In 2002 TV news producer Alexandra Pelosi’s private video diary on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign trail became HBO’s documentary Journeys With George, which would win an Emmy. In 2004 she followed up with Diary of a Political Tourist, which profiled the Democratic presidential candidates' campaign trails. On January 25 HBO will premiere her most recent documentary, Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi . This time around Pelosi, a blue-state Democrat (and the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), spent more than a year traveling across the country interviewing evangelicals from TV minister Joel Osteen to creationist educators to former National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard. Just days after Pelosi completed Friends of God, Haggard stepped down from his position over allegations of crystal meth use and sexual trysts with a male prostitute. The Advocate talked to Pelosi earlier in January about making Friends With God, her relationship with Haggard, and what she learned about evangelicals.
There have been a lot of documentaries about Christian
fundamentalists, including the recent feature Jesus
Camp. What’s different about your film
that other films haven’t already discussed?
Mine is much more mainstream. J
esus Camp was about a very small portion, a very
small sect. The Pentecostal movement is small. I went to 16
states and spent two years talking to people. I
didn’t stay with one family for a year.
Don’t make it sound like I’m disparaging other
people’s work, because it is so hard to make
anything. I don’t want it to look like I’m
being critical of what they did. It’s really
important to support one another. I tried to make a
big cross section of the 50 or 80 million evangelicals
there are in this nation. We don’t know how many
there are; there’s been debate among the
pollsters. But if that’s true, it would include
the liberal evangelicals, the Mel Whites, and the Dan
Wallaces. I didn’t really focus on the liberal
evangelicals, which could be about 20%. The problem
with the evangelicals is they have a bit of an identity
crisis. They like to escalate their numbers, to talk about
how many of them there are, but then they like people
to say, “Oh, the Christian [Wrestling
Federation], they don’t count, they’re
fringy.” Or “Oh, the evangelicals who
care about poverty and the environment, they don’t
count.” The highest number we’ve gotten is 80
million, and that’s the number out of Jerry
Falwell’s mouth.
Now back to the answer to your question: I try not to be like Chicken Little, "the sky is falling." A lot of New York liberal Democrats who go to the megachurches come back talking about how scary they are, and I never say that. I have nothing but admiration for these people and respect for them. I don’t think they are dangerous or trying to take over the country like a lot of people think they are. Maybe they’re trying, but I don’t think they could. I’m not afraid of them, as most New York liberals would be.
But you’re also not some gay kid living in Texas.
If you were a lesbian living in a small town, do
you think you’d feel the same way?
No, I think they cause pain to the gay community, and
you can’t ignore that. That’s why I
included [out evangelical] Mel White in the movie. I
was trying not to make it a polemic. Everyone I know knows
what we think, and I was trying not to include what we
think. We know what we think of them, and it’s
not a secret. They don’t talk about the war, and
they don’t talk about the environment. And they
don’t talk about gay rights—well,
obviously they talk about gays. So I tried to let them talk
about and understand where they are coming from, and of
course they are coming from the Bible. Everything
comes from a Bible.
You were raised in a Catholic home in a fairly religious
family. Did that make it easier for you in making
this film and getting to know your subject? Or if
you’re not a fundamentalist, it doesn’t
matter what you are?
It doesn’t matter what you are. If
you’re not a fundamentalist, you’re
going to burn, so it doesn’t matter. The thing about
growing up in a religious household is, I went to
Catholic school, and everyone in my family went to
Catholic school, and we were raised on the Bible, and
there was a lot of church in our lives, but we were never
told gay was wrong, or abortion was wrong, or
evolution was wrong, so you can still be raised on the
Bible and walk into the Bible Belt and talk to evangelical
Christians, and they are speaking another language. They
interpret the Bible in a different language. The way
they interpret the Bible is different from the way I
interpret the Bible.
You’re a straight gal from San Francisco. Did your
gaydar go off when you were around Ted Haggard at all?
I love that question, because everyone says “How
could you not know?” He was foreign to me. They
all were to me. I don’t know Christian
evangelicals, so this is what they were. Maybe someone would
have said, “God, they seem really gay.”
To me it was all new, so I didn’t know what to
call it. He had five children and a wife! Maybe that
doesn’t shock you, but he really had pretty
good credentials. A wife and five kids—that
usually means they are heterosexual.
Watching some of the scenes of Ted Haggard, where he
talks to young men in his congregation, it is
almost painful.
There’s a community of a lot of young
men. He was a father figure, so he related to a lot of
young boys from broken homes. That is just what was
explained to me, as the culture of his megachurch.
But in your documentary Haggard talks to some of them
about how great their heterosexual sex lives are.
It was unsettling to watch.
Did I believe that all of the men in their
church had sex with their wives every day? Maybe not.
That’s why I included [that scene], because
this is who they say they are. Not one friend of mine would
tell me they have sex every day. That was unusual. But
guess what? Being in a megachurch was unusual.
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