Dan Partland - Director of God and Country + (Bonus Content)
Brad's interview with Dan Partland, director of God and Country, a new documentary that examines Christian nationalism in the United States. Based partly on Katherine Stewart's The Power Worshippers, it includes many prominent voices speaking out against Christian nationalism - Andrew Whitehead, Jemar Tisby, Andrew Seidel, Anthea Butler, and many more. Brad speaks with Dan about what drew him to this project, what he learned about the threats Christian nationalism poses to democracy, and why it was important to him to include so many Christian voices in the project.
In the bonus content, Brad spends 20 minutes providing critique and analysis of the film.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, and today I have an interview with the director of the new film God and Country, Dan Partlin.
Many of you listening will be aware of the film God and Country, and you've seen the trailer, and you probably already have an opinion about it.
The film is about Christian nationalism.
And I think to date, it is the film that has most directly addressed Christian nationalism as a phenomenon that led to J6, that is part of the MAGA movement, and is a threat to democracy.
Watching the film, you will see many familiar faces and voices.
People who've been on the show, people like Kristen Dume and Jamar Tisby, Andrew Whitehead.
It really is based in part on Catherine Stewart's book, The Power Worshippers.
I want to take a moment just to say congratulations to Catherine on just this entire project.
It's truly amazing.
There's other folks in there that I think many of you listening will have strong opinions about.
David French, Russell Moore, Phil Vishers of VeggieTales fame, and so on.
So the film is, I think, important objectively just because we don't have something in the mainstream media, a film that is going to play in theaters in 2024, that addresses Christian nationalism like this one.
This one will, I think, be the most widespread and watched film about this phenomenon.
Dan Parlin is a very well-known director.
He's done just a lot of amazing things in terms of his work in the past.
He's a two-time winner of the Emmy for Best Nonfiction Series.
He's been nominated for Nonfiction Producer of the Year.
A lot of things you'll be familiar with that Dan has done in terms of his directing work.
The CNN series, The 60s, which was just a sort of very expansive and broad series about the 1960s.
The Netflix series, Afflicted.
The archival series, American Style for CNN.
He also Dan is a very experienced and accomplished filmmaker and somebody who brings that to this film.
which came out in 2020.
And that is iTunes bestselling documentary of all time.
So Dan is a very experienced and accomplished filmmaker and somebody who brings that to this film.
What I want to do today is I want to play my interview with Dan for you and And then after that's done for subscribers, I want to spend a few minutes just on my view of the film.
I definitely have some things I enjoyed about it.
I have some things that I really appreciate about it.
I think there's a lot to see positive in this film and what it might mean in the sort of next few months and conversations that might be had.
I also have my critiques.
Just like with anything, I have things that I think could be different or could have been considered as the film was made.
I really enjoyed my conversation with Dan.
He is a thoughtful person.
He's somebody who you can tell puts a lot of intentionality into anything that he's creating and what it means and why it's important.
So, I think that the interview really conveys that.
If you're listening and there's points where you feel like you wish there was time for more or I would have interjected, hang out because we're going to talk about that after the interview is finished.
For now, I'll just say, here is my interview with director Dan Partland, who created God and Country.
As I just said in my intro, I'm joined today by a special guest, and that is Dan Partland, who is the director of many things.
But of course, the one we're all talking about and thinking about right now is God and Country.
So, Dan, thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me.
I'm really excited to be here.
So, there's so much to talk about.
This is one of those moments where I watched the film, I took notes, but as somebody who does this show every week, there was just so much in there that I wanted to ask you.
We may run out of time, but Let me start here.
You've worked on so many things in your career, things related to culture, American High, the 60s, substance abuse, rare diseases, and then a couple years ago you did Unfit, politics, and that became such an important documentary in the run-up to the election.
Religion, at least from the outsider's view, somebody who doesn't know you, seems to be a bit new in your portfolio.
Wondering what drew you to this project?
What made you want to take on God and Country?
Yeah, good question.
All right, so we're doing a therapy session for me.
Yeah, listen, I think the truth is, there's something ironic about me making this film because in a lot of ways it's not really the kind of film that I want to be making.
You know, I like You know, something that's more personal, like a smaller scale, small stories about real people, something where the camera embeds and you get some, you're communicating cultural knowledge.
But at a certain point, pretty quickly after the 2016 election, I just became, you know, so concerned about what was going on in our politics.
That and consuming so much news like we all did, everybody all of a sudden is just reading books and articles and up all night watching cable news and just trying to get their head around what is going on in the country.
I just started to get super frustrated that, you know what, it's not enough for me to just sit at home believing in the right things.
You know, thinking the right things and believing the right things.
And I think all of us have that feeling a little bit that it's actually very, very hard to engage with the mass culture.
Where are we having these conversations?
You know, where can you engage the topic?
