Lobdell: Don't you think as a Christian after you get to know Michael and love him up and everything, you have a responsibility to try to get him to accept Christ to avoid hell?

Merchant: You know, the way I personally would look at it is I would hope that that conversation comes up because Michael brings it up, not because I would bring it up to him. Then Michal would see—"Wow! What this thing about how you seem to be more patient than everyone?" Then it becomes his choice.



Levine: There's something I'd like to mention to you. It just so happens I work in secular Hollywood. I would largely be a secular guy who happens to be very interested in God, spirituality, and religion, but I live a secular life. I have, as it happens, very, very close friends who are deeply committed Christians, and I also have friends who are agnostic and so forth. So, then Mr. Levine, in your daily, visceral, palpable experience is there a discernible difference? As a group, would you say, generally speaking, that the committed Christians are—generally speaking—more at peace? Are they a little kinder, a little more sensitive than your secular friends? And my experience is "no." It's about a draw. Maybe a tiny edge to the agnostic/atheists, because the other gang is so busy parroting Bible verses that they're not as thoughtful when I'm having a rough time. Now it's about a draw.

So I look at it this way. If a group of people you knew went to the gym five days a week and a group of people didn't, and the people who went to the gym were in no better shape—they were equally as fat—what exactly would you think of the gym?

Merchant [in reply to a question of his intended outcome from the film]: As you see when we get to black at the end of the film: "The conversation starts now" are the words we put up before the credits. That's what I'd like to see more of. The fact is that we've become—from a Christian point of view and otherwise—we've become lazy. It's become so easy to make enemies out of anyone who doesn't agree with us on everything. It's just become too easy. It's certainly antithetical to Christ's teaching and it's against the civility of common society as well. I think that when we don't know each other then these kinds of differences can become exacerbated. If I don't know Sister Mary Timothy [a cross-dresser who dresses in a bizarre nun's habit who is in the film] and I don't understand what his struggle in life is, the way he's been hurt by people who believe what I believe—what his struggle with his husband is like; if those things are alien to me—or worse, if they're just merely abstract concepts that can be oversimplified—and people are complicated, most of the issues are highly complicated; and when we don't know each other, it's dangerously easy to oversimplify or to take it in the abstract. And again, I come from a Christian perspective. Christ says at the last supper after Judas goes on his way, one of the disciples asks, "Lord, what's the most important commandment?" Jesus gives a new one: "Love one another." If we're going to oversimplify things down to a bumper sticker, if that's not it, then I'm confused as a Christian.

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