[NB: An unpublished autobiographical essay giving further background to points made in my essay “Understanding Our Partisan Divides . . .”]

Lessons from My Journey as a “Politically Incorrect” Radical

Our increasingly vitriolic partisan divides in the United States, now threatening our very democracy, moved me to draw on my original field research among social conservatives fueling America’s Culture Wars, and what I’ve been observing ever since, to write an essay about how we can better understand each other across these bitter divides. In that essay I mention certain prejudices, even persecutions, I experienced in the course of my work and realized for the sake of clarity and transparency—and for whatever lessons it might hold—I should explain what those experiences were.

I was raised in the family of a Methodist minister and his wife and partner in ministry who met in the railroad town of Sayre, Pennsylvania, during the Great Depression. My father was from a local farm and blue-collar family, thrown out of company housing for union organizing. His mother, my grandmother, became a schoolteacher and was the first woman to head Pennsylvania’s Parents Teachers Association. They were union Democrats, and then, New Deal ones, though some of my relatives from that branch of the family who continued to reside in that town moved in conservative directions as our Culture War politics set in. My mother’s family had moved there for her father’s work as an accountant for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. After he contracted multiple sclerosis and had to stop work, my grandmother’s relatives stepped in to build them a house on their farm. After he died she began working in the local public school cafeteria to make ends meet for her and her teenage son. During the turbulent years of the late 1960s her steadfast support for President Richard Nixon, even when he dodged incriminating evidence in the Watergate tapes by claiming “Only I knew what I meant by what I said,” taught me an important lesson. It showed me how a kind and caring, intelligent, hard-working, and, above all, loving woman could support Nixon and what he stood for in those days. She, in part then, inspired me to do this work.

The main thing I took from my formative experiences in our family home was the commitment to help others and help make our world a better place. I came of age in the 1960s when the civil rights movement, always supported in our home, was encountering violent pushback here and there and was morphing into the black power movement. Our nation’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, a symbol of change, was shot dead during a public parade in Dallas, Texas. And the Vietnam War was intensifying, stirring domestic divisions that would inflame the nation.

I entered Harvard College in 1964, on full scholarship, and decided to major in Government, an area of study I thought would help me make that difference. Bad decisions involved in the Vietnam War and the tragedies they caused made an anti-war activist of me. It also eventually gave direction to my studies by persuading me that we Americans did not adequately understand the politics and cultures in what we called the “underdeveloped” or “developing” world at the time. (Our involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq have continued to demonstrate this.)

During my senior year in college a car hit me while riding my bicycle, breaking my arm badly and requiring surgery and metal parts. The first thing the surgeon said when I woke up from the operation was wonderful news: “At least the draft won’t take you with this,” he said. I was free, suddenly liberated from that dark shadow of the draft hanging over us men at the time. If we were not enrolled in college, we would be drafted to fight in that tragic and dangerous war. This turned out to be my one moment of fame on campus when fellow students, seeing the cast on my arm, would come up to me and asked, “Are you the guy who had that great accident?” Suddenly free from the draft, I dropped out of school, deciding to study on my own and travel to some part of the developing world to gain some firsthand knowledge of such contexts. After a summer job in Brussels, I ended up living in London, working part-time at with youth in a public housing project while studying as an occasional student at the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies. Given the fact that Africa seemed the easiest part of the “two-thirds world” to travel to cheaply from there—mainly hitch-hiking and taking local buses—I turned my studies to African politics and then spent six months traveling around East Africa to Zambia, the country I decided to focus on. I visited farms, plantations, factories, political leaders, and families—from peasants to a former prime minister then under house arrest in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

I then returned to Massachusetts, having decided, instead of a career in journalism, to study subjects in more concentrated, focused ways. So, I entered the Ph.D. program in Sociology at Brandeis University. It was a very free-thinking department, which allowed me to continue working with my great teacher on society and politics at Harvard, Barrington Moore, Jr., whose comparative historical approach to political developments in diverse nations in order to understand why some became democracies and others dictatorships, and his thinking about the role of class and class conflict in shaping those developments, I strongly embraced. Though believing that the way a ruling class extracts a surplus from others—whether capitalists from workers, aristocrats from peasants, or party chiefs from citizens— was an important political dimension of any society, I was not a Marxist committed to a vision of socialist or communist society as an ideal for humankind.

