Revealing Experiences with Public Broadcasters about Documentaries

Dealing with Christian Realities

by Sociologist & Documentary Filmmaker James Ault

My first documentary film grew out of my research as a young sociologist among social conservative groups then launching America’s “Culture Wars” in the 1980s. In the course of that participant-observation field research among Right-to-Lifers, parents campaigning against sex education, and conservative home-schoolers, I came across a Jerry Falwell-inspired fundamentalist Baptist outside Worcester, the kind of “Moral Majority” church leading such movements at the time. And as soon as I walked through its door, and saw in its congregational life the kinds of families I was seeing among other social conservatives I was studying, and thought it would make an important documentary for public broadcast. And it did. I didn’t know anything about documentary filmmaking at the time, but a close friend of mine in grad school in sociology at Brandeis, Nancy Jay, happened to know the family of John Marshall, one of the pioneers of cinéma vérité filmmaking in the United States, where the story is told not by narration but by scenes of real life and stories told to camera by subjects appearing in them. John put his support behind the project and began introducing me to the arts and crafts of that kind of more intimate documentary filmmaking. One thing that interested him in the project, he once told me, was that his grandmother was a Bible-quoting Calvinist from Nova Scotia.

I ended up making that film, Born Again: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church, with another filmmaker, Michael Camerini (a longer story). And it was Nancy Jay, along with our close colleague in sociology at Brandeis, Karen Fields, both award-winning writers on religion who advised me how best to portray religion in a documentary. Religion was not an interest of mine at the time and it was politics that brought me to that church. Nancy and Karen both advised to show people facing ordinary problems any viewer can relate to, and then show them wrestling with them in terms of their faith. That was the approach we took in our film and it worked well. One reviewer praised the film, describing it “like a soap opera, but real, and set in a fundamentalist church.” It ended up winning a first prize in religion at the American Film and Video Festival that year, and was praised by commentators on opposite side of America’s political spectrum at the time. Ironically, when I explained over the phone to the head of documentary film funding at National Endowment for the Humanities that we were striving to take an even-handed approach to portraying this fundamentalist church, he responded sharply that that subject didn’t call for even-handedness. A negative approach was called for, he implied, and from that moment on he refused to even speak with me. Nevertheless, our film ended up being broadcast as a national prime-time special on PBS, a surprising development, I realized only later on, which I eventually came to understand was a result of a peculiar step in its development.

My most revealing encounter with PBS about this film came when a senior producer from Boston’s premiere station, WGBH, came to view our film’s rough cuts in our editor’s studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my co-producer and I were shaping the film with our editor, Adrienne Miesmer, who had edited John Marshall’s classic, N!yae: The Story of a !Kung Woman. We then heard from WGBH that they had no interest in it. But, soon thereafter we discovered that they had gone on to recruit a filmmaker from Britain to make their own documentary about fundamentalist Christianity’s rise in the US. Fully funded through WGBH, that filmmaker, a gay man from England, according to one reviewer, “set out to expose what he perceives as the hypocrisies within fundamentalist Christian churches, and his interviewees fall fully into the traps he sets.” His film set off such a firestorm among powerful church figures in Texas where he and WGBH decided filmed, that they weren’t allowed to broadcast the film without first airing an open conversation with its subjects who objected to its negative portrayal of them. The British, by the way, were way ahead of the United States in developing the more intimate style of cinéma verité documentary filmmaking—called “observational documentaries” there—since that kind of filmmaking requires much more footage which was a huge expense in the 16mm film era when filming and developing just an 11-minute reel cost over $1,000, and they had state funding to cover such expenses. Eventually a good number of British producers came over to the US to lead the development of such documentary filmmaking in major PBS stations, bringing with them, it seemed to me, generally more negative attitudes to Americans’ religiosity and, I believe, planting those attitudes in some of PBS’ organizational culture.

When our own film, Born Again, was finally completed, none of the major PBS stations across the country, like WGBH or WNET in New York City, wanted to sponsor its national broadcast, despite its having received completion funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcast, PBS’s parent company. Finally, South Carolina’s PBS station agreed to sponsor it and it was broadcast as a national prime-time special on PBS in 1988. After its broadcast, an evangelical pastor in San Diego where I was then living, a fairly liberal fellow educated at the University of California-Berkeley, sent me a letter thanking me for the film, and explaining that “We don’t expect that kind of even-handed depiction of us on PBS.” These institutions, then—the National Endowment for the Humanities and PBS—are publicly funded entities pledged to serve the American people in open-minded and objective ways, yet that was not my experience back then, or my experience to date.

