Pelosi: Friends of God (2007)

Over the weekend I got a chance to finish watching Alexandra Pelosi’s 2007 travelogue/documentary Friends of God. In the second half she spends a fair amount of time at Liberty University and at Thomas Road Baptist Church, and she visits a BattleCry rally. She also has a parting shot on Ted Haggard, whose sex-and-drugs scandal broke after Pelosi finished filming but before she finished production.

There’s some other stuff, too, but it’s mostly filler: a drive-through church, one of those guys who puts up crosses everywhere, etc. Pelosi’s take on most of these is pretty much live-and-let-live. I guess they’re supposed to soften the blow of the rest of the film.

Pelosi visited Lynchburg during the 2006 Congressional election cycle; Jerry Falwell had months to live, and the church was still at its Thomas Road location, before it moved to Candlers/Liberty Mountain. I’d forgotten how unwell Jerry looked the last few years of his life. It doesn’t help that he sits down to talk to Pelosi wearing casual not to say unflattering clothes, and of course she shoots him with the funny lens that distorts the shape of his head and makes him look even less well.

There’s also a brief introduction to Mel While, and footage of White crying while attending Thomas Road. Oddly enough White doesn’t get the eggplant-head treatment; I’m not sure why. It was a bit jarring for me to see White portrayed as the prophetic moral voice in his segment, engaged in some sort of peaceful protest by attending church at Thomas Road. And the footage of him sitting in church, apparently alone, crying, had a too-perfect feel. For some reason it reminded me of the orange juice scene in The Decline of Western Civilization II [link]. I wouldn’t say it was fake; it just looked and felt staged.

Her coverage of the BattleCry rally was essentially incoherent. All I really took away from the segment was that BattleCry rallies have slick marketing, a clear message of some sort, and are loud. I don’t understand why BattleCry and Rock For Life get as much attention as they do, and I definitely got the impression that Pelosi was appealing to a reference point she and I don’t share. I think the message was supposed to be something like “back in the Sixties rock concerts changed the world; now they’re in danger of changing it back again,” or some such. I’m not sure.

I think the definitive voice in the film was one of the short segments in the first half, where Pelosi visits Jeff and Susan Chapman: pastor, wife, and ten children with an eleventh on the way. Susan Chapman says directly to the camera that she though when she was in college she wanted to become a lawyer and eventually be the first woman President, but instead she got married and had ten children. To Chapman this is a clear sign of God’s work in her life; but I’m guessing Pelosi included her because she comes across like a character from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale [link], and Pelosi uses her deftly to suggest that the rise of the Religious Right and the appointment of justices like Samuel Alito [link] will bring oppression and the end of feminism. Or some such. I could be wrong.

Careful viewers may also recall that Alito was the embodiment of all liberal fears in the movie Jesus Camp, too. Why Alito gets singled out this way I can’t imagine; he’s not an evangelical, and if he’s part of the theocratic avant garde I can’t figure how. But that’s another topic for another day.

I would recommend seeing Friends of God if you get a chance; it’s not a good movie, but I found it interesting to see what Pelosi considers strange if not horrible about contemporary Evangelicalism in America. Hint: some of it really is strange, and some of it is horrible. I’m just not sure she and I would agree on what, exactly, and how.

 

Pelosi: Friends of God (2007)

At long last I finally had a chance to see the first half of Alexanda Pelosi’s 2007 documentary Friends of God: A Road Trip with Alexandra Pelosi [link]. I’ve been looking forward to watching this for a while, because I flat-out loved Pelosi’s 2002 documentary Journeys with George, cut from her time documenting life on the campaign trail with George W. Bush.

Remember George W. Bush? He’s that guy who was governor of Texas, ran for President in 2000, served eight years, started a couple of wars, and may or may not be our kind of Christian. He’s also that guy Rick Perry may or may not be all over again. I’m still waiting for someone in Christian media to explain that one to me. But I digress.

I loved Journeys with George, and I was hoping for more of the same from Friends of God. In the earlier documentary Pelosi had a compelling story with a strong if occasionally elusive central character, and the story had a natural rhythm complete with a conclusion. Friends of God, on the other hand, is sort of a survey of things Pelosi doesn’t like and/or doesn’t understand. It’s been chopped up into too many too-brief images, and midway through it doesn’t seem to have a point, unless that point is something like “Evangelical Christians are scary people who willfully life in a fictional world.”

