|
31 May 2010
Editorial Assistant Alyce Gilligan talks to Dan Merchant about his film, Lord Save Us From Your Followers.
Click to listen now or subscribe at iTunes.
The main question and the tagline for this movie was, “Why is the gospel of love dividing America?” Do you feel like you found your answer?
I did. And it turns out the answer is it’s not the gospel doing the dividing; it’s us. Like I said in the movie, it’s the followers of Jesus, and the rest of y’all. That’s it. We are all imperfect creatures. We all want to be right about things. We tend to be defensive. We tend to defend our turf, And the gospel of love is quite profound, and when demonstrated, like washing the feet of a homeless person under a bridge on a Friday night in Portland, OR, or Waco, TX or wherever else it’s going on, you see something interesting. You see very clear communication happening, because if you’re washing the feet of the homeless person, they don’t have any confusion about what you’re trying to tell them. They believe you care about them. And because you’ve told them you’re a Christian, and they know you’re a Christian, they understand that that’s God’s love you’re showing them. There is no confusion. There is occasionally confusion when I’m trying to win a political argument about why healthcare should do this or why military policy should be that. That’s just me with my ideas; I can be wrong. But if I’m plagiarizing Jesus, if I’m imitating Jesus, the chances are pretty good that the message is going to get understood.
How important do you feel humor is in this kind of conversation?
It’s interesting, it’s just been absent from it, as far as I can tell. By and large, certainly there is always good-natured ribbing within each camp. Christians will make fun of Christians, and atheists will make fun of atheists, but never really do you cross the line. With Lord Save Us From Your Followers, we were really endeavoring to have a conversation that invites everybody into the table. So you’ll see in Lord Save Us, there’s the church, or more pointedly, myself, gets made fun of appropriately at times, and then occasionally people who hold different views will get poked at, too, because we all have a tendency to get self-satisfied. We’re all struggling with being right about everything. I suppose the idea that I’m stealing from the gospels and trying put forward is that the gospel of being right is not as important as the gospel of love.
