These past few weeks I’ve watched four movies that deal directly with the relationship between Christian faith and politics, and all four were thoughtful, provocative, and well-crafted stories.

Jesus Camp and Hell House are documentaries. Both are political in that Christians reveal beliefs that require new law (or court rulings) in order to see them realized, primarily beliefs in the evilness of homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, abortion, alcohol and drug abuse, and in the case of Hell House, the dangers of non-Christian fantasy such as Harry Potter.

Jesus Camp documents the work of Becky Fischer, a Pentecostal pastor who runs the “Kids on Fire” church camp in North Dakota. She’s out to train a new generation of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” though instead of fighting racial slavery, they are supposed to take back America from the secular slavery these Christians evidently perceive.

Hell House is down south near Dallas,Texas, and presents a different way of creating more space for fundamentalist Pentecostals. Rather than training youth to become leaders that may be able to win positions of power in local or national government, this church is going to bring more people into the fold by scaring them into converting.

Both documentaries were pretty fair, avoiding caricatures, giving the subjects of the study a lot of room to express themselves without outside commentary. I have non-Christian friends who watched one or both of these and came away disturbed, worried about what they see as theocracy. I imagine, calling on memories of my Christian fundamentalist period, that some Christians could watch these films and say “Yes!”

For my part, I think both represent fringe and ephemeral movements, yet the politics of both intrigue me–grass roots movements via religion to gain more supporters for “traditional values.”

The other two I watched may seem very different (and here I expose my German Protestant roots): Bonhoeffer and Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace. The first is a documentary of one of the few Christian leaders in Germany to openly (and covertly) resist Hitler and Nazism, and who paid for it with his life. The second is a fictionalized version of the same story. Both are definitely worth watching, though I preferred the documentary because the other had some uneven acting and story-telling.

The big question in both, and one relevant today, is when is it right for Christians to oppose their government (i.e. break laws), and what forms of opposition are acceptable? Bonhoeffer is invited to join an underground movement which necessitates lying, and perhaps even murder (and in “Agent of Grace,” one person is willing to be a suicide bomber!). But what if you are shown documents that prove that Hitler is killing political opponents and butchering the Jews and others? There’s the religious and political dilemma.

These two may seem very different from Jesus Camp and Hell House, but what connects all four for me is the matter of how Christians who are deeply opposed to their government and even society work to change that government and society.