Collide Magazine

A Merchant of Peace

Scott McClellan - Originally posted Thursday, December 17, 2009 -

The bumper sticker from which Dan Merchant’s documentary, Lord, Save Us from Your Followers, takes its name suggests a troubling dichotomy between the Church and the rest of the world. It seems the growing consensus among non-Christian Americans is that Christians are an often unlikable lot whose attitudes, values, and behaviors don’t appear representative of Jesus (or our culture’s perception of him). And while Jesus told his followers to expect trouble in this world, it’s fair to assume he meant something along the lines of the persecution faced by the early Church in Rome and the modern Church in China. Merchant’s film posits that American Christians bring trouble upon themselves by judging rather than loving and seeking to control rather than serve. Books such as Dan Kimball’s They Like Jesus but Not the Church and unChristian by Dave Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons have put forth similar ideas supported by research and personal experiences, but the unique value of Lord, Save Us is that it humanizes the culture war. In other words, the film is about people, not propositions.

Merchant speaks face to face with people from all over the religious and political spectrums about faith, God, culture, and Christianity, and as he does we see his subjects as human beings instead of data. When Merchant interviews people on the street, he doesn’t take himself too seriously; he wields his microphone while wearing a jumpsuit covered in provocative (and contradictory) bumper stickers. The tactic simultaneously subverts, confuses, and disarms, serving as an icebreaking sight gag that enables perfect strangers to begin a dialogue about weighty subject matter.

In fact, the jumpsuit is a good metaphor for the man wearing it. In conversation, he laughs easily and loudly at our proclivity for mishandling and misrepresenting the message of Jesus. In his film, Merchant pokes fun at the dogmatism and ungenerous discourse on both sides of the aisle. All the while, Merchant’s heart is burdened by a desire to communicate a more loving gospel to both the religious and nonreligious. For Merchant, humor is a perfect gateway into exploring the apparent contradiction between “the gospel of love” and the anger and fear that sometimes infiltrate American Christianity. A filmmaker at heart, Merchant proves comfortable examining and challenging internal and external conflict in an inherently public medium.

The result is a film that is equal parts light and heavy, public and personal. It’s a film that features a confession booth at a gay pride event, a Family Feud-style game show between conservative Christians and liberal secularists, and a ministry—Night Strike—that provides love and care to homeless people. Lord, Save Us from Your Followers is a film that espouses a decidedly Christian worldview and is well received by secular media outlets. Recently, I spoke with Merchant about his film, the conflict that inspired it, and the power of grace.

COLLIDE: I heard you describe Lord, Save Us from Your Followers as being about “the collision of faith and culture in America.” In your opinion, what’s the root of that collision?

Dan Merchant: The simplest way to put it is everybody’s trying to figure out what it means to be American in the 21st century. We’re trying to figure out, as believers, what it means to be Christian Americans in the 21st century.

I think the easiest entry point into this “collision of faith and culture” conversation is when we butt heads on political agendas. I think what has happened to a certain degree is people of faith—so called Christian leaders— have advanced certain political agendas that thrust us into conflict in the public square. If you go back to the last decade, the Christian perspective has taken on very political tones, and I think what that did was create some incomplete perceptions about who we are. In a nutshell, we became concerned with what we were against rather than what we were for.

Those things became more visible than the gospel and that was a conflict I was observing. Personally, it was a conflict that I was experiencing, too. That’s where my phrase, “the gospel of being right vs. the gospel of love” comes in. That was my internal conflict and I think it was sparked by what I was seeing in the culture as well. Then, of course, I realized I was part of the problem.

COLLIDE: The film appears to issue a challenge regarding the lives that we live and the messages we communicate as Christians. For instance, you just mentioned becoming known for what we’re against rather than what we’re for. That comes down to how we use media to communicate and what we choose to communicate, right?

Merchant: As Christians, we have to decide what message we’re going to put forward. And as people who follow Jesus, it probably ought to be what he talked about. It’s easy to make it about what I want it to be about. It’s really easy to make it about “taking back America.” OK, that’s great, but that’s not what Jesus says. What Jesus says is a whole lot more challenging and a whole lot more redemptive.

