“Plato said something like what I’m about to say….that if he wanted to govern a nation, and he had the option to use politics or art, he would choose art. While politics can govern the laws of men, art dictates their minds and their hearts, how they think and how they work.”

No less than Plato provided the dominant philosophy of CPAC’s panel on Hollywood, “The Power of the Box Office: Getting the Pro-Life Message to the Masses.” With this title and the fact that two of the scheduled speakers were reality star Tarek from “The Apprentice” and Miss America 2001, I did not expect much. Thankfully, Tarek and the beauty queen did not show up, and so the audience was treated to a substantive discussion between a set of conservative entrepreneurs, producers, and filmmakers. The prevailing message: not all is lost in Hollywood for conservatives.

While the talking heads on Fox News might have you believe that Hollywood, with its godless tales of homosexual cowboys and alarmist propaganda about global warming, is a lost battle in the culture war, these execs preached a message of hope. Joe Giganti, who was introduced as having a “secular” radio and TV background and who had worked on “Passion of the Christ,” informed the crowd that these days, “New Media” and/or “Alternate Media” is, in fact, Conservative Media. And he’s sort of right—while progressives think of grassroots media on the internet as something inherently theirs, Giganti pointed to talk radio as proof that “the Revolution has taken place!” In the middle is Hollywood, where what Giganti and other conservative or non-secular filmmakers aim to promote is truly alternative; they see themselves as launching a veritable insurgency in Tinseltown. Theirs is a different kind of culture war—not a war between cultures but a war with cultural items as weapons. “The battle of ideas,” as one of them put it, “…and we have the benefit of the Truth!” Spoken like a true revolutionary.

However, there was some discrepancy between how to proceed with this cinematic rebellion. Mr. Giganti placed the responsibility on the artists, citing that “The Passion of the Christ” succeeded because it was a good film. While some would take issue with that evaluation, the idea of art as the great democratizer is certainly an appealing one—the notion that a movie’s status as artful or entertaining first and foremost is what allows any subsidiary political philosophy in it to reach people. But Mike C. Thompson, a producer who worked on “Chronicles of Narnia,” “World Trade Center,” and “Amazing Grace,” imagined the business of Hollywood as an explicitly political process. “We vote by buying a ticket,” he said, no matter how crappy the film. To actually effect change in what we’re paying ten bucks for, we must “write letters to our producers” (instead of our Congressmen). The language of this rhetoric had me thinking that maybe Plato was right.

The most fascinating element of the afternoon was the concerted effort to eschew any talk of the actual partisan issues in films on either side. Despite the title of the panel, the word “pro-life” was perhaps mentioned only once, and when asked a question about “An Inconvenient Truth,” Mr. Thompson commended it as the kind of film that conservatives need to make about issues close to them. Indeed, after quoting Plato, Sean Wolfington, an entrepreneur-turned-Christian film producer, resorted to the old story that the Columbine shooters had watched “Natural Born Killers” more than 100 times (ironic, giving the earlier praise for Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center”). This refrain is not easily placed on one side of politics or the other; rather, it reflected the prevailing sentiment on the panel that the more appropriate paradigm in which to think about films is not “left vs. right,” but “nihilist vs. humanistic.”

"Films should make everyone want to be a better human being," Wolfington said. That's a noble and broad enough goal, I thought. As long as it's better than "The Passion of the Christ," I'll be there.