FILM GIVES INSIDE LOOK AT FUNDAMENTALIST FAITH

Christian fundamentalists, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation about the “very rich,” are different from you and me.

That is the opinion of sociologist James Ault, who says fundamentalists come from “a different place in American life,” one where lives are organized around “place and kin” and far removed from the modern, mobile family.

Ault and independent film maker Michael Camerini co-produced and directed the documentary “Born Again: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church.” The 90-minute film, to be presented at 9 tonight on PBS by the South Carolina Educational Television Network, is a look at the phenomenon of the born-again Christian. It will air locally on KPBS-TV Channel 15 and will repeat at noon Friday.

The mostly blue-collar subjects of this documentary are a far cry from the flash-and-sizzle television world of Jerry Falwell and charismatics such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Bakker.

Instead, Ault and Camerini captured with magnifying-glass closeness the daily trials and victories of members of a small, independent Baptist congregation near Worcester, Mass.

Ault got the idea for the film in 1982 while doing research for a book on the conservative “pro-family” and right-to-life movements and parents campaigning against sex education in schools.

“I had some ideas for a book on these movements,” said Ault, who was in San Diego this summer as a visiting lecturer in sociology and film at UC San Diego. “I felt the existing accounts by academics and journalists failed at the basic level of understanding what (issues such as abortion, birth control, feminism) meant to popular conservative church activists.”

The key to understanding the fundamentalists’ positions depends on understanding the significance of lives built around place and kin, Ault believes.

“Ties to relatives and a particular place have overwhelming impact on shaping their lives. People in the church have trouble understanding the individualistic life, where we form our own families away from our family of origin, (marriages) where husbands and wives have to rely on each other much more because they don’t have these continuous ties to relatives.”

Ault decided to film a single congregation, showing fundamentalists in microcosm, including the strong role played by the church in family life.

“I was unemployed at the time, and I thought it would be a good subject and a fundable one,” Ault said. The National Endowment for the Humanities agreed and made an important grant.

The key to success was gaining the trust of the 100-member congregation before the seven months of filming began in 1984. Ault had some guidelines on how to work with fundamentalists based on his previous research. Most of all, he understood fundamentalist value systems. He could see why they could call Walter Mondale, television producer Norman Lear and former President Eisenhower communists.

“Trust is based on understanding,” he said. “It was not based on them thinking I was a fellow traveler.”

Gaining the trust of people who felt members of the media tend to make fun of them was still not easy. Ault said that before he was allowed to film certain interviews he was “grilled for an hour, two hours in some cases” by church members.

When church members didn’t want to be filmed in conflict, Ault said he didn’t want to portray them as “goody two shoes Christians.” They agreed that the church was in the business of dealing with sin.

In all, 35 hours were put on film. Viewers meet the pastor, an ex-mechanic and disabled Vietnam veteran, ministering to his flock through periods of personal crisis and intense stress.

One couple, Bob and Emma, struggle with adultery and desertion. Ted, the alcoholic brother of a church member, struggles painfully against his own impulse to “let God take over” his life and be “born again.”

Teen-agers are shown challenging an instructor on teachings about carnal knowledge, and Valarie, the pastor’s daughter, explains her attraction to elements in the “unsaved world.”

“Born Again” was Ault’s first documentary, and he found that there were limits on what was possible with 90 minutes of film. He still plans to write the book he originally set out to write, and he is planning similar movies.

Reaction to “Born Again” has varied.

Last week, the film was screened in New York City. “It was a New York intelligentsia audience, very secular and progressive,” Ault said. “You could feel the discomfort as the audience was getting to know these people (on film). They didn’t like to see these people as human beings with problems like they had . . . as complex human beings with strengths and weaknesses not unlike their own.”

Praise for the film came from opposite ends of the political spectrum. At a premiere in Massachusetts, two fundamentalist preachers told Ault they liked the fact that “there was no effort to prop up fundamentalism or to tear it down.”

“And Norman Lear likes it, too,” Ault said.