership program that votes on the projects the studio produces. (Members also get free tickets and other perks.) In 2025, the Guild generated two hundred and nine million dollars in revenue for the company.
Angel is careful not to refer to its contributors as donors—the studio is a for-profit enterprise—but the Harmons speak about their productions with a mission-driven urgency. The company’s goal is, according to their website, “to amplify light,” and Neil has likened it to a populist uprising. “The crowd is going to, over time, outperform the élites in Hollywood,” he once said. Instead of receiving notes from media executives, directors get them from Guild members. “It’s like a filmmaker’s best friend,” Jeffrey Harmon, the co-founder and chief content officer at Angel, told me. “You get hundreds of comments and a score that gives you a signal of how you’re going to do with the values audience.” One director submitted his film to the Guild a dozen times, making tweaks each time, before finally winning approval, Harmon said. The Guild is “genre-agnostic,” Jeffrey Harmon said; it has approved of the controversial anti-sex-trafficking thriller “Sound of Freedom,” Angel’s highest-grossing film to date, as well as romantic comedies, Westerns, and an animated version of “Animal Farm.” Angel says its films have an average Rotten Tomatoes audience score of higher than ninety per cent. “So much of marketing right now is about creating community,” Kevin Goetz, the founder of Screen Engine, a company that studies audience behavior, told me. “Angel Studios is brilliant at it—they get people engaged at the earliest moment.” In 2025, Angel went public at a valuation of $1.6 billion, though its stock price has since fallen steeply. “If you look at the Apple early-days stock, it didn’t look great either,” Harmon said; the company believes that the Guild could grow to encompass as many as eighty million members.
“The Chosen” was Angel’s second original offering. The ten million dollars of crowdfunding still made for a tight budget for an eight-episode season. (Each episode of Season 4 of “Stranger Things” cost around thirty million dollars.) The show, which was initially released behind a paywall on the VidAngel platform, struggled to find an audience.
The Harmons brought in Derral Eves, a fellow Latter-day Saint, as an adviser for the show. Eves is a toothy, gleefully entrepreneurial man who currently serves as one of “The Chosen” ’s executive producers. I met him at ChosenCon, where he wore a shirt that read #BingeJesus in the show’s signature color, teal. Eves grew up with ten siblings in rural Utah and discovered YouTube in 2005. He turned out to have a preternatural feel for online video and viral marketing campaigns. Around the time that Eves met Jenkins, he started working with a promising teen-age YouTuber named Jimmy Donaldson, who had around four million followers. Eves helped him shape his content strategy, encouraging him to focus on giveaways to strangers and game-show-style videos. Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has since become the most popular creator on YouTube and is currently closing in on half a billion followers.
Eves believed that the best way to build and sustain an audience for an unknown project released on an unknown platform was to sell the story behind the show, beginning with Jenkins’s tale of failure and redemption. At their first meeting, Eves was delighted to find that Jenkins had “all the qualities of an influencer,” he told me. “You’re either bipolar or you have O.C.D. or something. Dallas is kind of on the spectrum, so I’m, like, O.K., check. He’s very detail-oriented. He’s very well spoken. He’s very personable when he needs to be.”
It sometimes felt like Eves was advising him to “dance for nickels,” Jenkins said. But he quickly came around. “It was clear from the beginning that the people who watched the show, and also watched the journey of my wife and I, were abnormally passionate, abnormally intense,” Jenkins said. “There’s a difference between ‘Oh, I really like that movie, you should see it’ and ‘You need to watch this right now, it changed my life.’ ”
Jenkins began live-streaming the release of each new episode, telling funny stories from the set, singing a jokey song to promote the gift-shop merchandise, and raising money to keep the project going. “The Chosen” ’s target audience was primed for such pleas—contributing money was akin to tithing, sharing episodes was a form of proselytizing. When Jenkins had débuted the show’s first season at the National Religious Broadcasters convention, an annual gathering for evangelical media, the response had been underwhelming. “A hundred people in two thousand seats and me with a microphone going, Here’s my little show!” he recalled. But when he came back the following year “it was bedlam.” The packed room sang his gift-shop jingle along with him. “We’re going to do fifty-six hours of television. By the time the show is done, we’ll have released, I’m not exaggerating, thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes content,” Jenkins once said.
Lionsgate acquired worldwide distribution rights in 2023, around the time that the CW picked up the first three seasons for broadcast. Last year, Amazon MGM Studios signed a deal that gives Prime Video the U.S. streaming rights, control of theatrical distribution, and a first-look agreement for future projects created by Jenkins’s production company, 5&2 Studios. (Episodes are still available for free on the “Chosen” app.) But the relationship with Angel has deteriorated. Jenkins found Angel’s model “limiting,” he told me. According to him, only forty per cent of the money raised by “The Chosen” actually went to the show. (Angel said that the split was the other way around, claiming that forty per cent went to Angel and sixty went to “The Chosen,” after expenses.) Jenkins also chafed at what he called Angel’s “culture-war dynamic”: “This us-versus-them, we’re outside the system, this is a topic no one else will touch—I knew that that could sometimes help you generate more money from core fans, but that’s not a part of what our show is.” (Angel disputed this characterization: “Dallas is a one-genre wonder,” Jeffrey Harmon told me. “If you talk to any of the filmmakers working with us, we have a very good reputation.”) “The Chosen” ultimately terminated its arrangement with Angel, citing breach of contract. Angel filed a counterclaim; in a separate lawsuit against one of the show’s executive producers, Angel claimed that they were losing out on $2.6 billion in potential revenue from future seasons of the show. Arbitrators eventually ruled in favor of “The Chosen.”
