GOD + COUNTRY - Mark Reviews Movies

God + Country, Oscilloscope Laboratories

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 15, 2024

God + Country makes the case that Christian nationalism in the United States is neither particularly Christian nor congruent with the founding principles of the country. Instead, it's a fringe political ideology, wrapped up in an insincere, inaccurate reading of Scripture and an equally false understanding of the Constitution.

To make that argument, director Dan Partland has assembled a team of experts, all of them Christian, who know religion, history, and/or government. They do not condemn the people who have become caught up in this movement, which has gained traction since the 2016 election cycle and made what might be its first open assault on the country in the early days of 2021. These interviewees see members of the movement as fellow Christians, who genuinely believe in at least some accepted religious doctrine, and Americans, who will and should participate in and under the rules of our representative democracy, and human beings, who are fallible.

Many of these people have found comfort and meaning in this ideology, and there's a sad, terrible irony in the fact that it goes directly against the two identities—Christian and American—to which they attach themselves. The film hates the sin, in other words, and finds empathy for the sinner.

Despite this relative generosity (which might be an error, if the growing fanaticism and increased action of this movement continue, and which almost certainly will not be returned upon the participants or the film by the most ardent believers of the ideology), the film also serves as a warning about what could come in the future. This movement—made up of politicized churches, political organizations, militia-like groups, and just everyday people—has had some victories as of late, has come to perceive even massive failures as proof that they're winning on some twisted spiritual level, and is being dismissed by the press and the public at large as no big deal.

That might be true now, but the tides of politics ebb and flow in sudden ways. Before January 6, 2021, it's likely nobody considered the possibility that an organized mob would assault the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the process and change the outcome of an election. The previously unthinkable becomes the new normal in an instant. It would be folly to assume something similar couldn't happen again—or that something worse couldn't occur, simply because we can't imagine it at the moment.

Beginning on that January day, the narrative here jumps to the side and backwards, offering a dissection of both the political philosophy of Christian nationalism and the history of its foundation in the United States. The core tenets of it are simple (and simplistic in a variety of ways). It asserts that the country was founded as an exclusively Christian one, with many people in archival footage wrongly asserting that the Constitution expressly states this, and as such, the government and laws of the country should only reflect that.

Some of the leaders or advocates of this ideology must know better about history and the founding document of the country, but even if they do, some of them seem to be skilled at using weaselly tactics. In a favorable interview online, one of them points out that the separation of Church and State isn't in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights (The inherent repetition in separating them says something about his self-proclaimed knowledge on the subject). This is only accurate if one puts quotation marks around "separation of Church and State," of course, but the First Amendment makes that principle as crystalline as possible without using that specific wording.

The political doctrine of the movement is intrinsically flawed, and those experts go through exactly how and why that's the case. Partland has an unfortunate tendency to present multiple clips of people espousing this ideology, as a means of showing what they believe, without directly following that montage of footage with counterarguments. Since the whole of the documentary makes the case, it's mostly a distracting display of ineffective debate, and it's not as if the interview participants know exactly what specific statements they'll be answering.

Those experts include the likes of journalist Reza Aslan, conservative commentator David French, at least a pair of sociologists, Evangelical pastors, a Protestant bishop, and a Catholic nun who also works as an attorney. In other words, these aren't outsiders. They understand Christianity on a professional level and a personal one, and one of those pastors was once part of this more politicized sect. His awakening to the perils of this ideology is encouraging, and he explains how the bigwig donors to churches basically demanded that pastors keep their congregations angry about and afraid of Democratic politicians, multiculturalism, immigrants, and abortion.

None of that anger or fear can be found in Christian Scripture, and apart from the final apocalyptic book, neither can the violence that some pastors openly encourage in some footage. It's quite the opposite or non-existent, in fact, but these ideas have been a key to right-wing politics in the United States for decades. The history lesson of the marriage between religion and politics here makes that perfectly clear, and as that story approaches the events of January 6, many of these interviewees make it equally clear that the history of this movement isn't close to finished yet.

The big question, obviously, is what can be done about Christian nationalism before it becomes more organized, its outreach spreads, and its actions continue toward more violence. God + Country doesn't have an answer, except to be aware of this threat and to vote as if the fate of representative democracy in the country depends on it—because it very well might.

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