Christian streaming platform Pure Flix has announced that it will combine forces and merge with Bill Abbott’s Great American Family TV network, in a bid to rival the LGBTQ-affirming Hallmark Channel.
Pureflix, which has over a million subscribers paying $7.99/month, is known for its faith-based films and TV shows, some good and some wretchedly awful. It includes everything from God’s Not Dead (all of them) , The Case for Christ, Veggie Tales, Unplanned, Redeeming Love, The Chosen, Courageous, and a host of romantic dramas involving Christian women getting stranded in small towns and meeting handsome widows with precocious children.
You’ll recall that VeggieTales co-creator Phil Vischer once spent nearly 30 minutes on episode 537 of the Holy Post discussing Candace Cameron Bure’s move to the new Great American Family Network (GAF). Bure, a professing Christian, was one of the biggest stars on the Hallmark Channel, featured in over two dozen films. She left Hallmark because of their shift to feature same-sex couples and love stories, writing that she “wanted to promote faith programming and good family entertainment” and “I think that Great American Family will keep traditional marriage at the core.”
After taking a swipe at folks who don’t want to see movies with LBGTQ characters in them as people whose “comfort food is Cracker Barrel, and they just want a Christmas movie that feels like it was made in the 50s” Skye Jethani claimed it was an “overreaction” on the part of GAF to not feature LBGTQ character in central or even non-central roles, to which Vischer agreed.
