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CONSTANTINE’S SWORD
Produced & Directed by Oren Jacoby
Written by James Carroll & Jacoby, based on the book by Carroll
Director of Photography, Bob Richman
Edited by Kate Hirson
Music by Joel Goodman
Released by First Run Features/Red Envelope Entertainment
USA. 95 min. Not Rated

Taking on overwhelming subject matter, this investigative documentary delves into the dark roots and recent past of Christianity. However, it really tells three separate and distinct stories, which are interwoven only through the personality and experiences of narrator-presenter James Carroll.

First, Carroll investigates a scandal that arose at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. The pastor of the New Life megachurch, Ted Haggard (since disgraced following allegations of prostitution and drug abuse) and many of the congregation began to evangelize and proselytize quite vigorously among the USAF cadets. Evangelical students allegedly threatened and intimidated colleagues, including other Christians and Jewish students, with hellfire if they did not convert to evangelical fundamentalism. The film insinuates, though it does not clearly allege, that sinister forces within the USAF administration both blocked the academy chaplain’s attempt to rein in this evangelization and suppressed a Yale Divinity School investigation into the scandal.

Secondly, Carroll interweaves his investigation with the history of the relationship between Catholicism and political power since Emperor Constantine. Constantine (long since known to have been a homicidal thug) allegedly “turned Christianity violent,” according to Carroll, and, specifically, altered it into a vehicle for anti-Jewish persecution. This part of the film skips over vast expanses of time from the Crusades to the Counter-Reformation and the 20th century, but with little discernment or expertise. Interviews with two charming members of the Jewish community in Rome, whose family have made plates for the papacy for centuries, frame the claim that Pius XII could have stopped the deportation of Jews by Fascists and Nazis in 1942 if he had only tried to do so.

James Carroll’s spiritual autobiography forms the third strand. He was raised in a devout and patriotic Catholic family but chose the priesthood rather than serve in the Air Force like his father. He rejected hierarchy and nationalism during the Vietnam War, left the priesthood, and has, it seems, been exorcizing his demons over this ever since.

The film does make one coherent claim. Carroll argues cogently that when religion is allied with political power, persecution and violence will inevitably result. His rediscovery of Edith Stein’s prophetic letter warning the papacy against Nazism in the 1930s is deeply moving.

Unfortunately, the argument is flawed by Carroll’s constantly self-referential approach and his apparent lack of understanding of evangelicalism. Evangelicals stress a “personal conversion to Jesus” that makes winning new converts a huge priority. They generally teach substitutionary atonement, which makes the death of Christ the necessary consequence of all human sin. The blaming of Jews for the death of Christ, that Carroll rightly criticizes, should be irrelevant for evangelicals. If Carroll is really positing an analogy between evangelicalism in the US and the Inquisition or Nazism, that suggests a troubling lack of proportion. It also shuts down all possibilities of constructive dialogue between liberal and evangelical Christians.

Alliance with authority threatens pluralism when a church is dangerously and arrogantly convinced of its own absolute rightness. Rather, the fallibility of all historic expressions of religion needs to be recognized. Overall, Constantine’s Sword leaves a deeply depressing aftertaste, not least because Carroll himself seems so desperately sad.

Euan Cameron, Academic Dean and Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History, Union Theological Seminary
April 18, 2008