Her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, is a documentary filmmaker whose latest focus is evangelical Christianity:
In “Friends of God,” Pelosi is out of this comfort zone, unknown to the pastors and cultural warriors she meets deep in the heart of red-state America. Few acknowledge her pedigree, except the Rev. Jerry Falwell. After he learned who she was, Pelosi says Falwell told her off-camera, ” ‘Your mother is very bright, very smart and very wrong.’ And then I got kicked out of his trailer.”
Many journalists have explored the evangelical community in the wake of their growing political power. Pelosi doesn’t break much new ground. Instead she aims her documentary at people like herself, ignorant of evangelicals and with a “small worldview. Pelosi has spent a lifetime culturally landlocked in the blue states, having grown up in San Francisco until she was 17, attended college in Los Angeles, worked in Washington, D.C., and spent the past dozen years in New York.
“I was trying to show the people in the blue states, like me, that there’s this whole other world out there, a whole community of people who have their own wrestlers, their own miniature golf, their own rock concerts. They’ve rejected a lot of what the mainstream culture has given them because they don’t find it appropriate,” Pelosi says. “On the coasts, they have this very secular, coastal attitude that is very dismissive of the red states. I thought it was time to go into the belly of the beast.”
So she hangs out with grapplers on the Christian pro-wrestling circuit who preach to kids after the matches, and stops by a Christian miniature golf course. She listens to an anti-evolutionary teacher dismiss accepted science about human origins. The “most painful part” of the project, she said is how nearly every evangelical tried to “save” her off-camera.
I’m very curious.
“On the coasts, they have this very secular, coastal attitude that is very dismissive of the red states. I thought it was time to go into the belly of the beast.”
Well, thank goodness SHE doesn’t share that secular dismissive attitude. Out here in the red states we feel just downright flattered and respected to be recognized as “the belly of the beast.”
I grew up in Indiana, and I don’t think it’s a necessarily blind dismissal that the blue states have for the red ones. I’ve spent my adult life so far happily living on one or another of the coasts and have never considered going back for longer than a holiday. There are many people whom I love dearly who love living in the Midwest, but most of them are still aware that they are paying a price, in part by living outnumbered by reactionaries and bigots, and not having much of a progressive voice in their local government. While I’m sure there are plenty of people in blue states who are just being the intra-country version of xenophobic, anyone who reads the news (and the blogs!) knows that it isn’t New England or California trying to ban rape victims from getting abortions or fighting to teach Creationism in schools.
Which is not at all to say that we shouldn’t make ourselves aware of the very different subcultures that make up our country, and while I disagree with her about a lot of things (like, say, blaming gay people for not having enough rights), I can appreciate Pelosi’s attempt to educate her fellow Democrats and her ability to just listen to people whose views are opposite of hers. I can say that I for one don’t have the patience to listen to fundamentalist rhetoric at much length – heh, that’s why I like how you guys break it up into chunks and let me have my catharsis with your take-down (a la Jill’s brilliant date rape post yesterday, as a shining example), and I’d have a hard time keeping my cool while keeping my mouth shut.
And I really have no idea what to think about her notion that baptising her kid will vaccinate him against cults, but ok.
Wow, that came out a lot more, um, mean than I meant it to. I should mention that I just got off the phone with my FoxNews-loving dad and am a little worked up. Plenty of awesome people live in red states, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
Jerry Falwell is an asshole.
(And oh, the sheer irony of him saying her mother is “very wrong.”) I don’t know whether to laugh or snarl.
I’ve lived in red states most of my life and I’d say “belly of the beast” sounds like a pretty accurate description to me.
Pelosi may have a point about making certain her son goes to church so that he has “something to reject if he chooses”. I had lots of things to reject and I did. A lot of what was taught was non-sense and hypocritical, there wasn’t much choice for me but to reject it. Well – that or pretend to believe it to fit in… however, rejecting it insured that I could at least look myself in the mirror every morning without feeling like a fraud. Even if it did cut my potential “friend” pool down by a significant margin.. but I’m an introvert anyways, so it didn’t really bother me. Being okay with who I am was and is more important to me than whether or not others accept me.
Bah… I think I’m rambling. Somewhere I had a point… right I don’t think Pelosi was being derogatory towards red states by describing her venture into what she considers the center of red state-ness as the “belly of the beast”, she could have said “center of the labrynth” I suppose and it would mean the same thing, but perhaps that would have been less offensive, prefermottosay? What I mean to say is that I think you’re misunderstanding her use of a rather common colloquial phrase.
