COMMENTARY: The relatives we wish we didn’t have

(RNS) In an age not given to nuance, the undiscerning among us conclude that all Muslims are radical terrorists intent on waging a war against America. They also fail to make distinctions between different kinds of Christians. Unfortunately when it comes to religion, none of us gets to choose our representatives. It’s what I saw […]

(RNS) In an age not given to nuance, the undiscerning among us conclude that all Muslims are radical terrorists intent on waging a war against America. They also fail to make distinctions between different kinds of Christians.

Unfortunately when it comes to religion, none of us gets to choose our representatives. It’s what I saw in two very different portrayals of Christians at the Sundance Film Festival: “Higher Ground” and “The Ledge.”

“Higher Ground” is based on the life of Carolyn Briggs as told in “This Dark World,” her honest, heartfelt memoirs of the journey into and out of the Jesus Movement.


Briggs, an intellectually curious lover of literature, was drawn into a conformist, anti-intellectual Christian subculture in her youth.

She eventually ventured into the broader world, but remained respectful of the loving community she left behind. As director Vera Farmiga observed following the film screening, Briggs’ respects her roots because she didn’t leave religion per se, but rather an “impoverished expression of the Christian religion.”

I watched “Higher Ground” with a group of evangelical student filmmakers who loved the film but also detested screenwriter Matthew Chapman’s “The Ledge,” which pits an atheist against a mentally unstable fundamentalist Christian.

Prior to the film, Chapman paid homage to his good friend, Christopher Hitchens, a passionate evangelist for atheism. He then dedicated the screening to slain Ugandan gay activist David Kato who, he said, was murdered because of the “influence of American evangelical Christians.”

Needless to say, that didn’t sit well with the evangelical students in the crowd.

Chapman said his film is an attempt to explore the idea of how far people are willing to go for what they believe. Unfortunately, that intriguing premise fails to live up to its potential.

“The Ledge” portrays atheists sympathetically, while reducing Christians to a caricature of a detestable extremism. The atheist is willing to die for his unbelief; the fundamentalist is willing to kill for his belief.


A professor sitting behind me dismissed “The Ledge” as nothing more than demagoguery and propaganda, adding he had never met any Christian who remotely resembled this half-crazed fundamentalist.

My reaction was a little more layered — and for a very personal reason.

I agree the characters were flatly drawn, the cinematography lackluster and the overall effort more of a melodrama than a serious exploration of the limits of belief and unbelief.

But I could not dismiss the authenticity of the gun-toting religious fundamentalist because I met one 30 years ago.

After a divorce in my 20s, I dated a young woman who had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. Like Briggs, she ultimately spread her wings for bigger skies, but remained loyal to the sheltered, supportive home in which she had been raised.

In her family’s brand of Christian fundamentalism, dating a divorced man was forbidden; marrying a divorced man would condemn their daughter to life as an adulteress.

One weekend she went home to reason with her father, while I waited at a nearby park because he refused to meet me face to face.


She found her father sitting in the living room with a loaded gun on his lap. He told her that if she was going to proceed with this relationship she should just kill him, because she would be dead to him anyway.

Suffice it to say, the hoped-for reasonable discussion never happened, and I ended the relationship rather than causing her further distress.

I’ve never told this story publicly and I only do so now because, unlike those young evangelicals, who dismissed Chapman’s portrayal of a Christian as unrealistic, I know such people really exist.

Good films tell stories, and in each religion you’ll find examples of people whose misunderstanding of their religion has dehumanized them.

What to do when a story offends? In his “Experiment in Criticism,” C.S. Lewis says, “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”

If we are to understand how others perceive our religion, we must receive the good, bad and ugly stories of members of our faith. We must also learn to distinguish between distortions of faith and the best versions.


When we do that, we get off the precarious ledge of religious bigotry and find the higher ground of mutual respect and understanding.

(Dick Staub is author of the just-released “About You: Fully Human and Fully Alive” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

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