The title for this movie takes its name from the children’s hymn “Jesus Loves Me.” If you’ve ever been to Sunday School or have been part of a youth ministry, then chances are you’ve heard it and probably sung along to it. It’s a fitting title for this Sundance Jury Grand Prize nominee, a documentary that’s partially about how the Christian religion has abused doctrine to marginalize Gays and Lesbians, while the other part is interviews and testimonials of families with Gay and Lesbian members and the difficulties there in. With such powerful subject matter, this film had to work pretty hard to not hit an emotional resonance.
As I said, the film splits its time between two goals. The first and most important of those goals is to present the stories of various people that grew up in a religious household as they struggled through their adolescence and early adulthood with feelings of being different. Some of the people profiled included high profile subjects like Chrissy Gephardt, daughter of former Democratic House majority leader Dick Gephardt and Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Church. Regular, everyday American folk also get to share their stories, good people like Jake Reitan and his mother Britta, who was initially concerned and dismayed about her son’s homosexuality until she took up the cause for equal rights on his behalf.
The secondary part of the movie deals with America’s deeply entrenched homophobia and how a lot of it is being driven by religious zealotry and the perversion of Biblical text. Filmmaker Daniel Karslake has put together an impressive list of theological scholars and holy men to talk about the original meanings behind the often cited passages that are supposedly God’s condemnation of gays and lesbians. Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu talks broadly about the nature of love and the dangers of literalism in reading the Bible, while scholars like the Reverend Peter Gomes and colleagues draw attention to things like the original meaning of “abomination” as written in Hebrew, the mother tongue of Leviticus, the gay bashiest book in the Bible.
The film offers some very interesting insight behind the way people interpret the Bible and how it was really written in context. At the same time, he gets some incredible access with people like the Gephardts, Robinson and Tutu. By far though the most affecting parts are the testimonials; whether it’s a case of happy acceptance like with Chrissy Gephardt or the poor case of the young woman who felt so thoroughly rejected by her mother that she hung herself, these stories has a tremendous affect on the audience. There honestly probably wasn’t a dry eye in the house when it was over – the stories were that powerful.
On the flipside, I really enjoyed the word games and the dissection of these Biblical readings that are the cornerstone of religious influenced gay bashing. The roots of the certain words and the true meaning of certain passages are far too complicated to be explored in a simple movie review, but I will say that they’ll blow your mind. What I found problematic though is that filmmakers clearly like to dish it back out to the gay bashers and the other detractors. Karslake includes a clip from The West Wing where President Bartlett rakes out a Dr. Laura style radio host in the middle of a White House function and the whole movie kicks off with news archive footage of an anti-gay mouth piece getting a pie-in-the-face gag. Now I’m not saying that these people don’t have some serious karmic payback coming their way, but the rest of the movie is so powerful, I just wish they had stayed on a higher road.
Regardless though, I think this film is a must see as it sheds light and understanding on an issue that continues to reverberate in the United States (and if Harper has his way, Canada). For the Bible Tells Me So website has a list of places the film is currently screening, so it might be right now at a theatre near you. For more information on the film, go to http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org/index2.htm .
