A new documentary brings “intelligent design” out of churches and into theaters near you.
Never let it be said that the McLean Bible Church (MBC) is not intelligently designed. Twenty minutes from downtown Washington, DC, MBC is the Beltway’s own megachurch, a three-story multiplex of community rooms, coffee shops, and jumbotron equipped auditoriums. With a dozen ministries and satellite campuses in three neighboring towns, MBC seems to make organization a tenet of its faith.
Earlier this year, MBC put its organizational skills to a different purpose, serving as a test market for a new film promoted by Motive Marketing, the go-to publicity firm for any Hollywood project hoping to tap into the “Faith and Family Market.” Motive’s first major success was the Mel Gibson blockbuster The Passion of the Christ, which earned more than $600 million worldwide. MBC had been a part of the faith-based marketing campaign that helped make that happen, so now the publicists were back, pushing their latest product: Expelled, a Michael Moore style, man-on-a-mission documentary targeting “big science” for its assault on those who question evolution. The man engaged in this mission is the economist, actor, and former presidential speechwriter, Ben Stein. As both co-writer and star of Expelled, Stein does double duty as the film’s Gibson and its Christ.
Sixty MBC employees—one fifth of its three hundred member staff—gathered in the main auditorium on a Thursday morning to hear from the founder of Motive Marketing, Paul Lauer. According to Motive promotional materials, Lauer is “one of the most well-connected entrepreneurs in the Faith and Family Market.” He had flown in that morning to make a personal pitch to MBC.
“I worked with Mel Gibson on The Passion of the Christ for a year and a half,” he said. “No church did more than McLean Bible Church to make the Passion the success that it was. No church motivated its people more than McLean Bible Church. No church bought out more theaters than McLean Bible Church ... he paused a moment and flashed a bright California grin ... “with the possible exception of Rick Warren’s church.”
Politicians are sometimes accused of speaking in coded religious language to certain constituencies; marketers have no such need. Dropping the names of Gibson and Warren, mega-church pastor and author of A Purpose Driven Life, Lauer did all but announce, “I’m one of you.”
“This is the first film since my work with Mel that has the power to change culture the way the Passion did,” he said. “The way Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth changed the discussion on the environment, Ben Stein’s Expelled can change the discussion of allowing intelligent design into our classrooms.”
Some would call Lauer’s approach to movie marketing grassroots, but there is nothing organic about it. Returning to churches like this one with a film that has nothing but a target demographic in common with Mel Gibson’s blood and guts Jesus epic is a gambit as tactical as any movement of troops on a battle field. Needless to say, Motive Marketing, which coined the term “Faith and Family Market” and has ridden it to become a major player in the industry, is also intelligently designed.
Less so is the film Motive had come to MBC to push. Expelled is not an awful movie; Stein is a likeable enough big screen presence, as anyone (“Anyone? Anyone?”) who has seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off will recall. But the sight of him marching gamely in his blue suit and brown sneakers into the murky waters of intelligent design (also known as I.D.) can be painful to watch.
Stein sets up the documentary in the manner of An Inconvenient Truth, but in terms of dramatic momentum, Expelled does not even rise to the level of a one-hundred-minute harangue on global warming. Like Al Gore before him, when we first hear Stein in his film, he is just a man on a stage with some truth to tell. Only he is speaking to a crowd of indifferent Malibu teens. Until they leap to their feet to give him an obviously induced standing ovation at the end, the audience looks about as excited as would any crowd of sixteen year olds asked to sit still and listen to Ben Stein.
From there, Stein crisscrosses the country meeting martyrs of the culture war: scientists who have been “expelled” from their positions because of their stance on evolution. Cast out by the “neo-Darwinist establishment,” these Christian scientists are depicted as prophets in exile. Without labs or offices to call their own, they are interviewed in diners and coffee shops across the country. Stein drinks something brown at a Washington, DC, rooftop restaurant with Richard Sternberg, who lost his job with the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington after he published a paper sympathetic to intelligent design; he drinks something orange in a Redmond, Washington, café with Stephen Meyer, the author of the paper. Eventually he goes to Paris where, while trying out his French with another I.D. dissident (“merci, monsieur ... merci, monsieur... merci, monsieur...”), he strolls purposefully in the rain, apparently looking for a bistro.
Stein plays the skeptic for roughly the first half of the film (“Isn’t Intelligent Design just microwaved Creationism?”) but as he soldiers on, talking to scientists and journalists who claim to have been silenced, he comes to believe that educational standards that mandate the teaching of evolution are, in fact, endangering “the very freedoms which make this country great.”
It is on this dubious thesis that Stein builds the film’s central metaphor: “Big Science” has erected a wall around the very mention of I.D., making any discussion of alternatives to strict Darwinism “strictly forbidden.”
