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As I watched director Marc Forster's new film, based on a true story, memories of other movies about men of faith caught in extreme moral dilemmas made my memory, moral imagination and conscience collide. It also evoked contemporary documentaries and feature films about Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and other countries in conflict where kidnapped children become soldiers.
"Machine Gun Preacher" is the story of reformed alcoholic, drug addict and felon, Sam Childers (born 1962), who has lived as a Christian mercenary-like fighter in conflict areas of Africa since 1998. This is a powerful, raw experience of a preacher who is comfortable saying, 'lama soldier for Christ."
After his conversion to Christ, his mission went from building huts in northern Uganda and an orphanage in a defenseless location in South Sudan, to using a machine gun to rescue children. Although the film shows him killing a child in self-defense, in an interview he told me: '? can tell you definitively that I have never killed a child - even though it could be justified to defend yourself from a child soldier."
I didn't know if I was being preached at or propagandized by the film. Interviewing Childers didn't help a lot either. He said the film was the story of a wild kid gone bad who found Jesus, that anyone can change the direction of his or her life. This may be true, but the ending of the film is not an altar call but an implicit call to arms and an explicit dare to not challenge the means he uses to rescue children.
After the movie all I could think of were the questions of conscience that confronted the fictional Jesuits in "The Mission," and real-life Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero when they were faced with unspeakable crimes against humanity. I think a review of the dilemmas these good men faced is critical to evaluating "Machine Gun Preacher."
In Forster's relatively brief directorial career he has given us vastly different films, including "'Monster's Ball" (2001); "Finding Neverland" (2004), the life of James Matthew Barry, author of Peter Pan: "The Kite Runner" (2007); and "Quantum of Solace" (2008), a James Bond film. All these films tell stories about men, not women, in...