To watch the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, you'd think it was directed by a (very gifted) drunk, inbred banjo-picker with only the Holy Spirit for bridgework, but in reality Andrew Douglas is a young, well-spoken Englishman who just read a lot of Flannery O'Connor.
The people in the movie are wild, tattooed, and in several cases incarcerated, but Doulgas puts his finger on why none of that matters:
Some of the prisoners were very, very articulate. There's one man who says very poignantly, "I don't know what happened, when you're a kid you just kind of dive in. When you get older you can't seem to go in the water so well". He's not really talking about jail; he's talking about life. It has a great kind of beauty and sadness to it, I think. Another guy really nails the main themes of the film, saying, "When you're young, you're either in the bars or you're in the church. There's no middle ground".These people, whether they're Jesus-crazy or plain crazy, are less decadent than your average disincarnate Yankee. Might not be that all of them get saved, but at least it's something they think about from time to time.
The interesting thing is that here are people who are poor, under-privileged and often ill-educated, people who because they live in a culture that is so dense and saturated with Jesus, redemption and sin, have a kind of articulacy that the equivalent people back in England wouldn't have because they don't think about the world in such a consequential way. That's what makes a culture that on the surface looks rough and thin and under-privileged and bigoted, increasingly look rich and dense and textured to us. [...] All we do back home in our secular world is fight about football.
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