At one point in Dallas Jenkins’ new film The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (in theaters November 8), a tough, surly girl named Imogene—who has just entered the local church for the first time—listens as a nice church kid named Beth explains that their upcoming Christmas pageant is about Jesus. “Everything here is,” Imogene sighs.
It’s a fitting line for Jenkins, who has taken a break from the ongoing and massive success of The Chosen, a TV series about the ministry of Jesus, to squeeze in the feature-length Christmas Pageant. Based on the 1972 children’s novel of the same name, it’s a wonderful Christmas movie for the whole family that, in its own way, is all about Jesus. Clearly, for Jenkins, everything is.
Narrated by the now-adult Beth (played by Gilmore Girls’ Lauren Graham), the movie tells the story of an unexpected collision of opposites in the town of Emmanuel. On one side, the prim and proper local church is celebrating its 75th “Emmanuel Annual” Christmas pageant. The pageant has been run in pretty much the same exact way by the same exact church lady for years. On the other side are the Herdman children, a six-pack of misfit siblings known for stealing, swearing, smoking—and lighting the occasional fire. Beth has no qualms declaring them “absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world,” and they are led by the worst of the worst: the eldest daughter, Imogene.
The churchgoers and the Herdmans likely never would have crossed paths if it weren’t for a bad fall taking out the pageant director. After that, one unlikely mom—named, appropriately enough, Grace—volunteers to step up and take over the production. (“Did somebody die?” their son asks the parents at dinner. “It’s worse than that, son,” quips the husband, played by the perfectly cast comic Pete Holmes.) And when the Herdmans unexpectedly show up to the pageant audition, Grace—even more unexpectedly—allows them to bully their way into all the key roles.
As you might imagine, cringes and calamities ensue. But right from the beginning, two things are clear: first, these rough and impoverished kids—whose mom is never around and essentially are left to raise themselves—have never really heard about Jesus; and second, they are captivated by the infancy narrative and want to know more.
God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
Imogene, who is determined to play Mary, becomes especially captivated by a portrait of the Mother of God hanging in the church. (“You’re too dirty to play Mary,” the usual Mary snaps at her.) In one scene, Grace stands beside her, insisting that although Mary appears blandly sweet in this particular image, she, too, was a “tough one”—she had to be to do what she did—and explains that “Emmanuel” means “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). “That’s what baby Jesus was,” Grace explains. “The character you volunteered to play helped make that happen.” This emphasis on Mary running through Christmas Pageant is especially striking given that Jenkins is, like much of his audience, an evangelical. Mary continues to prove endlessly fascinating to us—not only Catholics, but also nonbelievers and Protestants. And rightly so; she is, as the Catechism teaches, Hodigitria, Our Lady of the Way, a sign orienting us to her son (CCC 2674). Like everything else in Christianity, she’s all about Jesus.
And that Way shines forth through the remainder of the film. The puffed-up churchgoers who have made an idol of the superficialities and externalities of religion—“the pageant is sacred,” the old director declares—are gradually shown to be at odds with the truth of the Gospel. One girl is squeamish at the idea of Mary being pregnant; one mom reacts with horror to the fact that the Herdmans talk about Jesus getting murdered—a quasi-Gnostic revulsion at the real enfleshment, the real birth and death, of the Savior. Meanwhile, the “lowly” Herdmans—especially the worst of them, Imogene (so redolent of “imaging,” calling Genesis readily to mind)—are gradually transformed by that same Gospel.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a beautiful testament to the potential goodness and beauty, and the deep desire to be loved and needed, in warped, hardened souls; “hurt people hurt people,” as the adage goes, and cruelty and indifference tend to mask deep wounds, so often incurred during childhood. (Bishop Erik Varden, in his wonderful new book Chastity, quotes the wisdom of one confessor: “You know, there are no adults, only children.”) It also witnesses to Christ’s injunction not to stand in judgment of our neighbors (see Matt. 7:1), even the “worst” among them; “There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?” (James 4:12).
And in and through all of this shines the truth of what Christmas is all about. It would be difficult to improve upon Linus’ explanation of that truth in A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was simply to quote the Gospel of Luke passage concluding with the angels’ song of praise before the shepherds: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” (Luke 2:14).
But we find another beautiful explication in G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, one that reflects the transformation of Imogene/Imaging:
Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. . . . Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet. . . . In the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.
Or, as Chesterton put it in one of his poems: “Glory to God in the Lowest.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer echoes the same idea:
He takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly. . . . God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
God isn’t degraded because of his descent, but the Herdmans—and all of us herdsmen in the fields of the world, all fire-lighting little monsters in our own ways—are elevated by it. As the adult Beth later remarks, the siblings just did what came naturally to them; the difference was that they now found themselves in a loving community and divine story.
The high meets the lowly, the rich becomes poor, grace perfects nature—and the worst of pageants just might become the best.