God & Country serves as an example of the perennial problem encountered by so many political documentaries that consider themselves critical or alarmist. Such a project, even when its cause is well-placed, is more likely to put the viewers off and those who come to its particular conclusion will feel that they have had their bias confirmed while the audience that perhaps needs to be told it the most will remain unmoved by the film or regard it as a piece of propaganda. I don’t know what the solution is here, if at all there is one here, a case can be made for the fact that a film like this is mainly aimed at preparing and arousing the support of the ‘churched’ to the upcoming fight.
As directed by Dan Partland who also made a documentary that revolves around President Trump being a narcissist, “God & Country” looks into how Christianity is seeping into politics and discourses such as national politics in the US. Those views are embraced by right wing evangelists who provide their congregations with campaign assistance to help garnet votes. The film has a distinctly evangelical (with a small “e”) ethos: the apocalypse is coming and it would be foolish not to pay attention to this fact.
According to one expert , in the USA , a determined few can grasp the machinery of local, regional or national government as the citizens notoriously do not bother to vote even when the situation is dire. That’s the challenge, and one can see it at work in response to those who do not go to school or other educational institutions and are bored of people protesting at school board meetings. Narrating the film, one finds that the reactionary section of US electorate is not so much in number as they are in volume. Actually, this accounts for about a third of the registered voters (much smaller than the elusive ‘half’ that the complainants refer to when one entertainer or another is accused of being liberal and alienating half the country). But these are people who have a much higher voting percentage than, for example, young voters who identify themselves as left wing, do. Who say a lot when online but cannot be bothered to show on election day in sufficient numbers for the establishment to actually care to hear them.
Christian Nationalists, those specific extremists, the film continues, are now using gerrymandering, voter suppression and settling controllable federal judges among other things to enable them rule a country forever as a minority. In the words of Rick Wiles, a Pastor and Founder of TruNews a conservative, orthodox Christian website, “We are going to impose Christian rule in this country!” David French, conservative columnist of The New York Times, adds that this movement practices “malice and cruelty and division and partisanship” to achieve their ends. But for the concern of the American civil society, the focus is more on people like Barber William, a minister of the congregationalist church, who distinguishes between active worship and materialism or the love of weaponry and determines so many concerning factors about the movement including the fact that – “the movement is so enraged about what God says so little about, and so silent about what God says so much about”, which is all about ending poverty and “caring for the least of thee”.
The film’s fascinating moments occur when the viewer seeks to learn history, as in the segment that tries to dispel the myth of the U. S. having always been a Christian country. It asserts that the government was not based upon the 10 commandments, George Washington did not kneel and pray in the snow at Valley Forge, the practice of public prayers in schools was introduced during the 1950 commie scare, the Bible did not take a significant stand regarding abortion, “In God We Trust” was put on our currency only in 1864 and the emergence of a Religious Right as a modern political force solely evolved in the 1980s, largely in response to government enforced integration of schools during the 1960s and 1970s.
The unfortunate reality is that there is hardly anything here that one can’t learn by spending time on Wikipedia, or by watching any of The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, or Rachel Maddow. The quotes are dumbed down so as to appeal to audiences and be shareable on social media. A particularly outrageous one belongs to Greg Locke, a pastor of Global Vision Bible Church, who preaches: “If you vote for the Democrats, I don’t even want you to set foot in this church! Get out, you demon! You get out, you baby butcher, you election thief!”
There is a creepy and insinuating background score that fits this description ‘Terrorists have planted bombs, will our heroes be able to find and defuse them in time’ and although there are some warm calmer passages of acoustic guitars and pizzicato strings (but only when the good guys are active on the screen) which are few and far between. Unfortunately, it is difficult to see how anything of it could offset the dietary counterbalance provided by say advocates of Fox News Channel, OANN, Alex Jones, or for that matter any of the numerous local heavy traffic hour radio announcers in big cities who inform their hearers that there is an invasion from the south featuring rapists, terrorists and drug peddlers.
The Other Side, as it were, makes films like this one, only in the other direction. The cuttings are simply stunningly quick. Maybe I am getting old for the types of documentaries that would have taken a camera to one of the churches immediately mentioned in this film and allow the audience and the community that the audiences of the church members, and the clergy, who give us insights to the culture and ideology that gave birth to them, and allied the dangerousness that threat to democracy.
Or perhaps I’d prefer the dominant American documentary style of mid-twentieth century, whose main aim was to, well, document and where details were likely to be stray marvelous or mysterious: blobs of colors to avoid a black and white reading of reality.
There are other media, other manners, to do what this movie is doing. I find the politics of the film almost persuading, but still, I would have instead watched one of those nauseating right-wing action movies directed by Mel Gibson or S. Craig Zahler, or a social realist work by Spike Lee or Ken Loach whose values resonate with me and I know that at least then, I’d be seeing some art.
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