Retailer's decision to drop The Blind Side upsets Christian faithful

A US retail chain that sells Christian products has come under fire for pulling the Oscar-winning film The Blind Side from shelves, two years after it arrived on home video, because of profanity and the use of a racial slur.

Critics – many of them also religiously-minded – say LifeWay is sending the message that Christians "must be sheltered from the world's realities", after it refused to stock copies of the John Lee Hancock film. Ironically, the Blind Side's $300m (£192m) box office success in 2009 was largely credited to Christian filmgoers: the drama, which stars Sandra Bullock in an Academy award-winning role, centres on a white evangelical family in the US bible belt that adopts a struggling African American teenager from the Memphis ghetto and sees him blossom into a star college football player. It is based on the real life story of Michael Oher, now an NFL professional for the Baltimore Ravens, and the Tuohy family which took him in.

LifeWay's decision apparently stemmed from an ongoing campaign by Rodney Baker, a Baptist pastor from Florida, to force the film off the chain's shelves. LifeWay is affiliated to the US Southern Baptist Convention as its retail arm.

"After selling the movie for nearly two years, LifeWay decided last month to stop carrying it because of the likelihood it would be the focus of debate and division at our annual denominational meeting," said the chain, which owns 165 stores, in a statement. "We were electing the Southern Baptist Convention's first African-American president and did not want to distract from that historic moment."

But in a blog post protesting the move, the televangelist Rod Parsley said The Blind Side's inclusion of controversial subject matter such as profanity, violence and racial slurs simply showed the existence from which the Tuohys rescued Oher.

"We don't begrudge Pastor Baker his opinion that Christians shouldn't see The Blind Side, but we're disappointed that LifeWay succumbed to his pressure," wrote Parsley. "Its removal from LifeWay's shelves sends an ominous and, we think, unbiblical message: Christians need not only to be 'not to be of the world', but also must be sheltered from the world's realities."

Christian author Eric Metaxas also said he was "kind of upset" at LifeWay. "I think it's insane," he wrote. "For outsiders looking in, the moral of the story is that 'there is no pleasing Christians. They always seem to be looking for something to be mad about.'"

Meanwhile, Christian Post columnist Jim Denison asked: "If Christians shouldn't see The Blind Side, what movies depicting life in our culture should we see? If Christian publications have uniformly endorsed the movie, why are Southern Baptists deciding three years after its release to make this an issue?"