My journey with our film Born Again revealed other lessons about prejudices at work more widely among America’s intelligentsia. When we had a public screening of the film at La Jolla’s Museum of Fine Arts, a group of activists from a local university stormed the stage after the screening to try to prevent a conversation about it. Then, when I showed the film at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, I was interested to see that there was a meeting of the Christian Sociological Association at the same time as our screening. I was curious about them, so, once I got the film running for the audience, I went to look in on their meeting. I was interested to find thirty-some mainly young scholars from diverse institutions across the country, and from diverse ethnic backgrounds, sharing “war stories” about hostile reactions they experienced, often from senior colleagues, when learning about their faith. It was revealing, and sad.

Years later, after other prejudicial encounters I had with PBS about other documentary projects, I found myself asking how it was, then, that our film Born Again was broadcast on PBS to begin with, and as a national prime-time special? That we had received a major post-production grant for the film from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was key in putting our film in the pipeline for PBS broadcast. But, the decision behind that CPB grant held an interesting dimension. The program officer from CPB who came to look at our footage that day in our editing room in Cambridge, a young, upcoming figure who would eventually rise to become CPB’s Vice President for Domestic and International Programs, was African American. He had grown up the son of a pastor of an African American church in Pittsburgh, and, given his background, could see that we had nailed the subject. And that was how our film became slated for national broadcast. Perhaps a reflection of his own experiences at CPB, years later when at the top of his career, he had a personal crisis, which led him to leave CPB altogether, and go on to become a pastor and author.

Our matter-of-fact portrayal of that fundamentalist Baptist church, then, though award-winning and praised by commentators on opposite sides of America’s Culture Wars at the time, did not open doors to me in the public broadcasting world or at NEH. On the contrary, it seemed to have closed them. Fortunately, other opportunities arose for work through foundations interested in religion and Christianity, in particular, the Lilly Endowment and Pew Charitable Trusts. I was hired by Robert Lynn, then head of Religion at Lilly, for some research work and then some modest documentary film projects that helped develop my filmmaking skills while living and working in New York City. Documentary filmmaking, I came to see, awakened artistic sides of me that had largely been pushed aside in higher learning. I felt my experiences growing up doing theater, music, and drawing all flooding back into me. Even when writing, I found that my time in the editing room discussing character development, dramatic tension, narrative arc, etc., moved me away from abstract, discursive academic prose to character-driven storytelling. My eventual book on that research and making Born Again, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (Knopf 2004,) was named one of the five best nonfiction books that year and “the best single-volume explanation of why fundamentalist Christianity thrives among certain people . . . and will not die out.” One reviewer described it as “an ethnography that reads like a novel.”

In the end, I found a fruitful marriage between my sociological formation and documentary filmmaking in its more intimate cinéma vérité genre, which proved an effective medium for bridging challenging differences in culture and worldview. Eventually, through a connection with Joel Carpenter, then head of Religion at Pew Charitable Trusts, who was way ahead of the times in seeing the importance of Christianity’s explosive growth in Africa and other parts of the “two-thirds world,” I was launched on an extensive documentary project to explore the sources and directions of Christian growth in Africa, which had been my first area of study as a political sociologist. I was immensely happy and grateful for this opportunity to return to the continent I had come to love and appreciate. However, once I developed some understandings about what was then fueling Christian growth in the two countries where we decided to film, Ghana and Zimbabwe, and had shot telling personal stories to convey these realities, I ran into formidable obstacles.

Even though the stories we captured in our footage were praised by leading thinkers on the subject, and our Ghana footage was shot by one of the world’s best hand-held camera persons at the time, it was dismissed by the powers that be in public broadcasting in the West. It was clear that they were generally uncomfortable with our matter-of-fact depiction of African Christians’ spiritualities, which are mainly quite charismatic or Pentecostal in order to address the diverse spirit world familiar to most African peoples, a key factor in Christianity’s explosive growth on the continent. The Head of Religion then at the BBC in England, for example, simply dismissed our work, while the film that helped launch his own career, Saving Africa’s Witch Children, presented a wildly distorted and negative portrait of some false Christian prophets in the Niger River delta preying on families suffering from environmental disaster there by persuading them that their problems could be solved by casting demons out of their children . . . which they did for a fee. A young white British man, the central character of the film, then comes to save these children from these prophets and their families. And this was presented as what Christianity was all about in Africa, as well as how African families treat their children, negative distortions on both fronts. Several follow-up films on this same theme appeared in British public broadcasting, again focusing on some self-aggrandizing false prophets, which one always finds in any historic period of exponential Christian growth. Yet, most of the churches I observed and filmed on the ground in Ghana and Zimbabwe grew by providing caring and supporting services to their members, people often facing the challenges of poverty and anonymity in city life. They included one young charismatic church in Ghana’s capitol of Accra which was then founding what would become that nation’s largest private university, similar to America’s own history with churches founding the majority of its institutions of higher learning.

