Norman Lear, who died on Dec. 5 at age 101, reportedly created some 100 television shows but is perhaps best known for All in the Family, which ran on CBS from 1971 to 1979. The cast’s Michael Stivik, played by Rob Reiner, is now producer of the forthcoming God & Country. According to one review, it is about “the threat of a movement that infuses Christian dogma with far-right politics,” also known as “Christian nationalism.”

As Mark Tapson explains, it’s all about “the specter of a fundamentalist theocracy on the rise. They envision America becoming a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia in which white male Christian mullahs hang homosexuals and imprison women for seeking abortions. The left’s vision of the separation of church and state, therefore, is one in which Christian patriots and their values are best excluded from the halls of government power entirely.” And so on.

This film derives from a tradition showcased by Lear but going back much further. As All in the Family was winding down, on the rise as presidential candidate was Ronald Reagan, loathed by the entertainment establishment but not for his movies or Death Valley Days. This hatred went all the way back to the 1930s when the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union, held so much sway in the dream factories that Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) called it the only game in town.

In the aftermath of World War II, a Communist power grab erupted into outright warfare at every major studio. It’s a complex tale that shows up in Peter Collier’s recent novel Things in Glocca Morra, and told at length in this writer’s Hollywood Party.

Reagan fought the Party in the so-called talent guilds while fellow New Deal Democrat, Roy Brewer, battled the Communists in the back-lot unions. Together they ran the CPUSA out of town and the screen Stalinists never forgave them. Their heirs in film and television began to work a leftist agenda into film and television.

The cartoonish Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O’Connor, was the caricature for conservatives and Reiner’s Michael Stivik the mouthpiece for liberalism, but it wasn’t limited to comedy. As Ben Stein noted in The View From Sunset Boulevard, and Michael Pack in Hollywood’s Favorite Heavy, the stock heavies were businessmen, military, and patriotic types. This was the prevailing view when Reagan ran for president in 1980.

By that time, many Christians had left the sidelines and entered politics in force. After the disastrous Jimmy Carter, they threw support to Reagan. That infuriated the Hollywood left, which charged that Christians had little if any place in public life and politics, an exclusionist view at odds with the Constitution and American history. As the late Richard John Neuhaus (The Naked Public Square) noted, if not for Christians there would have been none of the things liberals actually celebrated about America: no anti-slavery movement, no women’s suffrage movement, and no civil-rights movement.

Conservative Christians exercising their constitutional rights were smeared as the “religious right,” reminiscent of “the rise of Nazi Germany” and so forth. Lear also launched People for the American Way, wrapping his bigotries in populist pieties, a long tradition on the left. The group demonized Reagan and his Supreme Court picks such as Robert Bork.

Lear’s group produced a television ad narrated by Gregory Peck and packed with false charges against the judge. With his new film, Rob Reiner has picked up Lear’s torch, and he’s “all in the family” in another sense.

Rob Reiner is the son of comedian and television writer Carl Reiner, who played Al Brady on The Dick Van Dyke Show, launched in 1961. Rob Reiner is talented, but he probably would not have landed the sitcom role without daddy, who showcases another dynamic.  

Back in the 1960s, Dick Van Dyke fell down on cue with instant response from the laugh track, the sort of thing Woody Allen mocked in Annie Hall. It was this type of show that prompted the FCC’s Newton Minnow to proclaim television a “vast wasteland.”

Others proclaimed television the force that made American stupid but the late Terry Teachout had a different take. Television was the force that made America’s stupid people powerful, the theme of Howard Beale’s speeches in Network, written by the masterful Paddy Chayefsky.

In the modern world, as Jean Cocteau observed, stupidity has begun to think. That’s why they routinely use phrases such as  “religious right,” “Christian nationalism,” and “white supremacy” as if they were interchangeable insults. And that’s how we get films like God & Country. According to Rob Reiner, some of the most peaceful, law-abiding, and pro-family groups pose the greatest threat to the nation. This comes at a time when Biden’s FBI targets Catholics, pro-life activists and peacefully protesting parents as terrorists and violent extremists.

To demonize people in this way is to justify repression and violence against them, official and otherwise. As inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) told Madame de Montpelier (Delphine Seyrig) in The Day of the Jackal, “be in no doubt as to the seriousness of your position.”