And so, yeah, so I just came to the place of thinking like, well, I don't know what I can do, but I know that I know how to make films and that that's a powerful way to communicate.
I mean, the digression on that, I would say, is that Anyone who knows me, you know, for a long time, going way back, knows that in a lot of ways, politics is my first passion.
And that I really felt like, you know, there was a growing up, I certainly felt like I was likely to end up in politics on some kind of level, probably not as a politician, but, you know, just involved in government and trying to move people and move And what really happened, you know, somewhere along the line is I just started to feel like media might be a more effective way to move people.
And so, you know, the goal was always a certain amount of political engagement.
I just, I think that media and culture are actually the leading in the conversation and politics is downstream of that.
And so that was why that's kind of shaped all the different things that I've done.
But yeah, so anyway, at this point now all of a sudden I'm fully in and I'm doing something that in a lot of ways I think is not, you know, not where I wanted to be or thought I wanted to be.
But you asked about religion.
You know, I have this complex, you know, multi-faith, you know, American family.
That's, you know, that's it.
I was raised really in a secular environment, but But, you know, I'm a product of interfaith marriage.
That's really why I was raised in a secular environment, is that, you know, I think my parents understood on some level that even though the families eventually came together and came together really strongly, that it was a divisive thing.
They experienced interfaith as a divisive thing.
By the time I was growing up and had my own awareness, I didn't see any of that.
What I saw was that's just how a family works.
Of the five families that comprise my first cousins, no two families has the same faith.
Yeah.
So we all grew up going to each other's ceremonies.
And when you went to somebody else's ceremony, you practiced in whatever faith tradition they were in.
That was what you did.
And everybody was always super respectful.
So it always felt really normal and natural to me that that was the shape of our society.
That's a really fascinating insight into just you in terms of this project.
I grew up that way.
My father was raised Buddhist.
My mother was raised sort of nominally Christian.
And we have an interracial, interfaith kind of setting in my family.
But it took me a while to realize not everyone grows up that way.
Not everyone grows up going to a ceremony at a Catholic church.
A Jewish synagogue, a Lutheran place over here in the corner, and it's amazing what that does to shape your understanding of like a pluralistic public square.
I'm thinking about your work on UNFIT, your work on Trump in 2020.
I'm sure that taught you a lot about the state of our democracy.
Everything you had to dig into the psychology of the 45th president there I'm sure kept you up at night.
As I watched God and Country, my wife asked me afterwards after I watched it like, you What's it about?
What's going on?
And I said, you know, it's hard for me.
Sometimes it's hard for me to say in these settings because I'm so embedded in these conversations with Catherine Stewart.
I'm so embedded with these conversations with Jabbar Tisby and Doug Padgett and all these these these colleagues and friends I saw on this on the screen.
I guess the question here is, is you've already done this with Trump in 2020.
But what are some of the some of the things you learned making this film that honestly are scary or hopeful or any of the above?
Well, I mean, that requires a kind of step back about what's an approach to making documentary and what are the goals that you get into it with.
I definitely start these projects with a sincere curiosity, with a sincere interest to go on the journey of discovery, to put it in a kind of corny way.
And then you can read the books of all of these great people, And you can become quite read in, but then you still have questions, and that's really what the interview is for.
It's a little bit of a chance for those scholars who've done the work and have the insights and have earned the right to speak with authority on these topics.
It's a little bit of an opportunity to let them lay out in plain language what their point of view is.
But then what it really is, is an opportunity to try to go, for me to go deeper in things that I'm wondering about and then to see where it authentically goes.
And, you know, so one of the things in this moment is, there's a lot of moments like this that are in the film, but of course the best and most exciting, for lack of better way of putting exciting material comes from the things that you're not expecting to hear.
It's where the interview subject takes you to someplace you didn't think you were going.
But one of the things that I think is really interesting in just hearing my own voice in some of the footage, there's this moment where And Thea Butler, I ask her what keeps her up at night, and she says, I'm afraid that we might be slipping into a theocracy.
And I kind of break in with both skepticism, but also privately alarm.
And I want to get her clarified on the record.
Is that really possible?
And you know, you have to understand that as a filmmaker sitting there, I'm in the role of the audience, man.
I don't want her to say yes.
I do not.
I want to be in that moment.
I'm wanting to be I'm just a citizen wanting to be reassured.
It's dramatic as hell for the film that she says something different but that's not really the point.
You know I don't want you know You want to be reassured that your society is safe.
And when you do these interviews, and you accumulate enough interviews with people who have real genuine knowledge and authority, historical perspectives, and sober people, not people who are alarmist by nature.
And one after another keeps not reassuring you that the society is in a safe place, it has an impact.
And so what I'm doing as a filmmaker is I'm trying to share some bit of that experience that I had sitting in that chair that day with the audience.
That moment with Enthea is quite powerful, and it's one of those moments where, and it's an Enthea moment, where just knowing her, she says it, and then she pauses.
