Fraudulent Movie Churches: Don Verdean

Don Verdean (2015) One night when I was working at a hotel, a guest was reading the Bible in the lobby. We ended up chatting. She told me about an article she’d read that claimed that NASA calculations were  evidence of a “missing day” and were baffled until one of the scientists brought out a Bible and pointed to Joshua 10 -- which speaks of the sun standing still to allow Joshua time to win a battle.

I told her I was a Christian, but expressed my doubts about the story. First of all I had no idea how such calculations would be made, and a quick internet search showed that no one at NASA had ever made these calculations or made these claims. The story was a fraud.

It made me wonder why someone would invent such a story. Did they think that making up lies would strengthen people’s faith? To me, it shows a lack of faith in the truth of Scripture, and a lack of faith in the scientific method to find truth. Traditionally, the church has taught that God speaks through the Bible and Creation. Being dishonest about either goes against the methods God uses to speak to us.

Don Verdean is a 2015 film written and directed by Jared Hess (the creator of Napoleon Dynamite). Sam Rockwell plays the title character, Don, an amatuer archeologist who claims to have made great discoveries which prove the truth of Scripture. (“Finding treasure on earth would be meaningless if it did not lead someone to heaven.”) He believes that he has found the burial site of Samson, confirmed by iron shears used on the big guy’s hair, and it’s dated 3000 B.C.  But Verdean is running low on funds.

Help comes in the form of financial support from a pastor of a modern megachurch, Tony Lazarus (Danny McBride), a man who claims that God raised him from the dead. Lazarus argues that the great decline in church attendance in the United States is due to lack of scientific arguments for the faith. (“The scientists are saying we evolved from sea monkeys. Young people need evidence in these dark days.”) Lazarus is almost as upset about people going to churches other than his own, and he’s in competition with another megachurch pastor, Dennis Fontaine (Will Forte), a former high priest in the Church of Satan.

Verdean learns that someone in the Mideast has a great find, and he convinces Lazarus to purchase what purports to be the Lot’s wife from the time of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. (“I believe I have a solid lead on the location of Lot’s wife (97% sodium chloride,” Verdean tells Lazarus.) If you remember the story from Genesis 19, Lot and his wife were fleeing the cities as sulfur and fire rained down. They were forbidden to look back, but Lot’s wife did turn, and she was turned into a pillar of salt.

So at Lazarus’ church, they unveil what looks like a statue of a woman made of salt. It would be a real stretch to believe that a salt figure wouldn’t decay over the years, but Verdean, at least, seems to believe the figure is authentic.

As pressure mounts for Verdean to keep bringing forward new discoveries (such as the Holy Grail, and it’s noted that “the Holy Grail is the Holy Grail of archeology.”) He finally sinks to creating a completely phony artifact. He does some grave robbing and takes a skull, reburying it, then trying to excavate it as Goliath’s skull. He even makes a dent in the skull to fake it as a wound from the rock of David’s sling.

If someone does bad science while trying to do good science, that’s sad. Fraud is another thing altogether. Pressure from Pastor Lazarus and his church leads to that fraud.

As bad as Pastor Lazarus is, it could be that Pastor Fontaine is even worse. We hear one of his sermons arguing that the Devil is trying to reach people through breakfast cereals. Cereals like Lucky Charms are trying to bring people in the world of magic and the occult. Some cereals are sexually suggestive such as Grape Nuts and Banana Nut Crunch. Obviously the film is playing this all as comedy, but I’ve heard preachers with concerns about popular culture (such as Jerry Falwell attacking Teletubbies back in the day) that were just as crazy.

At the end of the film, Verdean rightly goes to prison. There he reaches out to a friend’s son who’s in prison too.  It seem that he finally is getting back to genuinely doing real ministry.

I should say that the work of real archeologists have done much to confirm the historicity of Scripture. The recent discovery of the Pool of Siloam by archeologists (which was described in John 9) affirms the firsthand knowledge of the Gospel writer. True archaeologists must reveal what they find, whether it confirms or seems to go against Scripture.

So, while Don Verdean isn’t clergy, his backing by a church earns that church one measly steeple. (Which is also the rating earned by his rival church.)

Science and Church: Contact (1997)

 As a rule, horror films are more church friendly than science fiction films, which is odd. Church youth groups are much more likely to screen Star Wars than The Exorcist. Horror films, by their very nature, usually acknowledge the supernatural. It's not unusual to find a priest as the hero in a horror film. Hard science fiction usually ignores religion, while fantastic science fiction often relies on something like the Force (the ultimate Deus ex machina).

