« The Ten Commandments are the basis of all law ! » An anti-abortion militant standing in front of the impressive building of the Supreme Court of the United States, is haranguing passers-by while flourishing a cross. Young students shout at him before conversing with him about the real foundation of the law in the United States. Is it the Bible or the constitution ? Is America a religious or a lay state ?
Our film and investigation in Washington, symbolic center of assertive Protestantism, will open on these questions. What is the reality of the American « civil religion » with its humanist messianism, its sacred emphasis on money and morality. What if this secularization led to some kind of fundamentalism or irrational spiritualism ?
Some unusual men and women will tell us how they see Protestantism and what the truth is for them. These various people will enable us to grasp the essential aspects of Protestantism as it is experienced today in the capital of the « New World order ».
The theological foundations of the Reformation, the attachment of the Americans for an imperial religiosity, the expansion of the puritanical movement, the conflict to be seen everywhere between the white world of plenty and the black world of poverty, the growing power of religious lobbies and media will be the themes tackled throughout this journey.
But Washington is also the city where young rappers preach the gospel and doctors choose to cure people with prayers ; a city with a kind of faith absolutely different from ours and where America, for once, does not appear as the model of our own near future. A city where questions on the death or the return of God in the West are condensed.