However, I did remain committed to anti-war and anti-imperialist activism, living in a commune with other left-leaning folks. I also identified strongly with the Women’s Liberation movement then growing in strength. With some radical economist colleagues, whose course on political economy at Harvard I helped teach, we formed a men’s consciousness raising group, as a parallel effort among us to work for social change in gender and family relations. Virtually all my women friends at the time were part of the rapidly growing “women’s movement,” as we called it back then, in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, I was fortunate to find good traveling companions and dear friends in Brandeis’ Sociology Department. They included Karen Fields and Nancy Jay, two award-winning scholars of religion, and Fatima Mernissi, a pioneering feminist scholar and activist from Morocco. It was Fatima, in fact, who first gave me a glimpse of certain intolerances among our fellow feminists at the time. It was in the early 1970s when she and I were walking to or from a political demonstration somewhere in Cambridge, when she leaned over and in a hushed voice explained that our local feminist colleagues would repeatedly not let her speak at events, because they disapproved of her valuing certain elements of traditional gender roles in the family. As a woman who grew up in Morocco in a life shaped by female harems, which Fatima eventually wrote about, it was totally understandable that she wouldn’t share the same outlook of feminists like Betty Friedan experiencing social isolation as a suburban housewife/mother in a middle-class nuclear family.

But it was Karen Fields and Nancy Jay, above all, who became close fellow travelers with me at Brandeis studying with our brilliant teacher there, the late Egon Bittner. A Czechoslovakian Jewish teenage survivor of Auschwitz where he lost his entire family, Egon ended up migrating to the United States as a youth and went on to become an outstanding member of the pioneering movement among phenomenologists in sociology at the time called ethnomethodology. After my graduate studies with Egon and Barrington Moore, I spent a year doing research back in Zambia, on the formation of Zambia’s urban working class and its effects on politics. I then returned to the United States and took one of the few decent jobs available at the time teaching at Smith College while planning to write my dissertation there.

But then an unexpected change occurred. My archival research in Zambia revealed too many holes in the secondary literature on class and politics there to apply Moore’s comparative historical methods to a broad analysis of that nation’s political developments. It wasn’t going to make a good dissertation or book. Instead, I ended up writing several articles based on that research. Meanwhile, while teaching Elizabeth Bott’s classic, Family and Social Network in my course on urban sociology, I realized it provided a framework for answering a question that always haunted us sixties radicals: why are we white and middle class? More specifically, why did our sixties feminism not appeal to working-class women or women of color? As I began writing my dissertation on this topic, I realized that understanding why some women weren’t into sixties feminism, was just a step removed from understanding why some women would militantly oppose it, like those forming the popular base of social conservative “pro-family” movements then fueling the New Right. I got a post-doctoral fellowship to do field research on such anti-feminist New Right groups from a newly founded women’s studies center at Brown University, one of the many founded at the time at first-rate universities across the country and funded by the Ford Foundation. I was in the first cohort of scholars on a research fellowship that year. We would meet with other colleagues at Brown in a seminar each week for discussions on various topics. I was the only man in our seminar group of 20-some members, and I was later told that I was granted that fellowship because of my good standing among my many feminist colleagues in the Boston area where I had studied and been active. However, that did not protect me from the persecutions I began experiencing.

“Persecutions” might seem too strong a word to use, but the experiences that I began having regularly with colleagues then at Brown’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women would often bring me to tears . . . and I am not prone to that. And, on other fronts, I began seeing my otherwise promising academic career become severely damaged, if not destroyed, as my work on understanding non-feminist or anti-feminist women was shunned, not for sound scholarly reasons, but for ideological/political ones.

I had begun attending our weekly seminar at the Pembroke Center with great enthusiasm, looking forward to discussing matters of common concern with its 20-some participants. They consisted of a half dozen researchers on fellowships like me, some Brown faculty associated with the Center, as well as some graduate students and even undergraduates. Since my project involved doing field research among conservative “pro-family” groups near me in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts, I decided to make the two-hour drive to Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, each week for our seminar. I would then spend the night in Providence, generally in some bedding I made up in the office given me there as a research fellow.

