Crescendo for Life

Filmmaker Jason Jones Works for a Good End

Jason Jones was two days shy of seventeen when his girlfriend Katie told him she was pregnant. His life plan on waking up that morning had included college football and a career in the NFL. But right away he knew he'd lost the right to keep on being just a boy. They strategized on the spot. He would drop out of school and join the army, and she would keep the pregnancy hidden until he finished basic training. Then he would assume support for the three of them. It was an abrupt change of plans that in an odd way felt completely natural, even a little exciting.

Several weeks later, near the end of basic training, he was washing dishes in an army kitchen when a call came in. It was Katie, crying as he had never heard a woman cry before. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It wasn't me," she managed to get out before her father took the phone. "Jason, I know your secret, and your secret's gone. She had an abortion."

Jason was so stunned he punched the drill sergeant standing next to him. "He killed my baby!" he cried, feeling the loss in his gut. His captain, mercifully, didn't discipline him and gently explained that abortion was perfectly legal. It had been for years, but Jason hadn't known.

He was both heartbroken and appalled. He'd never been a stellar student, but he knew killing a child this way was a terrible wrong. He called Katie back and promised, "If it takes me the rest of my life, I will end abortion for our daughter Jessica."

Single-Minded

He started by going door to door. "I wanna talk to you about abortion. Can we talk about abortion? Do you know it's legal?" Some people looked at him like he was crazy. Others invited him in for a beer. Regardless, he kept it up until an officer called him in and suggested he make a plan.

He didn't know there was such a thing as a pro-life movement until a woman from Hawaii Right to Life heard what he was doing and called his barracks. One of five kids born to a single mom on the south side of Chicago, Jason didn't believe in God and he had no use for church. But he didn't care what religion anybody was. If they were working to end abortion, he would work with them. His family and friends thought the anti-abortion shtick was a phase, but he wrote out a 40-year plan for ending abortion. It set the course for his life, and he's been working it ever since.

Finding Bedrock

Other aspects of life, however, were in for a radical realignment. By age 28, he was in graduate school and heavily involved in pro-life work when he found himself feeling utterly defeated. Discouraged, he called Dr. Alan Keyes. "Jason, the darker the world becomes, the further your light will shine," the seasoned political warrior said. "Just pray."

Well, why not? "God, if you exist, and I do not believe that you do," the honest atheist began, "prove to me you're real. End abortion. I need rich people, famous people, and powerful people to stand up. Where are they? Raise them up, God, and then I'll believe in you."

After that, as he would reflect years later, "strange things started happening." He began producing movies and working directly for presidential candidates. More important, he found himself reexamining the philosophical foundations of his life's mission. He'd read a line from Sartre which said that there are no transcendent moral values without a transcendent moral lawgiver—that the view of the human person as having been created in the image of God with incomparable worth was a remnant of Christian anthropology. That tenet resonated with his own view of human life. It also resonated with the indignation he felt over the unjust death of his daughter.

But it conflicted with the Ayn Rand objectivist philosophy he had held since adolescence. He'd always championed Rand's beautiful defense of human rights, but she had also said that the source of human rights was axiomatic, that it was self-evident. Sartre said no, it is not self-evident. It comes from Christian anthropology. That was where the foundation of all human rights lay.

And when Jason saw the argument laid out that way, he got it. At that moment, he believed in God. Later, after some mental wrangling and study of the church fathers, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church at age 32.

Flourishing

Today, Jason's drive to replace the culture of death with a culture of life finds expression through an ever-widening range of outlets, one of which is filmmaking. In 2006, he co-produced Bella, which won the Toronto's People's Choice Award. The Stoning of Soroya M (2008) won the NAACP award for best foreign film, and Crescendo (2011) won 15 major international film festival awards.

The awards are nice, but peripheral. "The world thinks we're in the movie business," he tells his staff. "But we're not in the movie business. We are anti-abortion activists at Hollywood and Vine." What really matters is the fruit the films produce in terms of defending human life. Bella earned high praise from Rosie O'Donnell, as did Crescendo from Perez Hilton—both indications that good storytelling transcends ideological barriers and resonates with people across the spectrum. Even more rewarding for Jones are the thousand-plus letters from women who wrote to say they chose life for their children because of Bella. And Crescendo, though only eleven minutes long, has raised over $5 million for pregnancy centers and women's shelters.

This is why Jones and his staff do what they do—to foster a culture that understands the beauty and incomparable value of human life. Jason says he wakes up every morning "leaning forward" and thinking, What am I going to do today to end abortion?

Sufficient Grace

In 2009, he was invited to the Vatican to strategize on how to create a culture of life. There, surrounded by powerful people from around the world, he heard God whisper in his ear, What do you need now, Smart Guy?

What do you need now? It had been ten years since he'd taunted God, listing his "needs." "That's when I realized that God has given us all the grace we need to end abortion. We've just failed to correspond our life to that grace. When we correspond our lives to the grace that God has given us, the culture of death will vanish in the blink of an eye."