Is there, or will there be, a “church-based” ad campaign for Exodus: Gods and Kings?

The Wrap story that I linked to in my last post, on the dismal box-office performance of recent “faith-based” movies, ends with a puzzling quote.

In it, BoxOffice.com vice-president and senior analyst Phil Contrino says 20th Century Fox is “running mainstream and church-based campaigns” for Exodus: Gods and Kings, the Moses movie that opens in three months, give or take, depending on the country.

This caught my eye, because I haven’t heard a peep about any church-based campaigns for this film (or synagogue-based campaigns, for that matter).

To provide a bit of perspective: I attended a pastors’ screening of Son of God hosted by Mark Burnett on November 15 of last year — three and a half months before the film was released in theatres.

And the studio behind Noah was showing special trailers for that film at church conferences at least eight months before the film came out.

But has there been anything like that for Exodus? Anything at all?

Last March, Entertainment Weekly reported that Fox was planning to promote the film “more as a Gladiator-style action epic than a biblical movie per se.”

And the only indication I’ve seen anywhere that the studio reached out to the religious community is in a story from last April, which reported that the filmmakers had shown the script to Barry Taylor, an Episcopal priest who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary. (Naturally, he didn’t divulge any of the film’s secrets.)

But if Fox is planning anything like an actual marketing campaign directed at the “faith-based” community, then I have seen no evidence of it, anywhere.