She knows that it's gonna sort of disrupt the equilibrium of the room.
And as you say, the cut-in from your voice is a sort of, really?
And to have her say that, to have someone like Enthea, who's been studying these things for 40 years, Who is a world expert on the history of white evangelicalism and Christian nationalism.
And this is not somebody looking for clicks, right?
This is not a YouTuber hoping for more views.
This is not somebody trying to make her name thinking, oh, this will really do it for my career.
This is somebody who's at the pinnacle of her guild and just giving you the honest truth from her perspective.
And it's an incredibly breathtaking kind of scene, I think, in the film.
Well, it definitely upset the equilibrium in the room.
I think that's a great way to think about it.
And it's something that, you know, I sort of wrestle with on the other side, too, which is so now we're making a film where that is sort of concentrating all of these moments that break the equilibrium and like trying to strike a balance between Ringing the alarm for the audience in the way that it's been rung for me, and also not slipping down the other side of sensationalism.
And so I think the other bite in that sequence that's really important to contextualize that is from Reza Aslan.
And I think that that's something, you know, the way Reza characterized it when I asked him the question, He says, I think we're about to find out how dangerous it is.
And that's where we're at and that's a scary place to be at.
Even for him, I would like him to say, no, no, American democracy is resilient and is going to fight back and it will stabilize.
We've seen these kind of pendulum swings over it.
Nobody's saying that.
The experts who know this space are not talking like that right now.
When I, you know, when Reza said that, I, the first thing I thought of was, I don't disagree, and I understand what he's saying.
It's incredible that we would have a situation where, in the wake of something like January 6th, someone like Reza is still saying we're about to, like we didn't find out enough.
On January 6th.
We're going to find out more.
Right?
I mean, that's when I when I watched that scene, that was my thought was like, I don't I don't disagree.
I don't think he's wrong, but I don't want to miss the fact that we had January 6th and we're still going to find out more about what is what this movement is capable of in terms of violence, in terms of anti-democratic You know, forces, impulses, and so on and so on.
Well, so that's the question I've been asked a number of times, right?
Which is, you know, the film calls out the use of, you know, stoking fear and anger as a fundraising tool and as an organizing tool from within Christian nationalist movements, but isn't the film also doing some of that itself?
It's a totally fair question, important for people to ask that and consider that when they're watching the film.
I think the question comes down to looking for evidence.
Is there evidence that Christians are being persecuted in America?
Well, I think it's really tough to make that case, but somehow they've effectively sold that emotion to a lot of people.
And then, on the other side, is there evidence that the United States, as a pluralistic democracy, is wobbling right now, is in danger because of the size and shape of this movement?
And to that, all I can say is I We're about to find out exactly how bad it is.
We're going to continue to be about to because it's always, you know, until something truly catastrophic happens, more catastrophic, I guess, than having a violent insurrection to, you know, in order to stop the election of a new president.
I mean, that was, you have to say, that is an important piece of evidence about where we're at.
Yeah.
And, you know, as well as all manner of, you know, redistricting and voter suppression movements are also an important matter, a whole matter of other political or politically adjacent violence that's happening in this country.
And not for nothing, but the United States House of Representatives elected Mike Johnson, who is pretty firmly aligned with a lot of this value system, to be second in line to the president.
So, when you're asking yourself if American democracy is in danger, I think those are important touchstones.
And it's not just the fact of what Mike Johnson believes, it's the fact that a majority of the United States House of Representatives thought that he was an appropriate choice to be second in line to the president.
Well, and we, yeah, we're seeing play out what happens when you put Mike Johnson in the Speaker chair right now in terms of, there's a, you know, as we tape this, there's a lot going on in both chambers of Congress related to Ukraine and the border and so on.
And so, you see the result of putting in someone like him to that chair.
We're not playing.
This is not make-believe or this is real-life governing and a real-life effect on the global order, on Americans' lives, and so on and so forth.
Part of the baseline that I do think shapes the film is the many Christian voices in the film.
So, there's folks, there's historians, right?
Jamar Tisby, Kristen Dume, and then there's also clergy.
There's Rob Shank, there's Doug Padgett.
I'm glad Doug wore his hat.
I was worried that we were going to see Doug without a hat and I wouldn't- Wouldn't have it otherwise.
Yeah, I don't think I was going to be able to watch if he didn't have the hat on, so I felt better about it.
Spoiler alert.
Russell Moore, others are in there.
I know folks listening are going to be wondering about this question, so I want to just ask very directly, what was the goal of including, you know, so many Christian voices in a doc about Christian nationalism?
What does that do for the message that you're trying to convey?
Well, I mean, a couple of different levels of that.
First and foremost, half of the game in this kind of a film is finding the best voices.
Finding the right voices, finding the best voices.
And what I found as I became deeper and deeper immersed into this space is that a lot of the best voices, very best voices, were from the faith side.
