Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present. It cannot regret the past; it is dangerous to prophesy the future. It can, and does, draw on the past in its use of existing heritages but it only does so to give point to a modern argument. In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations. (Paul Rotha)
Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images. (Werner Herzog)
“But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness.” (Matthew 6:23)
For a film about people talking about a book about a set of ideas, The Ordinary Radicals does a good job of maintaining its identity as a documentary. The tendency of documentaries is to become overly reliant on the monologue money shot, the spaces between talking heads crammed with montaged equivalents of what remains to be “said.” At the best of times (think: Errol Morris) these blocks of montage bear witness to states of affairs in handily deconstructable ways, helping us to see what the documentary is about more effectively. At the worst of times, we find our eyes pinned on target like Alex in A Clockwork Orange – or stuck in an inescapably self-conscious Kaufman echo chamber, Being Michael Moore. As it is a documentary about a book tour on a vegetable oil powered bus, most of the spaces of The Ordinary Radicals are filled with travel images. Different towns, different roads, the innards of different churches. Though innocuous at first, the natural sort of filler produced by a road trip, the effect of these transitions is to present The Ordinary Radicals as a movement, something growing across North America. If the film wants us to see anything, it is that prevailing winds in American Christianity are changing, and this veggie-powered bus has something to do with it – its movements regularly tracked with a line like those maps of Paul’s journeys in the back of most Bibles.
The book tour is connected to Jesus For President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. Generally, the book and tour are about getting people to think about how Christian faith and political affiliation relate. A host of interviews with people like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Tony Campolo, and snippets of lectures by Claiborne and Haw, define their problems with traditional election-year American Christianity. This in essence is a skillful evocation of social justice as it has been increasingly redefined by people outside the evangelical and liberal Protestant mainline. We have become too reliant on the political process, handed our ethical and communal identity over to related state or federal structures, and have been suckered into Bush doctrine concepts like “redemptive violence.” Our citizenships are conflicting. We can’t place our hope in the lever we pull on election day, but need to “vote” every day by committing to the social tasks the church has been called to do at a local level. Throughout the film we meet people who have embarked on this kind of work.
This is all pretty familiar stuff to people who have even just barely kept up with contemporary American theology, which has sought ways to wed a theologically shallow social gospel with the biblical and historical depth of more traditional Christian thought. And on different sides of this dialogue, critiques of Claiborne and Haw abound. For some, Claiborne’s ethics seem more Mother Teresa than they do Jesus (he refers to his experience with her fairly often). For others, his ideas are too connected to guys like Wallis and Campolo, who argue for increased Christian involvement in legislation rather than a Hauerwasian establishment of the Church as an alternative society to the empire.
A few interviews towards the end made me think that The Ordinary Radicals are still open to seduction by the Constantinian impulse even though there is a heavy emphasis in talks by Claiborne and Haw on the gospel narratives as a resistance to and subversion of the Roman Empire. This is a hot topic in New Testament studies right now, as it provides so many clear parallels to our current cultural landscape. But the verdict on prioritizing this framework in our reading of the New Testament is still out, as it neglects additional formative ethical and eschatological sources of early Christian practice. It may run into the same reductions post-colonial readings of bible texts have encountered in the past.
But these aren’t criticisms, just questions. The documentary is specific in what it wants to expose, the surface level content of Jesus for President. It isn’t interested in being a theological treatise as much as it is a nudge in a direction of Christian thought and practice that serves to get a conversation going. In this way, the film is an excellent resource. (And I have the sneaking suspicion that Claiborne would be a good conversation partner on all these points.)
Without more reference to Claiborne’s other books, and further conversation with him about the ideological mechanics of Jesus for President, I can’t legitimately muse on anything other than the title. My first thought when seeing Ordinary Radicals on the DVD cover was James K.A. Smith’s review of What Would Jesus Deconstruct in The Global Spiral. Here he says:
“My claim is relatively simple: that despite all the bad press and caricatures from supposedly enlightened liberals, it is in fact orthodoxy that constitutes the most radical appreciation of “deconstructibility.” To put it a little more stridently and provocatively, I would suggest that the Jesus of Pope Benedict XVI represents a more radical hermeneutic than the Jesus we get from Schillibeeckx, that the church of Francis Cardinal George is a more radical institution than the sort of church you’d get from Gary Wills, and that the Gospel according to Stanley Hauerwas is more radical than the Gospel according to Jim Wallis.”
This topsy-turvey perspective on what constitutes something as “radical” is attractive. I encounter this continually in my discipline, finding that the Jesus described by traditional stalwarts such as Adolf Schlatter persists as a more provocative model for political activity than the one enlisted by socially-minded writers like Albert Schweitzer. If ordinary is “the regular or customary condition or course of things,” then how are we to think of Christian activism as ordinary? Is it “ordinary” in that it is connected to early Christianity, and thus hardwired into a once “customary” Christian way of thinking that has gotten lost in the liminal mists of modernity? Is it “ordinary” in that they are advocating the everyday work of making the world a better place to live rather than pontificating on change from suburban pulpits?
There are a lot of directions this word “ordinary” points us, many of which peter out when disconnected from the extra-ordinary condition of early Christian theology. I get the image: ordinary things, small things, base things, weak things, 1 Corinthians 1:27 things, all doing Kingdom work. But I can’t help but want to insert an “extra-” every time I read this title. Social justice is an ordinary task. Christian social justice, prefigured by a Jesus that could pass through locked doors and cook his disciples breakfast on the beach, is an extraordinary task. If we look in earliest Christianity for an indication of how we can start being radical in American culture, the first thing we are going to see is Paul making his way across the map, planting churches. That is a radical approach to social justice.
Despite this digression, I am glad to have a documentary that pushes us to think through these issues. This is a film I want to show to other people, part of a conversation I think we need to be having at many different levels. I wish more churches would buy copies of this to share with people – and I look forward to handing mine off to someone else. In the past, I have always pointed people to Errol Morris, Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat, or Varda’s The Gleaners and I for documentaries that have a similar handle on issues near and dear to Haw’s and Claiborne’s heart.
What we need in American Christianity are more films like this, well-planned and produced essays on the pulse of our theological crises. For something so talky, The Ordinary Radicals is a well-conceived, directed, and edited documentary. While I wish it would have had a few interviews with people not on board with their mission, it is a lyrically organized description of what they are all about. It is a thrilling thing to see produced by a little group of people living in a rough part of Philly. We need more essay films, visual and self-reflective meditations on what it means to struggle in the church, narrated records of engaging these tensions between our citizenships. We need more films that true to the documentary spirit manage to both talk and listen.
What Herzog says above has a great deal to do with the Church, which has lost its cultural and political way in large part because we don’t even know how to talk about ourselves by means of contemporary media. So many of our identity markers are doomed to extinction because we have trouble producing images that will enact or rehearse them as formative ideas. (Or “performative” ideas?) Because it is effective, The Ordinary Radicals shows us that there is a need for more Christian documentaries and essay films, which in light of Matthew’s language would be better eyes for the body.
(Note: In an email that I hope he doesn’t mind me alluding to, Moffett said the film is a bit like Maher’s Religulous in that both are films by “recovering Catholics.” The Ordinary Radicals just takes a much different tone and direction. Indeed, Moffett pushes us towards the kind of filmmaking that could be a church activity, even though it doesn’t necessarily need to be so.)