I thought that by “belly of the beast” she was referring more to the evangelical community and the religious culture that was the focus of her documentary, rather than just the geographic area. Or maybe, um, she was picturing the US as an animal, which would probably make the ‘flyover states’ the belly…ok, maybe less plausible, but funny image.
What gets to me about the baptism thing is the train of thought that goes from “unbaptised” to “unchurched” to “cult mark.” The unspoken assumption there is that the ‘unchurched’ (which isn’t a word I’ve ever heard before) are stigmatised and somehow weaker than their indoctrinated counterparts. I can see the stigma thing, but continuing to play by outdated rules does nothing to change them. I’m sure that a kid who’s sincerely raised with or without religion stands the same chance as anyone else of ending up screwed up, but to raise your child with a religion that you don’t even buy into seems like a sure recipe for screwing him or her up. Cognitive dissonance, anyone? The only religion I was raised with was that of love and rational thought (ok, and Santa and the Easter Bunny), and I don’t think that I’m any worse off for not having needed to reject that.
Hmmm. I too do not understand the logic behind using religion as an inoculation against radical religion. Haven’t the red states been pretty darned religious for quite a while now? Why haven’t those states flipped over to a stronghold of atheists and secular humanists… or at least a stronghold of theists with a noticeable distaste for organized religion?
And since the red states are now so darned radically religious, did those states once contain a hotbed of religiously lax parents who neglected to send their offspring to church?
I’m just not gettin’ it.
I thought she was saying that the fundamentalist people would decide to home in on the kid less if he’d already been baptised, not that baptising him would somehow inoculate him spiritually.
I don’t know, an unbaptized person, from my growing up in fundie-land, just means a potential new member of the flock. They are given the opportunity to get cleansed by baptism and usually are looked on with great pity at their unclean state, but also seen as a possible great triumph if given to get a baptism.
Those who’ve been baptized or grew up in the church, such as myself, though, are seen as unclean and trully a sinner as we’ve known all along what to do and did the other anyway.
I remember when I finally got my ex to agree to marry me, after we had one kid already and one on the way, a fundie that he knew recommended a baptist pastor. I met with him out of consideration and wasn’t surprised when he said he wouldn’t marry us unless we renounced our past sins of fornication and became baptized in his church. I didn’t bite. Although guilt got me to finally find a Methodist preacher, he didn’t seem too happy either.
Unfortunately though, I don’t think anyone cared that my soon to be husband was a worthless jerk (obvious to anyone over 25 which I wasn’t), just that we were ‘unclean’ and living in sin.
I grew up in red states and can affirm that being unattached to a religion makes one both suspicious and a possible “saved soul”. While living in Utah, my sibling dated a Mormon. Her parents put him in conversion classes without consulting my parents (he was 16) and when my mother confronted them their response was “we didn’t think it was a problem since we weren’t taking him away from a set of beliefs.” Riiiiight. I tended to find that some religious folks made the assumption that we just didn’t know about ol’ Jesus because obviously our secular humanist parents kept us in the dark and if they just told us–we’d be in. That said, we didn’t need inoculation (today my brother is no Mormon!) to make up our own mind about religion (no thank you).
That said, I’m very interested in the Christian wrestling circuit. Sweaty men in spandex tossing each other around for an audience? I suspect the ex-gays for pay are behind this.
i grew up in a country with (at that time) a state religion. every schoolday morning (grades 1-6) started with hymn singing at assembly, religious instruction through primary education, entire school going to church twice a year, that sort of thing. at the time, i consciously thought of all that as inoculation of the mind against religion in general.
the reasons get complicated, though, and i’m not sure how well i still understand my own thinking. the state church i experienced could be likened to a “killed strain”, to be sure; it had to pander to the entire state, so it couldn’t get too bigoted or offensive. sects that did were commonly looked down on, as being primitive and stupid semi-cults. (there weren’t many of them, either. people who wanted to be religious had the state church as a default option, after all.)
maybe if there’s something to the “big lie” theory of propaganda, then perhaps having seen (and seen through) a few little lies first will make it easier to resist the big ones later. after all, if even a moderate and mostly reasonable religion is seen as bunkum, then surely they all are; but if all you get, right from the start, is a huge big PILE of rabid, vicious bunkum… that might be harder for a kid to see the fallacy in.
Pelosi may have a point about making certain her son goes to church so that he has “something to reject if he chooses”.
Yeah, this sounded like an excuse to me. Oh, I’m just happening to have my child baptized like my mom wants me to in the church we grew up in because…uh….it’s like getting him vaccinated!