Stein and his collaborators love this image. The film opens with scenes from the construction of the Berlin Wall and closes with scenes of its demolition. In between, Stein compares the forces of evolution to the Soviet Union, complete with flickering images of tanks parading through Red Square. “Science is a multi-billion dollar industry,” he says. “In order to get a piece of the pie, you need to be a good comrade.”
As Stein tells it, except for the few brave truth tellers who appear in the film, most everyone in the scientific community marches lockstep behind the Darwinist banner, regardless of what they actually believe.
Where might this lead? Expelled goes so far as to equate the implications of Darwinian evolution to Hitler’s Final Solution. “Could there have been Nazism without Darwinism?” Stein wonders, and later: “Would you say Hitler was a Darwinist?” To answer these questions he uses more than just vintage newsreels. He actually goes to Germany—to Dachau and to Hadamar, the hospital where fourteen thousand patients were murdered because they were disabled or mentally ill. His guide to the asylum, now a museum, says all Stein needs to hear about the place when she explains, “The Nazis relied on Darwin.”
Although true, facts like this make only a manipulative appearance in Expelled. As a work of propaganda it is fairly blunt but savvy: Distancing I.D. from religion throughout, Stein is allowed to frame it as a matter of “academic freedom.” Those who would pursue this freedom have been persecuted, allying them with innocents who have been victimized—even murdered—in the past. “I’m not saying contemporary Darwinists are guilty of these crimes,” Stein says. “But if Darwinism justified such things in the past, could it be used that way today?”
According to a 2001 Gallup poll, 66 percent of Americans prefer creationism to evolution as an explanation of the origins of life. Turning such a mob into a threatened minority is impressive sleight of hand, but otherwise Expelled is lacking on almost every level. Some nice computer imaging does show the truly awesome structure and detail found in a single cell. But beyond these few moments of elegance, not much is found for the non-partisan viewer to enjoy.
Six months before the movie launched, Expelled raised flags in the press because a number of the dissenting voices featured in the film claimed the producers had lied to them. Pitched to the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and Christopher Hitchens as a documentary exploring the intersection of science and religion, the film then had a different name and was not presented as having a pro-I.D. agenda.
“At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front,” Richard Dawkins told the New York Times, referring to the creators of Expelled. The head of the National Center for Science Education, Eugenie Scott, also felt she had been deceived. “I have certainly been taped by people and appeared in productions where people’s views are different than mine, and that’s fine,” she said. “I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren’t.”
Aside from serving as the film’s obvious villains—complete with ominous music whenever they appear on screen—Dawkins and the other atheists featured have nothing to fear. Even when Stein goes for a gotcha moment in the final act, striving mightily to poke holes in Dawkins’ arguments, one wonders what his point is.
“So how did the universe begin?” Stein asks.
“I don’t know,” Dawkins replies.
Stein nearly clucks with delight: “So you say you don’t know!”
“Yes, nobody knows.”
Eventually Dawkins agrees that it might be interesting to consider the possibility that a more advanced form of life had a hand in the design—he does grant the word—of life on Earth. “But they too would have a cause,” he says.
Stein’s glee at this “admission” suggests that he believes Dawkins proves himself a fool for being more ready to believe in extra-terrestrials than, as Stein says, “a loving God.” Expelled regards such talk as mindless atheism, but the truth is more complex. Dawkins and his ilk merely point out that every thing has a cause, which has a cause, which has a cause, ad infinitum. Far from being anti-religious, it’s actually closer to Buddhism than anything else. It’s a thought that serious theologians take seriously, though this film does not.
Which suggests the greatest flaw in this deeply flawed film. Not only does Expelled treat evolution dishonestly, it does the same with design. Playing fast and loose with the question of whether I.D. is religion or science (swearing it is the latter but reaching for “a loving God” when it wants to drive its message home), Expelled manages to miss the most intriguing facet of the discussion.
Let’s say that a kernel of truth is found in the I.D. argument, as even Dawkins considers at the end of the film: Life has a detectable “design” and whatever force or entity or universal law that was responsible for this design is something that we might call “God.” Allowing this possibility is sometimes seen as cracking the door open to creationism, but is it possible it does just the opposite? Compared to this “God” of science (that which gives cells structure; that which lets stars die), the God of traditional religion (He of snakes and frogs and locusts) begins to seem insignificant. Far better than any atheistic argument ever could, the designer suggested by I.D. demolishes the notion that the deity of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Qu’ran is anything but a metaphor for something we do not understand.
Such implications didn’t stop anyone at MBC from embracing the film, at least according to the healthy applause it received. Nor did the possible problems I.D. may one day cause the faithful stop the founder of Motive Marketing from offering a pious word in closing.
“Thank you for watching,” he said, “and please pray for Expelled.”
Peter Manseau is the Editor of Search Magazine.
