Bumper-Sticker Man Dan Merchant from "Lord, Save Us From Your Followers"

Dan Merchant doesn't take himself too seriously. How could he when he spent months wandering the country dressed in a white jumpsuit covered with bumper stickers? What he does take seriously is his quest to find out why the Gospel, which is a message of love, is dividing America. How did the public perception of Jesus' followers get so far away from His teachings? Dan took two years of his life to find out and the result is the documentary film Lord, Save Us From Your Followers!

Dan and I talked one morning as he was returning from getting some coffee for his wife.

Love One Another    Us vs. Them
Culture Wars    Civil Conversation    Change is Happening

What was the inciting incident that pushed you out on this journey?

Dan:            In retrospect, I can see where the seeds were planted. What happened was Jim Standridge, the cinematographer, Jeff Martin, the executive producer, and I were on a trip to Ethiopia to shoot a little documentary on a completely different topic, although related. Jim and I traveled around Ethiopia, and I not only observed Christians and Muslims getting along, which I didn't think was supposed to happen, but I also observed Christians from around the world giving of themselves in this very difficult place.

Then I met Ethiopian Christians. I met this kid in particular who lives in a hut. We were talking about faith, and I tried to find out who Jesus was to him, what Jesus looked like to him, this Christian who lived such a different existence from me.

This kid looks at me with this very serene and kind expression on his face. He was probably thinking, "I'll try to explain it to this poor dumb Westerner, but he's not going to get it." So he looks at me and says, "My mother, she died of AIDS, but not for me. And my father, he also died of AIDS, but not for me. But Jesus Christ, He died for me."

And the first thought I had, and I'm embarrassed every time I tell this story, was, "Wow! This kid sounds like he really believes this stuff." My next thought was, "Wait a second! That's what I believe!" It just sounded so different. He seemed to believe it on a much deeper level and to trust in such a deeper level. In film parlance, it was like a Hitchcock stretch-zoom move. I'm sitting there looking at this kid, thinking, "Wait a second! I don't get it. But I think I do."

I went out of my way to get baptized in a river when I was 16, and that was probably the eighth time I was saved. I was trying to get this right and understand this. To be 40-ish and find out that I pretty much don't know anything yet is a pretty humbling and startling place to be in. We're so short of what we can be. You can see in my journey, I had a toe in the water, rather than swimming out in the ocean, the way God offers to us. I'm missing it, too.

We came back from Ethiopia about five years ago, and this was in the run-up to George W. Bush's re-election. I heard the Christian voices on the radio and TV basically reducing this powerful Gospel to a couple of political issues, saying that if you don't vote this way or that, you're against God and country. When I compared those voices on the microphone to this young man basically living in a hut with his orphaned brothers and sisters and go, "OK, which one of these reminds you of Jesus?" It's the kid in the hut.

When I look in the mirror and ask what club I belong to, I belong with the idiots with the microphones. That's my tribe. When I realize that's where I'm standing, I question it a little bit. Maybe the kid in the hut is just weird because he lives in Africa, and maybe these guys are right.

Trying to understand the gap between those two positions really is my journey on Lord Save Us from Your Followers.

How far did you go on your journey?

Dan:            Some days I feel quite a distance, other days I feel like we've just started this thing. There have been a few times I've thought, "Well, we're just about done with this," then realized how much further we have to go.

It's kind of like in the Bible where Jesus says really simple profound things like "Love one another. Love your neighbor and love God." You know, those are really simple, straightforward things. How can you get confused on those things?

On the other hand, you go, "Wait, those things are almost impossible to do." So some days you think, "Love one another. I totally get it." Other days, you're thinking, "Even him? I have to love him?"

So that's what the journey of the movie feels like to me. For people outside the church, there's been such a bizarrely warm response from people who will never darken the door of a church, or at least haven't so far. They may not have any time for church and church people, but the foot washing of the homeless really messes with their heads. They realize there's something in there that they want to know more about. That's deeply encouraging to me.

And, frankly, for people who go to church all the time, but church isn't ringing the bell for them. It's probably because we're not all in. So when people see others helping in Africa or helping after Katrina or washing the feet of the homeless under the bridge, they go, "Oh, wow! There's something more to this." It's been a profound understanding and learning process for me. The Gospel of love expressed with that kind of language, the language of self-sacrifice and compassion and grace, speaks to absolutely everyone.

If we could relax with the rhetoric a little bit and use that language, we'd be surprised to find that this faith we hold dear (those of us who follow Jesus) will be visible and understandable to people who "hate religion." That messes with the paradigm a little bit in 21^st Century America.

Who set creative direction on this? You did some really interesting things visually.

Dan:            It's pretty much a two-man band. I wrote and directed it. Then there's my director of photography/editor/whatever help he can give me, Jim Standridge. He's a guy I've worked with in television for years. He can shoot and edit and also knows Photoshop. He can do lots of things. That allows me to sit and ramble and go, "It has to be like this and this." The fact that he knows me well enough to translate was extremely helpful. So I didn't have to go to ten different departments and this film house and that film house. Virtually everything was done in-house. I think an animator I sat with executed the Franken-Christ cartoon. Everything else is Jim and I.

