I thought God was someone you keep in your heart. Everyone knows you have him, but you just keep him quiet. I never knew that Jesus was someone who lies inside you and you live out loud about it.
— Megan Iannuzzi, Hard as Nails team leader
“God ain’t about judgin’, he’s about lovin’.” So proclaims 29-year-old Justin Fatica, self-described “unordained Catholic youth minister” and leader of the Hard as Nails Ministry. And Fatica means to make that “lovin” visible and audible, especially to kids who suffer from lack of attention. That would be kids who suffer acutely: the members of his team who speak up in Hard as Nails list all manner of pain and terror in their lives, from drugs and sexual molestation to cutting and suicidal depression. Fatica listens to them and assures them: they can believe him because he is right.
Justin underscores the point by an array of gotcha performance strategies, including screaming lectures and rituals of abuse-as-cleansing. His followers carry crosses up hills or stand against them as he and others hammer at the boards (no actual nailing), or he yells at one assistant (“Jesus loves you! He took all the pain all the agony for you!”) while another slams Fatica in the back with a chair, repeatedly, WWE-style. The show is startling, to be sure, and Fatica means to shake up his audience. As team leader Tim Hanley explains, Tim Hanley, “The world is extreme… People in this world are hurting and they need to be loved in an extreme manner.”
Fatica’s own story is extreme and also not. As David Holbrooke’s documentary recounts, his route to Jesus was roundabout, inspired in part by his belief that he had impregnated a girl when he was just 17 and an erratic high school student (he cites a 1.6 GPA). “I was scared,” he tells a New Jersey high school audience — a group of mostly white kids who look alternately bored, horrified, and rapt. And so, he narrates, he approached Father Larry Richards of St. Joseph’s Church, “this priest beefy unibrow guy asked me to get involved with my faith.” During a religious retreat, Justin was saved, determined from then on to “care.” Noting these “darkest times for the Catholic Church,” and so, the need for enthusiastic evangelists, Father Richards also admits that Fatica can be a bit much. “If we only had more people like Justin,” he says, “Not as loud as Justin or as in your face as Justin, but as on fire as Justin.”
As the film explores the sources of this fire, Fatica’s story becomes increasingly complicated. Painfully earnest, he speaks with a singular faith in his own calling (“Lord I do not want to pray a prayer to touch one person like many people do; Lord, you have given me a gift to touch millions”). When his wife Mary (whom he met during an evangelizing tour to her dorm) gives birth to their first child during the course of the film, he not only tapes her looking exhausted in the hospital to the point of her frustration, but also starts using baby Joseph as prop in some shows (“I would never kill him for you,” he tells one listener, but God, he did kill his only son, because “He loves you that much”). Fatica’s preferred wardrobe includes LeBron James jerseys and Jesus t-shirts, and he sees his hard body as a sign of his devotion: early in his ministering, he struggled with “controlling my energy,” and devoted too much time to masturbation. A priest told him “You need to work out man. Your penance is to work out three days a week for six months.” And, as Fatica tells it, this became his routine (“This is my prayer right here, I like to keep it real”), his resulting physique incorporated into the show.
While Fatica appears upfront concerning his fervor and his struggles, the film suggests he’s still got some figuring out to do. A visit to his parents’ spacious home (something like a tour on Cribs) includes his mother Kathleen’s observation, “I just think he was embarrassed that he came from an affluent family and he just portrayed himself as someone who came from another side of the track, if you want to say that.” In fact, she sees similarities between her husband Jack and her rebellious son, each with his own entrepreneurial “vision,” whether economic (a desire for money that Justin sees as “sinful”) or spiritual (a board meeting and benefactor dinner indicate Hard as Nails’ efforts to come up with a viable “business plan”). While Fatica and his dad agree to disagree concerning his ministry, Kathleen sees another sort of problem: “Justin wants everybody to believe what he believes and that can be a problem,” she sighs.
That desire extends to a kind of constant self-testing, as well. And in these moments, to the film’s credit, Fatica’s self-image and view of the world look decidedly simplistic. Though Fatica insists he doesn’t compare himself to “Jesus Christ,” he does point out more than once that he endures doubts and even hostility (one guy on the street, his face an anonymous blur, shouts, “You guys are so fucking brainwashed, it makes me fucking sick!”). This endurance is repeatedly performative, as when the camera follows Fatica into a barbershop full of black customers and haircutters. Here he announces, “I’m the only minister that comes to this barbershop,” adding that he comes “down here” because “It makes me uncomfortable.” Cut to Justin in his car, bumping noisy Christian rap.
Invited to speak in Barbados, it’s unclear whether Fatica wins over the priest of the Church where he involves kids in the performance — blindfolding and urging one boy to give himself over. Banned by the Burlington, Vermont diocese after his “in-your-face” show brings some students to tears, Fatica takes this as the same sort of “resistance” that Jesus encountered. Hard as Nails lets him speak his piece, and asks you to make your own judgment.