So far we’ve met Joel Osteen, Ken Ham, Ted Haggard, comedian Brad Stine, professional wrestler Robert Vaughan, and a Tennessee preacher with ten children named Jeff Chapman. It’s a mixed bag: I can’t say as I often do (see e.g. Jesus Camp) that Pelosi doesn’t understand what she’s seeing; it’s more that Pelosi is seeking to portray her subject in a particular way and her subject obliges.

I am particularly disturbed to note that most of the head shots seem to have been shot with some kind of fish-eye lens (see e.g. the picture of Phish bassist Mike Gordon on the cover of Billy Breathes [link]) that leaves the interviewee looking like a pinhead, with a big broad mouth and a smaller, pointed head. I’m kind of embarrassed for Pelosi for her having shot these people this way. It’s not like we haven’t seen e.g. Joel Osteen before or won’t see him again, so it seems unnecessarily cheap to suggest that while he has many flaws having a head shaped like an eggplant isn’t one of them.

 

Kevin Roose on Ted Haggard

As I’m sure everybody knows by now Kevin Roose interviewed Ted Haggard and wrote a substantial piece about it for GQ Magazine [link], and Sarah Pulliam Bailey has written a pretty good summary at GetReligion [link]. Bailey correctly points out that Roose has done good work here in going back and filling in some gaps in our understanding of what exactly caused Haggard to leave New Life Church in Colorado Springs.

Let me say first of all that even though Haggard was head of the National Association of Evangelicals he didn’t mean much to me as an evangelical. This is something that folks in the media don’t seem to understand about evangelicals: we tend to get our themes and talking points top-down, but we don’t follow our so-called leaders in a way that fits the popular political narrative. But that’s another topic for another day. Instead, I had heard of Haggard in an episode of This American Life [link], and I’d seen his bizarre appearance in the already bizarre documentary Jesus Camp. It wasn’t entirely clear to me from those media appearances that Haggard was actually a Christian, much less an evangelical. In retrospect I’m willing to chalk that up to editing, narrative restrictions, etc.

But when Haggard left New Life I felt I’d seen that particular movie before, because the plot seemed so familiar:

• Pastor gets caught up in scandal that’s distasteful enough that nobody will actually say what he did
• Church leaders fire pastor; important aspects of severance agreement are undisclosed
• Many rumors rush into information vacuum; various stories fail to completely line up
• Former pastor, church leaders repeatedly claim the other side is misrepresenting him/them
• Church broadly divides into four camps: loyalists to each side, the don’t-cares, and the disillusioned
• Two camps stay, two camps go
• Pastor re-enters the ministry, possibly with a triumphant return to his old church
• Both the former pastor and his former church soldier on with mixed success

We definitely got most of this basic template in this story, especially when Gayle Haggard resurfaced with her book and Ted appeared to contradict some of the established story, saying that he never did some of the things the leaders at New Life said he did. I don’t know where you saw this, but I saw some of it at Phoenix Preacher [link], see also [link]; unfortunately Haggard’s appearance and comments are no longer available, having as best I can tell been archived with the old Phoenix Preacher site.

The facts of the story, as best I can tell, go like this: Haggard was in Denver and asked his hotel concierge to recommend someone who could give him a massage. The concierge recommended Mike Jones, who turned out to be a prostitute and drug dealer. Haggard purchased drugs from Jones on a handful of occasions, as well as receiving one or more massages from Jones that were not strictly speaking therapeutic massages. Haggard also took  crystal meth.

As best I can tell Haggard and his wife are aggrieved at his dismissal by the church leaders. It has never been clear to me what the Haggards expected was going to happen when his behavior came to light. He never actually says that he expected to be retained at full salary as pastor while having sexual encounters with both his wife and at least one man and at the same time experimenting with hard drugs, but I can’t figure how else to interpret his actions and comments over the last several years.

Roose focuses more on the sexual side of this story than he does on say the drug issue or the church organization issue. This isn’t surprising; Roose is at some level aiming for a gripping read rather than doing a longitudinal study, or whatever. And he took a somewhat similar tack in his book about Liberty University. I’m left with the impression, however, that Haggard isn’t actively addicted to crystal meth: this many years of heavy use would have damaged his smile, for example, and Roose notes that while rectangular Haggard’s smile is apparently intact.

