When your friends come back from vacation, they always want to show you pictures and videos of the things they’ve seen along the way. To be honest, most of these exhibitions are mind-numbingly dull. When Alexandra Pelosi does the same thing, the result is anything but….
Pelosi, an Emmy-winning filmmaker, just came back from a cross-country pilgrimage, and her movie, “Friends of God: A Road Trip with Alexandra Pelosi,” is must-see tee-vee for all Americans. The documentary, which airs on HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern on Jan. 25 (and at other times in subsequent weeks), is a highly personal video scrapbook of evangelicals in America.
The subject matter runs the gamut from the impressive (Joel Osteen’s Texas mega-church empire) to the colorful (“Christian” miniature golf courses, “Christian” theme parks and “Christian” professional wrestling) to the alarming (Ken Ham indoctrinating children in the flaws of evolution).
Evangelicals have created a “Christian” alternate universe that many Americans don’t know exists. (If you want to find it, thumb through your community’s “Christian” telephone directory.) Pelosi is the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but the filmmaker is careful to avoid partisanship. She lets her subjects speak for themselves, and she says her goal is educational.
“I was trying to show the people in the blue states, like me, that there’s this whole other world out there, a whole community of people who have their own wrestlers, their own miniature golf, their own rock concerts,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “They’ve rejected a lot of what the mainstream culture has given them because they don’t find it appropriate. On the coasts, they have this very secular, coastal attitude that is very dismissive of the red states. I thought it was time to go into the belly of the beast.”
Those of us who believe in church-state separation will be especially interested in the footage on religion-based politics. TV preacher Jerry Falwell, for example, offers his usual belligerently partisan take.
“The Democratic Party has gone to hell in a handbasket,” he blusters, adding that evangelical Christians have formed such a formidable voting bloc that Democratic presidential candidates cannot win.
Falwell demonstrates how some Religious Right operatives bend (and possibly break) federal tax laws in the process. The movie shows him at (tax-exempt) Liberty University recruiting students to campaign on behalf of Republican candidates.
“We absolutely will take this country back for God,” he boasts.
The Rev. Ted Haggard, the now-disgraced former head of the National Association of Evangelicals, makes many appearances in the film. The taping took place before the sex-and-drugs scandal that took down the Colorado Springs pastor, and now many of his observations appear quite jarring and darkly funny. (At one point, he quips, “You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any group.”)
But Haggard, too, boasts of the evangelical movement’s political clout. When its leaders call on people in the pews to contact their members of Congress, he insists, they often get results.
“We can crash the Capitol switchboard system,” says Haggard. “That’s power.”
This movie isn’t a comprehensive study of all evangelicals in America. No one could do that in a 56-minute film. It doesn’t feature the millions of evangelicals who find Falwell frightening and Christian wrestling tacky. It doesn’t cover the burgeoning drive among some evangelicals to broaden the movement’s political agenda or to reject politics altogether. But Pelosi gives viewers a wonderful smorgasbord of people and places in the evangelical world. It’s enlightening, funny and scary, all at the same time.
Americans who think the Religious Right is yesterday’s news need to wake up and smell the “Christian” coffee. Or better yet, tune in to Pelosi’s “Friends of God.”
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