And so they had, in some way, just a different understanding of it than people from the secular side.
Not better or worse, but just different.
And it completed the picture to hear that side.
I think it was always very important to me from the onset The way Christian nationalism works, on some level, is that it defends itself by saying anybody who attacks this political agenda is anti-Christian.
So, of course, that was going to be the first thing that people were going to use to try to assail the film.
So, but not just for that, for the sake of a genuine belief in pluralistic democracy, for a genuine belief in religious liberty, and for allowing everybody to have, like, I wanted Christians to speak up.
I don't think I realized, I mean, I know I didn't know when I started the project how deeply upsetting this was to so many Christians.
And that certainly, at least in the mainstream media, I think that voice has not been cutting through.
It's cutting through for people who are listening for it.
But so, yes, absolutely.
Amplifying those voices, people of, I think, incredible insight and passion and, you know, commitment both to their Christian faith and to American democracy.
That was certainly a perspective that I thought was really important.
And over time, I think, felt like it was more and more important.
To the shape of the film in terms of a balance because you want a diversity of voices and people are going to say anyway, if they want to try to, you know, critique the film that, oh, it's it's monolithic.
These are all progressives trying to get their political agenda over.
It's a woke mob of what about that?
They're going to say that, but no one can make that good faith argument about this group of voices.
They are diverse in terms of their religious background, secularists, fully faithful people in every different degree of that spectrum, people across the political spectrum.
Very deeply conservative point of view all the way to very progressive, racially diverse.
Nobody can safely say that about this group of voices.
And it's very important to me in terms of the mission of not adding further division to a political context that is so, so bitterly divisive, to show people who disagree on a huge range of topics able to come together in good faith on points that they agree upon.
Because I think that's ultimately healing and that's where we have to get to.
I'm wondering on that...
So, you know, there is a difference.
I agree with you.
There is a difference when we have the perspective of those who have been on the inside, you know, folks who have lived it.
Kristen Dume talks about just growing up and not.
Not really knowing a world outside of her Midwestern Christian cosmos.
Jamar Tisby talks about being in the seminaries, the colleges of white evangelicalism.
This is somebody whose DNA was really, you know, it's all been, his whole life has been shaped by these institutions.
One of the arguments we make on this show over and over again is that conservative white Christian, as I think you've just alluded to, is framed as the default American.
Like the hard-working, family values, people of faith who are the heart of the nation.
A couple weeks ago, Joy Reid said something that got a lot of people very angry on Iowa caucus night.
You know, she talked about how the Iowa caucuses, that 55% of the voters are white evangelical.
And by the numbers, that means a lot of white Christian nationalists were there.
She quoted Robert Jones in that segment.
And the amount of vitriol online when she said that was immense.
It's hard to criticize that group in any way.
I mean, I think you've alluded to this already.
If you do, you hate God, you hate America, you hate people of faith, you hate family values.
Did you sense that dynamic as you made the film?
Were you, you know, were you anticipating that response?
And what has that looked like as the film has sort of debuted and made its way to the public up to this point?
Well, you know, did I anticipate that an angry mob would come after us and try to discredit the film on the grounds that it was anti-Christian?
You know, I'm sure I anticipated it.
I have to say that that wasn't really my focus.
My focus was on making sure it was fair and thoughtful to everyone.
That's really what I was thinking about.
I wasn't thinking about You know, gaming out how we're going to react to irrational claims made to the film.
I was deeply concerned about being fair and not, as I said before, not needlessly contributing to division.
But yeah, I kept very much in the front of my mind, I kept in mind some of the people very close to me, closest to me, who are deeply devout.
And, you know, I just sort of casting this whole thing as a problem with Christians in general, or with Christianity in general, anything like that.
It would have been just precisely contrary to the goals of what I thought was important to say.
So it wasn't a defensive posture because I was afraid of incoming.
It was part of the DNA of the project itself.
As to how that's gone so far, I think it was, even though on some level I expected it, it was nonetheless shocking when the trailer came out.
The degree of really rage, vitriol that came out of exactly the groups that we're concerned about in this film.
And I think, and you know, and brutal, brutal personal attacks, they saved the greatest vitriol for those that were most Devout and conservative, right?
Which makes a lot of sense in a certain way.
The point of view that's most threatening are those who share in some genuine devotion, religious devotion, and also in deep commitment to politically conservative ideals.
So, if the people of that profile, with a great degree of integrity, are leaving this movement and calling out how bereft of actual moral authority and political coherence this movement is, That's more damaging.
So, you know, what I would say, what I think we all have to recognize, and I kind of, I try to be a happy warrior when stuff like that happens.
I feel deeply, I mean, I just feel terribly for the courageous people in the film who are standing up for things that really need to be said and who got these withering attacks.
But I think we all have to recognize that a powerful movement, a movement that has strong, that has important and strong ideas behind it does not win by leveling personal attacks against individual people who cross it.
