“I wanted to know why the gospel of love was dividing America, and if I was going to find an answer, I would have to do more listening than talking… but first I had to get people to talk,” says Dan Merchant in his book Lord Save Us From Your Followers: Why is the Gospel of Love Dividing Society? The book goes on to describe how Dan made a costume consisting of a painter’s jumpsuit covered in bumper stickers expressing various religious and political viewpoints, then went out to engage in conversation with people in public places around America.
Dan’s adventures, which subsequently became the subject of a film with the same title as the book, include interviewing Tony Campolo, Al Franken (a former writer and producer of the US TV show Saturday Night Live), Senator Rick Santorum, Michael Reagan (son of the former US president Ronald Reagan), Sister Mary Timothy (a well-known San Francisco identity and gay activist), and a host of others.
The book includes a 12-page comic book interlude, a set of instructions for making your own bumper sticker suit, and a bumper sticker quiz. One of the most interesting chapters describes how Dan set up a confessional booth — along the lines of the one described in Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz — at the Gay Pride Northwest festivities in Portland Oregon, and spent a day apologising to gays for the ways Christians have treated them. The book makes an interesting contribution to the subject of politics and the church in the US, but the film is probably more compelling.