What Difference Does it Make?
What could have been the takedown of a real-life faith-healing scandal becomes instead an unlikely conversion story in 1992’s Leap of Faith.
Review by Gregg Fairbrothers
In a 1992 Paramount Pictures film, Leap of Faith, Steve Martin gives without a doubt the most compelling and sensitive performance of his career as a shameless preacher-man, con-man Jonas Nightengale (née Jack Newton), who uses all the usual gimmicks and deceptions to part the faithful and their dollars. At the opening, we find Jonas’s traveling caravan stopped for speeding somewhere in the dusty plains of Kansas. Inside the lead bus, Jonas’s crew smirks and stakes bets on whether he can con his way out of an expensive citation as he heads out to do his thing. Coached from the bus through an earpiece, in no time he has the chubby officer weepy over his troubled marriage. The team inside guffaws as the lawman calls his daughter to patch things up. This short sequence establishes the theme of the film: Jonas may have scammed the guy, but true repentance has happened, and a father and daughter are on the road to a restoration. Seamy—but if it works, what difference does it make?
Then one of the trucks breaks down and the whole traveling show has to hole up in a rural Kansas town struggling with a broken economy and a drought that has its farms on the edge of ruin. Jonas, characteristically brazen when it comes to a buck, has the crew set up to work the community until they can roll on to the next big-money town. As they settle in, Jonas takes a passing fancy to Marva, a hostile diner waitress whose younger brother, Boyd, was crippled in the auto accident that claimed their parents. Doctors say there’s nothing wrong with him, but he struggles to walk on crutches with braced legs that barely work. They’ve seen everyone—shrinks, quacks. Worst of all were the faith healers. Do you know what they told him? His faith wasn’t strong enough. His faith is all he has, Marva tells him grimly. She is having none of Jonas, but never one to shirk a challenge, Jonas befriends Boyd anyway.
Meanwhile, in the revival tent, Steve Martin as Jonas gives the performance of his career, preaching on stage, slaying in the spirit, damning the devil, and selling Jesus. He wows the faithful with “prophetic” knowledge (fed through an earpiece by his crew); healing the lame who leap from wheelchairs to dance (after the crew helpfully greeted elderly walk-ins with said wheelchairs); showers of crutches thrown on stage (yup—by the crew). When skeptical Sheriff Will publicly unmasks Jonas by disclosing Jack Newton’s criminal background, Jonas gives a rousing recount of his redemption in Jesus that has the crowd in ecstasy. It seems there’s nothing Jonas can’t con his way around.
Jonas passes out into the night among the throngs of faithful camped in the fields under the tent’s neon cross.
Until the climactic performance, when everything goes off script. Boyd struggles forward on his crutches. “Hey Rev,” he calls, “What about me?” Jonas is stricken. He tries to dodge, but the crowd shouts “One more! One more!” Jonas grimaces and helps Boyd onto the stage. He pulls the trusty “if there’s even one among you who doubts,” card and sets up Sheriff Will for the rap. The cynicism is palpable. Marva holds back tears. And then: Boyd drops his crutches at the foot of the cross, touches the nailed feet of Jesus, and walks!
Later that night we find a bitter Jonas—shaken to his core by a true miracle—returning alone to the dark, silent tent. “Hey, boss,” he grimaces at the foot of the cross, “Remember me? Jack Newton. I’ve got a question for you… Why’d you make so many suckers?” Channeling the psalmists, Job, Ecclesiastes, he calls out to God for answers. But the answer he gets is not what he’s seeking.
“Rev?” says Boyd.
Jonas turns to find the kid has come in behind him. Boyd wants to join Jonas’s crew. “You made me walk again,” he says. Jonas sets him straight, but admits that there is one thing you can never con your way around: the genuine article. “And you, kid, are the genuine article. I know I’m a fake.”
“Well, what difference does it make if it gets the job done?” says Boyd.
“Kid,” Jonas says, gravely, “it makes all the difference in the world.”
Jonas passes out into the night among the throngs of faithful camped in the fields under the tent’s neon cross. People are reading scriptures to the children by campfire light. Servers ladle out stews. The sequence sensitively captures Jonas seeing what he has done—the spiritually hungry people who have come are praying, sleeping in groups, tending campfires, feeding the hungry.