You counter an attack with stating the virtues of your position.
And there is zero of that happening because there really isn't a great virtuous position to be defended out of this.
I really appreciate the way you put that, because I'm still on ex-Twitter, and I'm still somebody who goes there.
I know.
I ask myself, when is the day, buddy, when you're going to get out of here?
But I was on the platform the day the trailer dropped, and I saw in real time.
It's all expected, but I think the way you put it is right.
that they were talking about, not only the film, but the, yeah, as you say, the people in the film, the Christians in the film who provide their insight and their perspective.
It's all expected, but I think the way you put it is right.
It's shocking, and it's shocking.
The whole point of the film is to talk about Christian nationalism as a threat to democracy, but also as something that really seems to be as far as possible from the ideas of universal love or empathy or compassion that we might associate at times with Christianity.
And so what happens, you put the trailer on X, and here comes You learned 18 new cuss words and slurs because you just read the retweets and the subtweets of like one, you know, one thread.
And it really proves the point in real time in terms of everything you're trying to say.
All right.
With all that in mind.
Who's who's the audience for this film?
A lot of people are always going to watch a lot of folks who are up to date on these things are going to watch it.
A lot of folks who are paying attention have read all the books are going to watch it.
A lot of just interested Americans are going to watch it.
But I'm just wondering who this film might convince in your mind.
Well, I think we have to be realistic about what media can do.
I think everybody loves the idea that you could make a film that was so powerful and reach so many people that it just changed, you know, the course.
I don't think that's not realistic.
You know, we live in a vast media environment, complicated, different silos, different things, some cut through this, some cut through that.
What I think media can do, though, or I should say what I think this film can do, you know, we tried to take all of the great There's been no shortage of great work in the public sphere about this topic, right?
Lots of great pieces published, great books published, discussions happening on, you know, cable news and other forums and stuff like that, but nothing is really cutting through.
I think the important thing is that a film has an opportunity to distill all of those things down.
For people who aren't going to invest the time to read a few dozen books on it and, you know, and really immerse themselves and go to events and try to absorb it, you know, distill it all down and deliver some really important ideas in an emotional kind of narrative structure.
Right, where you put people in the story, where it stops being data on the page, or, wow, that fascinating thing I read in the paper about this phenomenon that's happening in this or that, you know, circle.
So, I think that that can be very powerful.
And I think that that has the potential to do two things.
Number one, I think it creates, not to get too wonky, but it creates a sort of meta-narrative.
It creates a narrative that other media can also draw on and talk about.
You see that that's happening with reviews, that's happening with opinion pieces that are being written about the film.
And what happens as that reverberates out is that the public starts to have a shared language and a structure for how they're talking about it.
There start to be some things that are agreed upon.
And the normalization of talk in this space is really important because it really is so sensitive that only the very bravest people are willing to take it on for fear of seeming like you're attacking a faith, a faith that only two-thirds of the country adheres to on some kind of level.
Who would want to do that?
So, A, number one, we have to deliver the point that this is not Christianity but a political movement, and prohibit the Christian nationalists from hiding behind the shield of saying, this is my faith.
You know, there's an interesting paradoxical thing here, which is, because Americans genuinely believe in religious liberty, And genuinely have tolerance for people's religious, you know, if it's religion, no one wants to talk about it because we're Americans and we want to let our fellow Americans believe what they want to believe.
So, the problem here isn't that.
We have a deeply ingrained civic culture that believes in religious tolerance and religious freedom.
What we need to correct for is the assertion that this has anything to do with religion.
This has to do with politics.
And if it's politics, then it's open to being criticized.
But I would say that in a sort of less of a cultural thing, just in a more interpersonal thing.
I think, you know, we very much want the film to be used as a conversation starter, like in an intimate way, like with family.
I think it's really, this stuff is so sensitive and hard to talk about.
I know that I Couldn't convince a relative who was slipping off into, you know, people who are fully in the tank, you know, that's probably not a great place to put your energy, but the topic does have to be engaged.
And if there's people who are slipping down this road, who's maybe who's, you know, Christian nationalism is a spectrum.
It's not, you know, people who are at a place where they're signing on to more and more of it.
Using the film, we have this idea, you know, will you watch this for me?
We know that in terms of moving ideas, having something recommended to you by someone who loves you is a really important entry point.
Will you watch this for me?
I think it's a great way to start the conversation.
And then you don't have to be at the holiday dinner table carrying this discussion yourself.
You can have David French and Russell Moore and Catherine Stewart and a whole bunch of other people who can say it better and with more authority than any of us, any individual of us.
You can have them You know, start that conversation and then we can talk to each other about what we think it means and what our attitudes towards it are.
Yeah, I appreciate that dynamic very much that, hey, this is an hour and a half.
You don't have to read 10 books.
We're at Thanksgiving.
