We scoff at Shirley MacLaine running into the surf and joyfully shouting “I am God, I am God!” But when Haggard boasts about our great sex, and Falwell crows about our political power, as we sway like Dervishes chanting mantras, we don’t look that different from her–just drier and not as pretty. We’ve become sensualists, aesthetes, untroubled by either self-reflection or accountability.
As if to drive home this point, the most sinister fault Focus on the Family finds in Pelosi’s documentary is an aesthetic one. Her camera angles do not flatter her subjects; we’re not handsome enough. FOTF is silent about Falwell’s politically motivated insult to Senator Clinton (demeaningly calling her by her first name) and Haggard’s assault on the privacy of the marriage bed. The silence about Falwell and Haggard is shameful, and the complaint is absurd, as if anything other than the magic of the WETA Workshop could make Falwell not look like Boss Hogg of Dukes of Hazzard fame (and, for the record, I look a lot more like Boss Hogg than I do Cousin Bo).
Pelosi does provide reprieves to this sorry picture of spiritual etiolation, though. There’s the sweet old minister who sits with Pelosi in his car and tells her, with tears in his eyes, about “his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (He erects monumental white crosses near interstate exchanges, each cross costing him about $30,000 out of his own pocket.) And there’s the lady in a drive-up teller booth who simply offers to pray with anyone who wants to spend a few moments with the Lord: Drive up, roll down the window, pray, and drive away. And there’s the Mennonite mother with ten children in Tennessee who speaks honestly of being frazzled by the work but still uplifted by the Lord. But in Pelosi’s film, as in our culture, those folks are being pressed to the margins by the other Evangelicals–the big churches, the big programs, the big visions.
Yes, we can see ourselves in Pelosi’s film, but a lot of what we see should make us wince. We’ve forgotten the Scriptures and allowed ignorance to characterize our preaching, and delirium our worship. In our confidence in God’s grace, we have become presumptuous in our salvation. And we’ve too often confused salvation in heaven with right voting on earth. We need to change. We need to repent.
Related: "My Evening With Joel" – a review of a Joel Osteen event (one of his touring events, not at the place in Houston) from the perspective of a Reformed Christian.
Joel’s own sermons are not like those of his fathers (the late John Osteen). They strike me as the next generation of the Charismatic movement. They aren’t about experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit in your life; they are just about encountering your feelings. He talks over and over again about your relationships with other people and in the end he doesn’t really ask you to do anything – except try to change. His language is a mix of manifest destiny and late night infomercial. If I had to characterize the 600 words “sermonettes” I heard I would say “Charismatic emergent, non-threatening, non-spritualized therapeutic language.” Maybe American Idol with Paula as the lone judge.
Never once did I hear the words Gospel, Jesus Christ, Trinity, Sin, Cross (except in Scripture songs sung by performers and in a video testimony played before the Osteens arrived in arena)
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