I am personally more interested in the church organization issues surrounding the Haggard story. I can’t figure how a man with as many responsibilities as Haggard must have had (dealing with both NAE and New Life matters) had enough unsupervised free time to carry on a relationship with a masseur in Denver when he lived in Colorado Springs, more than an hour away. I’m also a little surprised that he knew who to ask when he wanted a particular kind of massage, and didn’t have a church functionary/handler/flunky/whatever around to serve as a deterrent. There must be a lot about the lifestyle of a high-profile preacher I don’t understand.

But more than that, I’d be more interested in figuring out how to avoid people (preachers) like Haggard generally, and I’m not sure how much we can learn from this story that’s helpful. I mean, everyone is tempted to terrible sins, but not everyone succumbs. And there are lots of preachers who are in positions not very different from Haggard’s at New Life, and certainly not all of them feel entitled to boyfriends and recreational drugs, much less partake of either one. Surely there must be visible warning signs, and they can’t all be as remote from the final result as, say, Haggard’s fascination with “grid praying.”

“It’s hard to find God in a megachurch” and other stories

Intelligence Squared sponsored a dial-in debate between journalist Mollie Ziegler Hemingway and “megachurch and leadership expert” Dave Travis [blog] on the premise “It’s hard to find God in a megachurch” [link, free registration required]. The introduction for the debate doesn’t look promising; apart from some soundbites (Robert Schuller, Eddie Long, George W. Bush, Ted Haggard) there’s this definition:

The evangelical movement has a globally influential role, and the megachurches are an important element of it. They have huge congregations with inspirational, charismatic pastors. They are run like businesses and, it might seem, often with rather business-like objectives of raising funds and satisfying customers.

Hemingway gets off on the wrong foot from the start:

Most notably, the size and charisma aspects affect the relationship of the pastor to his congregation. These features require for lowest common denominator preaching; it becomes based on ‘You’, rather than Christ.. Equally, sacramental worship is not feasible with a congregation of 2,000 people. In small congregation churches, members are active. In megachurches, the audience is passive, consuming rather than engaging with gospel entertainment.

Yes, there are problems when the relationship between the preacher and church is out of whack, but she trots out the “big/passive, small/active” red herring: neither of these is necessarily true. And while her point about “gospel entertainment,” whatever that is, is probably apt, she’s made the mistake of making the conservative Lutheran method of worship standard so everything else is deviant.

The problem of America’s churches is that they’re market driven, but megachurches are market driven on steroids.

I have no idea what “market driven on steroids” means; this sounds like a fancy way of saying “very market driven” or “very very market driven.” And of course it begs the question “market driven as opposed to what?”

Hemingway is offering the usual talking points here, as if the alternatives in the megachurch debate were the LCMS standard on one side and Joel Osteen on the other. Briefly: not everyone outside a megachurch is looking to “receive sacraments for the forgiveness of sins” and not everyone in a megachurch is looking for “your best life now.” I’m disappointed in her presentation and don’t think it was effective, especially once she conceded that church size isn’t the problem.

Dave Travis on the other hand offers a fairly standard set of church growth arguments: “we took a survey, here are some results, lo and behold they support our model of church.”

Here’s part of his opening argument:

People are moving from small to big institutions in every sector of America’s society. In the church, this is not necessarily an obstacle to a healthy relationship with Christ; it just creates a different one. Yes, in megachurches, preaching is simpler in approach than smaller churches, but accessibility to doctrine does not make it un-challenging. In fact, megachurches preach what is relevant to the congregation.

I’m not sure how the first two sentences are related to one another; if there’s a causal connection between other institutions getting bigger and churches getting bigger I don’t see it. He concedes that megachurch preaching is simple and includes mention of the relevance of the text to the believer, but doesn’t point out any differences between sermons that are relevant to the believer and sermons that are consumer-centered. It’s a weak presentation, but Travis is mostly stuck responding to the moderators’ opening comments and Hemingway’s opening comments.

Travis doesn’t handle a question about pastoral accountability well; he answers a poorly-presented question about congregants in a small church engaging in question and answers with the pastor by saying megachurch pastors take feedback via websites and response cards. He also interacts poorly with a question about authoritarian preachers.

Hemingway responds to the same question by presenting the same lousy argument “churches should be defined by creeds and sacraments, not market research” and equivocates between creeds and sacraments on the one hand and Scripture on the other. I don’t know what if anything Hemingway can say about churches that are neither focused on creeds and sacraments nor driven by market research.

