Is The Church Killing the Gospel?
Dan Merchant is an ordinary guy… as ordinary as a guy can be, that is, if you’ve spent several years working in TV production, put everything you own in hock to make your own movie, spent months walking around the country with inflammatory and contradictory bumper stickers pasted onto your coveralls, and then assembled it all into a powerful, moving, insightful, often hilarious, and yet somehow good-hearted skewering of the religious debates that have gripped America’s politics for the last two or three decades.
If Dan Merchant’s Lord, Save Us From Your Followers gets much exposure, Bill Maher’s Religulous—which has now slipped to this fall’s release schedule—is going to look quite petty by comparison.
Merchant has created a fine, fine documentary—one that looks deeply at the human cost of sectarian and partisan squabbling—the band arguing, as it were, while passengers are drowning (to borrow Titanic as a metaphor). The Church, it seems, has come to care more for causes than for actual people, and Merchant is here to try to get the band to start playing music once again.
Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright talks with Merchant about what the Church is doing wrong… and the tools it has to do things very, very right.