I'm not going to ask you to go with me to the New York Times front page.
But I'm going to say, hey, we talk about these things a lot.
Cousin, nephew, brother, friend, colleague.
Let's go see it together and let's talk about it after.
It's an hour and a half.
I'm not going to ask you to read two 400-page books.
You're not that person.
You don't like doing that.
Let's get dinner.
Let's see the film and see if we can't open up some sense of like, you know, dialogue about it.
I think that frame is something people can take away and people listening can take that away too of like, you know, if you are that person who does read the 28 books, you've read everyone's book who's in the film and you're deeply embedded in these things, this is your chance to say, well, yeah, there's a film here.
It's an hour and a half.
Maybe I will get my cousin to go with me and we actually could have a productive discussion rather than the usual yelling match and so on.
All right.
Folks listening, and I know my audience really well, I know that there are folks out there who are going to notice a couple things.
They're going to notice some of the people you just mentioned.
Russell Moore, David French, Rob Shank, Phil Vischer, folks like that.
They're going to know who those folks are.
They'll be familiar with Andrew Seidel and Catherine and all the other great folks in there.
But the Christian voices are There's seemingly not, there's no queer Christian voices like sort of foregrounded.
There's no, there's no sense of a trans pastor speaking out against Christian nationalism or, or, or someone visible at the forefront of that kind of culture war and that issue.
The queer community has been so demonized over the last couple of years, just in terms of the grooming rhetoric and the, the book banning and so on.
I guess I'm just thinking about those folks listening and what they're going to be wondering is, Was there a sense that including the trans pastor, the gay pastor, the person out on the front lines fighting for the LGBTQ community in the name of faith, would that not work for some of the intended audience?
Is that a place where some of the sense of balance in your mind might have been offset or just wondering about any insight you can provide on that issue?
Well, I mean, it's a great question.
I think, you know, it's probably, if that was a consideration, I think it was an unconscious consideration.
I do, you know, I don't think, I think it was important that the film Be a voice, a moderating voice.
So seeing people who were too, you know, foregrounding people who are maybe really at the leading edge of some of these debates, maybe, you know, not the greatest thing, but it wasn't really, that wasn't really a thing that I was consciously moving through.
I think one of the things that you are always thinking about consciously or unconsciously as a filmmaker is how I mean, that's what storytelling is.
How do you get people on this?
How do you open them up to hearing this?
How do you get them interested?
How can you create a point of entry that is broad enough, you know, for as many people as possible?
So, you know, on one level or another, that's something that I'm always juggling.
But, you know, I also think I think all of the focus on trying to be more inclusive and more inclusive in the voices that you have and all the things, I think all that's important and great, and I always try to live up to it.
But it also is an impossible bar.
We're never going to get all the way there.
I talked about all the ways in which this list of voices is diverse.
But it doesn't encompass everybody, and it's not diverse enough.
I think for a film like this, if you're going to sort of err on the side, I think it's probably a better idea to err on the side of familiar and voices that are most similar to a sort of important audience.
Um, you know, but that's, that's, that's, that's something that you sort of, I think, I don't think anybody's, I didn't consciously go into it that way.
I'll give you an example when, you know, you, you mentioned Unfit, the previous film.
Well, it was just super important to me to hear from prominent conservatives also, you know.
Um, so when you start to like put prominent, you want to hear from prominent political conservatives who have an issue with Trump, well, you end up with a, A middle-aged white male group, largely, you know, tips the scale in that direction.
So I think there probably was some of that where I was thinking about, you know, it was less about thinking about the profiles, it was more thinking about what ideas every different person could add.
That was a bigger component of mine.
And probably the side effect of the sort of issue sets that I wanted people to speak to yielded this particular mix.
I was just going back to what you said about the American ethos of kind of religious tolerance and really religious liberty being a foundational principle of our American public square.
And what strikes me just, the white conservative Christian is such a default in this country that if you put out a film like yours, the vitriol, the pushback is going to come swiftly and immediately.
If somebody puts out a film about, you know, radical Islam, or if somebody puts out a film about what might be a sect of Buddhist monks who have turned violent, whether in this country or another, right?
There's no kiddie gloves needed.
It's just, well, hey, that's the truth.
We reported it and here it is.
And then you put this film out or anything like it, and it's like, The public has been so primed for the white Christian to need to like a soft landing.
Otherwise they won't be able to handle it.
It's like my toddler in the morning.
Well, and this is me talking, not you.
So I, you know, but like my, in the morning I have a two and a half year old and it's like, if I give her the graham crackers in the wrong cup, There's a chance that's wrong.
If the apple slices are on the wrong plate, or I gave her the goldfish crackers in the bag rather than in the... And I'm always waiting like, okay, did I do it?
Here I am with a PhD and my biggest concern in the morning is like, did I put the goldfish crackers in the right arrangement so that I don't get yelled at by the two and a half year old?
