pietistic

Not for Gardiner the pietistically devotional approach that can stultify.

It’s also a deeply spiritual film, without being pietistic or sanctimonious.

“Like Hollywood — a world so often criticized by the pietistic — these institutions and their leaders celebrate and reward the ‘blessing’ of fame, popularity and influence,” he writes.

They could be starchily formal or free-flowing, operatic or pietistic, shameless or scolding.

Less interested in blunt proselytizing than more open-ended explorations of faith and its challenges, Affirm films have gratifyingly avoided the kind of pietistic Sunday-school pageantry that characterizes so many motion pictures of the genre.