Sarah Posner is an investigative journalist and author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters. She blogs at Religion Dispatches.

Jesus is the star of the latest faith-based blockbuster movie, Son of God, but a new conservative hero may well break out of a smaller, independent film. Persecuted, which opens in theaters May 9, is a political thriller about an evangelist facing down a government threat to destroy religious freedom in America. In Son of God, the main character is divine; the Persecuted protagonist, the film’s producers suggest, could be you.

Persecuted screened this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C., and it couldn’t have found a more sympathetic audience. The tribulations of the evangelist, not so subtly named John Luther, seem calculated to capitalize on conservative claims that a tyrannical government is infringing on their religious freedom. The spreading legalization of same-sex marriage, the contraception coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act and other laws have convinced many religious conservatives that, as political strategist Ralph Reed told the CPAC crowd at another event, “Our freedom as Americans to practice our religious liberties and to express our faith in God is under assault as never before.”


If so, it’s under assault from within the right itself, as the film comes at a time when libertarian-leaning and younger conservatives are starting to make their peace with same-sex marriage. At one CPAC panel, Alexander McCobin, president of the libertarian group Students for Liberty, argued, “gay marriage is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.” A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fully half of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 33 favor same-sex marriage, compared with just 18 percent of Republicans over 68.

But religious liberty is one issue both social conservatives and libertarians can coalesce around. It lets each camp play into the other’s concerns by invoking a fear of government strong-arming its citizens, in this case by violating their religious conscience in making them comply with secular laws. In that sense, Persecuted is perfectly pitched to bring CPAC’s dominant wings together.

About 150 people attended the Friday-night screening, and responded eagerly to the producers’ plea to help them promote the film. Unlike Son of God, which debuted last weekend in 3,260 theaters across the country, grossing $26.5 million, Persecuted is very much a do-it-yourself affair. Without studio backing, the producers said, they need supporters to pre-purchase at least 500 tickets per city just to be able to fund a weeklong screening.

Daniel Lusko, the movie’s writer and director, told me he was an admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and aimed to emulate his work. But Persecuted is more like a made-for-TV melodrama than The Man Who Knew Too Much. It is rife with ham-fisted symbolism—Luther’s name is just one example—and plot twists that range from inexplicable to implausible. Imagine House of Cards for the religious set: that’s Persecuted.

The film opens with Luther (James Remar, who played the father of a serial killer on the Showtime drama Dexter) refusing a last-ditch effort of Senate Majority Leader Donald Harrison (Bruce Davison, best known for his role as Sen. Robert Kelly in the X-Men movies) to convince him to endorse the Faith and Fairness Act, a bill that would give “equal time” to all religions. “I cannot water down the gospel to advance anyone’s political agenda,” Luther tells Harrison in one of many robotic pronouncements.

Furious, the senator dispatches what later is revealed to be a Secret Service agent to drug Luther and frame him for the rape and murder of a 16 year-old girl. Emerging from his stupor the next morning on a rural roadside, Luther discovers a massive manhunt for him is underway. He spends the remainder of the film attempting to prove his innocence and evading the government’s efforts to assassinate him.

One of the film’s many duff notes involves Fred Thompson, the former senator and presidential candidate, who plays Dr. Charles Luther, John Luther’s father, a Catholic priest. Thompson’s grimly earnest Luther advises his son that he’s “just a pawn in a bigger game” and that he must “stand up against a cabal of phony politicians” who “can’t silence the truth.” How the protagonist, named for the founder of the Protestant Reformation, is the son of a Catholic priest, is never explained in the film. After Father Luther is executed by government agents, his evangelical son goes to his church, takes communion, enlists the help of one of the younger priests in his father’s parish and begins carrying a rosary.

Lusko explained the backstory in an interview: Father Luther had a family before becoming a priest, and father and son had been estranged until the younger Luther’s crisis. (In very rare instances, the Catholic Church has permitted ordination of priests who are married, but only when they were clergy in another denomination and chose to convert to Catholicism.) The father-son relationship, Lusko told me, “represented the schism between the Catholic and the evangelical church.” Lusko added that “under persecution,” these denominational differences disappear, as with the evangelical son and his Catholic father.

But it’s precisely the erasure of religious differences that lies at the heart of the diabolical government plot at the center of the story. Luther, the evangelist, runs a ministry called Truth. The government seeks, through the Faith and Fairness Act, to impose “equality for all faiths,” a concept presented darkly as the mysterious acronym SUMAC, with symbols nearly identical to a Unitarian Universalist “co-exist” bumper sticker.

After Luther’s disappearance, Truth’s rapacious board of directors, led by Luther’s double-crossing right-hand man, Ryan Morris (comedian Brad Stine) meets to decide whether to support the bill. After Morris tells them they will get tax breaks and earmarks (eliciting a knowing groan from the audience), they decide to support it. Gone are the Truth logos; they are replaced with SUMAC’s irreligious leaf motif.

In front of the SUMAC logo, Senator Harrison is shown telling an audience: “This is no longer a Christian nation! It never has been!”

After Luther returns from hiding to confront Harrison, the senator defends the bill as “the most crucial piece of legislation since the Bill of Rights.” He won’t have time for remedial civics class, though, as moments later he is gunned down by the same agent he ordered to frame Luther. But before he meets his end, he abruptly reveals the bill isn’t about religion at all, but about national security. If someone has a bomb hidden in a mosque or a temple, Harrison tells Luther, “I don’t have oversight!”

The majority leader still hates religion, though; when Luther protests, he snarls, “Stop with your Christian platitudes!”

