Charleston-area filmmaker Matthew Pridgen recently released a jarring documentary that calls on White Christians to examine how America’s racist religious, economic and political systems helped Donald Trump win two presidential elections.
Pridgen’s full-length documentary, Sins of Our Fathers, is a graphic timeline that combines the hate speech of segregationists with the brutality of slavery through a violent Jim Crow era up to the nine murders at Emanuel AME Church by a White gunman who wanted to start a race war.
The film is not intended for Black audiences, said Pridgen, whose upbringing in a conservative White family in Charleston’s affluent South of Broad neighborhood shaped his initial views on race, religion and politics.
Instead, he and his co-producer, the film’s director Joey Papa, made the documentary for White Christians to show how their overwhelming support for Trump is rooted in the nation’s original sin of slavery.
Pridgen narrates the film on camera, but he intended not to be in it. He realized the story he wanted to tell was also his story as an evangelical Christian and former lifelong Republican who voted for Trump in 2016.
Many evangelical Christians are trapped, he warned, in an ideological bubble that forces them to vote against their self-interests. The film challenges people of faith and conscience to see America’s past and present through a new lens.
“Telling my story is a bridge because white conservatives don’t listen to outside groups,” he said. “I was in the bubble, and I came out of the bubble. Let’s look at the bubble, and let’s pop the bubble and move on (to) overcome our inherent biases and form a more perfect union,” he said.
Tried to kill himself
The film currently is showing on Amazon Prime. Pridgen and Papa said they hope to organize screenings in Atlanta and Charleston, where the film is set and has repeated references to the Holy City and images of local church steeples.
In the film, Pridgen reveals his unintentional path to Christianity, which he said nearly cost him his life.
As a rising senior majoring in economics at Duke University, Pridgen said he was an atheist drug addict who took a variety of illegal substances nearly daily. A drug dealer once warned him about his excessive addiction.
At sunrise on May 29, 2005, a delusional Pridgen evaded a police officer at the Folly Beach County Park and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on the outgoing tide. He planned to swim out in the ocean as far as he could so if he wanted to abandon his suicidal mission it would be too late to return to land.
He said was high on LSD. But then he sobered up to realize his peril.
“I am going to die out here,” he recalled saying to himself. “That is when I gave my life to Jesus, and God gave me the strength to keep going. He saved me for a purpose. It is a miracle for me to survive for 18 hours in the ocean.” He came ashore at Kiawah Island.
Life with a purpose
Pridgen and his wife, Nicole Pridgen, started a youth mentorship program on Charleston’s Eastside, an area he had avoided because of its perceived dangers. As he ministered in the community, Pridgen started to see how race is used to manipulate people. “Although I was hesitant about Trump, I felt I couldn’t vote against the abortion issue,” he said.
“One of the myths we (as White people) tell ourselves is that these poor Black people are poor because they are lazy, they are on welfare or they are drug dealers or whatever,” he said.
As he became familiar with the Eastside and its residents, Pridgen said he saw the “dark history of the political movement I once supported.”
That sentiment led Pridgen to “unravel how the modern Republican Party has pulled on those racial fears (that supported) Trump’s rise to power on a very racial platform,” he said.
A different life experience
Unlike Pridgen, Papa grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood in New Jersey near New York City. Producing the documentary educated him about racial issues in America, said Papa, who now lives in Tampa. “I had knowledge of (segregation and Jim Crow laws), but I had never gone deep into it.”
While editing the film, Papa became emotionally overwhelmed by the images of lynchings and other violence directed at people of African descent, he said.
“There were many, many times I had to stop and cry and grieve and pray,” he said. “The atrocities are so horrific. I never thought it was that. In my mind it was segregation. Two different sides of the waiting room, but not the lynchings.”
Pridgen said he still identifies as an evangelical Christian – even though the religious term has been corrupted by politics.
“My heartbeat is to share the gospel, and I certainly have always identified that way, but I don’t identify with what most evangelicals do. I hate to see that they’ve hijacked the term to make it a political movement.”
Editor’s Note: Herb Frazier, the Charleston City Paper’s senior editor, is featured in Sins of Our Fathers.
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