The Media Research Center has long hated actor and director Rob Reiner for expressing political opinions that don’t mesh with its right-wing narratives — to the point that it insists on still labeling him “Meathead,” an acting role he hasn’t played in nearly half a century. So when Reiner made a documentary criticizing far-right Christian nationalism, the MRC went on the attack once again. Tim Graham huffed in a Jan. 14 post:
Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein offered the typical left-wing propaganda in promoting Rob Reiner’s new documentary warning of “Christian nationalism” overwhelming democracy.
The goal of Reiner’s documentary God & Country, she said, “is to wake up churchgoing American Christians — who number in the many tens of millions — to the threat of anti-democratic religious extremism in the United States.”
Introducing an interview with Reiner and filmmaker Dan Partland, Boorstein oozed the film is “perhaps the first Hollywood-adjacent effort to make the term ‘Christian nationalism’ mainstream and to get Americans (specifically Christians) to engage in conversations about recent well-organized and well-funded efforts to officially merge church and state.”
Nowhere in this public-relations exercise is there any room for the notion that anyone opposes this argument. Nowhere is there any partisan or ideological label for Reiner or Partland. They’re not liberals or Democrats (Partland’s donated to Obama and Elizabeth Warren). Instead, we’re told the Baptist Joint Committee, “which advocates for religious pluralism, organized the premiere at the Capitol.” The BJC doesn’t seem to be Baptist at all – it opposed crosses on government property and favored forcing bakers to make a wedding cake for gays. But the leftists who hate Trump are the “devout Christians.”
Graham tried to insist that right-wing Christians have every reason to attack (their caricatured version of) liberals:
He acknowledged “Christian nationalism” doesn’t sound negative: “I think the term is very problematic because it sounds pro-Christian and very patriotic. It doesn’t self-describe. The film takes time to explain … it’s actually not a faith at all, it’s a political ideology masquerading as a faith. And turns out it’s not very Christian and totally un-American.”
A conservative Christian would turn that exactly around. Secular leftists like Rob Reiner and his pals are engaged in an exercise in a “political ideology masquerading as a faith” that’s “not very Christian and totally un-American.” The leftists never acknowledge the idea that conservative Christians have a reason to be alarmed about the culture with the ascent of “gender-affirming care” and “Drag Queen Story Hours.”
Graham ended by huffing some more:
Reiner could find some Christian conservatives who sounded like democracy was not a supreme value, but it ends up smearing every other conservative Christian who simply would not vote for the Democrats (and “save democracy”). Not every orthodox Christian voter equals “fascist.”
Graham’s job, meanwhile, does not involve finding the nuance he demands of Reiner, attacking anyone who’s not as far-right as he is as “left-wing” or “ultraliberal.” He also gave no indication he had actually seen Reiner’s film.
A Feb. 3 post by Clay Waters whined about Reiner talking about his film — and made sure to put “Meathead” in the headline:
Christiane Amanpour was eager to promote on her eponymous PBS program Tuesday a new documentary, “God & Country,” on the supposed threat posed by “Christian nationalism in America,” produced by actor, director, and veteran liberal alarmist Rob Reiner.
[…]After Amanpour explained who Norman Lear was for her “international audience” (Lear created the TV classic “All in the Family,” for one, starring Reiner as Mike Stivic, aka “Meathead”), she set Reiner up to talk of the Christian imagery that supposedly dominated the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, “all those people waving crosses and speaking Bible verses and the like.”
Like his boss Graham, Waters also tried to justify right-wing homophobia and transphobia:
While speaking of the dark side of Christian politics, nothing was said of valid social conservative concerns over so-called gender-affirming care for children, or “drag queen story time.” Reiner didn’t face any tough questions.
Reiner condescendingly insisted he wasn’t bashing Christianity, only those Trump-loving rubes who fell for his dangerous rhetoric. Reiner said “we’re not bashing Christianity at all,” noting the presence in his documentary of Christian theologians like Russell Moore.
Alex Christy spenet a Feb. 17 post lashing out at another Reiner media appearance:
Despite the collective media freakout over “Christian Nationalism,” the term still remains difficult for critics to define in a way that is different from traditionally understood Christian conservatism. The latest installment in this attempt at doom-mongering about the end of democracy comes from filmmaker Rob Reiner, who joined MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Friday’s The 11th Hour to discuss his new documentary on the subject and suggest critics of Roe v. Wade are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and just care about political power.
Ruhle wondered, “What made you decide to go all in on a project focused on Christian Nationalism?”
Reiner responded by giving some autobiographical information, “You know, I was raised as a secular Jew. There was no religion in my household. But I started reading about Christianity, about Buddhism, about Islamic religion and I came away with understanding the real teachings of Jesus were about loving thy neighbor, doing unto others as you would have them done to you and those are the things that I latched onto.”
Pro-lifers, apparently, do not believe this, “They meant something to me and when I saw this movement — it started, you know, in the 50s, but it really took hold in the 80s after Roe v. Wadebecame the law of the land and Norman Lear had People for the American Way and I started to see that there was a movement afoot that had nothing to do with what I understood to be the teachings of Jesus and it was a pure political movement for just, for power.”
Not killing babies would be the absolute minimum standard for “doing unto others as you would have them done to you.”
Yet we don’t see Christy demanding that every woman who has ever had an abortion be imprisoned or executed for “killing babies.” Christy complained about another statement Reiner made:
Later, Reiner would declare that the January 6 riots were “fueled by Christian Nationalism” and while it is one thing to condemn that, it is quite another lump the rioters in with decades of pro-lifers who have principled beliefs on when life begins, which only raises the question: just how conservative are these conservatives Reiner speaks of?
Christy offered no evidence that there is any meaningful distance between anti-abortion protesters — some of whom engages in violence and murder — and the violent insurrectionists of January 6.
Christian Toto used his March 2 column to gloat over the film’s allegedly bad box office performance on its opening weekend in limited release:
Reiner’s film earned oodles of free publicity via the press, little of it challenging the film’s thesis. Rolling Stone. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Newsweek CNN. Axios. NPR.
That’s the kind of marketing muscle most documentary filmmakers would love. Critics raved about the film, too, giving in a robust 92 percent “fresh” rating at RottenTomatoes.com.
All of the above didn’t translate to box office glory.
The film, which opened in 85 theaters nationwide Feb. 16, earned just $38K in its opening frame. The left-leaning Wikipedia dubbed those numbers “disappointing.”
The far-Left Deadline.com desperately spun the results, letting the film’s distributor frame the poor numbers in the best light possible.
Not only did Toto not offer any evidence that Wikipedia is “left-leaning” or that Deadline.com is “far-Left,” he explain why that’s a bad box office take for film in only 85 theaters that was not necessarily meant to attract a mass audience.
It should also be noted that there is no post at NewsBusters that reviewed the content of the film itself — the MRC was merely content to personally attack Reiner instead (and, of course, lazily call him “Meathead”).