Dateline Pasadena: Journeys with Ted; or, how a meth-buying, male-hooker-loving ex-pastor helped Alexandra Pelosi make a better film about evangelicals

When Alexandra Pelosi delivered her documentary “Friends of God” to HBO last October, after spending a year and a half traveling and filming along America's evangelical backbone, she could not have foreseen two things.

  One was that her mother, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, would become the first female Speaker of the House, though by then it was looking like a good bet. The other, which came out of the blue, was that one of her closest allies through the process, the Rev. Ted Haggard, would resign his pastorate and his leadership of a major evangelical group over a sex scandal in November.

  The result, ironically enough, is that when HBO airs “Friends of God” on Jan. 25, Pelosi will be a bigger factor in the film than she ever imagined. Ironic, because compared to her two previous HBO documentaries — including her breakthrough “Journeys with George,” filmed aboard the Bush campaign jet in 2000 — “Friends of God” has the fewest number of on-camera intrusions by its filmmaker.

  That was the intent at least, said Pelosi when she appeared before TV critics at their winter press tour last week.

  “I wasn't trying to make an egomentary,” she said. “I was trying to make it about this movement in America, which is between 50 and 80 million people. I'm not an evangelical Christian, so I didn't think it was appropriate to insert myself in it.”

  But she acknowledged that the two backstories to the film will cause some people to accuse her of maligning evangelicals by making Haggard so prominent in “Friends of God.”

  In her defense, Pelosi said she was due with a baby in November, and was under orders from HBO's docuqueen, Sheila Nevins, to “deliver the movie before you deliver the baby.”

  Besides, it's hard to see how “Friends of God” could have survived if Haggard was sliced out of it. As president of the 30-million-member-strong National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of a sprawling megachurch in Colorado (he was also featured in the A&E film “Jesus Camp,” which was partially shot in Lee's Summit), Haggard proved a helpful guide, both on-camera and off, to the secularized, urbanized Catholic Democrat as she began her explorations of the praise-Jesus crowd.

  If “Friends of God” is able to overcome the doubters and become a useful document of today's Bible Belt, much of the credit must go to Haggard. Pelosi said he took her into his family and on trips through the evangelical world; opened doors to Jerry Falwell, who allowed her to film inside his Thomas Road Baptist Church; and turned her on to subculture phenomena like Christian wrestling, which looks just like the blood-and-guts version on cable TV, except there's an altar call at the end.

  Unfortunately, Haggard also provided what, in hindsight, will surely be the film's touchstone moment. Standing outside church, he tells Pelosi's camera that surveys have found evangelicals enjoy the best sex lives. Without warning, he turns to a couple of men standing nearby and asks them, “How many times a week do you have sex with your wife?” and, “How many times does she climax?”

  As weird as this exchange is — and despite the fact that Haggard is clearly overcompensating for his own inability to find satisfaction in heterosexual relations — the testimony of the other men seems genuine, and the scene helps give “Friends of God” an authenticity that it might not have had were it edited by a born-again believer.

For instance, Larry Poland, an evangelical who consulted Pelosi and HBO, told the TV critics he wasn't entirely happy with the film. But then, “the film I'd have made wouldn't have been interesting and fascinating,” Poland added.

OK, what about Mom? What does she think of her daughter's film coming out now?

“She leaves my work alone,” said Pelosi, who also authored a book last year called Sneaking Into the Flying Circus: How the Media Turn Our Presidential Campaigns into Freak Shows.

“People are always surprised when they come to eat dinner at my house because they are always expecting to have these heated discussions about politics. But when we get home, everybody is trying to unplug. Since I just had a baby, we really talk about baby feedings and diapers and lactating … stuff you gentlemen wouldn't want to hear about.”