I just feel like those kiddie gloves are so needed with this group.
And so anyway, I'm just thinking about all the ways this group would be completely fine with anyone saying whatever they wanted about Muslim communities in the United States, Sikh communities, Hindu communities, Buddhist communities, and yet any mention of them
Results in coordinated campaigns on X and in Twitter and everywhere else about how you and everyone involved is anti-God and anti-Christian and things like that.
It's just a fascinating dynamic of our country.
It is, it is, but I mean, I would say that I didn't, that's not really the lens that I looked at through.
I really looked at it from the sort of most genuine, sincere place, which is to take as a given That people have such an intimate, some people, some people's faith is at an arm's length, but the people have such an intimate relationship with their faith that it just is inherently that sensitive.
And even though, you know, so through that lens, I would say that we probably should be more critical Of the other hypothetical you gave, which is of how insensitive we are to other faiths and try to match the sensitivity that we're bringing and talking about American Christians to how we talk about Americans of other faiths as well.
I made a similar point the other day.
One of the things the film wrestles with a little bit is about a persecution complex, like that American Christians just feel persecuted, and I think that just doesn't stand up to any real scrutiny.
But, you know, when you have a widespread phenomenon, you have to look for, well, what may be true in there?
What really is true?
And I think there are a couple of things that are true.
One is definitely that, you know, white American Christians feel like they are losing some Cultural and political authority, you know, power.
They are.
And they are because the country is diversifying, and they are because the country is secularizing.
And so what their, you know, their diminished privilege is feeling like persecution, it's not nothing, it's a thing, and people are feeling it.
But at the same time, just to be an equal opportunity offender of the mainstream culture, I think people of faith are like the one group that is allowed to be mocked in the mainstream media culture.
It's allowed to be mocked on late night TV.
That's a funny joke to make fun of somebody's faith.
And I get why that is.
On some level it is because of the cultural dominance, because that still is 60%.
It's punching up.
It's considered okay because you're mocking the majority group that is essentially in power.
But that doesn't make it cool, and probably as we're going through this great moment of trying to live up to the aspirations of American society, we should probably be more sensitive to people of faith as well.
Yeah, it's a tough one, because as you say, when you're used to privilege, you know, equality feels like persecution.
Right.
And that's exactly what is happening with the group that, you know, you're focused on in this film.
And so the kiddie gloves are needed because they've never been out on the playground with the rest of us.
They've been out there in the gated community and are not sure what happens when we all sort of have equal access, right, to the playground and the slide and the swings and everything else.
We gotta go.
Let me ask you one more question.
I think you've already answered this a little bit, but I'll just put it out there to close.
Reza Aslan says, we're about to find out.
How has making this film left you feeling about the rest of 2024?
Well, I'm very concerned about 2024 and about the possibility of political violence and about the possibility of just, you know, increased political and racial and culture war along these lines.
Um, so I think it's, uh, I think it's going to be a rough, a rough time.
Um, but at the same time, you know, I do, it's very hard to shake my faith in American democracy and American people.
I think that despite all of this, I do think that we have a really robust civic culture in America that, that at its core believes in these things.
And as, as this movement is exposed, I think it'll be harder and harder for people to stay on board with it.
But I think until the rest of American culture wakes up to this danger and takes it really seriously, I think it's not being addressed.
It's not being confronted.
It's not being engaged.
And at the moment, sad to say, I think it's still an ascendant movement.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And I also agree that it's just any chance we can to get folks to understand the state we're in is one we should take.
It's just really hard to get folks to kind of pay attention in a way that they understand where we are in terms of the threat to democracy coming from this movement and this set of communities.
We're out of time.
Just want to say thank you so much again during a busy week.
God and Country is in theaters now.
People can go see it.
Go to our website, godandcountrythemovie.com, because there's a listing of theaters there.
It's opening in about 100 screens, and hopefully a theater near you.
Yeah, it's wonderful that just this week there was a great event with so many of our friends of the show, folks from Americans United, Andrew Seidel, Rob Boston, Catherine Stewart, and others.
So I know folks were tuned into that.
But all right, friends, go see it.
Go see the film.
And we'll be talking about it on the show here in the coming weeks as well.
But for now, we'll say thanks to Dan Partland for his time.
Thanks to all of you for listening.
Thank you so much for having me.
I love the show.
Thanks.
All right.
Hope you enjoyed listening to Dan and I talk about God and Country and Christian nationalism and everything that's happening in the United States here in 2024.
As promised, wanted to spend just a few minutes talking about my view of the film, my takeaways and my criticisms.
I think the biggest takeaway is that, as Dan said, this is a chance perhaps to open a conversation with people on an interpersonal level.
Many of you listening are the types of folks who I love, and I love you because you are the types of folks who read all the books, you listen to all the podcasts, you are very aware of the threats against the United States, the sinister impulses that people are falling into, and the ways that Christian nationalism and authoritarianism are ever-present and ascendant factors in our lives today.