The audience ate it up.

“Given our current administration,” said Avi Davis, president of the American Freedom Alliance, a Los Angeles think tank that “promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals,” the film could depict realistic events, a sentiment echoed by others in the crowd.

“Government has already overtaken freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the Second Amendment,” said Teresa Frerking, a CPAC attendee from Kentucky. “I have lost total faith in the government.”

“It was very credible in this day and age,” Marlene Curry, a CPAC attendee from Virginia, said. “I grew up in a country where government was restrained and represented the people. And of course that’s no longer the case.”

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Persecuted is very much the personal project of Daniel Lusko, the movie’s 30-year-old writer and director. Lusko grew up Christian, the son of a pastor, Chip Lusko, in Albuquerque, N.M. Interested in filmmaking as a teenager, Lusko attended the New York Film Academy at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, and then worked with his father’s production company.

Lusko told me he wrote the script five years ago, before many of the recent political battles with the Obama administration, but said the film’s themes of religious persecution were “timeless.” On his blog, Lusko’s father has praised his son’s perseverance in pursuing funding for the film. The elder Lusko also described the film’s prescience, as his son wrote it “before it was obvious the IRS, DOJ and other organized government arms were targeting people of faith.”

Lusko was a minor celebrity at CPAC, where he was also featured on a panel, “Not All Quiet on the Western Front: Conservatives Are Alive in Hollywood!” The film is being hailed in the Christian media as a wake-up call for Americans who think, in the words of Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, who plays a TV anchor in the film, that government persecution “would not happen here.”

Lusko’s previous credits include the 2007 documentary Epicenter, based on pundit Joel Rosenberg’s book, which described events in the Middle East as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy about the end-times. Persecuted was financed by an Overland Park, Kansas venture capitalist, Jerry Simmons, also the film’s executive producer. Simmons told the Deseret News he was persuaded to invest because he “loved” the script, and saw it as “an avenue to reach a lot of people.”

Lusko said he used the same film crew that had just wrapped the AMC series Breaking Bad, which, like Persecuted, was filmed on location in New Mexico. The cinematography indeed has echoes of Breaking Bad, particularly the use of time-lapse images. And shots of Luther at times evoke the itinerant and evasive anti-hero Walter White. But of course Luther isn’t breaking bad—he’s breaking for the Truth.

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The CPAC enthusiastic audience’s reaction to the film was clearly primed by the religious freedom wars conservatives have waged over the past decade or so, and which have accelerated since the election of Barack Obama.

In late 2011, for example, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops launched a new religious liberty drive. Timothy Dolan, then archbishop of New York and president of the bishops’ conference, told reporters, “We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,” and that “well-financed, well-oiled sectors” were attempting “to push religion back into the sacristy,” a reference to the closet used to store sacred vessels.

When the Obama administration declined to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act in court, Dolan said the inaction could “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.” (The Supreme Court later struck the law down.)

The final rule requiring employer-provided insuranceto cover contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act is being challenged in court as a violation of both non-profit organizations and for-profit companies’ religious freedom. Although Catholics were the first to object, evangelicals joined the fray. Later this month, the Supreme Court will hear challenges brought by the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby and a small cabinetmaker, Conestoga Wood.

Conservatives have championed these cases as epic confrontations to government infringement of religious freedom, and have characterized the stakes as dire.

In the latest example, in Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer recently vetoed a controversial religious freedom bill, angering conservatives who saw the measure as essential to protect the religious rights of business owners who decline to participate in same-sex weddings.

The Arizona bill and others like it have been fueled by conservative fears that the Supreme Court could invalidate bans on same-sex marriage, following its ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act last summer. Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, which lobbied for the bill, said it was needed because “hostility towards people of faith is very real,” driven by “the increasing use of government to threaten and punish its own citizens.”

But the bill’s opponents, a coalition of business and civil rights groups, persuaded Brewer to veto it, saying it would have permitted discrimination rooted in religion against LGBT people. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, which supported the bill, said after the veto that Brewer had “yielded to the cultural bullies and their frenzy-driven opposition instead of consulting the facts.”

From the CPAC podium, speaker after speaker hammered these themes. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 presidential candidate, said it is “prohibited for the government to dictate how much faith a person can have.” When a citizen’s faith conflicts with a law passed by the government, he added, “it’s time for government to scale back not for people of faith to scale back.”

Ralph Reed, who has aimed to form a coalition between the religious right and Tea Party conservatives through his Faith and Freedom Coalition, devoted his speech to religious freedom, painting it as the crucial issue of the 2014 and 2016 elections. There is a “war on religion and a war on religious values being waged by this administration and their radical allies,” he said, including an “outright hostility to the expression of faith in the public square.”

Reed called Attorney General Eric Holder’s February statement that state attorneys general did not have to defend discriminatory statutes, including same-sex marriage bans, a “brazen act of lawlessness.” He compared the Obama administration’s opposition to school vouchers to former Alabama Governor George Wallace’s efforts to thwart school desegregation.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, whose Friday afternoon speech drew a raucous and supportive crowd of what he called “the next generation of liberty lovers,” invoked the specter of a government that spies on its citizens and that “imprisons” them without trial. “Any group that has ever been persecuted,” he said, and “anyone who has sought to pray to God without permission should be alarmed that any government might presume to imprison without a trial.”

The promoters of Persecuted say fiction could help persuade people of what they claim are the realities of religious persecution. As Lusko put it, “If we can get the culture engaged on that level of entertainment, that’s where results will be.”