At the centre of the film is the village's fiercely disciplinarian pastor, played by Burghart Klaussner.
The strict pastor, played with magnificent chill by Burghart Klaussner, ties white ribbons around his children to remind them to steer away from sin.
The plot bears more than a passing resemblance to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca Daviss plays Dorothy, a scheming housekeeper obsessed with the dead wife of her employer, an English village pastor played by Alex MacQueen.
The point of view shifts effortlessly from the communal (the familial rifts surrounding the unionization of the mine) to the interpersonal (the frustrated romance between the village pastor, played by Walter Pidgeon, and the narrator's older sister, played by Maureen O'Hara) to the purely subjective (the narrator's recollection of himself as a child, played by the young Roddy Mc- Dowall).
While "The Fighting Temptations" preserves the stereotype of the uptight religious hypocrite (LaTanya Richardson), who steamrollers over her brother, the weak-willed pastor played by Wendell Pierce), it is more interested in justifying the Lord's music than the Devil's, in showing believers a good time while proving to skeptics that Christian music can be cool.
The archbishop wails on the saxophone, the pastor plays the upright bass, "sound ministers" take solos on the drums, keyboard, harmonica and alto sax, and the supreme mother reverend leads the vocals through the long musical interlude that finds divinity in the music of jazz legend John Coltrane.
In many black communities, pastors play highly political roles.
"Last time I read the Bible I saw nothing about style being a sin," says Pastor Galley, played by the film's writer, Galley Molina, a real-life pastor who based the screenplay on his own life after prison.
A Presbyterian pastor did play down "John Calvin's doctrine of special providence and -- horror of horrors -- his doctrine of predestination".
You meet an ex-vegan who's smoking whole hogs and a church pastor who plays in a secular rock group.
The pastor, Terry Jones, played the recording — which he said was made on Sept. 9 on his assistant's iPhone — of a conversation between him and Imam Muhammad Musri, an Islamic leader in Florida.
