J.E.S.U.S.A.
Kevin Miller, Writer/Director/Editor
Hat Rock Capital LLC and Kevin Miller XI Productions Inc., 2020

I’ve watched Kevin Miller’s documentary J.E.S.U.S.A. twice now. The first time made an immediate impact on me, but the second time made me want to watch it a third time. Multiple views are needed to absorb, internalize, and process its rich content and dueling expressions of ugliness and beauty. Impressive in his dialectical interplay of complementary and expanding ideas, Miller has created a thoughtful, sometimes distressing, utterly engaging visual triumph that I’ve always wanted to see but could never find.

About the first half of this gem of a documentary explores the pervasive American Christian fixation on violence and militarism cloaked in an insular nationalism, but then gradually deploys this unfortunate pathology as a case study of a much broader exploration into dehumanizing, othering, mimesis, and scapegoating in our conscious or unconscious attempts to ignore commandments of Jesus that He meant for us to take seriously. As David Bentley Hart remarks in the film, we’ve “been inoculated against the Gospel” — given just enough to make us immune to the fulness of the Christian faith that includes nonviolence.