Sick, Immoral Movie

My first principal objection is the implied equivalence between medicine/science and religious faith. The filmmakers seem particularly keen on stressing the necessity of keeping God in your heart to help ward off disease and that it is somehow just as beneficial as consulting a qualified physician. Dr. Harris eventually caves in and concedes that the town needs a spiritual presence to fight typhus as much as it needs medical care. The movie actually dares to give the preacher credit for saving the life of Faith Samuels by simply having him pray at her side. The suggestion that faith healing actually works is a truly reprehensible message that should be rejected by any sane, rational person. People die because of this delusional attitude and others have been rightfully convicted of child abuse and felony reckless negligent homicide by focusing on prayers to heal illnesses. But of course, in this movie, the man of science must be made to see the error in his ways, and by the end he has converted to Christianity and attends church. It’s all the more sickening that they dared package this message to children in the form of a family film.

And the offensive, foolhardy message at the end is that Klansmen and racism can be deterred by simple appeasement. There’s no concern at all here for the significance of what white-hooded warriors actually stood for, or for the violence that they inflicted habitually in towns like Walesburg for generations. It doesn’t treat the KKK issue with any element of seriousness. Instead, this movie argues, if we just throw them a bone to them they’ll go away. The preacher effectively caves in to the wishes of his neighborhood terrorists and coerces Uncle Famous into bequeathing his property to people who made every effort to take it by force. There’s no indication that the preacher consulted with Uncle Famous about this decision beforehand, and he seems to have made it up on the spot. The white man still gets to decide what happens to the black man’s property, he just happens to know that Uncle Famous can’t argue the point being forced upon him or else he’ll face death. So, it’s “give up your property to the terrorists on terms dictated by another white man” or get hanged. By appeasing the Klansmen, the preacher has made himself complicit in their racist oppression, and his actions are outrageously unethical, an affront to the humanitarian values he claims to uphold. Intimidating someone to relinquish their property with the threat of physical violence was illegal in the post-bellum South and law enforcement was actively prosecuting the KKK, but the obvious solution of involving the legal authorities doesn’t seem to occur to anyone in this simpleminded movie.

We’re supposed to believe that a nativist hate group will be willing lynch someone one moment, and then be cowed over by Christian brotherly love within minutes because the darkie was apparently nice enough to let them inherit his land and possessions. Excuse for suggesting that this kind of animosity and racial superiority is not so easily resolved, it certainly wasn’t resolved this way in the post-bellum South, and teaching it to family audiences in such crude, naïve terms is both immoral and dangerous. Racists who employ violence to achieve their goals are scary people with deeply entrenched feelings of hatred, and they can’t be shrugged off so easily like they are in Stars in My Crown. And of course, the suggestion that Old Time Religion can help defeat the Klan and other related groups has been proven wrong by history and is quite patently stupid.

The Josiah Gray character really isn’t a very good person. He’s annoying and aggressive in his Bible-thumping, intolerant of the secularists and self-righteous in his presumed superiority, the kind of a person who invites and deserves active criticism for his in-your-face approach to evangelization. Very few educated, secular people would put with such a character being portrayed as a hero in a film today, and I can’t understand for the life of me why this movie gets such an easy pass from people. The values it tries to present as ethical are indeed anything but, and I suspect that most of its admirers haven’t really made an attempt to engage with its ideology. Because if they did, there’s no way this movie would have a 7.6 rating in 2014.