The talking heads scene that opens the movie, for example, came from this idea of a classroom. We thought, "What if you got everybody and do it like a class picture? We put everyone whose voice we've heard in the culture wars in the same room. What would that look like, and how could we do it?" Clearly you see some Monty Python influence, and you can tell what's on my movie shelf at home by looking at the movie, probably.

Some of the images were kind of shocking to view. It's not a mean use of images, but there's a shock quality to it. Were you after that?

Dan:            It's funny, because Bill Maher and Religulous, and Expelled are "us vs. them" movies. They have a perspective they're trying to defend and a conclusion they're trying to do, and I'm trying to create a conversation. I hope at the conclusion of this film, people sit around and talk about it. I'm not trying to rewrite the Gospels or excise something from traditional doctrine, but I want us to talk about it because we seem to have lost the ability to do so.

So when I use Franken-Christ, it's because I'm trying to create a good metaphor for what's happening. We in the body of Christ are a conglomeration of different parts, but we'll argue over whether we should be sprinkled on the forehead or immersed in a river or a hot tub in a church. That's what we're going to fight about? You're kidding me!

To say that we're put together with disparate parts is a verifiable fact. So we were trying to illustrate the absurdity of that. We agree on 99.8% of things, and it's 0.2% that we don't agree on. We're going to fight over the 0.2%. Really? Do you think Jesus is on our side when we do that?

This is what creative people do. They come up with weird ideas to try and explain the point. It is a bit of a shocker for some, I suppose, but again, I think the analogy works and is unfortunately apt.

It does work, but it also made me think that Jesus took a pretty big chance when He left things to men. He left the work of His kingdom to disciples.

Dan:            You know what, you're right. The other part is about the "love one another" stuff. I use the phrase "the Gospel of being right" in the movie. I think that in my life there have been times when that was the most important thing, to be right about those things, vs. the Gospel of loving.

What I learned in the making of this movie is that I don't need to rely upon God to be right about everything. I'm pretty good at that by myself. It's this whole "love one another" business I absolutely am forced to rely on Him for, because I can't do it without Him.

Without Jesus as the example, without His Spirit moving through me, I'm just not capable of doing an adequate job of loving my neighbor as myself, let alone approaching loving my enemy. I just can't do it. To me, that seems like an enormous clue.

To your point of leaving it to the disciples, He did leave the Holy Spirit. He left the Helper. When we're open to it and not trying to do the Holy Spirit's job for Him, He shows up once in a while. It's pretty wacky when He does. I think there's a whole trust and reliance issue in here that we might have missed.

I agree. When you look at the disciples in Acts, you see their arguments over small things. But when I see their effectiveness, I think there's hope for us. There's a game show segment that you did that was really fun. What do you hope people take away from that?

Dan:            The "Culture Wars Game Show" was an attempt to visualize the divide and realize that it's people that we're talking about. It's not "us" and the culture, with the culture being some big monolithic Lord of the Rings thing that's faceless. It's the guy on the radio at 8:00. It's the record you just heard. It's us, too, by the way.

This idea that the culture is some kind of us and them proposition is a little odd to me. I had this suspicion that this difference isn't as polarizing as they claim. Certainly in the media, there's oversimplification of the issues and the positions, and it's just not accurate. It's not true. White hat vs. black hat has always been a simpler story to tell and that's time-tested and that's what everybody is doing. So everybody relax.

I thought the show would be a fun way to try to illustrate that, and I was serious about the actual IQ on the issues, trying to find out where that would fall. The trick with this game show format was to mimic my favorite game show from the '70s, Family Feud. It's not like Jeopardy, where you're looking for the right answer. It's saying what you think other people said about this. What did the 100 people surveyed say?

Admittedly, it's relatively non-scientific in that we put out the call for people, and whoever showed up, showed up. The fact that the young conservative team showed up and three of the four guys happened to be Young Republicans was a bonus.

Some of the other folks that turned out, again, were just people that were interested in the conversation and were willing to be involved. Some things that played out were that, for some reason, the conservative team had a really hard time understanding what somebody else would think about the issue. They had very firm beliefs about what they thought and knew. They'd go, "Oh, well there are five answers on the board, and we got the two that people like me would have answered. Now, huh, I guess I'm drawing a blank here."

Then we'd go over to the other side, the liberal kind of team that had less conservative positions, and they were sort of used to looking at all sides of the equation and trying to make their minds up. Therefore, they had a much broader understanding of what the issues might be.

That was the first kind of revelation that, not to over-simplify it now, those with a Judeo-Christian worldview really didn't respect or understand the views of people that didn't think like them. That was the first basic revelation. So both the conservative teams just got punched in the competition.

Then the next thing that was fascinating was what happened in the green room after the taping. These eight people, four from the liberal team and four from the conservative team, hung out and loved talking to each other. Literally, we had to chase them out of the building about two hours after the taping. They just hung out, and as one of the women in the film described, there was much more of a continuum than a black and white, or red and blue. It's more like I'm a little left of you and you're a little right of me.

