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If I recall correctly, this is how the saying goes ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ and his wonders are very profound. Sam Childers, a Pennsylvania ex con, drug addict and thief turned humanitarian is nothing short of a miracle. In 1998, he started leading crusades to provide help for underprivileged children from South Sudan. To me, he’s best known as the ‘Machine Gun Preacher’ because of his superb violence and warlike eccentricity. But there is much deeper to him than this.
The news paints us a clear picture of Sudan and most of us already have a concrete stance on the violence that transpires in the region. Joseph Kony, a warlord in Africa lives in pure carnage. The self-proclaimed ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’ has almost single-handedly killed hundreds of thousands, torched entire villages, kidnapped girls to make them sex slaves and HIV-positive boys to turn them into soldiers. He is truly an evil person who deserves to be bombed, right alongside Gaddafi.
The film starts off in Pennsylvania where we are introduced to Childers (Gerard Butler) and his friend Donnie (the always memorable Michael Shannon), who spends his time drinking, doing drugs, and causing trouble which negatively impacts his wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) and daughter. While Childers was in prison, Lynn found God. One Sunday morning after a night of violence, Sam goes to church and confesses his sins followed by a baptism of full immersion.
Sam eventually hears a sermon from a Sudan missionary talking about the suffering of orphans. This motivates him to go to Africa and see how he can help. As I have pointed out before, there is a lot. He constructs an orphanage and starts helping out, but it isn’t until he goes back home that he becomes driven.
Deplorable as the situation is, Childers goes back to the instincts of his violent self and starts to battle the Lord’s Resistance Army as a commander in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Therefore that is why the movie is titled the way it is. Childers is, however, not the first one to take up arms in the name of the Almighty.
The heart of the movie’s enigma is the nature of his authentic religiosity. He’s a born-again Christian, yes, but he appears to be, aside from that, pretty much the same. He continues living out his drives and impulses, and still, if one gets down to it, allows himself to break whatever laws there are in Sudan. I get from Brett Keller’s article at Foreign Policy that as Childers was fundraising in the United States, Sudan’s People Liberation Army issued a statement saying, “The SPLA does not know Sam Childers. We are appealing to those concerned to take legal measures against him for misusing the name of an organization which he is not associated with.”
There’s even more about “his narcissistic model of armed humanitarianism,” which is the term that describes, at least in part, what has bothered me. It’s perplexing, though. He seems motivated by rage and his ego more than anything else, spirituality and family being left behind so he can go off and “play” with his guns. Nonetheless, it is fascinating how Butler gets us to sympathize with the character to such a degree.
Marc Forster (“Monster’s Ball“) directed this film based on a script by Jason Keller that, while effective in some scenes, lacks a degree of cohesion in its overarching message. Given that a lot of the violence in Northern Uganda and South Sudan is motivated by sectarian and tribal hatred, I’m not sure shooting back serves as a solution, especially from a self-styled white saviour from the West.
Sam Childers armed with a machine gun and ammunition belt is reminiscent of that guy in OʾRourke’s who, during one of the nights, brandished a handgun for my friend McHugh.
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