There are exceptions. Gravity is arguably all about prayer. There's no arguing that Contact is all about faith. The film is about science in relation to religion, reason, and faith; and by extension, science and the church. This is all the more interesting as the film is based on a novel by the late scientist/atheist Carl Sagan. Sagan obviously had a different perspective on religion than Richard Dawkins.

We never see a church in the film, but we hear the story of one very unfortunate church experience. And we see at least three different -- very different -- clergymen.

The film tells the story of a woman (Eleanor Arroway, played by Jodie Foster) who, from childhood, dreamed of the skies. She never knew her mother, and she asked her father if her mother was somewhere "out there." He couldn't give her an answer. She asked if he thought there was life out in space, and he answered, "If not, it's a real waste of space" (a phrase that is repeated throughout the film).

Eleanor grows up studying astronomy and physics and joins SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), where she listens to radio signals from space for clues of "little green men."  When a message from space is received, along with blueprints for what seems to be some kind of space transportation, Ellie's childhood dreams seem to be coming true.

Ellie's faith seems to be placed in science, and that's where she seeks truth and meaning. She seems mildly hostile toward religion, and as an adult, she tells a very sad story about the roots of that antagonism. She went to Sunday School a few times as a child, and she says she asked annoying questions like, "Where did Mrs. Cain come from?" Eventually, someone at the church called Ellie's father and asked him to keep her home; it's a very different attitude than Jesus' "Let the little children come to me." The church was practicing what seems more like stumbling block and mill stone behavior to me.

We do see a flashback of young Ellie with a clergyman in a clerical collar who tries to comfort her after her father dies. Since she was in the house with her father when he died, she frets that if she had gotten medicine to him more quickly, he might have lived. The clergyman says, "I know it's hard to understand things, but we have to accept it as God's will." Have those words ever brought comfort to anyone?

That priest or pastor is much better than the crazy-eyed Prophet Joseph. When the building project begins, based on the alien plans, the site is surrounded by fans, fanatics, and protesters. Many of the fans and protesters seem religiously motivated.  We see one protester, Prophet Joseph, who looks almost as crazy as Gary Busey. That's because he's played by Gary's son Jake.

As Ellie is being driven to the project, Prophet Joseph screams, "These scientists have had their chance; are these the people you want talking to your God for you?" Turns out Joseph, like some clergy, is not a fan of scientists or science. He believes that anyone who contemplates truth to be found in the Big Bang and Evolution is obviously on the devil's payroll.

And it turns out that Prophet Joseph is plotting a terrorist act to bring down the whole project and take many lives with a suicide bombing. Outside of ISIS, and in the vast majority of mainline churches, such a thing is not considered cool.

But the third clergyman in the film is cut from a different cloth. Rather, he says he's a "man of the cloth, without the cloth." Matthew McConaughey plays Palmer Joss, who at various times in the film is called "Pastor" and "Father," though it's unclear if he's gone through any ordination process with any denomination.

He went through seminary, but since he sleeps with Ellie the first day they meet, I'm pretty sure he never took vows of celibacy. He tells about a mystical experience that convinced him of the existence of God. Ellie responds asking him if he's ever heard of Occam's Razor, and he says he hasn't (which is kind of sad in itself). She explains that the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is likely to be the correct one. Therefore, Occam's Razor argues against the existence of God. If Palmer had been a little more knowledge about Occam, he could maybe point out that Occam was a theologian.

Palmer works in third world churches protecting people from exploitation.  If we heard him explain anything in depth, we might find he believed in liberation theology, but Palmer only talks about God and faith in the most general of terms and doesn't talk about Scripture or Jesus at all.

Palmer seems to think that the pursuit of truth and the possession of faith are the important things, and that whether these things are pursued through science or theology is irrelevant. I appreciate the idea of "all truth is God's truth," but Palmer's truth seems to be of the most amorphous sort.

I did appreciate Palmer's response to Ellie's denial of God based on lack of evidence. He asks her whether she loved her father. She says she did. He responds, "Prove it!" And Palmer shows her something about faith by trusting her.

But I'm still afraid that the one church we hear about and all three clergymen average out to a One Steeple rating. (Don't mistake that for a rating of the film, which I quite admire.)