Bad Faith: An Unholy War on Democracy | Screening May 18, 7 p.m. | The Rialto Theatre, Raleigh
Bad Faith: An Unholy War on Democracy, a grim new documentary from filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones, begins with rowdy footage from January 6, the familiar colors of the American flag bleeding into the whites and blues of the Christian flag, waving amidst the crowd, and aggressive reds of Trump paraphernalia. “Nobody knows what the hell is going on, there’s never been anything like this,” Trump tells the crowd. “We will not let them silence us.”
The Capitol insurrection may seem, in some ways, like a distant memory, but as the presidential election nears, Ujlaki and Jones remind viewers of the astonishing speed at which democratic norms have been chipped away since January 6, and—now that Trump has been established among the right as a kind of anti-democratic antihero—all the ways that things can get worse.
Despite his dubious moral credentials, Trump has a powerful alliance with evangelical Christians. (According to a Pew Research Center survey, he harnessed eight-four percent of the white evangelical vote in 2020. ) And as Bad Faith demonstrates, that relationship is a significant step forward for Christian nationalism—the idea that the American identity is indistinguishably Christian and that the future of the country depends on asserting that identity.
To better understand Christian nationalism, which Bad Faith characterizes as a movement, the film follows the fault lines of Jerry Falwell and other foundational Moral Majority figures to the January 6 riot (it had been a while since I’d watched the footage, and I’d forgotten how jolting it is) to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which clearly lays out the architecture for the reshaping of the federal government, pending a second term for Trump.
Interspersed among all this are interviews with subjects ranging from Elizabeth Neumann, a former homeland security official in the Trump administration, to North Carolina social justice activists Reverend William Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. The documentary also spends time in the Patriot Church, a small East Tennessee church in which galvanizing calls for theocracy and an armed “soldier realm” are run-of-the-mill Sunday sermon fodder.
On May 18, Raleigh’s Rialto Theatre will host a screening and a panel discussion with Wilson-Hartgrove and executive producer Todd Stiefel, among others; the documentary is also available to stream on Amazon, Apple+, and other platforms. Ahead of the Raleigh screening, the INDY spoke with Ujlaki about the origins of the Moral Majority and what lies ahead.
INDY: What made you decide to pursue this topic?
UJLAKI: It mostly came about because of the fact that I was shocked when Trump was elected. I didn’t think it was possible given the information that I had—and I’m a news junkie,I thought that I was reading everything, but of course, everything I read was in the same bubble. I wasn’t aware of what was going on in the rest of the country and Trump’s election made me very aware of that. So I set out to try to find out all I could about evangelicals because they had obviously played a very huge part in his success. And I learned a lot: I read a lot of books, I interviewed a lot of evangelicals, and the result of all that was the film.
North Carolina comes up a few times in the film and a few talking heads—Reverend Barber, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove—are based here.
[Some] of the people that I found out about by reading their books were Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove and Reverend Barber. And the more I dug into it, the more I realized [Barber has] been fighting this for many years. He was responsible, starting from when the Tea Party started to have success in cutting all kinds of services in North Carolina, for creating the Moral Mondays. They had a huge number of people up in arms about what was going on. So he was active right from the onset of Christian nationalism and I interviewed him, I saw a lot of footage. And not only is he incredibly articulate and a man of faith, but he is also an activist coming from a faith background. He is very much, in my opinion, following the footsteps of Martin Luther King. He made a natural hero or protagonist, if you will, of the story.
Going back to the beginning, with the Moral Majority—I think many people may be familiar with Jerry Falwell, but in your film, you introduce the character of Paul Weyrich. Who is he and why was he important?
He was a Republican political strategist and he was determined to turn around the Republican Party after the devastating loss of Goldwater in 1964 that he participated in as a young Republican. He spent years trying to figure out how he could interest evangelicals, who at the time did not, for the most part, engage in politics.
Eventually, Weyrich found a way to interest them in politics: the tax-exempt status of the segregated academies, [which was] threatened by the implications in the further rulings of the Supreme Court following Brown v. Board of Education. It was no longer possible to claim tax-exempt status as a charitable institution if you were discriminating, and that cut to the very heart of their financial empire of people like Falwell, Bob Jones, and Robertson—so those people now wanted the government to start working for them and to turn these things around.
Weyrich was able to convince them to join forces. The clever thing he did was—since defending segregation was not that great a rallying cry if you’re trying to get people to come to give grassroots support—they came up with this notion of the “rights of the unborn,” which was a complete joke. But nevertheless, it was a business deal. He was Catholic and conservative Catholics were against abortion. He said, “Look, if you could get your followers to be against abortion, then we could have something we were all against, and our moral majority alliance would work.” Otherwise, there’s nothing connecting the Catholics to the evangelicals.
So the abortion issue became the thing that the evangelical leadership decided that they would now start saying that it was Biblical, which was always very handy. Whereas the Southern Baptist Conference in 1973 had applauded the passage of Roe v. Wade. But that was years ago, and now it was going to be more convenient to get behind this.
It seems like abortion was a bit of a Trojan horse.