As our semester settled in, I soon began to experience a sense of negative attitudes toward me among a good number of our seminar participants. “Microaggressions” would be a good term to describe what I experienced, a term invented to describe both intentional and unintentional slights or derogatory attitudes expressed, often in subliminal ways, toward African Americans or other stigmatized or marginalized groups. Though such actions are often hard to identify clearly, much less remember now almost 40 years later, they took the form of looks, body language and slight offhand remarks that were clearly felt. I began feeling them so strongly that at the end of our seminar day I remember often crying in my office that evening while preparing for bed and calling close friends back home in Northampton for sympathy and support. Now, forty years later, those friends still remember those calls.

But there was one moment when the collective nature of these subtle aggressions became clearly evident. It was at a presentation to our seminar by the only woman of color who appeared there over our thirty-some seminar meetings that year. She was African American. When we were discussing her presentation and I mentioned the strong role of African Americans’ extended families in shaping their lives, one of our undergraduate students immediately countered sharply, “That sounds racist to me!” Her face glowed with pride as she scanned the seminar room for approving looks from her professors and others around the table. She received some knowing looks and smiles.

I should be clear, my remark that day was not racist, but based on literature like Carol Stack’s All Our Kin which I had taught for years in my course on urban sociology, as well as my own experiences in African American households I worked with in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and knew elsewhere. In fact, our African American presenter that day—again, the only woman of color to be present in our seminar that entire academic year—came up to me afterwards and said she appreciated what I had had to say. But, the prideful, attention-grabbing comment by this undergraduate was a manifestation of the collective disdain I had been experiencing among her senior colleagues. In their talk, I imagined, my identity had been collectively set as politically and morally incorrect so that a young undergraduate could, in her very ignorance of African American life, it seemed, joyfully declare my remark racist while looking for expected approvals from senior colleagues around her.

To help understand the climate of the times helping fuel this felt disdain toward me–even today, when mentioning to academic colleagues my doing this research back then, they grimace to imagine the prejudices I must have experienced–this was a moment of unbounded enthusiasm for feminist academics at the time, as their interests and concerns were gaining traction in newly instituted centers for women’s studies, and eventually gender studies, in elite institutions of higher learning across the country. Of course, such achievements had taken time and had not come easily, and I certainly appreciated that and celebrated this progress. However, the fact that a majority of American women—working-class women and women of color, especially—were still not embracing Women’s Liberation’s call for changing gender roles in family and personal life, and that broad swaths of American women were then even mobilizing against it in the conservative “pro-family” movements I was studying, was politically challenging, if not embarrassing. The prevailing view among feminist activists and even scholars at the time, about why some women were not embracing their Women’s Liberation movement, was that they were dominated by “false consciousness,” drawing on Marxists’ use of that term (originally coined by Karl Marx’s partner, Friedrich Engels) to explain why many working-class people were not communist revolutionaries. That is because their vision had been clouded by false ideologies foisted on them by their oppressors. However, that was not what I was seeing on the ground during my field research among anti-feminist groups, generally dominated and led by women, or what I had come to understand about working-class life, or African-American life. To simply begin speaking to these truths, perhaps, made me seem like an enemy of their movement . . . which I was not.

I must make clear that I did not experience these subtle negative judgments from all the members of our seminar at Brown’s Pembroke Center that year, including its then founding director, the gifted and much-accomplished historian Joan Scott. I always felt an open, accepting and appreciative colleagueship from her in all our interactions. However, there is an irony here. Twenty years later, in the early 2000’s, when the conservative activist David Horowitz was in the midst of his nation-wide campaign against political correctness in academic institutions, it was Professor Scott, then at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, who published an Op-Ed in The New York Times criticizing his campaign to hold academic institutions accountable for prejudice or intolerance toward conservative, or simply non-progressive, points of view. This isn’t warranted, Professor Scott wrote, since we in the academy have sufficient means to notice and correct any such discriminatory practices ourselves. Yet, she had headed a small center at Brown where one of those under her watch experienced such discrimination quite powerfully and she either wasn’t aware of it, ignored it, or didn’t know how to address it. This demonstrated the limits of academic institutions’ capabilities to create a safe and non-prejudicial climate for free and open conversation about political differences among us, which, it appears from recent surveys of college students, they generally continue to fail to achieve. The fact that some conservative students say privately that they avoid expressing their views to fellow students and faculty because they fear it might negatively impact their careers is further testimony to the ideological climate in many of our academic institutions.

