The arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in Cape Cod area in 1620, together with Massachusetts governor John Winthrop’s famous City upon a Hill sermon in 1630, have long established America, and then the United States of America, as a Christian nation. Therefore, when commercial cinema developed in the U.S.A., it did not come as a surprise to see silent reels showing scenes inspired from the Bible. But the American film industry rapidly came under scrutiny by Christian groups (whether Protestant with the Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians…. or Catholic) that saw the potential of films to teach the Gospel and to attract people to religious services (Lindvall 81, 87, 103), but that also denounced the perversion, moral depravation as well as the corruption of young minds supposedly brought about by Hollywood films (Lindvall 76, Portes 250). Those Christian groups, and particularly the Catholics, became very vocal in the fight for the creation of a federal censorship. It was gradually averted by Hollywood thanks to the adoption in 1927 of the Don’ts and Be Carefuls, and then of the Production Code or Hays Code in 1930; some Catholic personalities like Father Daniel A.Lord contributed to both codes (Crafton 472-474; Miller 50-51; Portes 263-274). The Hays code pacified most Hollywood Christian critics and was effectively enforced between 1934 and 1966 (Gomery 175). The post-WWII years then saw many changes in America. For Hollywood, the 1950s meant the arrival of television in American homes and the subsequent decline in cinema audiences. Trying to fight back, the studios resorted to new inventions such as CinemaScope or Cinerama while scenarists further used the Bible as a source of inspiration. It gave birth to some lavish films such as The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) that allowed directors to make the most of the technical inventions, but they did not stop the decline in audiences. Moviegoing ceased to be a family outing and teenagers gradually became the dominant film audience for the studios—their importance as an audience was revealed by the success of films such as Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) or Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) whose themes also heralded a changing society. Films inspired by the Bible were less numerous in the troubled 1960s, thus partly reflecting the growing desecularization of a part of the American society. The troubled 1960s, with the Vietnam war and the student movement, initiated many changes in American society as well as in Hollywood whose audience and structure were gradually modified. The 12-to-24-year-olds were confirmed as the dominant film audience while the old ‘Moguls’ lost control of their studios, taken over by various conglomerates. The new studio executives, educated in business schools, implemented a way of doing business that lasted well into the 1980s and 1990s. At the end of the 1990s, those modifications, together with changes in the American political and religious landscapes, led Hollywood to once again pay some interest to Christian themes. The 1970s and the 1980s had already witnessed the return of the Christian religion to the forefront of the American political scene with the elections of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to the American presidency. That return was later confirmed in 2000 and 2004 with the election of G.W. Bush to the White House. For Hollywood, the renewed visibillity of the Christian religion on screen was made possible by the success of The Passion of The Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004) that definitely proved that there was a market for those films. Therefore, in the context of a more religious America, the present paper is going to focus on the reasons that have led the studios to pay greater attention to films with visible Christian themes, and on the way those studios have done it, finally showing the strong—albeit with limits—distinct business interest that links Hollywood to the American Christian groups.