‘Saved!’ Perfectly Captured the Hell of Attending a Christian High School

In the hyper specific subsection of teen dramas about religion, there’s only one that’s right with God: Saved! Or I should say there’s only one that’s right about God. Eleven years and Mandy Moore’s entire career later, Saved! is still the only teen comedy that fully and unabashedly understands the harmful hypocrisies of growing up in a Christian school.

At its core, Saved! is a movie about countless misunderstandings. Directed by Brian Dannelly, it tells the story of Mary (Jena Malone), a good Christian girl whose perfect life and faith are put to the test when she learns that her boyfriend is gay. She tries to “fix” him the only way she knows how: by having sex with him. For Jesus. What follows is a stumbling teen pregnancy coverup, a B-plot about perfect Christian Dean (Chad Faust) going away to a conversion center, and Mandy Moore acting her heart out as Hilary Faye, the popular girl obsessed with converting the masses. Everything is predictably warped in this film. Almost every self-proclaimed good Christian character is secretly a monster. Every outsider has a heart of gold. And every person flipping between those two extremes is immediately relatable.

When it was first released Saved! rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The movie was criticized by some for using bad humor to bash Christianity, while others complained the movie didn’t hit hard enough. If you really want to attack the hypocrisy of this religion, the line of thinking went, hit harder. The truth is more complicated than either. As a condemnation or attack on Christianity, Saved! is endlessly flawed. But as a reflection of the surprising toxicity of “good” Christian school it’s by the good book perfect.

My high school may as well have been named American Eagle Christian High School. That’s how intensely I related to Saved! in my teenage years. Leveraging your relationship with Jesus into mainstream popularity was something I witnessed on a daily basis. It wasn’t uncommon for the prettiest, most popular, and inevitably meanest girls in my class to also be the most outspoken about their youth groups and virginity. Obsessively trying to convert people to Christianity, almost as if saving souls were a sport, was something that was preached loud and often by my school’s founding church. Every year there was another confusing missionary trip that theoretically helped someone, much like how Mary’s love interest Patrick (Patrick Fugit) somehow helped South America through his skateboarding. And I have an endless amount of stories that feel grossly reminiscent of Hilary Faye’s relationship to her brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin), who uses a wheelchair. The moment when Hilary snaps at Roland for making people feel uncomfortable for “your differently abledness” rings true. Even under the guise of helping others, there is a type of Christian, and person, who still makes everything about themselves.

Yet seeing Saved! as a black and white lesson about religion is willfully misunderstanding a huge theme of the film. Teenagers are terrible. High school is terrible. They will always find a way to create and maintain hierarchies, even if that means gamifying their own spirituality. That’s what Saved! is at the end of the day, a parable about the dangers of posing as a good person instead of actually trying to be one. It’s not Hilary Faye who’s the true villain in Saved!‘s many finger-wagging moments. It’s the overarching school system that encouraged and rewarded her hypocrisy while rejecting anyone who looked different than its straight, cisgender, primarily white, largely able bodied, and obviously Christian ideal.

To understand Saved! as an indictment of religion is to purposefully ignore its final scene. In the movie’s last moments, Mary, after having been terrorized by her religious former friends and giving birth, decides to remain a Christian. No single religion is bad, the movie argues, but the people who abuse these systems certainly can be. To paraphrase the great and clueless Mary Cummings, the Bible is not a weapon… You idiot.

Where to stream Saved!