It’s not surprising that Dan Partland’s documentary about the increasing influence of Christian Nationalism begins and ends with footage from Jan. 6., 2021. Christian Nationalists were among the principal organizers of the insurrection that occurred that day, which featured a trespasser carrying a Christian flag onto the Senate floor. God & Country, which counts Rob Reiner among its producers, delivers a bracing primer on the rise of this political movement that should thoroughly scare the large majority of American adults who don’t embrace it.
And, as the film points out in exhaustive detail, Christian Nationalism is very much a political, rather than religious, movement. The movement posits that America is a Christian nation and that the founders intended it as such. It seeks to roll back feminism, LBGTQ rights and abortion, and to either introduce Christianity to public schools or substitute them with private Christian schools funded by vouchers.
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God & Country
The Bottom Line God help us.
Release date: Friday, Feb. 16
Director: Dan Partland
Rated PG-13,1 hour 30 minutes
That a large majority of the population opposes these things doesn’t faze them in the least. But it does motivate them to prevent people from voting. The documentary features the infamous footage of Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, declaring in a 1980 speech, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.
Among the things that gives God & Country — based on the book The Power Worshippers, by Katherine Stewart — its strength is that most of its numerous interview subjects are both deeply religious Christians and politically conservative. They’re clearly disturbed by the movement’s distortion of religion and its rewriting of history. A constitutional scholar describes how the founding fathers intended the separation of church and state to protect religious freedom for all faiths, and that the country was not founded on Judeo-Christian principles.
Although most people assume that the movement was catalyzed by the Roe v. Wade decision, it was actually another Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, establishing racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional, that energized it. (It took longer for the government to crack down on segregated private schools. The evangelical Bob Jones University didn’t admit Black students until 1971, only after it was threated with losing its tax-exempt status.)
Donald Trump (the subject of Partland’s last documentary, Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump) courted the evangelical vote in 2016 with a vengeance. For many of them, it didn’t matter that their hero was a serial liar, tax cheat and adulterer, especially when he released his list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Rob Schenck, a pastor and former pro-life activist, says that a fellow evangelical told him, “This is our guy. This is the guy who’s going to get it done. He was ordained by God.” Trump went on to tally 81% percent of the white evangelical vote. “You can’t forget the ‘white’ part,” author Reza Aslan, an expert on world religions, comments acidly.
While the MAGA movement, so entwined with Christian Nationalism, often proves inexplicable for those who haven’t joined the cult, conservative New York Times columnist David French provides some context when he points out, “If you were immersed in the world they’re immersed in, you’d be wearing the red hat too.” The prevalence of Christian media, which largely promotes a conservative Republican agenda, adds to the divisiveness.
The rise of violent extremism, as demonstrated by the events in Charlottesville, is another result of Christian Nationalism. (The Book of Revelations is particularly handy when it comes to justifying violence, it’s pointed out.)
The movement bears an unfortunate similarity to the rise of Nazi Germany. In one of the film’s more disturbing moments, Schenck relates how, when he was receiving his religious training, he was instructed to always consult a reference book written by German theologian Gerhard Kittel. Kittel, he later discovered, was an avowed Nazi and anti-Semite who described the Jewish people as the enemy of Germany. “Boy, that was an eye-opener,” Schenck says, unnecessarily.
The film ends where it began, with footage of Jan. 6 insurrectionists proudly bearing crosses, signs emblazoned with bible verses, and pictures of Jesus. What it doesn’t provide, unfortunately, is a persuasive prescription for how we’re going to prevent our country from descending from democracy to theocracy.
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