MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Kingdom Come’: Documentary Mixes Christianity and Politics

Antony Thomas’ troubling and incisive “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done” (at the Nuart through Sunday) opens with a fleshy TV evangelist exhorting his flock: “It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet and change America!” In his documentary--pulled from the Public Broadcasting Service’s “Frontline” series in May, 1987, but now to be aired on KCET-TV Channel 28 on April 6 at 10 p.m.--Thomas reveals how born-again Christians mean to effect this change through political means.

“Thy Will Be Done” is a study of how fundamentalists act when they attain a postion of power, as exemplified by Dallas’ 26,000-member First Baptist Church, the largest and richest Protestant congregation in America.

The version that the Nuart is showing and that KCET is airing is 90 minutes long, 14 minutes shorter than the original form. Thomas, reached by phone in London, said that he made the cuts himself to fit two 52-minute programs into a 90-minute slot and that he in fact has decided that the shorter form is less repetitious and has more impact. Frankly, there’s not all that much difference in the two versions. As to PBS’ reason for withdrawing the film last May just as the Jim Bakker-PTL Club scandal broke, Thomas said that he’s “still unsure. It was a different excuse every day.”

Thomas pinpoints the beginning of the born-again movement into mainstream American politics with words of encouragement spoken by President Reagan at a 1980 Dallas rally. Thomas makes it clear that he respects the appeal of evangelical Christianity, and he fills the screen with many ordinary Americans who have found salvation from drugs and alcohol and everyday despair by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior. They are very moving in their testimony--until we learn that their literal interpretation of the Bible leads them to hold ultraconservative social and political views, which they wish to impose on society at large.

The point of Part I is to show how such people and their leaders, especially TV evangelists with their wide access, computer banks and telephone volunteers, have been mobilized over the past decade by far-right political organizations.

The specter created is of a dangerous breakdown between the traditional separation of church and state and the emergence of a monolithic conservative political force with an intolerant, ignorant and militant “if-you’re-not-for-us, you’re-against-us” philosophy. “The pressure on ordinary, concerned Christians,” observes Thomas, “is relentless.”

The coup in Part I is Thomas’ interview with Jim Bakker just before his fall. There’s a tour of Heritage, U.S.A., Bakker’s kitschy religious Disneyland, complete with a “synthetic Main Street that never was” and its mock-Victorian manor for severely disabled children, inhabited only by diminutive 18-year-old Kevin Whittum, a key PTL fund-raiser.

Part I ends with a visit to the weekly Bible class held in the ornately furnished mock Mt. Vernon mansion of Ruth Hunt (widow of the super rich and conservative H. L. Hunt). While the camera pans over a parlor full of heavily rouged and dyed matrons, we hear one of them say, “God gave each of us our coloring.” Hunt wishes there was a Dallas First Baptist in every community.

Since 1944 First Baptist has been run by the dynamic Dr. W. A. Criswell, whose office looks as if he had the same decorator as Hunt. A once-outspoken segregationist, Criswell has allowed black membership in the church only since 1968. Nevertheless, First Baptist has absorbed 26 local ethnic Baptist congregations where, in Criswell’s words, “birds of a feather flock together.”

Although Dallas, “the buckle of the Bible Belt,” has one of the worst crime rates and some of the direst poverty in the nation, First Baptist seems intent on making its membership feel comfortable about being well-off and politically conservative: according to Thomas, only one-third of 1% of First Baptist’s income goes to the poor.

A respected professor at Criswell College told Thomas that he was fired after he wrote a paper on the biblical obligation of the rich to share with the poor. (So much for literal interpretation.)

“The Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done” (Times-rated Mature for its complex issues) is an altogether persuasive, absorbing and timely accomplishment.