Since 2019, more than 100 million people have watched The Chosen. Many have gone further, and donated to fundraising campaigns to have the show dubbed into new languages and pushed on social media. The reliably secular New York Times calls it a “crowdfunded miracle.”

The man behind much of that success shares its assessment. “We would be remiss if we didn’t say there was at least some revelatory help with the whole crowdfunding idea,” says Neal Harmon, the co-founder of Angel Studios, appearing over Zoom (in piercing HD quality) from his studio in the Mormon heartland of Utah. ….

Given that preview episodes of The Chosen had been well received, Harmon had an idea: let people pay for advance copies which they could then gift to friends and family. The original idea was received well, but there was something Harmon didn’t anticipate: people weren’t just willing to pay for copies for their friends, but for total strangers too.

Four years later, the company now known as Angel Studios has refined the model that it calls “pay it forward.”

[Christian cinema had gained significant ground before The Chosen. I’d pick 2016’s Risen as the best in class for cinematic releases of faith-based entertainment, and there were solid choices before that too. 2004’s Passion of the Christ was highly influential in that development, although Mel Gibson accomplished that through the existing cinematic establishment, a marvel on its own. Harmon and Angel Studios have expanded that success enormously, though, by building a truly independent funding mechanism that allows for greater autonomy in story telling. — Ed]