I think Travis misses an obvious knock-out punch that goes like this: The Hartford Institute, which provides definitions and lists for American megachurches, lists 1408 churches that meet its criteria. Of these seven are part of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod [link]; does Hemingway’s analysis apply to these? If so then all her bluster about creeds and sacraments is nonsense; if not then her distinction she’s making above is invalid.

I hate to say it, but I don’t see a winner here; neither party actually interacts with the premise. Hemingway’s argument is just special pleading, and she grows increasingly shrill as the discussion progresses. Travis comes closer to interacting with the premise by relating survey results about church attenders’ impressions of their relationship with God, but never suggests that there’s any way to close the gap between those results and an actual God. Hemingway can’t seem to see past her tradition. It’s a mess.

On the whole I’m left wondering if there is any common ground between the two sides, and whether this is an issue a debate can resolve. I would recommend listening to this debate anyway; 25 minutes isn’t very long to sort out issues like this, but it’s helpful to hear where the discussion is now (nowhere, mostly). As I said several months ago, this still sounds like a dialog between a dead church and a dying church to me.

In other news, Dee at The Wartburg Watch offered a take on Cruise With A Cause 2011 a couple of weeks ago [link]; her comments cover some of the same ground I covered [link], from a different angle and somewhat more pointedly. She also points out that the online biography for Ergun Caner appears to mix in elements of his brother Emir’s biography.

And finally: I found myself awake between 1:30AM and 2:30AM and ended up taking a peek at the KAZQ [link] overnight offerings. They offer GOD TV [link] as a second OTA digital signal (Digital channel 32.2) and on their primary signal in the wee hours. I got to sample the late Barry Smith’s program Mystery Babylon [link, link]; it caught my interest when I saw the word “Weishaupt” on the whiteboard behind Smith and heard his Kiwi accent. His presentation was a fairly typical fast-and-loose “Freemasons are apostate; Freemasons run the English-speaking world” presentation. Highlights included

• Smith’s claim that floor tiles in contrasting colors, especially in black and white, in public buildings, are a secret Freemason symbol
• Smith’s claim that certain hand gestures require Masonic judges to free Masonic criminals
• A dissection of the symbols on the back of a one-dollar bill that sounded even stranger with a Kiwi accent

GOD TV currently offers two or three episodes of Barry Smith programming a night and another in the afternoon; Joe Bob says check it out.

why are fundamentalists authoritarian? 2

Authoritarian themes are sometimes hard to pick up on if you’re accustomed to hearing them, especially if you heard them as a child (when trusting an authority figure is often more important than understanding all the reasons they’re saying what they’re saying), but here are are a few examples I’ve heard myself and wish I had tapes of:

• “You’re going to go off to college, and your professor is going to tell you your preacher didn’t know what he was talking about, and the earth is millions of years old.”
• “I like grid praying.”
• “But he grew up in one of those households where they’d have the preacher for lunch every Sunday, and when he got old enough to make decisions for himself he stopped going to church.”

The first quote interpolates the pastor into a story about the historicity of the Ussher chronology, more or less. Even if we ignore the difficulty of Ussher’s interpretation, whether the preacher said something isn’t as important as whether the Scriptures say it. Especially among fundamentalists.

The second quote is part of Ted Haggard’s justification for “grid praying,” and was part of what made New Life Church sound so strange in the This American Life episode devoted to it; perhaps there was lots of discussion of sin and salvation at New Life, but none of it made the final cut. A careful listener could be forgiven for thinking that Alix Spiegel was on the verge of joining a cult headed by Mr Haggard, rather than converting to Christianity.

The third quote is an admonition against discussing a sermon critically in front of children. The admonition is an attempt to cast a shadow over the parents’ responsibility for children in favor of uncritically accepting what the pastor says. Looking back on my days in fundamentalist churches I wish my parents had discussed sermons a bit more critically: I came away believing they were entirely down with the program, while the truth was a bit more complicated.

Authoritarian language also surfaces in invocations of federal headship in the local church, where a New Testament concept where someone is “in Abraham” or “in Christ” is appropriated to suggest that someone needs to be accountable to the pastor (without any reciprocal accountability on the part of the pastor) to remain under his covering, or some such. I’ve heard variations on this theme repeatedly but don’t have any quotes handy. I would love to find a tape or compact disc of a sermon where this language is used.