But, my experiences of prejudice and intolerance did not stop there. I was then in the process of trying to move my academic career forward by finding a publisher for at least some revised version of my doctoral dissertation entitled Class Differences in Family Structure and the Social Bases of Modern Feminism, a work praised by my leading teachers, Egon Bittner and Barrington Moore. In fact, in letters of recommendation that inadvertently came my way—and, therefore, Egon and Moore assumed I would never see—Moore referred to me as “about the best student I have had in the last decade of my teaching at Harvard,” and Egon, “among the two or three most gifted and serious Ph.D. students I had the good fortune to guide.” Yet, despite praise from two great thinkers of the age for my work addressing issues then beginning to transform American politics, my dissertation was shunned by the powers that be for what they perceived to be its politically incorrect outlook. This was evident in a letter of criticism from a prominent figure in women’s studies to a prestigious Ivy League Press, which, I was told, had killed my dissertation’s acceptance for publication there. “Ault spends a lot of time explaining why working-class women aren’t interested in sixties feminism,” this professor wrote to conclude her criticisms. “Why doesn’t he tell us why kind of feminists they are?” Now, would shifting the nature of my inquiry to give a positive slant to feminism be academically relevant, or even truthful? Wasn’t it relevant to understand why Women’s Liberation arose among the white professional middle class, to begin with, and found little interest among working-class women or women of color, and was then even generating grass-roots movements of women against it? If I had been forced to describe some of the women I was then meeting in my research as a certain “kind of feminists,” I would have had to call them, say, “Phyllis Schlafly-like” or “Sarah Palin-like feminists.”

These responses to my dissertation began casting a dark shadow on my otherwise promising academic career. I was grateful, then, that other opportunities opened up, as our intimate documentary about a Jerry Falwell-inspired fundamentalist Baptist church I met in the course of my Pembroke Center-funded research was broadcast as a national prime-time special on PBS, and on public broadcasting networks around the world, and won first prize in religion at the American Film and Video Festival that year. Quite significantly, it was praised by figures as far apart politically as Norman Lear (producer of popular sit-coms like All in the Family and founder of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way) and Jerry Falwell. However, our matter-of-fact portrayal of a Moral Majority church then at the forefront of conservative “pro-family” movements didn’t sit well with the powers that be at PBS or at other public institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH had given us the first grant to make that film, won over by the involvement in it of John Marshall, a pioneer in cinéma vérité filmmaking in the United States, who was introducing me to documentary filmmaking. However, later on, when I was speaking to one powerful figure at the NEH about our effort to portray this fundamentalist church in an “even-handed” way, he objected sharply, saying that that subject didn’t call for “even-handed” treatment. In his view, a negative one required. After that he refused to even talk with me again by phone, as he continued on in his long career as a funding conduit for documentary films with liberal or progressive content.

Also, when we first showed some of our intimate and engaging footage to the heads of production at WGBH, PBS’s prominent affiliate in Boston, where we were editing the film, they said they weren’t interested. Soon thereafter, however, we learned that they had gone on to enlist a filmmaker from Britain, a gay man, to make their own documentary about fundamentalist Christianity in the United States. Fully funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that filmmaker, as one reviewer put it, “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 others had decided to film, that they weren’t allowed to broadcast the film without first showing an open conversation with its subjects who objected to its negative, prejudicial portrayals of them. These institutions, then—the National Endowment for the Humanities and Public Broadcasting—are publicly funded entities pledged to serve all the American people in open-minded and objective ways, and, yet, that was not my experience.

And when our film, Born Again: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church, was finally completed, none of the major PBS stations across the country, like WGBH in Boston or WNET in New York City, wanted to sponsor its national broadcast, despite its receiving 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 appreciative letter after watching it on PBS. We don’t expect that kind of even-handed depiction of us on PBS, he wrote.

