Marjoe (1972) chronicles the last preaching days of a child prodigy minister, Marjoe, before his evangelical demise brought about by a documentary that exposes him as a religious fraud. This documentary. He not only cooperated; he initiated the film with the intention of ending his career as a religious con artist. “Touched by God” one night at age 4, so the story goes, he woke up with the spirit of the Lord in him and began to spread God’s word. Rubbish. Trained by his parents on how to act like a minister, he was a spectacle production intended to pry money out of the hands of fervent Christians. At one point in the film, Marjoe, shirtless in a hotel looking incongruously immodest, says “If I were to be a Christian … “. He is a performer. As he puts on Mick Jagger moves during a hot and bothered sermon, we see the rock star ego comically strut around preaching the Word of God. But he provides the audience with an experience, very much like a rock show. And though he clearly recognizes himself and many other evangelicals as frauds, at no point does he belittle his audience or their beliefs.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000) documents the life of Tammy Faye Bakker as she and her husband, Jim Bakker, rise to celebrity in Christian broadcasting, building a million dollar a day empire, only to have everything fall apart because Jim has a sordid encounter with a Playboy model. The real downfall, which sent Jim to prison, was financial mismanagement of the millions a week in contributions from the Christian boob tube. The upshot of the film is that, well, Tammy is a lovable loon who lives somewhat in her own world but means well and hasn’t a hateful bone in her body. Unlike Marjoe, she is a believer. But unlike her followers, and despite her years as a televangelist, she does not wear Jesus on her sleeve. The film highlights her compassion and openness. Early in the AIDs crisis, she boldly invited gay men suffering from AIDs onto her religious talk show and embraced them with God’s love. This is not the angry punishing God of Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson but the God that “so loved the world.” Later in her career, she co-hosted a short-lived television talk show with a gay man. Although she appears to live in another world, she very much reaches out to this world, here and now, non-judgmentally and with open, if slightly lunatic, arms. It is hard not to like her.
Though both individuals are fascinating, what is remarkable is the portrait of the evangelical community these documentaries provide. The thirty years between the two films makes little difference. Everything these people do and say is filtered through a Jesus lens. The hamburgers from the church picnic are tasty, praise Jesus. I got a job, Jesus was in the interview with me. We were in an accident but no one was hurt, the hand of Jesus scooped us to safety (never mind the ‘Jesus is my copilot’ bumper sticker). Please God, for your glory, let our high school football team whomp that other school. Praise Jesus. Jesus Jesus Jesus. But distortion creeps into the Jesus lens; it doesn’t always reproduce a faithful view of the world through the eyes of Jesus. Human nature, often very un-Christlike, introduces noise and our view through the eyes of God begins to dither. A regular, traditional glass-lens camera reveals this.
When an evangelical preacher in Marjoe thunders with the righteousness and fervor of the Holy Spirit that “God wants me to have a Cadillac” it is easy for those of us watching, with even minimal childhood Sunday school, to see a problem. Either Jesus is waffling over the years— ‘eh, never mind that rich-man-camel-eye-of-needle stuff and, well, don’t give anything unto Caesar, whether it is his or not, just keep it for yourself. You DESERVE it! You are my children and as I’m getting older, I think I’ll spoil you’— or this guy is simply self-serving. One might think that seeing the world through a Jesus lens might elevate and somehow enrich one’s perspective, transcending to a higher plane. Jesus is God, after all. All seeing. All knowing. Eternal. Infinite. No, instead he’s dragged down to a very earthly plane and made to participate in Jesusified parodies of the worldly culture evangelicals so vehemently reject. Witness heavy-metal for Christ (You Tube it). And does Jesus really need a theme park? Might he, just possibly, have other ideas of what to do with a million dollars a day? You know, the poor, the down-trodden, the meek, that lot.
The difference between a standard lens and the Jesus lens lies in optics. A standard lens is transparent. It refracts and focuses scattered light such that it can be captured and fit on a tiny square of film, recording a moment. In this way, we can see the light long after it has passed. The traditional lens offers no Truth. It just dutifully records patterns of light that come its way. We supply the meaning according to our own experience and frame of reference. And different interpretations engage us in dialogue as we try to hammer out a shared understanding of the world around us. A Jesus lens is opaque and etches, a priori, a predetermined Truth right on the lens. In doing so, light is actually bent, blocked and transformed such that it always confirms the etched Truth right there on the lens. This simplifies the problem of interpretation considerably. It’s like a camera in reverse. Instead of capturing the world in an image, it stamps an image onto the world. This shouldn’t be confused with seeing through the eyes of Jesus. It is merely an optic through which very human eyes peer. Jesus himself didn’t need one. You can’t engage in dialogue with someone looking through a Jesus lens because they only see the etched Truth. Any discussion boils down not to interpreting a given pattern of light captured in a moment but to debating the validity of the etched Truth. Seeing is secondary to believing. Either you accept the Jesus lens or you do not. You are in, or out. Saved and enlightened, or blinded and damned. Unfortunately, the Jesus lens is not reliable and the etched Truth can become significantly distorted when repeatedly applied to human experience.
What I want to see is a documentary on how evangelical Christians respond to films such as these. What happens when a plain old camera captures the world created by the Jesus lens? How does the woman writhing on the floor in the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit respond when she later finds the child prodigy was a performing con artist? God works in mysterious ways? How do the viewers of the PTL network respond when faced with the contrast between Tammy’s genuine love for them and Falwell’s conniving, self-serving, self-righteous hate mongering? Do they recognize the absurdity in “God wants you to have a Cadillac?” The personalities—Tammy Faye, Marjoe, Pat Robertson— come and go. What persists is the community of religious fervor that elevates, feeds and sustains them. It is vexing that this community so often fails to see what is obvious to everyone else: when they are being manipulated and duped. The Jesus lens is a powerful tool and hooked to a satellite, can create a Jesus Monster, not at all in the likeness of God. If only they could see that through the Jesus lens.
