
Friends of God
Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi spends months on the road with American evangelicals, camera in hand, asking them to explain their faith and their politics in their own words. She sits down with pastor Ted Haggard at his Colorado Springs megachurch before his fall from grace became public, visits the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, and films the Christian Wrestling Federation body-slamming its way through scripture in a small-town gym. Teenagers describe pledges of virginity, a home-school family explains why they reject evolution, and a group called Cruisers for Christ hands out gospel tracts at a NASCAR race. Pelosi asks plain, sometimes blunt questions about abortion, gay rights, and whether Christians and Jews can both get into heaven, and lets the answers run without much editorializing. With tens of millions of evangelicals in the country by the numbers cited on screen, the film treats their political weight as a given and spends its time instead on the texture of the movement itself: the marketing, the merchandise, and the sincerity sitting right next to the showmanship.