You've got to have faith.

WHEN Fox Filmed Entertainment last week announced that it would produce up to a dozen movies a year with religious themes, you could almost hear the entire country sigh "duh."

In fact, one of the biggest business mysteries of our time is how Hollywood survives while chronically disparaging enormous swathes of its audience. The religious audience is one big example.

As a disclaimer, I should admit that I don't regularly attend church and I'm not a particularly spiritual guy. But backsliders like me are in the minority. Look up most any survey, and you'll see that vast numbers of Americans--70 or 80 or 90 percent--describe themselves as religious in some way. In a somewhat-famous Newsweek poll a couple years ago, 79 percent of those surveyed said they believe the virgin birth is literally true.

But Hollywood movies rarely reflect people with such beliefs. The characters that populate movies are seldom depicted as going to church or synagogue as a practice, and they usually don't reflect religious values or even awareness.

Worse, when religious people are portrayed, they're often hypocritical megalo-maniacs or petty bigots who won't let the kids dance.

The problem is not simply a matter of movie-goers failing to see their lives reflected in movies. It's much worse. Many feel that something in which they believe deeply and sincerely is ridiculed or even attacked by Hollywood. They buy a ticket and get insulted. It took the outsized success of "The Chronicles of Namia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "The Passion of the Christ" to hit producers over the head with the obvious.

Religion is but one example of how Hollywood is out of step with most of its audience. Just think of how the American workplace is typically portrayed. In many movies, manufacturing plants are dark, deadened and futureless, a gritty hell hole from which Jennifer Beals must flashdance her way out. Offices are amoral and absurdist white-collar holding cells where ambitions are crushed so the greedy corporate owners can squeeze an eighth of a point rise out of the stock.

In many movies, the main character is on a quest to be a celebrity. He yearns to escape his workplace prison so he can be fulfilled as a sports hero or movie star or dancer. Otherwise, he must succumb and be just another soulless automaton stuck in an unsatisfying job.

Funny, but that's nowhere near the reality for most American workers. Do workers have complaints? Sure. But surveys routinely show that most workers are proud of what they do and are generally fulfilled at work. According to a Pew Research Center study done for Labor Day, 89 percent of workers surveyed--9 out of l0--said they were entirely or mostly satisfied with their jobs.

There's been lots of chin rubbing about why movie attendance has slumped. Surely, Hollywood's been hurt by home theaters and the degradation of the movie-going experience, among others. But I'm convinced one reason for the downturn is that Hollywood has lost touch with its audience and routinely insults many customers.

So long as Fox's new religion-tinged unit, called FoxFaith, doesn't pander to the religious, it can't help but find a big audience. For that matter, maybe someday there'll be more movies that basically understand typical American workers.

If so, it'll be about time. Customers have been sitting in darkened theaters for years, slowly shaking their heads.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [e-mail].