That same pastor, I might note on another matter, invited me to have lunch with him one day, which served as another step in my struggle at the time, wrestling with the question whether God existed or not, having spent the last twenty-some years since college as an atheist, I had just spent a month as a visiting scholar at the Trinity Institute at Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street in New York City, to show and discuss our film. Trinity lodged me that month in a brownstone apartment under one inhabited by Episcopal nuns. These Sisters had been so kind and gracious to me over my weeks there, that I thought I should attend church at Trinity my last Sunday there just to say goodbye to them.

Meanwhile, while trying to persuade my current girlfriend in San Diego to come visit me in New York, I received devastating news. Over the phone she told me that since this was a decisive moment in her career as a radio talk show host, she needed to devote herself to it and, therefore, had decided to end our relationship. I was shocked and heart-broken. When I attended Trinity’s worship service the following Sunday to say goodbye to my nun friends, I found its high church Episcopal mass with its procession and incense strange and unfamiliar. However, while singing a familiar hymn during worship I suddenly felt God’s powerful presence stirring up within me, breaking me down into tears. As I returned the San Diego the following day, those feelings stayed with me, like the reassuring sound of the surf in the background. Still, I kept struggling with the question whether God existed or not. At one point I even cried out to God, “Are you there?” God answered my cry with a stunning vision one night and my journey of discovery continued. I ended up attending that pastor’s young Community Church of San Diego, a multicultural congregation that was meeting in a local YMCA where I ended up being re-baptized in its swimming pool.

When my parents came out to visit me from Pennsylvania the following Easter, I had another revelatory experience. After introducing them to my friends and touring various sites in the area, we attended an evening communion service at a large United Methodist church my parents knew (my father was then a leader among United Methodists worldwide) and then an Easter morning service at my own small congregation. When we were having a bite to eat in my apartment before I was going to drive them to the airport, my father, in his pastoral way, summed up our experiences together that weekend in appreciative ways. “But I can’t tell you what a moving experience it was for me to take communion with you the other night,” he added, with tears welling up in his eyes and choked with emotion. “I can’t remember the last time we did that,” he concluded matter-of-factly, with tears still in his eyes as my mother eyed us both quietly. It was an emotional moment and took me totally by surprise. Yet afterwards I came to realize an important reality it had revealed to me: that over my twenty-some years as an atheist, my parents had never let me feel there was anything wanting or unfulfilled in our relationship, anything that could separate me from their unconditional love. (Cf. Spirit and Flesh, p. 338.)

My journey with our film Born Again continued to carry revealing lessons. When we had a public screening of the film at La Jolla’s Museum of Fine Arts, a group of leftist activists from a local university stormed the stage after the screening to try to prevent a conversation about it. For them, also, an even-handed portrait of such a community wasn’t acceptable. 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 sharing “war stories” about hostile reactions they experienced from colleagues when learning about their faith. It was revealing, and sad.

Years later I was prompted to ask myself, “How was it, then, that our film was broadcast on PBS to begin with, even as a national prime-time special?” Of course, that we had received a post-production grant for the project from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was key in putting our film in the pipeline for PBS broadcast. It then had to be broadcast. But, the decision behind that CPB grant held an interesting lesson. The program officer from CPB who came to look at our footage that day in our editing room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a young, upcoming figure who would eventually rise to become CPB’s Vice President for Domestic and International Programs, was African American, and he had grown up the son of a pastor of an African American congregation in Pittsburgh. Given his own background, he could see from watching our footage that day that we had nailed the subject, and recommended us for that grant. Years later, when at the top of his CPB career, he had a personal crisis, which led him to leave CPB altogether. He is now a pastor and author.

Our matter-of-fact portrayal in our film Born Again of that fundamentalist Baptist church, then, despite its awards and many international broadcasts, did not open doors to me in America’s public broadcasting world or at NEH. On the contrary, it seemed to have closed them, as they had largely closed in academic life. Fortunately, other opportunities arose for work through foundations interested in religion and Christianity, particularly 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. Documentary filmmaking, I realized in retrospect, had awakened artistic sides of me that had largely been pushed aside in higher learning. I felt that my experiences growing up doing theater, music, and drawing were all now flooding back into me. Even when writing, I found that my time in the editing room working on Born Again with my co-producer/director, Michael Camerini, and our editor, Adrienne Miesmer, discussing character development, dramatic tension, narrative arc, etc., moved me in my writing away from abstract, discursive academic prose to character-driven storytelling. My eventual book on that documentary project, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (Knopf 2004) was named one of the five best nonfiction books of the year, called “the best single-volume explanation of why fundamentalist Christianity thrives among certain people and will not die out,” by the Washington Post reviewer, and described tellingly by another reviewer, as “an ethnography that reads like a novel.”

