MAGA Christians unleash unintentionally hilarious Ben Franklin film

By Joseph-Siffred Duplessis - ZgEyj5EEKdux-g at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21880454

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect that the Val Kilmer play "Citizen Twain" was renamed "Cinema Twain" upon being released as a film.

In theory, “A Great Awakening” could have been a fascinating film. It depicts the real-life friendship between American founding father Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield, one of the founders of the evangelical movement. Franklin was a deist intellectually and a lapsed Puritan emotionally, while Whitefield was Calvinistic.

Yet “A Great Awakening” has no interest in exploring their relationship in any thoughtful or dramatically interesting way.

It’s easy to see why that happened. Despite focusing on religion, “A Great Awakening” is not a good faith movie, at least in the sense that it exists primarily to entertain, enlighten or in some other way enrich the lives of its audience. Director Joshua Enck and his co-writers Jeff Bender and Jonathan Blair, have created a bad faith film, a Trojan horse of Christian nationalist propaganda packed inside as a supposedly poignant tribute to two 18^th century luminaries. Blair also stars as Whitefield, and the film’s lone virtue is that his performance is so horrible, it becomes unintentionally hilarious (more on that later). Blair’s costar John Paul Sneed, a longtime veteran of Christian Right schlock, plays Benjamin Franklin with such blandness that I laughed when my autocorrect tried to change his surname to “Snooze.” Sneed could learn a lot from cinema’s greatest Franklin, Howard Da Silva in “1776.”

The propaganda behind “A Great Awakening.”

The movie’s central plot is the claim that George Whitefield inspired Benjamin Franklin to support human equality; for this reason, I cannot talk about it with any semblance of intellectual honesty and not dive into the story. While Franklin did ask the 1787 Constitutional Convention to open its daily sessions with prayer, he was not particularly religious and seems to have done so because — like millions of Americans today — he could simultaneously want to be on God’s good side without also being a theocrat. Yet the movie draws from a controversial account by a man named William Steele, written almost 40 years after the event occurred and relying entirely on Steele’s unverified second hand recollections supposedly relayed by New Jersey delegate Jonathan Dayton. Steele was later contradicted by Virginia delegate, future president and the Constitutional equivalent of influencer James Madison, who recalled that Franklin, who represented Pennsylvania (where much of the movie is set), had not asked for that prayer in quite the dramatic fashion that Steele relayed. Madison was confident that Franklin’s “proposition was received and treated with the respect due to it; but the lapse of time which had preceded, with consternations growing out of it, had the effect of limiting what was done, to a reference of the proposition to a highly respectable Committee.”

Madison added, “That the communication [Steele’s account of Dayton’s testimony] was erroneous is certain; whether from misapprehension or mis-recollection, uncertain.”

"We know little of relevance about either William Steele or Jonathan Steele,” scholar Louis J. Sirico, Jr., wrote in 2018 (Benjamin Franklin, Prayer, and the Constitutional Convention: History as Narrative, 10 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric 89 (2013)). “We know that William Steele was a Revolutionary War veteran who was born in New York, lived in New Jersey, married Mary Dayton, possibly a relative of Jonathan Dayton, and moved to upstate New York. He was an active Presbyterian and often wrote poetry for his family. Jonathan D. Steele became a wealthy businessman and served as president of the Niagara Fire Insurance Company."

Sirico added, “Nothing in the available historical record offers any insight into the genesis of the false narrative.”

Sirico is not the lone voice casting doubt on the credibility of the Steele account. John Fea, Professor of American History and Chair of the History Department at a private Pennsylvania Christian college called Messiah, wrote for Commonwealth Magazine in 2024 that “the Awakening had nothing to do with the American Revolution (and, in fact, may never have happened in the first place),” and that indeed there is a “twenty-five-year gap between the First Great Awakening and the Revolutionary Era.” He concluded that a 1981 thesis by historian Jon Butler disproving any link between the two events (to the extent that the former occurred at all beyond a few local incidents) was “groundbreaking and convincing.”

Yet with powerful Christian nationalists like informal President Trump adviser Steve Bannon and longtime theocrat David Barton spreading the lie that the Great Awakening inspired the American Revolution, “A Great Awakening” is guaranteed a built-in audience, especially with it being distributed by a mainstream studio like Roadside Attractions.

Which brings us back to the movie on screen.

Christian Right movies are notoriously second-rate.

The only people who enjoy these movies are either those who deliberately dull their tastes to insensitive nubs in order to “own the libs” or those who enjoy laughing (often with gallows humor) at the fact that these movies exist at all. The most notable entries in the genre include “Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas,” “War Room” and the five “God’s Not Dead” movies. None of them amount to much as serious or even unironically funny films, but like “A Great Awakening,” each is rip-roaringly hysterical if you have a taste for the specific type of cheese produced by these particularly talentless people.

“A Great Awakening” has plenty such moments, at least when Blair is gnashing his teeth, contorting his face and otherwise mugging as the most unlikeable and histrionic Whitefield ever performed by an actor. There is a maudlin scene of foot washing in which Blair and an extra seem to compete to overact, a narcissistic so-called “self doubt” set piece that had me agreeing with a John Wesley put-down and several blatant uses of African Americans as props, even though Whitefield in real life had a very complicated relationship with race. My favorite moment was when Blair’s Whitefield insults the clerical establishment in a scene intended to come across as free-thinking but instead seems needlessly rude. He is given a command that he may no longer “preach inside.” With a look of triumph he declares, “Then I will preach outside!”

I try to be polite during movies, but at that moment I couldn’t stop myself from guffawing so loudly my voice literally reverberated against the auditorium walls. Where else is he going to go? Fortunately, the theater was empty except for me, so I wasn’t technically rude.

Yet I don’t think those theaters will remain empty (I was at an early morning screening and paid because it is the film critic’s tax, so to speak), as much as I hope my cynicism is misplaced. I’ve seen advertisements for “A Great Awakening” everywhere, and if you go to my earlier list of Christian Right films that normal people laugh at, you’ll see that several of them were box office successes. The audience for these films are not the early 21^st century equivalents of Franklin or Whitefield or either man’s many contemporary followers in the 18^th century, but rather of the people from that era too mediocre to be remembered. The individuals who earnestly support “A Great Awakening” or any similar slop films own themselves as the world laughs that such insipid material can economically support itself at all. Unfortunately, because they believe they're owning their ideological opponents, millions of such mediocrities are out there, happy to part with their money to prove a point.

The sad thing is, as I mentioned earlier, it didn't have to be this way. I think back to "Cinema Twain," an obscure play-turned-movie directed, written by and starring Val Kilmer as an American secularist as iconic as Benjamin Franklin, author Mark Twain. The 19th/early 20th century novelist had a respectful-yet-critical epistolary relationship with Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. Kilmer (who busted my balls when he saw there was a journalist in the audience) did a poignant job of vividly bringing to life both the brilliant personalities and the sharply different ideas of his two central figures. Kilmer's passion project, which sadly was never adapted into a film, moved me because it came from a place of authentic curiosity and was executed with talent. By contrast, "A Great Awakening" strives only to manipulate, and it does so ineptly.

Like all movies made by the Christian Right that intend to proselytize, “A Great Awakening” is full of lazy exposition, flat dialogue and cringey pandering to reactionary self-glorification. This movie is so dumb that it has the gall to insert in one character’s mouth the line “How long will you hide behind your wit?”, as if any substantial amount of that precious commodity exists in this motion picture.

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