Ethics. The topic is everywhere you turn. It’s inescapable. Just before I sat down to write this article, in fact, I read in the local paper about a Federal Justice Department scandal in which the country’s top prosecutor in charge of environmental abuses cozied up to a Conoco lobbyist. While two Conoco consent decrees were being negotiated with Justice, the lawyer and the lobbyist went in together to jointly purchase a million-dollar vacation home.

Almost everybody involved in the case agrees that no laws were broken, and the lawyer involved his since resigned (after signing off on Conoco’s proposed settlements, not surprisingly). But legality is hardly the issue; the issue is ethical impropriety—and, to a degree, common sense. Government lawyers have every right to know and befriend lobbyists. At the same time, the Justice Department, at the very least, needs to not only be squeaky clean, it needs to appear squeaky clean. If you don’t have confidence in Justice, who is there left to trust?

So much for the secular world. What about the Church? And, given my particular ministry niche, I will be more specific: What about the ways in which Hollywood and the Church get cozy?

A congregation which shall remain nameless recently received a promotional pitch for a film which shall also remain unidentified. (The parties involved aren’t germane to my discussion; it’s the issues involved that interest me.) Without giving you any idea of the background, I’ll cut straight to the chase just to test your capacity for shock.

The publicity firm was looking for a congregation to “sponsor” commercial screenings of a film for a limited theatrical engagement. The publicist proposed that the church in question accept “25 Free Seats,” “Privileges to place Flyers/Handouts on each seat in the theater,” the right to have church members “greet moviegoers inside the theater,” the right to “place an easel stand sign inside the theater,” and the privilege of having the “Church logo on [the] movie poster at the theater.” In exchange, the publicist wanted to the church to agree to “help promote” the film by “Showing Promotional Trailers during services,” “Making announcements during services,” and “Posting Promotional Materials In Your Church and the Community.”

Clearly, it’s the American way to expect something in return for a favor. This is known as quid quo pro, a deal in which each side gets something out of the bargain. So there’s nothing illegal here.

But doesn’t it bother you that a publicist would think that movie seats could be bartered for worship time? If one accepts the apocryphal observation that movie theatres are “the church of the masses—where people sit huddled in the dark listening to people in the light telling them what it is to be human,” I suppose one could make the argument that true quid quo pro exists in this case: a trade of one worship experience for another. To me, though, that seems like swapping your birthright for a cup of porridge, and we know how that turns out.

Personally, what’s more troubling to me than this publicist’s profane presumptiveness is the fact that the publicist is obviously finding takers—and knows that takers are there for the, well, taking. In a legal sense (though not in a criminal one), this might also represent a case of bribery: when quid quo pro crosses a line into unseemly influence.

What has happened in the wake of The Passion of the Christ? Has the Church just become an easy whore for Babylon West?

I don’t think so, really. This one little example is but the tip of a big, gray iceberg—a frozen muddled mass of neither black nor white, sadly. And on the whole, the reality of the situation is far uglier and harder to dispense with than might be accomplished with convenient finger-pointing. There’s so much gray involved that no one’s likely to come out looking lily-white.

Over the next few months, I’ll be offering up my thoughts and very informed observations on the subject. I doubt I’ll come up with any tidy answers, but I’d very much appreciate it if you’d be a part of the conversation along the way.

Maybe in the end we’ll at least understand the nature of the beast, even if we don’t discover how to slay it.

Next month: Publicity—Whose Business Is It?