In the end, then, 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. The effectiveness of Born Again in that regard stemmed from an important suggestion I received from my close colleagues in sociology at Brandeis, Karen Fields and the late Nancy Jay, both award-winning authors on religion. Since I had not focused on religion in my own studies, I asked them how to best portray faith in our documentary on that fundamentalist church. Both recommended that we show individuals facing problems or challenges in life anyone could identify with, and then show them wrestling with those things in terms of their faith, which is what we eventually did. One reviewer wrote that our film was “like a soap opera, but real, and set in a fundamentalist church.”

Eventually, through a connection with Joel Carpenter, then head of Religion at Pew Charitable Trusts, who was 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. I was immensely happy and grateful for this opportunity to return to the continent I had come to love and appreciate. Yet, 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 footage 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 cameramen at the time, it was dismissed by the powers that be in public broadcasting in the secular West. They were generally uncomfortable with our matter-of-fact depiction of African Christians’ spirituality, which is mainly quite charismatic or Pentecostal in order to address the diverse spirit world familiar to most Africans. 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 that 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, in addition to its distorted impression of how African families treat their children. 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, though a minority, in any historic period of exponential Christian growth. Yet, most of the diverse 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, the International Central Gospel Church, which was then founding what would become that nation’s largest private university, now Central University College, 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 their 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 and exorcisms, one remarked in wonderment, “I’ve been to Zimbabwe many times, and I’ve never seen anything like that!” Others concurred. It turns out that, though such events of all-night worship are central to the very identity of Zimbabwean United Methodists and critical to their church’s growth, 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 West 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.

In conclusion, these experiences in my journey as a sociologist-turned-documentary filmmaker have taught me how deeply challenging differences in culture and worldview can be here internally in the United States, to say nothing about their power across the diverse peoples of the world. Here in the United States they have become manifest in deep and searing divisions among us that have become increasingly nasty, and even hateful, over the past generation. And my own experiences have shown me how those divisions have been continuingly fueled, in part, by certain blindnesses and prejudices among our liberal educated elites.

I am not denying any blindnesses or misreadings conservatives may have of liberals. For instance, I remember the pastor of the fundamentalist Baptist church we filmed back then outside Worcester, Massachusetts, turning to me in one of our personal moments, and asking me, “Where do you live out there in Northampton anyway? . . . You’re still at home, aren’t you?” Even though I had mentioned to him on more than one occasion that my father was a church leader, then a United Methodist bishop, living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he still fell back on his assumption about people he knew, including all the unmarried men in his congregation. Even into their late thirties, like me at the time, if they were not married, they still lived “at home,” that is, with their parents. However, that was worlds apart from my life and the lives of most of my colleagues in the academy and documentary filmmaking who left home to attend college and then moved to take up jobs in particular professions wherever they were offered.

This is further evidence that things we may take for granted as real—things foundational to our very lives, for example, like our families—might well not be real to other good and caring people perhaps living right down the street or across town from us. Our original “Culture Wars” then, I had learned, were rooted in such differences in culture, especially family cultures, and over the past forty years I have watched them evolve while continuing to divide us in evermore bitter and dangerous ways. Yet, at the same time, such differences in culture among “we the people” in the United States, exist among people like us who otherwise share so many other elements of culture—like our beliefs in “freedom,” for example, or “justice,” or our love for our children and for their friends and playmates. Understanding such differences in culture among us, as I’ve set forth in the essay mentioned at the outset, I believe, can help us come together as a people to face the challenges to things we ultimately all care about. I am grateful for these lessons I’ve learned from my own journey, and for all those contributing to that journey, and hope some of these lessons are helpful to others.

March 5, 2022 by Dr. James M. Ault, Jr.