But there are so many folks in Jamar Tisby and and Thea Butler They're not going to listen to 10 hours of politics podcast a week.
And so there's a chance here to say hey As I said in the interview, we got an hour and a half.
You want to get dinner?
Come on, watch this film with me.
Let's see what we think.
And maybe, you know, that's difficult.
Maybe that's not something that can happen in every case.
But I do think there's a chance there to say to somebody who's not Fully down the rabbit hole of QAnon, not somebody who thinks that John F. Kennedy Jr.
is still alive or that Donald Trump is really president right now or whatever, but you know, folks who are trying to sort their way through the next couple of months, folks who Don't really care for Joe Biden, but they don't like Trump and they're this and that and the border and Ukraine and CRT and, you know, your friend who's just trying to figure that stuff out.
This might be a good chance to, you know, go go to dinner and watch this film.
I really do think.
That's one of the best things about the release of this film.
I also agree with Dan that there is a sense in which this puts Christian nationalism in the ether and it normalizes talking about it.
And we do that on this show.
I do that every week.
This is the world I live in.
It's those of you listen regularly.
It's your world, too.
But it's not the world of everyone in this country.
And, you know, I'm always surprised when people thank me for Working on these things, they are so glad that somebody's bringing attention to it.
Could be us, but could be any number of voices and authors and podcasts out there.
And it's a reminder that not everybody is seeing this issue as a kind of thing that we need to be talking about, like we talk about so many other issues in our ether.
Could be voting rights, could be reproductive rights, and so on.
So, I do appreciate that about this film very much.
Other things that I appreciate a lot.
There are voices in here of people that I just have the highest respect for in terms of their work and perspective on Christian nationalism and the history of it, the future of it, the present of it.
That includes obvious friends of this show.
You'll see Andrew Whitehead, who created American Idols for Access Moonday Media.
If you see Andrew Whitehead in the film and you want more Andrew Whitehead, just go to accessmoonday.us and look for American Idols, because he did a four-part series for us on that.
You'll see Andrew Seidel, who is just an incredible human being, but an even more incredible voice for articulating what the separation of church and state means in this country and how it's being threatened.
Rob Boston from Americans United and of course Catherine Stewart, somebody who has been just a huge support to this show and to so many others and whose work is The thing I always appreciate about Catherine's work when I read it is its detail and its analysis.
She's able to really zone in on details, but also just analyze in a way conceptually that's rare.
So those folks should not be missed.
Anthea Butler is there, and Anthea, as I talked about with Dan, has maybe one of the more show-stopping scenes in the film.
And in a way that perhaps only Anthea can, she really brings the entire project to focus in one answer to one question.
And so I do appreciate that very much about this film.
As you can imagine, there's always things that I wish would be different, and I'll just name two, and I think they're ones that are not unique to me.
I think there's other folks writing about these things and commenting on them, and many of you listening will already have them in your mind, and they'll already be bothering you.
So let me just talk about them a little bit.
All right, so two things.
One is, there are a lot of folks who, as Dan mentioned, and I already pointed out, are not MAGA folks who have come out against Trump and Trump's movement, who are either still evangelical stalwarts or kind of on the borders of the evangelical world.
Folks like Rob Shank, folks like David French, folks like Russell Moore.
And, you know, I appreciate what Dan said about their voices and about the ways that hearing them reject the MAGA movement and Trump and authoritarianism is really important.
And for them to articulate that this is not, in their minds, how Christianity is meant to work.
So I appreciate that.
And I don't, this is not a show where we do either or.
This is not a show where we're going to reduce things to this or that.
So, I am appreciative of that aspect of the film.
I think there, however, are moments in the film where folks like Russell Moore and David French and others are able to kind of put forward this idea that Christian nationalism is a perversion of the gospel, and if folks would wake up, we could get back to how things were, which was good.
And that's where my bone is always going to be to pick.
If you follow this show and you follow Dan, if you've read my book, if you've, you know, listened to our interviews with so many people, we really take the view that yes, the Trump years have accelerated Christian nationalism.
The Trump years have presented a dynamic where out and out xenophobia and racism and queer phobia are just all within the Overton window.
And people saying that we want a dictator and they want Trump to be a dictator.
They don't want democracy and so on.
That's all now part of our political life in ways that was not normalized to that degree in the Obama years, the Bush years, the Reagan years, whatever you want to say.
We're living in a different time.
There's no doubt.
But the idea that if we could just go back to an evangelicalism that was not perverted by Christian nationalism and everything would be good is just not an idea I'm ever going to accept.
That's not an idea that I think holds.
up to historical scrutiny.
It is mentioned in the film that abortion is one issue that catalyzed evangelical political involvement in the 20th century, but that racism and segregation and desegregation were really the driving forces, and I agree with that.
So once again.
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