Nightengale packs a bag with only a few things and slips away, hitching a ride with a truck driver bound for Pensacola. When the driver asks if he’s in some kind of trouble, Nightengale-Newton smiles. “No, no, no, no, sir. Maybe for the first time, I’m not.” Just then raindrops, big, fat raindrops patter on the truck windshield—first just a few, then the downpour. Jonas leans out the window with rain pouring over his face. “Come on baby, rain!” he cries, “Thank you, Jesus!”
A smug, outrage-inducing let’s-look-at-the-real-story tell-all would fit right in with contemporary culture and the entertainment industry—one that would leave audiences disgusted with both the perpetrators and the faith of the suckers who enrich them.
On the surface, Leap of Faith screenwriter Janus Cercone’s script is about a fictional grifter who makes a killing fleecing the faithful. By the end her point is clear—even Jonas Nightengale can be saved. It’s an entertaining and insightful twist, a story of self-discovery, conversion, and redemption—Jonas Nightengale’s own leap of faith.
But Cercone has gone one level deeper. She has given us not just a sensitively written and brilliantly performed conversion story, but a profound commentary on Christianity in contemporary culture—and a challenge. In a 2015 article in London’s Sunday Times, Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Justin Stoneman report that Cercone based her script on the life and career of one Peter Popoff, a notorious, debunked faith preacher and healer who has scammed the faithful for millions over 60 years.
Starting in 1960 as “The Miracle Boy Evangelist,” by the 1980s Popoff and his wife, Elizabeth, had built a televangelism empire. In a field of the cringeworthy and detestable the Popoffs stand out. You can find samples here, here, and here. Among Popoff Ministry techniques that found their way into Cercone’s script are feeding research through an earpiece, seating able-bodied old people in wheelchairs to fake miracles, and buckets of crutches. At the end of the 1980s the Popoff Ministry was collecting almost $4 million a year; in 2005 it was over $23 million. The scam continues to this day with a revivals cable show and a franchise selling “Miracle Spring Water.”
But, come on, this is hardly new. From tents, to radio, to television, to the internet, the false prophets and profiteers have always been with us. They go all the way back to the Bible—Testaments Old and New.
Now, imagine for a moment an entertainment industry writer-producer dreaming up a film script. She comes across the Popoffs, watches their shows on YouTube, and gazes at the piles of dollars that pour in from faithful who have the least to spare—even after the Popoffs have been repeatedly exposed as hucksters. What tale, today, would you expect that entertainment professional to sell? A smug, outrage-inducing let’s-look-at-the-real-story tell-all would fit right in with contemporary culture and the entertainment industry—one that would leave audiences disgusted with both the perpetrators and the faith of the suckers who enrich them. And, really, who could blame this hypothetical writer? What kind of name do the Popoffs of the world give Jesus’s Church?
Thankfully, Janus Cercone didn’t produce that script. At the deepest level, Leap of Faith isn’t just about the gullible and grifters, or even a conversion. By turning a Peter Popoff into a Jonas Nightengale, Cercone is talking to us, gently reminding us that we should expect a miracle anywhere, a conversion of anyone. What is our reaction when we look at those Popoff Ministry videos or the exposés that unmask the truth? There are so many crooks and exploiters in the world: Ponzi Madoffs, startup frauds, bitcoin kings. There are whole cable series on hucksters and scams that prey on suckers. It’s hard to keep faith in a gracious God with the world filled with these—“My feet had almost slipped when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”
Cercone’s film turns the question around and holds a mirror to each of us: what about you? Are you the Pharisee praying in the temple? “Thank God I’m not like that tax collector!” With Leap of Faith, Janus Cercone gently reminds us: in Christ anyone can be saved.
Gregg Fairbrothers is a founding board member of Fare Forward, and a founding faculty-alum advisor to the Dartmouth Apologia and the Eleazar Wheelock Society.
Leap of Faith was released on December 18, 1992, by Paramount Pictures. It was written by Janus Cercone and directed by Richard Pearce. If you’d like to watch it, it is available to rent on YouTube.
