Lightening poundage and costs, digital technology unleashes an explosion of film schools, student hopefuls in the streets, and filmmakers hosting their own non-fictions. Auteur-guided pseudo-documentaries mostly are cause cinema -- war, politics, environment, music -- self-styled truths unequal to what was agitprop and is now advocacy journalism. “U.S. Premiere Pre-Election screening” at an urban campus and programmed to tour others, Jesus Politics exhibits another hallmark of the flood in that, as director-guide Ilan Ziv asserted at a Q&A, it had to be done under a deadline -- November 4 -- and was thus rushed with certain electoral contingencies neglected.  Ziv claims he was vindicated by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Asked if he had done an unincluded section in case Hillary had won, the secular Jew who “can admit I’m atheistic here [in New York]” replied he had not. The cross-country drive was not to focus on individuals but on the “forces behind, . . . to explore the rôle of religion,” how belief has evolved and how it is manipulated for purposes of power. On the Democratic side, Obama (not Biden) was naturally a more thematic draw in that he “talked about faith and dialogue with faith” and that, correctly or not, reverends and congregants and campaign volunteers in socially oriented Southern African-American churches clothed him in the mantle of Dr. King, Prophet not Politician.

To Ziv’s voiceover, his life’s odyssey begins with the 1973 Sinai Desert campaign and his soldier’s prayer to live and emigrate to “my safe haven” America and its separation of church and state. But those days of Norman Rockwell or rock ‘n’ roll rosiness after Kennedy’s televised dissociation of his church and his country had faded long before the now New Yorker “witnessed thousands incinerated by religious hatred” at the Twin Towers. Not only airliners were hijacked, but the nature of belief as well, and the tracing of the change, its history and implications, is by far the attraction of this documentary.

Though it is pointed out that urbanites have little understanding of the out-there hinterlands where ninety percent claim they believe in God, the caucus, primary and institution interviews with campaign workers, heads of families and their families, churchgoers and their leaders, are unexceptional stuff. Middle America treated the outsider film crew with courtesy and generosity, but even unironic headshot sincerity goes on like the present year-and-a-half parade that one commentator has characterized as “mental root canal.”

One wishes more weight had been given to the direction of seventy-five-million-strong evangelicalism, equated in the public mind with a Religious Right which, the director noted (although not within his film), is but a vocal minority. Omitted is the granddaddy of our cyclical extravagant God fervor, the eighteenth century Presbyterian-Methodist-Baptist Great Awakening, and the Jefferson-Adams dichotomy is only passing words among a period-costumed few at the Red River Meeting Place. The latter furnished the spark of a progressive nineteenth century conversion “to create the Kingdom of God here in America” through women’s suffrage, Abolition, free public schools, labor laws.

The film asserts that the new revivalism took root in the Carter presidency when, a Plains, Georgia, woman guesses, “country roads appeal[ed] to others.” I was taken aback when, interviewed throughout as overview assessor, Randall Balmer reveals he is an evangelical. This theology historian asserts that “Carter reintroduced the language of faith into American politics. It’s been with us ever since.” Religion-in-high-places grew during the White House years of ironically non-churchman Reagan, and the film follows the trail among Protestants and Catholics.

Roe vs. Wade, right to life, same-sex marriage, Iraq are brought up, along with endorsements from national religious figures of different persuasions. Emphasis, and voter preference, however, comes down not to particular issues but to the certainty of “which God is the real God” faith, to the heartfelt proselytizing warning signs dotting highways and byways.

Theme dictates time for Obama over McCain, with Huckabee an also-ran afterthought, though the handling is even enough that it must be accidental lighting giving a sinister Christopher Lee look to Moral Majority cofounder Paul Weyrich. Intentional full-circle irony must be lurking in the hoedown “Hava Nageela” before thousands of Christians United for Israel, a lower-profile but, pining for end-day Armageddon, more powerful Capitol Hill lobby than that of that nation itself.

Also indicative of a tight schedule is the absence of the nation’s obsession with its pocketbook. Given the slant, that, too, would have been irrelevant, anyway. Specific concerns are secondary on the bandwagon push for ballots, which translate into power. Votes are cast, says Jesus Politics, according to the heart, not the words of the mouth. Unthinkable twenty-five years ago, the battleground for souls’ ayes amidst fossilized idealism leads back to Sinai’s indifferent soil, to Joshua and Ramses, Crusaders and Islam, to Jesus and Israel, where “Absalom stole the hearts of the men.” 

(Released by Icarus Films; not rated by MPAA.)