These days, the show’s production is funded through a nonprofit organization, and contributions are now tax deductible. Revenue comes from box-office sales, licensing fees, and merchandise sales—in “Chosen” parlance, the products are called “gifts.” The show still makes millions of dollars from donations each season. Donors include both “regular people” and “institutional types,” according to Jenkins; there have been a handful of “seven-figure, eight-figure” contributions from Christian philanthropists such as Mart Green, the son of the Hobby Lobby founder David Green. Even so, some fans still think of the show as an underdog. At ChosenCon, I chatted with a woman from Maine in her eighties. “They couldn’t make it without us, which is why I bought a shirt, and a cup, and another cup,” she told me.
Devoted audiences can be demanding constituencies. Last year, the Angel Guild approved the acquisition of “Sketch,” a children’s movie starring Tony Hale, which was not an explicitly faith-oriented movie. (The Guild asked for lines in which a character said, “Oh, my God,” to be edited out before it granted approval.) When it was released in theatres, though, some Angel Guild members called its fantasy elements “demonic.” Despite positive reviews, the film underperformed. “I loved that movie, but it should not have been an Angel release,” Greyson, the faith-based film marketer, told me. “I think those guys are very shrewd, but they’ve become too Hollywood in their approach. My concern for them is, now that they’re a publicly traded company, there’s a lot of pressure on them to expand beyond the audience.”
Some viewers of “The Chosen” have wanted Jenkins, who has described himself as both “a Christian conservative” and “a libertarian,” to be more vocal about politics, but he has largely avoided getting involved in culture-war skirmishes. In part, this may be because the show has more viewers outside the U.S. than in it. Season 1 is available in a hundred and twenty-five languages, including Finnish, Tulu, and Kyrgyz; when it streamed on Netflix, it was in the Top Ten in Paraguay, Honduras, and Brazil. Jenkins also seems temperamentally inclined to treat faith audiences as a capacious majority rather than as an embattled minority. During panel discussions, I was surprised (although perhaps should not have been) to hear the show celebrated for its inclusivity, including praise for its diverse casting and its rich, nuanced roles for women. (This relative openness has its limits. The show’s portrayals of a flamboyant Pontius Pilate and his butch wife echo old tropes about how the Romans’ gender decadence contributed to their civilizational decline.)
In May, 2023, fans watching a behind-the-scenes video of Season 4 noticed that one of the show’s cameramen had a small Pride flag on his equipment. The backlash was swift. Fans called for the crew member to be fired. “Christians, just like we boycotted Target & Bud Light, we need to boycott @thechosentv,” Jon Root, a conservative sports commentator, posted on social media. “The promotion of the Pride Flag is never acceptable in church or any form of ministry. While you boycott & encourage friends/family to do the same, please pray for Dallas Jenkins, the actors/actresses, production crew and everyone at Angel Studios so they may understand the error of their ways.” Jenkins addressed the drama in a series of videos, live streams, and podcast interviews. The cameraman, who is gay, was “probably one of my top two or three favorite crew members,” he said. Jenkins went on to say that he believed in “a Biblical viewpoint of sexuality,” but he didn’t require the cast and crew to sign on to his personal outlook. When he spoke to a Christian podcast about the controversy, he sounded exasperated, noting that he believed it was also “outside God’s will” for straight, unmarried crewmembers to have sex. He didn’t understand, he said, “why this particular issue, this particular sin, is worse and requires a public statement.”
The show’s final season, which will depict the Resurrection and its aftermath, began filming this spring. The ‘Chosen’ extended universe, as Jenkins calls it, has continued to expand; it includes an animated version for kids and a reality series in which Bear Grylls, the British adventurer, takes cast members on wilderness excursions. Jenkins has enlisted his father to write novelizations of “The Chosen,” which read like Biblical fan fiction (not to be confused with the show’s actual online fan fiction, in which Matthew and Mary Magdalene are the preferred characters to ship, with varying levels of smuttiness). A series based on the Book of Acts is in the works, as is one about Moses, whom Jenkins envisions as “a reluctant Tony Soprano” with a speech impediment.
A director’s Jesus tends to be a stand-in for his conception of masculine virtue. He is sinewy and stoic in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”; righteous and radical in Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”; conflicted and worldly in Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Rewatching the show after ChosenCon, I decided that Jenkins’s Jesus is, above all, a tender and benevolent manager. Roumie, who, like Jenkins, is in his early fifties, can appear weighed down by the burden of his responsibilities, but he always rises to them. His charisma is powered by resolute certainty. He spots talent in overlooked places and inspires his disciples to believe in themselves; he is generous with praise but stern when he needs to be; and he never misses an opportunity for a teachable moment.
On Palm Sunday, Jenkins signed on for another live stream. He wore a Chosen-branded half-zip fleece; Amanda sat next to him in a denim shirt and silver necklaces. At ChosenCon, the couple had revealed that Amanda is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and on the live stream her enthusiasm seemed more hard-won than her husband’s. Over the course of an hour and a half, Jenkins showed off a new T-shirt design and warned viewers against A.I. scams that use Roumie’s name or likeness. He introduced a snippet of the forthcoming season—“Where’s Judas?” Mary Magdalene asks forebodingly—and debated the show’s “most impactful” moments. He promoted a guide for hosting a Christian version of a Jewish Shabbat dinner and encouraged fans to share promotional content on their social-media feeds. For those who didn’t know how to tag the show in their posts, he suggested that they ask a grandchild. “If you like what you’re hearing, hit that like button,” he said.
“Like it in your heart, too,” Amanda said, the mildest hint of reproach in her voice.
“Yes, it’s good to like it in your heart,” Jenkins said, looking at her and smiling playfully. Then he turned back to the camera and mimed clicking on a share button. “But out of the heart, the fingers speak.” ♦