Reforming Hollywood

Book excerpt: In Reforming Hollywood, William Romanowski tells the long and complex story of the relationship between Protestants of all stripes--from Episcopalians to evangelicals--and the American film industry. Drawing on personal interviews and previously unexamined primary sources, he chronicles Protestant efforts to exert influence on the industry and use movies to promote the moral health of the nation. At the same time, Romanowski shows, mainline Protestants were surprisingly averse to censorship, which they saw as intruding upon individual conscience and antithetical to American democracy--of which they saw themselves as the guardians.