Is religion getting too mixed up in US politics? Israeli-born filmmaker Ilan Ziv is concerned that it is, so he takes a 4000-mile roadtrip through 17 states to find out why religion has had such a powerful influence on the 2008 presidential election process.
Instead of following the candidates, Ziv follows the religious activists who support them, starting in freezing Iowa on January 1st and finishing in Oklahoma just over a month later. Ziv's film is an entertaining, informative, often zany and sometimes frightening look at the 2008 campaign trail as well as an engaging history lesson. The context is provided via interviews with theological historian Randall Balmer and Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich, plus archive footage.
Ziv's involvement in the 2008 American election campaign began in the Sinai desert 35 years ago. As a soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, he resolved to escape from the obsessive mixing of bible and politics as Israel lurched from one territorial holy war to the next. The USA became his 'safe haven' in 1974, a nation founded on the separation of church and state, a principle enshrined in the American constitution.
However, after 9/11 he felt everything he fled from was closing in on him again. Finding the growing mix between faith and politics both mystifying and troubling, Ziv takes to the road to untangle it for himself.
Ziv's film asks some big questions. To him, the war on terror and the 2008 elections are two sides of the same coin. Is God on the side of US troops? Which candidate's side is God on?
'I believe God has anointed Senator Obama for such a time as this,' enthuses the Reverend Helen Seemster of Waterloo, Iowa. Revd Seemster has transformed her Baptist church into a voter registration centre and is spending every hour telephoning potential voters.
In the other camp, over in New Hampshire, McCain volunteer Maureen Mooney confesses to having always been interested in politics. When she was five years old, she says, she asked for a picture of Ronald Reagan on her birthday cake.
Senator McCain, notes Ziv, is the least overtly religious candidate. What will he need to do to win the conservative Christian vote? Mooney is going to the same extraordinary lengths on his behalf as Revd Seemster for her respective senator - and McCain is also her hero, Mooney admits.
Ziv's angle is religion, but there is more to his film. It provides a unique insight into modern America, which also serves as a warning. As Obama appears to revel in comparisons to Martin Luther King, even speaking at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, Alabama, the start point for King's Selma to Montgomery marches at the height of the civil rights movement, it is hard not to think about what happened to King.
If Obama wins, we have to hope that in the 40 years since King's assassination America has changed.
