I felt at once compelled and really put off by A Faith Under Siege. It took me until about halfway through the documentary to realize that I was very much not among its target audience. Disseminating a pro-Ukraine message through appealing to Christianity while also directly criticizing Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Margorie Taylor Greene, the documentary seems best suited for a conservative Christian (male) who watches Fox News uncritically and opposes American spending on Ukraine (I say male audience given that the documentary’s protagonists were all men and its interviewees were also almost exclusively male). Someone who might be susceptible to Christian’s evaluation of Tucker Carlson: favorable,“except that he has got some things that aren’t true.”
As a result, although the spontaneous prayer circles that the protagonists convened or the talk about demons in Ukraine were jarring to me, I could see them being a way to build trust or credibility among this audience. The film introduces us to the protagonists themselves only very briefly, mentioning their faith and a little bit about their background before throwing us into Ukraine with them: this background could be sufficiently relatable (or at least more relatable) to Christians of similar backgrounds, but I struggled to resonate with their stories given my own background—and the sparse details they presented didn’t help with that. One of the “protagonists” was a man from an idyllic ski town in Colorado about whom we know virtually nothing except that he felt a religious calling to go to Ukraine. Aside from not feeling too invested in his emotional transformation with these sparse details with which I didn’t connect much, his story also made me question how he got involved in the project in the first place, which threw me out of the story a little bit. Yet I could see this documentary having a pretty forceful impact on a conservative Christian who doesn’t know much about Ukraine. The Colorado character’s speech to his congregation toward the end of the documentary seemed to also be directed at the documentary viewer themself: its intended audience may find the argument more persuasive by imaging themself among the congregation to whom he spoke.
Furthermore, I finished the film unsatisfied with some of the simplified narratives that the documentary crafted. On the one hand, the statement that “This is good versus evil. There’s not a grey area here” feels accurate for the most part, but on the other hand, presenting one side as good merely because the other seems evil can hide important nuances (e.g. stories of traumatized Ukrainian soldiers returning home and becoming domestic abusers, etc.). Apart from this good-evil dualism, some other narratives made me want to do more digging. For example, the film stated that Russia’s population decline was the only factor behind it abducting Ukrainian children. Evidence does seem to support this being a major rationale, but other such reasons include using abducted children as bargaining chips and as propaganda for the war effort (which the film did successfully demonstrate). At the same time, given the documentary’s statement that the cause of declining birth rates was because so many pregnancies ended in abortion, and given the fact that the number of abducted children pales in comparison to the annual birth rate of the country, I wonder to what extent the prominence of the birth rate explanation correlates to an implicit anti-abortion message (again, this would probably be evidence that a conservative Christian audience could get behind).
