**½/****
directed by Tonje Hessen Schei
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Bill Chambers Praying for Armageddon is about the mobilization of Christian evangelicals, who, according to on-screen statistics, now make up 30% of American voters. That’s scary, but as the movie makes clear, no number is too small to set off alarms. We meet Pastor Gary Burd of the Mission M25 Ministry/motorcycle club, who says, “I don’t want you to think that I am raising a militia,” but holds his sermons in a bunker and knights his congregants so they may take up swords against whatever windmills the evangelicals are tilting at this week. “Swords” is uttered often in Praying for Armageddon, for what it’s worth. Jesus was a war hawk, according to Burd, who quotes Him in Luke 22 as saying, “Yeah, if you don’t have a sword, go sell your coat and buy one, because the time is coming when you’re gonna need a sword.” But the word has an elastic meaning in Christian evangelical-ese, even though influential figures like Christians United for Israel founder John Hagee insist the Bible–which the odious Hagee fashions into an acronym for “Basic Information Before Leaving Earth”–is “literal from cover to cover.” (Burd’s Jesus sounds like Mark Wahlberg, Hagee’s like Gary Busey.) Swords are swords, but they’re also guns, they’re also nuclear weapons. That’s why the so-called Armageddon Lobby (shudder) has concentrated its resources on indoctrinating U.S. soldiers to its religious crusade, which begins with proselytizing new recruits and baptizing them at the end of Basic Training. Presto! A Christian national is born–a perfect mirror image of the ostensible enemy, incidentally. Michigan-based company Tijicon went so far as to supply the Marines with rifle scopes engraved JN8:12, referring to the passage from John that reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” This way, you’re aiming Jesus at your targets.
You may ask, what’s the endgame here? The answer is to hasten the Rapture by starting a holy war–hence the evangelicals’ perverse embrace of Zionism: destabilizing the Middle East oughta do the trick. They had a gift in reckless fascist (or is that feckless racist) Trump, the first president they were able to dupe into moving Israel’s American embassy to Jerusalem. True believers have a boner for the Rapture, if I’ve parsed the explanations given correctly (and I’m prepared to accept that I haven’t), because it’s a way to skip the line and go straight to Heaven. One avoids death, in other words, which is to say one avoids life. The hypocrisies, contradictions, and irrationalities stack up in Praying for Armageddon, natch, starting with who is this Terminator version of Christ everyone’s talking about? Burd says God speaks to him while he’s riding his motorcycle; at one point, we learn that Burd and his wife crashed their bikes, and I wondered whether God had thought to say, “Hey, Gary, look out.” Later, after Burd and his wife have both fully recovered, Burd claims that an angel helped his brother lift his wife’s motorcycle off her body. “And then,” he tells a revival-tent audience, “the Lord brought to my mind about that angel, and He said, ‘Listen, where you fail, that’s where I show up.'” Amen! Hey, just out of curiosity: how do you go about distinguishing epic fails from divine intervention? What if God’s inspiring people to cross the border? What if He’s helping lost souls to see they’re gay, or trans? What if an abortion is angels lifting a metaphorical bike off a metaphorical motorcycle chick?
Empathy’s a wood-killer, I know. It leads to compassion, acceptance, and, before you know it, unconditional love. Then everything is different. There’s no action. You have to wait around like everyone else. You’re an average nobody and get to live the rest of your life like a schnook. The whole point of weaponizing Christianity is that weapons don’t think, can’t think. There are folks engaged in trying to sound the Klaxon, but they are very much the underdog if this documentary is any indication. Plucky investigative reporter Lee Fang, the closest thing the movie has to a Michael Moore figure, is effortlessly bounced from campaign rallies and megachurches, and the whistleblowers he talks to have been expertly pariah-ed, giving their spilled tea a paranoid tang. Although the rest of us may outnumber Christian evangelicals (for now), as climate change has aptly demonstrated, our inertia is its own uphill battle, compounded by the diseased ideology of the billionaires subsidizing the conservative agenda. It all seems inexorable and irreversible, this tidal wave of bloodthirsty sanctimony, like a real-life Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Praying for Armageddon left me fearful and hopeless, quite intentionally and therefore successfully. But it’s less a work of serious journalism than an achievement in packaging, sorting yesterday’s memes into a coherent narrative outlining where we are and why we’re doomed while only abstractly indicating and critiquing the larger motives at play. And I think the filmmakers think that to present evangelicals evangelizing without comment is sufficiently incriminating, but this kind of fire-and-brimstone rhetoric fills arenas, and the movie’s iPhone gloss further threatens to transform these scenes into a commercial for the American heartland.
