One Nation Under God

With the ludicrous "Truth in Love" campaign now fully underway, this video is a must-see for anyone who wants a more full understanding of the concept behind ex-gay ministries. As shown in the video, many of the original founders of groups such as Exodus are no longer associated with those groups and debunk their "conversion" therapies. Although I found some of the ideas that these "ex-gay" ministries espouse to be silly and ridiculous, I thought the video was not as "funny" or "hilarious" as the box quotes make it sound. Rather it was a chilling wake-up to the way certain religious groups in our country are preaching hate and intolerance in the thinly veiled form of "Ex-gay" ministries. Ever more frightening is that many of these groups are growing every day...

I suppose some people will accuse me of traking a seperate but equal way of thinking about this film, but tough beans. I would say that for gay people, especially gay Christians, especially gay Christians who have felt alienated from God, this is a wonderful and moving, powerful and important film. For those of the rest of us who are straight or gay but non-Christian, it is just good.

The film is a frank discussion about ministries that claim to be able to change your sexual orientation from gay to straight with the Bible, support groups, therapy (including electroshock), and a lot of hard work. However as the film points out, you never can work hard enough to change your sexual orientation, and all these ministries accomplish is self delusion, denial, hatred, homophobia, low self esteem and self destructive behavior including suicide. Every accredited scientific study of the last 30 years or so has collaborated this fact, but ex-gay groups like Exodus Ministries (the largest group) still claim to be able to "cure" a gay man by teaching him how to play softball and a lesbian woman by teaching her how to put on makeup, willfully ignoring the reality that gay women wear makeup already (myself among them) and there are gay men who can bench press 300lbs (like my roommate). The film is pretty low budget and shows production values that are pretty consistant with it being made in the early 90's, so it is no technical feat. However you can have a good laugh at the woman from Exodus trying to cure a lesbian by slathering her in blue eyeshadow ala Mimi on The Drew Carey Show.

As a final point, a reviewer on this site said that the film lies when it claims that Gary Cooper co-founded Exodus Ministries. That is a popular nitpick used by Exodus to discredit (the late) Cooper and his partner Michael Bussee. Gary Cooper was never on the board of directors, unlike Bussee. However Cooper was there before the group came together, when they were a loose patchwork on similar organizations. He put work into getting groups networked, doing advertizements, handing out literature at pride marches, even picking people up from the airport. However he never held a title in the group. This is why Exodus claims he was not really a founder, which I personally think is total bull.

I was appalled by the very poor physical quality of the DVD of this movie. I had often watched a VHS recording of a television broadcast about 8 years ago and I bought the DVD especially because I was hoping for improved video quality - however the DVD video has significant problems with dropouts and pixilisation, and the audio is just plain shocking with very many dropouts.

So I then bought the original VHS version, being prepared to sacrifice some video quality in the hope of improved audio, but sadly the VHS has exactly the same video and audio errors as the DVD - plus the added annoyance of a severely overloaded HiFi audio track which causes lots of clipping throughout.

The original content of "One Nation Under God" deserved the very best mastering for DVD and VHS presentation, so I am very disappointed.

I must correct another reviewer who misrepresents the claimed credentials of the film's main characters. They do not claim to have been "the two founding members of Exodus", but merely "two of the founding members" - there's a BIG difference. This film has lots of street cred and is just as relevant today as when it was filmed (1990-1993).