I wanted to see “Lord Save Us From Your Followers” when it first came out last year, but for a variety of reasons, I never quite made it to the theater. Last night, my church held a public showing of the film, and I must say I regret all of my excuses for not seeing it earlier.
The movie was convicting to say the least. Toward the end of it, I was fighting back tears. This is unusual because Uncle Luther simply does not cry. But you don’t care about me— if you care at all— you care about my thoughts on the movie.
The Gist:
Christian culture and secular culture are often at odds, but nobody is communicating. In fact, the sharing of worldviews and faith ideas have degenerated into a shouting match where everybody’s screaming, but nobody’s listening. To get to the bottom of this, Dan Merchant dons a white jumpsuit covered in popular Christian, anti-Christian and political bumper stickers and canvases the country talking to people about their thoughts on Christianity.
One of the discoveries he makes is that Christians are oblivious to the surrounding culture and how they are perceived. They are also particularly oblivious to the fact that “the world” which they espouse hatred for, seems to have a much better handle on who Jesus is than the church crowd does.
Eye-Openers:
- At one point during the movie, Merchant hosts a Family Feud-style game show that pits the Liberal Media Elite against the Christian Conservatives. Not only did the liberals come out ahead, but the Christians were completely unable to see outside their own bubble to understand the culture. To test this further Merchant did the game show again with college students, thinking perhaps it was a generational issue. The young Christians lost hands down, and their non-believing counterparts rattled off a series of answers to Bible-based questions.
- We have so tarnished our faith that when people here the word “Christian” attached to an event they immediately think it is a conservative, racist or anti-homosexual event.
- Despite our tarnishing of the word “Christian,” we have not tarnished Jesus. People still identified Him for His love and forgiveness, and were able to name His good works.
- We have seriously wounded the homosexual community and done serious damage that would make even the staunchest fundamentalist weep were we to realize the depth of the pain we have caused our fellow human beings.
- Christians need to apologize more. We who have forgiveness need to do more than offer forgiveness, we need to beg those we have hurt to forgive us.
Other observations:
- Tony Campolo is a lot cooler than I thought he was.
- Al Franken is also a lot cooler than I thought he was.
- Jesus and politics don’t mix. He is so far above and beyond our pithy political squabbles.
- Our political squabbles are pithy in comparison to the love of Christ.
- We cannot continue to condemn people on moral issues while embracing greed in our own lives.
- We who are known for our literalism don’t take Jesus literally when He says “Man cannot serve both God and Money.”
Reccomendation:
Every Christian needs to see this movie and take its message to heart, but be prepared to be convicted.
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