[3][4] One of the last films that British activist Mary Whitehouse campaigned against was Irvine Welsh's The Granton Star Cause, which portrayed God as drunken and abusive.
[2] God has largely been cast as white and male, Morgan Freeman, Morissette, Ken Jeong[6] and Jamie Foxx[7] being exceptions to this, that line up alongside William Keighley's 1936 film The Green Pastures, where all characters, including God, are played by African American actors (Rex Ingram in the case of what the movie calls "De Lawd").
The opening prologue of that film included what amounted to a disclaimer to make the movie palatable to the white audiences in the United States of the time, asserting that:[2][8] God appears in many forms to those who believe in him.
[11] God has in fact been portrayed in movies ever since the days of silent cinema, in biblical epics, experimental films, everyday dramas, and comedies.
[2] A suicidal supreme being identified as "God Killing Himself" expires in an act of self-immolation in E. Elias Merhige's 1989 avant-garde feature Begotten.
[13] In Carlos Diegues' 2003 movie Deus é Brasileiro, God is a down-to-Earth character, exhausted from his labours, who is resting in the northeast of Brazil.
In that series, God is portrayed, in accordance with the programme's theme song (Joan Osborne's "One of Us"), as simply a proverbial "stranger on a bus".
Neuhaus characterizes this portrayal as an "unknowable but visible God, who sees and is seen and is among us always, in all forms, participating in our everyday life but not interfering with humanity's free will, and who nonetheless calls us into service".
The creator, Barbara Hall, set out how God would be portrayed in some directives to the series' writers, named the "Ten Commandments of Joan of Arcadia".
Neuhaus deduces that this portrayal of God was partly motivated by the fact that Joan of Arcadia is a television show, a product that has to appeal to a broad range of viewers.