Despite this sad absence of any public broadcasting interest or support in the West for our work on Christian growth in Africa, I managed to complete our two-part African Christianity Rising series, which has been praised by leading thinkers on the subject and remains in use as an invaluable resource by educators around the world. However, during this work I did come to appreciate how African Christians’ spiritualities, central to the faith’s relevance to them, can be quite challenging to many in the West, even church leaders. When I showed our early rough cuts, for example, to leaders of the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Ministries at their offices in New York City, including footage of all-night worship at an annual women’s revival of United Methodist women in Zimbabwe with spiritual warfare, exorcisms, etc., one remarked in troubling wonderment, “I’ve been to Zimbabwe many times, and I’ve never seen anything like that!” Others concurred. It turns out that, even though such events of all-night worship are central to the very identity of Zimbabwean United Methodists, they typically would not bring their sisters and brothers visiting from the United States to them. They felt that their visitors’ visible discomfort with those often bodily acts of spiritual warfare might disturb the normal tone of worship. This, I came to learn, was true across church denominations in the West, even among Pentecostals, for example, when members of France’s Assemblies of God visit their brothers and sisters in Africa. These lessons continued to teach me that crossing boundaries of culture and worldview to portray realities unfamiliar, and even uncomfortable, to viewers can carry considerable challenges, however challenges that cross-cultural documentary filmmaking can help address.

Returning to the Public Broadcasting world, my recent documentary about the inspiring work of Esperanza in North Philadelphia, an organization founded by Hispanic Protestant clergy to strengthen the largely poor neighborhoods there, brought up to the present day my experiences of prejudices in the PBS world about matter-of-fact portraits of any faith-based Christian work. Even though the transformative impact of many dimensions of Esperanza’s multi-faceted work had earned its founding president, the Rev. Luis Cortés, the city’s annual Philadelphia Award, the first Hispanic to receive that award for a citizen contributing the most to that city’s life, the Head of Production of PBS’ flagship station there (who was unaware of that award) didn’t think our documentary about its work merited broadcast. While she found the dramatic stories of some young people facing difficult challenges in inner-city life being transformed by the educational and counseling work in Esperanza’s public charter high school and Christian college of interest, she didn’t think what motivated and supported those doing that work of any interest. In the end, she explained, it sometimes felt too much like being in church, revealing her discomfort with the faith-based nature of the organization, a prejudice, I am sad to say, I have experienced time and again in the PBS world.

One telling moment in our conversation came when she suggested that maybe a half hour of our 90-minute film featuring the young peoples’ stories would work. When I asked “How about an hour?” she exclaimed, “No!” adding with a laugh, “Then we’d have to hear from those heavy-set guys in the cafeteria!” She was referring to the “School Climate Officers” in Esperanza’s high school—what they call the security officers in all their public charter schools. The main one we see at work in the cafeteria, Mr. Philson, an African American, tells us he has 800 names and personalities of the students in his head “and I cater to each one,” he says, as we watch him checking in with them, knowing what they’re going through right now, and even covering lunch expenses for one he knows is often short of money. “You’ve got to let them know that you genuinely care for them,” he explains. “My job is like a counsellor, like a father figure, like a brother.” These School Climate Officers, then, are men and women who have been specifically recruited and trained to help set the “climate,” the culture, of Esperanza’s schools, people embracing the Esperanza’s mission, citing Matthew 25, to “serve the least of these.”

“When I go home I pray for some of these kids,” explains Philson’s workmate, SCO Mrs. Morales, who grew up in the neighborhood and knows what challenges the students face. She, Philson and the teachers and staff I saw and filmed at work in Esperanza’s schools, know how to meet students’ needs, how to engage with their families, and to do that in terms of their culture. I wasn’t sure whether this PBS officer’s failure to see the importance of their work was a result of her blindness to the cultures present in the North End, or of her dismissive discomfort with the Christian faith animating Esperanza’s work and shaping the “climate” of its schools. Given my experiences over the years with PBS’ prejudicial attitudes toward matter-of-fact portrayals of faith-based Christian work, I suspect the latter.

I would hope that such prejudicial attitudes would be corrected in our Public Broadcasting System, and in institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities, since they help fuel popular support for political figures like Donald Trump who routinely appeals to his base at rallies with his oft-repeated mantra that “faith and family, not government and bureaucracy are the heart of America.” I believe such prejudices are a reality that should be, and need to be, addressed, to help bring us together as a nation.

(For a fuller autobiography click here)