WASHINGTON — The Kennedy Center will be screening a film in the New Year about Orthodox Christianity, which has been experiencing a surge of converts in recent years, in an effort to promote works that will connect with viewers “across religious traditions.”
Billed as a black-and-white art film, director Josh David Jordan’s “El Tonto Por Christo,” follows monks at a remote monastery on the Gulf Coast of Texas suffering together through the “swelter,” doubt and at times mischief that results when a “brotherhood of misfits” retreats to the wilderness.
Jordan told The Post in an interview that the movie took inspiration from “Texas southern culture” that is “contrasted with the life of the monastery” — but it’s “not necessarily an Orthodox film” and full of genre-bending scenes that draw from noir thriller, horror and even comedy.
The title, which translates from the Spanish as “The Fool for Christ,” invokes the ancient Eastern Christian tradition of the “holy fool,” a saintly figure, portrayed perhaps most memorably in the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels, who can disrupt the comfortable through humor and absurdity.
“It is a story of forgiveness, really,” Jordan said, “and striving to be better people in this world.”
Kennedy Center Vice President of Public Relations Roma Daravi said the film was chosen out of a commitment “to celebrating religious expression and presenting art that engages and connects audiences across faith traditions.”
It also comes as Orthodox churches experienced a 78% increase in converts in 2022, according to a nationwide survey, despite their overall representation being less than 1% of the US population.
By contrast, 40% self-identify as Protestant Christians and 20% call themselves Catholic.
But the shift toward Eastern Christianity — particularly among men, at least 60% of whom are darkening the church’s doors, per Pew Research Center statistics — has been the subject of articles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post in the last five years.
The movie, Jordan’s second full-length feature, will premiere at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Feb. 9, 2026, with a post-screening panel featuring the director and the artist and cultural commentator Jonathan Pageau.
“An angle that a lot of the journalists have been missing is that a lot of the people that are converting to Orthodoxy are, for all intents and purposes, something like elites … people that are intelligent and that are looking for lofty things, that are searching for beauty,” Pageau explained.
“There’s always been a connection between Orthodoxy and a very kind of high intellectual pursuit, whether it’s Dostoyevsky … whether it is [the Russian filmmaker Andrei] Tarkovsky,” he went on, “an aspect of the conversion that we’re seeing happen now is that a lot of the people that come are looking … for a kind of deep experience … and Josh’s movie offers that for sure.”
“The Christian grammar, you could say, is the grammar of Western art. We can’t separate it,” Pageau said. “So to plunge deeply into it, and to want to learn about it and to be able to make it shine again is something that I think that Christian artists should be able to do and should do.”
Tickets go on sale at the Kennedy Center starting Dec. 23.
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