CHRISTIAN conservatives in America are marshalling their forces against Sir Ridley Scott’s forthcoming crusader epic, The Kingdom of Heaven, claiming the film is insulting and unfair.

Scott, 67, received death threats from Muslim fundamentalists during filming in Morocco two years ago when King Mohammed VI, who admired his earlier work, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, lent him troops from the royal bodyguard.

Yet it is Christian hostility that may ultimately prove more damaging at the box office. A spate of hostile reviews that are due to appear in the increasingly influential religious press this week will urge America’s 80m born-again believers to avoid the £100m film.

Scott said he has tried hard to be fair to both sides in his film, which depicts the 12th-century battle between Muslims and Christians for Jerusalem. He even employed Grace Hill Media, a Los Angeles public relations agency that markets potentially “troublesome” films to increasingly influential Christian opinion-formers. It organised a private screening earlier this month for Christian journalists at which Scott spoke.

Many of the resulting reviews have been poor. Bob Waliszewski, director of Plugged In Film Review, a programme heard on 300 US radio stations, said the film depicted Christians as “mean-spirited”, while Saladin, the Muslim leader, was shown as a chivalrous knight.

“The Bishop of Jerusalem is a coward who deserts his flock, and most of the crusaders are driven by greed rather than piety,” he said. “This is not how Christians I know see each other, nor will we want to see this film.”

Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan are waiting to see the film before commenting. But a spokesman for Buchanan, a former presidential candidate, said early reports about the film were “truly disturbing”.

The box-office clout of born-again opinion is formidable: the fringe group that vainly protested against Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ has become a movement that turned Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ into a blockbuster.

The conservatives are looking forward to the Christmas release of CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, co-funded by Disney and Philip Anschutz, the American billionaire who is an evangelical Presbyterian.

“The film makers met with us recently to assure us they are maintaining the original Christian allegory of the books,” said Waliszewski.

“Now that would not have happened in Hollywood 10 years ago.”

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