J Paul Johnson
In American Pastoral, Parisian filmmaker Auberi Edler turns her lens to the rural central Pennsylvanian town of Elizabethtown in 2023, where a vitriolic school board race between a group of moderate incumbent Democrats and their far-right Christian Nationalist challengers rivets and divides the community. One could be excused for thinking there are few things more benign or uninteresting than a school board election, but in the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election and subsequent January storm on the U.S. Capitol, these quickly became the sites of strife, protest, and even threats of violence. Edler’s verité-inspired documentary lets an election campaign unfold and escalate until its stakes are made clear: in little Elizabethtown and in similar communities all across the country, the future of the nation’s democracy is at stake.
Etown, as the locals call it, serves as an everytown here. It may look from a distance pastoral, as in one meaning of the film’s doubly ironic title. Its hills and dales rolling across Lancaster County’s rich farmland, Elizabethtown exudes a small-town American charm, one where neighbors cheerfully greet and support each other. But its bucolic veneer is merely a façade: the fractures between left and right have grown so deep as to have become practically intractable. There’s where the second meaning of pastoral comes into play: concerning the adherence to doctrine.
It starts with a book. Not any particular actual physical book, but the threat of some hypothetical book where, say, a LGBTQ+ person might exist. The far-right faction demands the school board put under lock and key any such book, lest one of their unsuspecting and impossibly impressionable children stroll through the stacks, open said book at random, and fall prey to a passage that makes them (or, more likely, their parents) squirm or, their God forbid, turn gay on the spot. That such a possibility is conceivable has the local Christians in a huff, demanding that the library erase such content. This has been a canard of the conservative right in recent decades, demanding that all districts, schools, and staff kowtow to their ever-shifting and increasingly absurdist worldview.
It’s a playbook straight from the rumpled brow of Steve Bannon, who said in 2021: “the road to Congress is through the school boards.” And so, those once-sleepy public meetings few attend have devolved into theaters of toxic grievance. Control school boards at the local level and from there, dominate curriculum, education, and instruction through constant inculcation into right-wing ideology. Straight from Project 2025 to a town near you. In Elizabethtown, a gaggle of far-right Christians follow the precinct playbook perfectly, seizing control of the local Republican committee and securing three school board seats in the last election.
Among those existing board members are Danielle Lindemuth, who smugly drapes herself in the American flag as a shawl, her husband Stephen, and firebrand James Emery, all devout congregants of Elizabethtown’s extremist LifeGate church. At board meetings, Emery leads the charge to ban books; in the community, where his presence seems practically ubiquitous, he leads a Christian men’s support group where he and others ready platoons in what they call a “spiritual battle” against the left. This isn’t just idle talk, either. In a scene where Emery packs for a convention—the First Landing 1607 Project’s Declaration of Covenant—he arms himself with enough munitions to start, and probably finish, a war. Elsewhere, he rhapsodizes about his having participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, as defining a moment in his life as his conversion to Christianity.
The convention Emery and other LifeGate congregants and school-board aspirants attend featured a speaker I’d seen before in the news: former Father James Altman, who had been a pastor in the Catholic Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, until his inflammatory fire-and-brimstone diatribes circulated across social media. Telling his parishioners that Democratic voters were headed straight to hell, Altman was swiftly removed from ministry. Having been defrocked and publicly rebuked by his own church hasn’t kept him from taking engagements, wearing the collar, and continuing to rouse the rabble. Like with the widow of a murdered podcaster, every setback is just another opportunity to further the grift.
While school board candidates on the right arm themselves to the teeth, fantasize about the prospects of a violent civil and spiritual battle against the left, and organize themselves in well-funded and well-attended small-group and large-scale operations alike, the local Democrats have a different approach. Like the Republicans, they canvas door to door, but otherwise, theirs is a milquetoast resistance based mostly on worry. A women’s group pines for the day when To Kill A Mockingbird could be taught in class without protest. A couple of exceedingly polite men ask reasonable, benign questions of their ideological opponents, then resume their silence. Candidates carry placards, not guns. One, Kristy Moore, bravely warns of the consequences of Republicans gaining a board majority, but by and large, it’s clear from the events depicted in An American Pastoral that hers is a losing proposition.
To what degree she can, director Edler steers a moderate course in her documentary approach, like a modern version of Frederick Wiseman, whose High School and Titicut Follies similarly examined American institutions on the verge of disintegration in the 1960s. Her subjects talk to each other, not to the camera; there are no direct-address interviews to speak of, no lower-third chyrons, no expository sequences or voice-over narration, no nondiegetic music or content of any sort guiding one’s response. The editing—which must have been a Herculean task, to make cogent narrative sense of months and months of raw footage—slowly draws us into the conflict and raises the stakes.
I’m sure, in fact, that nothing about making An American Pastoral would have been simple. In Elizabethtown, where nearly everyone appears to be of similar ethnicity, the fear of the “other” has become palpable, even paranoiac. For Edler to convince campaigners on both sides of the virtue of intentions and embed herself there as a silent observer for months is itself impressive. The approach serves An American Pastoral well, giving the film a necessary veneer of objectivity, even if its content seems to lead to an absolutely inevitable, predestined conclusion.
Two years after the events depicted here, and in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, we’re all seeing first-hand how ceding power to a rising Christo-fascism is playing out. The government is literally killing law-abiding citizens; people of color are targeted for detainment, deportation, and disappearance; and ICE forces are using Long-Range Acoustic Devices, which can cause permanent injury, against peaceful protesters. I could go on, but suffice it to say, An American Pastoral, as difficult as it can be to watch, adeptly and adroitly charts the Project 2025 precinct playbook executed to perfection, with consequences every bit as devastating as expected.