So it also revealed that civil conversation is absolutely possible. It's not some unicorn we're chasing. If everybody relaxed a bit and listened to the other guy, you might learn something. And you might learn something about them that you didn't know, and you might learn something about yourself that you didn’t know. You might learn something about how to more clearly articulate what's really important to you to somebody else so they might actually hear you. As opposed to using buzzwords that make their shields automatically go up so they don't hear you when you communicate.

I think that's been one of the problems in our culture, Because we do such a lousy job of understanding what's important to people who don't agree with us, we have essentially abdicated the position of being able to share our opinion in a way they can understand it. We just sound like we're raving lunatics. "You're just one of those Bible thumpers!" In fact, not at all. If I explained it this way, we might almost actually agree, but we didn't realize it until we talked about it for an hour.

Those are the big learning points: we have to do a better job of listening and understanding where the other guy is coming from. And buy the way, the other guy's probably not that far away from you. We agree more than we disagree.

That's true. I have a very spiritually diverse group of friends that get along great, but if you compared our belief systems, we're all over the map. However, we have terrific friendships, and we have a lot in common when we listen to each other with our hearts.

Dan:            I think it's true. Doesn't that option seem and feel, based on our own life experience, so much more like what we see Jesus doing? It's so much better than slamming the door on somebody's face because they're disagreeing with us at some point.

In Tony Campolo's segment, he made a statement that "consumerism is the end of the church." Did you see evidence in your journey that supports that?

Dan:            Yeah. You know, the first thing I did, which I learned to do on this project, is to ask myself, "Is that true about me?" And it is true about me. I love my big screen. I can't wait for football season to start and I want to get surround speakers so I can hear every tackle. What does that sound like to you? Does that sound like somebody who's laying their life down for their brother, or does it sound like somebody who's gotten pretty used to how comfortable our lives are?

It sounds like the guy who's hoping your church will have a Superbowl party on the big screen because you don't have one yourself.

Dan:            Don't you know it! I think it's definitely a caution. The trick is we live in a capitalistic country where the accumulation of wealth is good for the country as an entity, and we get caught up in that. So I think it is a concern.

Fortunately, I'm seeing a change. I'm seeing churches moving from these big plans for facilities that are remodeled every three years with sanctuaries that are as nice as the concert halls downtown. I see them moving from that to asking how can the 4000 people who come here every weekend embrace this culture and embrace their city and reach out to those in need?

They're asking how they can use their resources outside their walls and inside their walls. I'm seeing that happen all over the place, and that feels like it makes sense to me. It's good to see that's where we're going, moving away from this castle mentality. It's definitely a concern, and I don't think Campolo was in left field when he threw that out.

There were some points in the film that I thought were extremely poignant. One was seeing the Amish at work during the rebuilding after Katrina, side by side with "the English."

Dan:            That's a picture right there, isn't it?

I think it was an especially strong visual to me because since the presidential campaign, some of the leadership of our country is ignoring what people are already doing. I know I'm guilty of that. There are so many in our country already involved in trying to help in very concrete ways. You commented that there is a lot going on, but we don't see it until we're ready to do so.

Dan:            Exactly.

Then the segment where you have George Clooney and Pat Robertson on the same stage is incredible.

Dan:            When I see stuff like that going on, I jump up and down and point at the TV and go, "there! That's supposed to be us! That's supposed to be us!"

When I see the pope on TV apologizing, or go to a U-2 concert in Canada on Good Friday in 2001, and Bono drops to his knees at one point and gets 20,000 Canadians (19,000 of whom were high) all singing "Alleluia." When the crowd is singing "Alleluia," he starts praying. I'm looking around going, "This is the coolest church I've ever been to."

That's it. That's where it's at, with George Clooney and Pat Robertson telling us we need to reach out to others that need us. God bless Clooney and Robertson for that. I was encouraged to see that.

As Bono says in the movie, "That's proof of the Spirit moving," and it's remarkable what happens when we're willing to trust and get out of the way and be used in the way we can be used. It's been fascinating for me to see how, on the journey of this film, I've been used. I've stood in front of some crowds and thought, "Wow! How did I get here?"

If God had said, "Dan, I'm going to take four years of your life and you're going to do this movie. You and your business partner are going to go broke and lose all your money. And I'm not going to let you know if you're going to get released or not, or how it's going to come out in the end. So sign here, and this is what we're going to do." There's no way I was going to sign up.

But this is how God does it. He gets you in a little bit and He breaks you down, and it's like, "Hey, are you going to trust Me or not?" And there's the decision. There's your life choice. Are you going to trust Him or are you going to run around and ignore Him as best you can?

Some of us are better at the ignoring and the denying than others, but you eventually get to a place where you go, "OK, fine. What do You want from me?"

We're having this conversation because I said, "OK, fine. What do You want me to do now?"

Just as it began, our conversation ended with Dan's hearty laughter, free of pretense and full of hope and the contentment of a man who knows he did what God asked him to do.

©2009 ChristianCinema.com

For information about where Lord, Save Us From Your Followers!  is showing, visit the film's website.