What I observed through the making of Lord, Save Us and in the last year of screening the film is the power of the language of the gospel, how it just cuts through all the clutter, how it knocks barriers down, how lovingkindness actually works. Grace and forgiveness and redemption are things that knock down walls that, frankly, we don’t always trust will be knocked down.

So it’s an interesting thing that happens when we actually trust in God because He’s capable of some pretty powerful things that we’re not capable of. Perhaps we don’t trust that He’s actually going to show up sometimes, so we feel like we have to make it all about the rules instead of this love that overwhelms and upends the rules.

COLLIDE: Speaking of grace knocking down walls, the scene in Lord, Save Us in which you set up a confession booth at a gay pride event seems like a profound and emotional part of both the film and your personal experience making the film.

Merchant: Oh, no kidding. It was. The confessional idea I’d seen clearly demonstrated by Pope John Paul II, when he gives the Jubilee Apology, and I feature that in the film. And, obviously, Donald Miller and Tony Kriz (Tony the Beat Poet) in Blue Like Jazz did a version of a confession booth at the college that they were hanging out at. The idea of that kind of posture was really moving to me. Frankly, what I tried to do at the gay pride event was find the most difficult place I could think of. I was half praying and half thinking about it and said, “Lord, how could I do this? Where should I do this?” And it came to me: gay pride.

I said, “Lord, any other ideas? How about a college football game? How about a Rolling Stones concert? Anyplace else?” But the response was, “Nope, gay pride.” I thought, “Dang.” That’s one of those ideas that kicks into your head so fast, I’m not quite sure I thought of it. So I suggest, perhaps, God stuffed it in my noggin.

It was a powerful day. I prepared myself to get yelled at for eight hours; instead people graciously and lovingly accepted my apology. That created a foundation for a conversation because it knocked down the walls that were between us. There’s a thing that happens when people understand that you care about them. For almost everybody there, it was a completely bizarre and weird experience to hear “I’m sorry” from a straight, married, Christian guy. There’s a lovely, young redheaded woman [in the film] who said, “I just don’t know what to say. I’ve never heard any Christians say anything nice to me before.”

You hear those things and those things wound you because you start to understand— you start to walk in somebody else’s shoes for a minute. You start to get a little perspective. These are hurting human beings that are made in God’s image. We have to understand that compassion is not something that people have to earn before we deliver it to them. We’re Christians. We’re the ones who are supposed to get this compassion stuff. What was Jesus’s ministry and sacrifice all about if we’re the ones that don’t understand compassion? It seems like we’re in Bizarro World sometimes. The idea that everybody has to check the box, you know check these boxes. [Withholding compassion]bis so antithetical to the gospel. Again, the good news for the Church is that lovingkindness actually does work.

COLLIDE: The idea of not having to earn our compassion reminds me of Paul saying, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). That’s an incredibly important phrase that we tend not to apply to other people.

Merchant: You’re right. With Paul, it’s not that he was the grumpy guy on the road to Damascus who Jesus transformed. He was the worst guy. You think there’s not a lesson in there? God can use anybody. God is using a goofy filmmaker who made a movie named after a bumper sticker.

COLLIDE: What has been the response to the film now that it’s out in theaters and people are actually getting to see it?

Merchant: The response has been remarkable, and from all kinds of folks. People that go to art house movies because they think they’re interesting but don’t go to church and don’t have faith say, “Wow, that’s an eye opener. That gives me a perspective. It gives me something to say yes to.”

Some of the pre-screenings we did were at very liberal, non-religious colleges, and one of them was Lewis & Clark College up here in the Northwest. There was a kid who came up to me after the screening and said, “I don’t like church and I really have no time for church people, but there was something about that last bit of the movie where people were washing the feet of the homeless that was really powerful.” He was attracted to that and went down and volunteered at Night Strike.

COLLIDE: Wow.

Merchant: He was one out of an audience of 300 at that Lewis & Clark screening—only 12 were Christians, 288 weren’t. In the three weeks that followed the screening, 80 people went down and volunteered at Night Strike. So that’s from the non-Christian perspective. They’re saying, “Wow, there’s something about this I don’t understand. I thought I got this religious stuff and I wrote it off, but there’s clearly something more here.” It’s because people respond to this presentation of the gospel the way Jesus did it. It works.

To find out more about Lord, Save Us from Your Followers visit www.lordsaveusthemovie.com.