Yes, and it’s been incredibly successful. It masks all the economic interests of the people voting against their own economic interests because they’re caught up in the culture question. The Republican Party has no natural majority in this country, they represent rich people, but they’ve been incredibly successful using these cultural devices to get people to not even look at the actual policies these politicians vote for. And now we’re at a point where it’s gotten even worse, because, well—as you see in the film, things have gotten very bad.
Abortion was this original token used to galvanize the right, over the years, and that’s shapeshifted to things like prayer in schools—what are the rallying cries today?
Most egregiously, they’re whitewashing all history for students, so that they’re not even going to learn the history of their country. They don’t want there to be any trace of the fact that they are against democracy. They don’t want anyone to know anything about it so that they can contest their version, which is complete fiction.
You have people like David Barton going around the country with his show explaining that the country was basically founded by evangelicals. And the big lie, of course, is that it is “turning secular and we have to stop that.” It was founded as a secular government and was done so after the terrible experiences that Europeans had had, coming to America and saying, “Listen, we want to avoid all the religious wars that have been in Europe that killed millions of people. We will have a secular government. The government will not support any one religion and will support the rights of all religions.”
And they are pretending that this didn’t happen—they’re pretending that a religious government was founded. If history were taught properly, you could debunk this but they don’t want people to have that information, which is why they are attempting to curtail discussions, any discussion, anything having to do with race, anything having to do with the real history of this country—how it has never been a perfect democracy and has always had to struggle to realize the ideals of the founders.
I wanted to ask about the Patriot Church and the experience filming there. How did you get access?
Because we shot during COVID, I did the interview with Pastor Ken [Peters] remotely and we had a local crew, a terrific crew, who came in and shot it. Ted was extremely interested in any kind of publicity he could get. He was very anxious to spread the word. He realized, of course, that we were not evangelicals, but I think he felt so confident in the message that he was conveying that he felt that any publicity is good publicity. They were accommodating and everybody was extremely nice and very open about their beliefs. What we did not know and found out later was how active he had been in January 5 and January 6.
At the beginning of the film when he talks to his parishioners about what happened on January 6, he’s lying to them about what he did and what happened. And then, of course, this is the foundational lie, which is now the basis of the Republican Party, that nothing bad happened and that these were patriots. And as he pointed out, he says, “There’s nothing wrong with Christians taking a stand.”
That’s one of the things that film is trying to counter, to the extent that we can get it out, is that a lot of what people believe in this country is a total lie that’s been fabricated by people who are so invested in that lie because it’s the means by which they are going to obtain power—because they’ll never be a majority. I mean, I guess you didn’t ask me about this, but the other thing is, “Why did they turn against democracy?” Well, because they realized that they’d never be a majority, this Christian nation, because people would not voluntarily give up their rights. So, therefore, what do you do? Well, you try to weaken and destroy democratic institutions.
One of the most important points that I hope the film makes is that the divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that we have today were all part of their plan. Their plan was so successfully carried out, over the last 30-40 years, that we are now actually living in the kind of situation that they wanted to create—because if you have a distrust of democratic institutions, which is widespread, you leave open the path for a strong man to come in and fill the vacuum. That would never have happened 10 or 15 years ago, people calling for a strong man.
But they’ve successfully done it, and that’s what I want the documentary to show, to get people to realize, “Wait a minute, I need to fight back, I need to do something I need to defend democracy.” That’s what Reverend Barber, amongst many other people, is doing. That’s why I applaud him and why he had such an important part in the film. And you know, this is all in North Carolina.
What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about Christian nationalism?
I don’t know about misconceptions, but I will say this—when we first started this documentary, people were denying that Christian nationalism existed. They said it’s a “left fantasy.” Okay, several years later, January 6 was a very powerful movement for Christian nationalists to mount an actual military attack on the Capitol. People on the left or people on the center don’t understand that in their chronicling of it, this was a historic moment; this was the moment when God was attempting to reclaim America through them.
I’ve described this to someone, and I think it’s true—there’s a slow-motion revolution taking place and it’s moving very slowly and people are still trying to normalize, normalize, normalize, but it’s anything but normal. It’s very scary because, how do you stop it? What are the ways in which you can reverse that tide? That’s what our goal is. We have a presidential election coming up in six months and it’s not a pretty picture.
Some evangelicals have also pushed back against Trump—I’m thinking of the editor of Christianity Today—and you included that perspective in the film as well.
The reason to have conservative evangelicals in the film is to show that this isn’t some kind of leftist conspiracy—this is actually something that people as reputable as Russell Moore, and other conservative evangelicals as well, are aware of. Russell Moore calls it a heresy, so does Reverend Barber. They’re both completely aligned on that. And it was very important to show in the film that this is not a left/right. issue. This is a pro-democracy versus anti-democracy.
What do you hope people’s takeaways from Bad Faith are?
The point that I want to make about the film is that it is frightening, but you should not, as a result, withdraw or concede defeat in any way. The idea is: Once you know the reality, act upon it. Many people are so confused about what’s going on, they don’t know who to believe. There’s such distrust of media and the normal ways people have gotten information.
When I hear about young people not wanting to vote because they’re so disgusted by both candidates, it’s very important to say that this is an incredibly important election, because it has to do with protecting democracy. And this is not just some hyperbole, this is literally the case. And it’s the hardest thing in the world, I think, to try to get through to people who don’t necessarily trust anything.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. To comment on this story, email [email protected].
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