An affirmative answer would be one way of reading the recent piece on Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of such great movies as Miller’s Crossing, Hudsucker Proxy, and No Country for Old Men at Christianity Today. The neo-evangelical habit is to take the rough edges off Christianity in order to make the faith relevant and agreeable to middle America. That also seems to be what happens when the editors at CT turn a kind eye toward former bad boys of Minnesota. I mean, of the many characters available to him, Josh Hurst, the author of the piece, turns to Marge, the family friendly cop from Fargo. Hurst writes:

That’s a good way to describe the brothers’ opus: a chronic search for truth. Some might argue that the Coens’ world is amoral, but a discerning look reveals morality aplenty. Good and evil stand apart from one another as clearly as black and white—or red and white, in the case of their classic crime story, Fargo. Set against the endless snow of the frigid Midwest, it’s a movie about greed, about a perfect crime gone horribly awry—in short, about the wake of destruction left by one man’s evil ambitions, seen starkly as a crimson trail of blood against the pure white terrain.

But then comes the evangelical smiley face:

Fargo’s heart and soul is local sheriff Marge Gunderson, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Frances McDormand. She’s chipper, [did someone say “chipper”?] pleasant, and very pregnant. She’s deeply affectionate and supportive of her husband, Norm. Their tranquil life contrasts the frenzied greed of the bad guys as much as a drop of blood on the snow. . . . Like Marge herself, the Coens have a longstanding curiosity about matters of morality. But hard as they might try, they can’t seem to shrug off the realities of evil as calmly as their most famous heroine.

Another reading of the Coen’s comes more from Tom Reagan, the punching-bag hero of Miller’s Crossing, than Marge Gunderson, the cop who likely pulled the Coens over a couple times during their youthful indiscretions. Tom repeatedly says, after being told to look into his heart, that you can’t know what motivates anyone, not even yourself. That’s actually fairly compatible with what Protestants know about the ambiguity of moral impulses even among the saints. But it is not the same as, “the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?”

Granted, the Coens did lose some of their mojo when they indulged Hollywood with Intolerable Cruelty and Ladykillers. Both movies appeared to be parodies of Coen brothers movies, what Hollywood would try to do if it were going to make a movie like Joel and Ethan.

But when you take a movie that features a human leg sticking out of a wood chipper and turn it into a study of purpose and rectitude, you may feel, like the teenager who is embarrassed to find that his parents also like The Who, that the church lady is trying overly hard to live on the edge.