Documentary Alert!

If you get HBO, you should tape this for me. (My boss said she'd try, but it will all depend on whether or not she can figure out her VCR/DVR/Tivo.)

Man, I've got to quit sounding like such a tree-hugger Californian on my blog, or people will start thinking I eat tofu and brown rice for lunch. Oh wait. . .I do eat tofu and brown rice for lunch.


A Culture of Faith, Devoted Yet Complex
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

There is a God, and he punishes those who overreach on television.

Until he was removed from his ministry last November for “sexually immoral conduct” (he was accused of having sex with a male prostitute and buying illegal drugs), the Rev. Ted Haggard was the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and one of the most prominent spokesmen for the Christian right.

“You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group,” Mr. Haggard waggishly told a documentary filmmaker a few months before his secret came out. On “Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi,” which will be shown tonight on HBO, Mr. Haggard coaxes a member of his congregation to say how often he has sex with his wife (“Every day. Twice a day.”) and how often she climaxes (“Every time”).

You could almost see the wrathful lightning bolt striking down from the heavens.

The Bible Belt is the Loire Valley of American extremism — visitors glide across vast highways in the South and West to marvel at the revivalist megachurches and “Honk for Jesus” road signs with the giddy awe of tourists exploring an alien civilization. And like Chenonceau or the vineyards of Sancerre, Christian evangelical churches rarely disappoint.

In his hit comedy, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen already proved how open and trusting born-again believers can be in front of a television camera. Posing as a naïve journalist from Kazakhstan, Mr. Cohen was welcomed at a Pentecostal meeting where worshipers spoke in tongues and helped him accept Jesus as his savior.

The French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy took a more self-serious tour of evangelical Christianity when he retraveled the road taken by Alexis de Tocqueville in his study of the modern American psyche, “American Vertigo.” (Mr. Lévy found New World religiosity a little less admirable than his predecessor did.)

“Friends of God” is not intended as a satire or even an exposé; Mr. Haggard’s fall from grace occurred after the filming was complete and is summed up in a postscript.

The documentary is a good-natured travelogue: it glances on the more intolerant and grotesque manifestations of Christian fundamentalism and also the faith’s vast following and political clout. Ms. Pelosi’s film doesn’t go deep; it doesn’t even explore why so many televangelists seem to follow the trajectory of Elmer Gantry. But it doesn’t snicker. “Friends of God” serves as a breezy, colorful reminder of how George W. Bush became president, why Fox News has the highest ratings of any 24-hour cable news network and why Democrats didn’t win an even greater landslide in the 2006 elections.

Ms. Pelosi is the daughter of the newly elected House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and this is her third HBO film, and the one furthest afield from her natural habitats of Washington, New York and San Francisco. The first documentary, “Journeys With George,” was a mischievous, camcorder-look inside the world of the presidential campaign. (Ms. Pelosi was an NBC News producer on Mr. Bush’s press plane.) Her second, “Diary of a Political Tourist,” a smart-alecky, first-person tour of the Democratic primary process, was less winning.

Ms. Pelosi stays off camera and out of the way in “Friends of God,” and we only occasionally hear her voice. “So explain to me the concept of this Biblical mini golf,” the filmmaker says to a man who putts on a paper-and-glue parted Red Sea. (The ninth hole is a papier-mâché miniature of the Holy Sepulchre.)

Mostly, Ms. Pelosi lets pastors, creationism teachers, Christian stand-up comics and rockers and the founder of the Christian Wrestling Federation speak for themselves.

“So we do have a public relations problem; we always have — they killed Jesus if you’ll recall,” Mr. Haggard tells her. “And the church has always had this problem because we are the ones with the role to say, ‘There is a moral plumb line, and we need to rise up to it.’ ” At this point, the disgraced minister seems almost to foreshadow his own fate.

“And that’s also why secular people are so concerned when the church doesn’t fulfill its own moral standard,” he said. “Like if a pastor falls into corruption or becomes dishonest or greedy: it’s heartbreaking because even secular people want godly people to be authentically godly.”

FRIENDS OF GOD

A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi

HBO, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Written, directed and produced by Alexandra Pelosi; Lisa Heller, supervising producer; Sheila Nevins, executive producer