Fast-forward almost 20 years.

On the eve of the release of another controversial film, "The Da Vinci Code" -- which posits, among many biblically unorthodox ideas, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had children with her, the descendants of whom still walk the Earth -- the reaction of the evangelical community could not be more different.

67% of churches on board

There are still some religious leaders who are asking fellow Christians to boycott the film based on Dan Brown's mega-selling novel of the same name. One such group is calling for an "other-cott," asking "every Christian who loves Jesus" to buy tickets to any other movie besides "The Da Vinci Code" during its opening weekend, which begins this Friday.

But a much larger, more organized and better-marketed movement among major evangelical leaders has been under way for months, urging the faithful to embrace the film as an opportunity to spread the gospel, rather than a threat to its sanctity.

In a survey earlier this year, Outreach Inc., a Christian marketing firm in Southern California hired by Mel Gibson's production company to market "The Passion of the Christ" to evangelicals, reported that 67 percent of churches planned to do something in response to the "Da Vinci" film.

"And that was back in January!" said Lee Strobel, a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune and a onetime pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington. "To me, that was a sign that people were trying to kind of get ahead of the tsunami, and try to prepare their people to leverage it for good."

Last month, Strobel and Garry Poole, director of spiritual discovery at Willow Creek, published Exploring the Da Vinci Code: Investigating the Issues Raised by the Book and the Movie. The 110-page paperback already has more than 1 million copies in circulation, Strobel said.

Strobel and Poole's book is meant to help readers understand what is historically and biblically true about Brown's Da Vinci Code, and what is not. The two traveled to London and Paris -- key sites in Brown's novel -- and have also produced a DVD series and accompanying discussion guide for Bible studies.

Willow Creek, like many evangelical churches around the country, is in the midst of running a multiweek series of Bible studies based on "Da Vinci." The first two Sunday services in the series drew more than 44,000 people, church spokeswoman Cally Parkinson said.

'Wasn't there before'

"There's a huge response to this thing, and churches are really seeing this as an opportunity to turn what has wrought so much ill, for good," Strobel said. "There is a segment that wants to boycott, picket and protest. But I turn to Paul in Acts 17, who comes to Athens where [the people] are idol worshipping, and he's pissed off and wants to smash the idols. But instead, he engages them.

"[St. Paul] quotes their books to them! He's read their books! He'd seen their movies, so to speak, and he's speaking their language. So he reasoned with them and used it as a bridge to bring them the gospel. So that's what I'm hoping people do."

The evangelical Christian community's passion for movies is of a recent vintage, said Mark Noll, co-founder of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, who is widely considered the leading historian of American evangelicals.

Since the massive success of "The Passion of the Christ" -- based in no small part on the support it received from evangelical Christians -- evangelical Christian billionaire Philip Anschutz's "family-oriented" film company, Walden Media, had a smashing success with "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," which it co-produced with Disney.

"The Polar Express," "Gods and Generals" and, most recently, "Flight 93," all have been marketed toward an evangelical audience.

"By way of a long historical comparison, there certainly is just an assumption that it's appropriate to be active in this medium, or about this medium, and that certainly wasn't there before," Noll said.

As recently as the 1950s, most evangelical Christians were decidedly anti-movies, he said. Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, only has allowed its students to watch movies since the late 1960s.

In the weeks leading up to the release of the film "Flight 93," which told the story of the airliner hijacked on 9/11 that crashed in a Pennsylvania field, rather than its intended target in Washington, D.C., when passengers rebelled against their terrorist captors, Noll said he was contacted twice and invited to screenings by a Christian marketing group.

"That, too, showed planning, funding, organization and a direct effort to impinge on the media," he said. "We have a phenomenon here. ... This is pushing further what had been before."

Up next: 'Nativity'

But what the secular world calls marketing, many evangelicals increasingly view as evangelization. It has proved to be an effective tool for spreading the gospel that continues to gain momentum, Strobel said.

What's next?

"The Nativity," a film directed by Catherine Hardwicke, whose previous directorial work includes "Vanilla Sky" and "Three Kings," and produced by New Line Cinema, tells the story of Mary and Joseph in the days leading up to the birth of Christ.

"Nativity," which began filming in Italy this month, stars Keisha Castle-Hughes (of "Whale Rider" fame) as Mary and Oscar Isaac (of "Che") as Joseph.

Copies of the "Nativity" script already have been making the rounds in evangelical circles, and Outreach Inc. is gearing up its marketing plan for the film, Strobel said.

"They're the ones who are kind of on the horizon with binoculars trying to figure out what the next thing is," he said. "This is a film that they hope will do for Christmas what 'The Passion of the Christ' did for Easter."

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