Filmmaker Matthew McCaulley received plenty of pushback when he proposed creating a faith-based film highlighting the dangers of pornography. McCaulley just ignored them.
“If God’s telling us to do this, we need to do it,” he says today.
Five years in the making, McCaulley’s film Undefiled follows the story of an aging baseball player who is battling addiction when he sets out to rescue a victim of sex trafficking. The movie is now streaming on Amazon, Apple TV, and Tubi (for free, with ads) and tackles the subject of pornography without being salacious. An 8-part Bible study guide, Living Undefiled, is also available.
It stars Bradford Haynes (War of the Worlds: Annihilation) and Stelio Savante (The Chosen, Pursuit of Freedom).
McCaulley was inspired to make the film after a Christian psychologist friend shared alarming statistics with him: more than 60 percent of churchgoing men regularly watch pornography. Pastors, too, struggle with addiction, his friend said.
“Those hit me in the face,” McCaulley said. “One of the biggest things that Christians would say to me when we said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna make a feature film about this subject’ — a lot of the Christians would say to me, ‘I don’t understand why you’re doing that. That’s not an issue. It’s just porn.’… And so part of what motivated us was we have to address that thought that of, ‘Oh, it doesn’t hurt anyone, it’s just porn.’”
The pornography industry is fueled by the sex trafficking trade, he said. That intersection is a central theme in the plot of Undefiled.
It received eight nominations at the International Christian Film Festival.
“Some of the scenes, they needed to be handled very carefully with grace, with tact,” McCaulley said. “… Our prime objective was to handle it in such a way that you understand completely what’s going on and the severity of it, but yet, it handles it in a very Christian worldview type of manner.”
McCaulley recommends the film for teens. It is not appropriate, he said, for young children.
“One of the things that it does really well is it stirs up discussion,” he said. “And that’s really what the film was made for. It was made to start discussions.”
Photo Credit: ©SWN/Light of Life Films
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
