The Lord Is Not on Trial Here Today

“Sometimes our culture picks on the wrong person at the wrong time,” says then-92-year-old nonbeliever Vashti McCollum (1912-2006), whose heroic stand against small-town religious persecution in the 1940s is aptly recorded in this powerful documentary. McCollum's bold activist efforts involved suing the local board of education in 1945 for forcing Christianity and daily prayer on her children in public school. Combining voiceover narration by David Ogden Stiers, archival stills and footage, and commentary from legal scholars and others, writer-director Jay Rosenstein's The Lord Is Not on Trial Here Today plants the viewer in the WWII/Cold War–era Midwest; specifically, the college community of Urbana-Champaign, where McCollum and her atheist husband taught at the University of Illinois. This PBS-aired film offers an empathetic portrait of McCollum herself; but its account of the trial, media coverage, and larger context come together to create a disturbing portrait of mid-20th-century middle America, which in some ways still resembled Puritan-era New England: there was simply no freedom from religion—which was synonymous with Christianity. Once McCollum's lawsuit went public, she and her family received death threats and hate mail and were branded as dangerous subversives. Although McCollum lost her case locally, she was vindicated by the Supreme Court, where justice Hugo Black made the famous First Amendment ruling that sought to “erect a wall” between church and state. A remarkable story of how one citizen's courage and idealism profoundly affected a nation's future, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Sandlin)