America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee
By Trevor Denning
Another patriotic documentary? Seriously. We all know that facts don’t care about our feelings, documentaries deal in facts, and Conservatives hate ambiguity. So it sometimes seems like every couple of weeks another right-leaning, talking-head, fact-based movie is held out begging for our time and attention.
What could possibly make the Centennial Institute’s America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee noteworthy?
Two words: Nick Searcy.
Whether you know the film and television star from his work on FX’s Justified, his numerous films, or his notorious Twitter feed, the name and reputation should grab your attention in a way that the other documentary hosts just can’t compete. Searcy’s too-hot-to-handle charisma and snowflake-slicing wit bring every familiar fact to life. With Searcy as our guide, the interviews with all the familiar faces (Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, et al) spark like never before.
The new historians want us to believe that America was founded in godlessness. Yet just a brief glance at their own words reminds us that the Founding Fathers had a deep and abiding respect in a Creator. Even Thomas Jefferson, whose problems with the Bible are well known, had a reverence for its moral teaching. Today’s attempts to remove belief in an outside moral authority leaves only government to be God, a role for which our government was never designed. “The death of religion in America,” says Prager, “is the death of America as we know it.” If government is God, that makes any other source of morality a threat.
Searcy traces the nation’s movement away from God all the way all the way back to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For people who didn’t want a moral higher power over their lives, Darwin’s theory gave them another avenue to explain the world. And as Michael Knowles points out, removing Christianity doesn’t remove all religion, it just opens the door for a new religion. Today that religion is what he calls “Secular Liberalism.”
At this point the conversation moves out of history and into the present, away from Washington D.C. and west to Hollywood. The film industry is powerful, and has been openly hostile toward Christianity since 1960’s Inherit the Wind. As Ben Shapiro points out, that hostility has only accelerated in recent years. Let’s not think for minute that Hollywood is only driven by money. Faith based movies make money.
“I think the only way the culture changes in Hollywood is if we stop letting them bully us into silence,” Searcy says in a conversation with Dean Cane.
The buck stops here.
As for the public schools, Madayln Murray O’Hair, a woman so crazy and spiteful even the USSR wouldn’t take her, made sure God was removed from that space. The door was then opened to more radical ideas to indoctrinate rather than instruct the next generation of Americans. Now that indoctrination has been going on for generations.
So here we are. Government is God. Hollywood is a bully. Public school unravels the social fabric. And there’s more. “The Wuhan Virus has been handed to the Left on a platter,” says Brigitte Gabriel, “because they are using that right now to silence people of faith.” The stakes are high.
The Great Day of His Wrath (ca. 1853), by John Martin, who met his maker in 1854.
The question becomes, how do we get back to being the nation Founders intended? The answer is the other thing that sets America, America apart and makes it the most important documentary available.
There is a way back, and it’s not via Pennsylvania Avenue. This documentary was made before we knew the results of the presidential election, and the outcome is irrelevant. A bigger issue than which party holds the power in government has cast its shadow over us for a long time. But for whatever reason we have allowed ourselves to be blind to it.
Break the chains, remove the blindfold - the world of CREATIVITY needs all hands on deck.
Author Larry Schwikart points the way in simple terms: “We have to reclaim three institutions: the media, the public schools, pop culture.” But there’s more. Mike Huckabee believes that the battle in this country isn’t left/right, male/female, or any of the other divisions about which we hear so much, but good versus evil. The battle is spiritual. And the late Herman Cain believed that prayer could save this country.
The closing moments America, America are scenes of Searcy praying with his interviewees. It’s a powerful conclusion to a powerful film. There is a fight. In the midst of all the screaming voices, here we have hope and direction.
Morning in America needs you to get up and get to work on the culture. Create ART. Create REALITY.
