Back in the early fourth century AD, the Roman Empire was riven by strife between dueling factions and threatened by northern barbarian hordes. One of the striving emperors, Constantine the Great, had a vision or dream featuring a cross that read, "In this sign you will be the victor." As any right-thinking military leader would, he then decided Christianity was the way, emblazoned that symbol on his soldiers' shields and led them to victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. The stage was then set for Christianity to become the state religion of the Roman Empire. This story has often been played up by Christian historians as miraculous forward step in the legitimacy of a religion that until then had been decentralized and underground.

However, in the viewpoint of James Carroll -- the ex-priest and journalist whose 2001 bestseller, Constantine's Sword, is the basis for Owen Jacoby's thoughtful documentary of the same name -- this is a more problematic event. Because from that moment at the Milvian Bridge forward, due to the actions of Constantine (a murderous man who, Carroll wryly notes, was rumored to have converted to Christianity because he'd sinned too much for any other religion to take him), the worship of Jesus Christ would inextricably be intertwined with military might. This has always been a problem, but perhaps more so when the American president starts throwing around words like "crusade" when talking about the invasion of a primarily Islamic country.

Carroll serves in Constantine's Sword as more than a co-writer and animating spirit, but as something akin to a host. In many ways he makes an ideal guide to the subject, not just because of his several years as a Catholic priest, but also because of his unique positioning at the confluence of religion and war: At the height of the Vietnam War, while Father Carroll was protesting at the Pentagon, his father, a hard-nosed conservative Catholic, was inside helping direct the conflict as first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Jacoby's camera follows Carroll on his quest to uncover the troubling roots of his church's close ties with state-sponsored military violence, particularly as symbolized by the deathly icon of the cross (a symbol that didn't figure much into pre-Constantine Christianity). A sincere if halting narrator, Carroll is filmed in a somewhat stilted manner as he walks around the various geographical vectors that will factor into his larger thesis (one that seems, admittedly, too ambitious for a 95-minute film) about not just the mix of God and war but also how Christianity's endemic anti-Semitism has played out over the centuries.

As a film and intellectual argument, Constantine's Sword is most effective when following the trail of Christian anti-Semitism. Carroll and Jacoby track in a few short scenes the path from Gospel passages improbably blaming Christ's death on the Jews to the organized pogroms of later centuries and then the creation of the first ghettos, pre-modern Europe's version of the concentration camp. Carroll takes a boat down the Rhine and points out the beautiful Crusader castles on the shores (ones he'd marveled at as a child, his father being stationed in Europe), many built after the knights rampaged down the valley in 1096, slaughtering Jews on their way to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. All along the way, Carroll gilds the narrative with scenes from his family history and the troubled nature of his relationship with the church, an entity he still believes in but whose more conservative and authoritarian elements he stands in firm opposition to.

The film's overly ambitious conceit gets it into trouble once it tries to bring in the modern dimension. Bracketing Constantine's Sword is footage taken at the Air Force Academy, discussing the recent controversy when it was revealed that evangelical Christians had been attempting to turn the institution into their own private recruiting center for waging war, literal and figurative, on the unbelievers. While it's always a good idea to show up the cynical insincerity of a scarily grinning huckster like evangelist Ted Haggard (filmed before he admitted to some problems with a male prostitute and drugs), there's something off about this whole part of the film. It's clear that Carroll and Jacoby wanted, with the strong current link between the American military and evangelism, to present a modern-day corollary to the Catholic Church of earlier centuries, where church leaders lent spiritual blessings to dubious military ventures and religious intolerance. But it feels thinly argued, a poor comparison to the bulk of this excellently thoughtful and personal film. This is not to say that Carroll is wrong when he says "this cross throws a shadow," but that he and Jacoby should have taken more time to make their case.



Did Constantine get with the pogrom?