As I stepped into the lobby of Denver\u2019s Esquire Theater<\/a> last weekend, I overheard a couple of middle-aged women talking about the movie I was going to see, Vera Farmiga<\/a>\u2019s directorial debut, Higher Ground<\/a><\/em>. One of the ladies was fuming: \u201cI almost walked out after the first 20 minutes. I couldn\u2019t believe all that Jesus stuff. Why did they need to do all that?\u201d Her interlocutor\u2014a stranger to her, I gathered\u2014answered that, well, the Jesus stuff is precisely what the movie is about: \u201cThat\u2019s fundamentalist Christianity,\u201d she said. \u201cI was raised that way. The movie does a good job of showing what that world is like.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I\u2019m a Jew,\u201d responded the first woman. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like that, and I didn\u2019t like it. At all.\u201d<\/p>\n On my way out of the theater a couple hours later, my wife and I\u2014both raised in conservative evangelical homes\u2014had a very similar conversation. I was touched, even bowled over, by Farmiga\u2019s film about a young woman who finds faith in Jesus, experiences deep personal renewal, and then slowly, painfully questions everything she\u2019s believed and the community she\u2019s believed it with. I saw the world I had known writ large and alive. Many scenes felt like explicit pictures of my past. I\u2019ve said the things Farmiga\u2019s character says. I\u2019ve believed what she believed and questioned what she\u2019s questioned. Good on Farmiga, I thought, for getting so much right, and for doing the extremely difficult work of describing a world not your own.<\/p>\n But my wife was frustrated. The film felt false to her, a total misfire. She didn\u2019t recognize at all the world Farmiga renders in Higher Ground<\/em>\u2014didn\u2019t recognize it as her own, and didn\u2019t recognize it as a Christianity that actually exists.<\/p>\n What gives?<\/p>\n Religion is expressed in cultures, with an emphasis on the plural. Even a category that is contained by a string of modifiers\u2014contemporary American fundamentalist evangelical Christianity\u2014is too broad a category to describe any particular culture, because culture is local, layered, and idiosyncratic. Higher Ground<\/em> captures just one strain of evangelicalism, and it\u2019s a particularly fundamentalist strain, particular in the way its language is inflected with the Bible, in the way it prays, in the way it understands life\u2019s tragedies and triumphs. But it\u2019s a real strain, one with which I identified as a teenager. And it\u2019s one that still exists\u2014though Farmiga\u2019s film, which is based on Carolyn S. Brigg\u2019s memoir, is a period piece set mostly in the 1970s and 1980s among the hippie-esque Jesus Movement, it captures a movement whose legacy lingers. Cultural forms diversify and change, but they also permeate boundaries of time and space.<\/p>\n Farmiga\u2019s film opens with a close-up of a man named Ethan (Joshua Leonard) as he testifies (in the technical sense<\/a>) to the work of Jesus in his life. Ethan, we soon learn, is husband to Corrine, played by Farmiga, and the two are new Christian converts, flush with faith and the renewal it has brought their lives. A long flashback section shows us how Corrine prayed the Sinner\u2019s Prayer as a child but didn\u2019t really find a faith of her own until, as a teenager, she got pregnant with Ethan, married, and discovered that their lives of drugs and rock n\u2019 roll couldn\u2019t sustain and nurture a young family. To Jesus they turned.<\/p>\n For a while, the turning was an entry into a fun, strong, lively communal life, one that helped them make sense of the world and find peace for their souls. But over time, Corrine begins to question her faith. We learn, along with her, that her church is stridently conservative\u2014too patriarchal in its family and church life, too literalistic in its approach to Scripture, too limiting in its dealings with the outside world (which, for them, barely exists at all). Corrine bumps up against her culture again and again, especially after tragedy strikes her best friend and she learns that her church\u2019s grasp of theology has too little counsel for those who suffer.<\/p>\n Many of the themes that circle around this story transcend cultural settings. Believers and non-believers of all types might relate to many of these very human moments. But to her great credit as a storyteller, Farmiga emphasizes the details of Corrine\u2019s\u2014and presumably, Carolyn S. Briggs\u2019\u2014specific Christian culture. The film gets just right the way a Christian group emphasizes certain Bible verses over others, the way singing praise choruses constitutes \u201cworship,\u201d the way a pastor can establish a quiet but implacable authority, and the way strict spirituality can be leavened by playful sexuality. I\u2019ve experienced several of these subtle cultural expressions, yet rarely seen them represented in fiction in a way I could recognize. Higher Ground <\/em>nails all this and more.<\/p>\n Critics seem split on Higher Ground<\/em>, and I\u2019ve noted that critics who admire it seem to recognize that the film is set in a particular culture, and critics who don\u2019t see it as standing for the whole of (something they might call) Christian Fundamentalism. So New York Magazine<\/em>\u2019s David Edelstein writes<\/a> that Corrine and Ethan \u201cjoin an evangelical church of scruffy, folk-music types\u2014it\u2019s the seventies\u2014who believe the Lord also \u2018writes his gospel in the rocks and trees\u2019\u201d; he clearly recognizes that Farmiga is exploring something unique. (He also calls the group an \u201corder,\u201d which is too high-church for these freewheeling, self-styling Protestants.) Likewise, Chicago Tribune<\/em>\u2019s Michael Philips writes<\/a> that Farmiga\u2019s film is about a \u201ctiny, fairly radical fundamentalist Christian sect in Iowa.\u201d Those kinds of modifiers\u2014tiny, radical\u2014matter. They acknowledge that the religious group in Higher Ground <\/em>is but one group, and its particularities are what make it what it is.<\/p>\n