“There’s something very strange about these people,” the writer and documentarian Alexandra Pelosi observes during her zippy, entertaining trip through Jesus-crazed televangelical America. “They’re all so happy.”

Well, amen to that, sister. As a fellow New Yorker, dressed in dark jeans, dark coat, and dark circles, I share your amazement at people who sway ecstatically to pounding prayer services in a floodlit, 16,000-seat cathedral that once played home to the Houston Rockets. If I go to church, which I do very, very occasionally, I like it quiet, I like it mournful, I like it old, and I’m partial to incense. In other words, I like it “cultural.” That way, feeling at home, feeling a bit as if I were inside a museum, I can almost inch my way toward belief.

“Friends of God: A Road Trip with Alexandra Pelosi,” which will air Thursday on HBO, approaches Red State America at its reddest, much as an upper-class Englishman, Aldous Huxley, approached Southern California 68 years ago. In his novel, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” Huxley described “a vast, untidy land of filling stations and billboards … of occasional office buildings and shops and churches — primitive Methodist churches built, surprisingly enough, in the style of the Cartuja at Granada, Catholic churches like Canterbury Cathedral … Christian Scientist churches with pillars and pediments, like banks.”

And where Ms. Pelosi, the director of the film and daughter of California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, focuses the camera obsessively on billboards and signs (such as “Darwin Is Dead! Jesus Is Alive!” and “‘Don’t Make Me Come Down There’ — GOD”), Huxley itemized vulgar advertisements (“Drive In for NutBurgers”; “Astrology, Numerology, Psychic Readings”; “Jumbo Malts”; “Do Things, Go Places With Consol Super-Gas!”) with an equally profound alienation. For Huxley, in Los Angeles in 1939, commerce was the American religion. The protagonist in his novel couldn’t tell if the girls he drove past were praying or chewing gum. “Gum, not God,” he eventually decided.

For Ms. Pelosi, navigating a land of mall-size churches and giant, $25,000 crosses, commerce = religion = politics: a quintessentially American triple-headed monster. It’s God and gum. It’s also God and skateboarding, God and rock ‘n’ roll, God and nose rings, God and homophobia, God and culture war, God and get out the vote. It’s God as all-you-can-eat. Although her film is clearly intended as a warning about home-grown religious fundamentalism, she displays a winning urban sense of humor. Stopping at a “Drive-Thru-Church” in Richmond, Va., she listens to a brief prayer delivered by Pastor Sharon Jones, a black woman dressed like the commander of a space ship, and observes: “This is my kind of church. Drive through. Two minutes and I’m out.”

“Well, you’re out of here,” Ms. Jones responds cheerfully. “See you next time!” She, too, is happy.

Things get more interesting when the director interviews people who are happy but also a little edgy. One example is Brad Stine, a faith-based comedian who has been profiled in the New Yorker. “When I’m performing, I’m a preacher, but when Chris Rock does it, he’s a social commentator,” this kinetic, bleached-blond comic complains, sounding a common theme among the believers. The press judges religious Christians one way, and everyone else another. “Everybody preaches. Every time Bruce Springsteen writes a song, he says, ‘Vote like this, get out of the war, become a Democrat,’ whatever. He’s preaching. That’s okay. That’s the American way.”

Likewise, the Rev. Russell Johnson (the “Patriot Pastor”) argues that the press only worries about church-state separation when white Christians are scooting back and forth across the line. But if the Rev. Al Sharpton or the Rev. Jesse Jackson tell people whom to vote for in church, or seek office themselves, it’s not a problem. “I believe many in the press are not really understanding their own bigotry,” he says.

The problem, of course, is one of demographics. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who appears in the film, claims there are 80 million evangelicals in America and that in 2004, 78% of them voted for President Bush. (Ms. Pelosi’s previous documentary, about the president, was “Journeys With George.”) Men like Mr. Falwell consider it their job to keep this constituency whole and on their side of the “war” between God and secular society. Embattled beneath sunny skies, sandwiched between contemptuous coasts, they’re hunkered down in Middle America, raising families. Ms. Pelosi interviews a woman with 10 children, and her camera follows the mother’s spawn around the house as if they were aliens.

Although they do not share liberal positions on gay marriage, abortion, and other sensitive topics, most of Ms. Pelosi’s interviewees seem amiable and are willing to joke about themselves, and indeed about their Lord. Most of the ministers, however, seem stupid or outright duplicitous. A year after being interviewed for the film, the Rev. Ted Haggard, pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, confessed to taking drugs and having sex with a male prostitute. Ms. Pelosi cheats a bit by constantly filming everyone in unflattering close-ups, so that faces look distorted and strange (this seems particularly nasty when she’s photographing children), but it’s hard to imagine Rev. Haggard, with his fleshy nose and beady eyes, looking trustworthy at any angle. Otherwise, Ms. Pelosi is a reasonably generous guide. She may be covering the “other” side of a culture war, but she doesn’t try to exacerbate it.

Ultimately, the world of “Friends of God” is a religious Disneyland. There are Christian miniature golf courses, Christian wrestling tournaments, rock concerts, theme parks, car clubs, comedy clubs, and just about anything else you can think of except strip clubs. (They’re available, of course, often right down the street from a towering crucifix.) Born-again Christians, we are told, have the best sex in the country. Now imagine adding silicone and devilry to the mix. But apparently they don’t need it. “So you’re high on Jesus?” Ms. Pelosi asks a blissed-out, unshaven man at a Christian rock concert (or church service — it’s hard to tell). “High on Jesus, and I ain’t comin’ down,” he replies.

One thing kept coming to mind as I watched this film, and that was the notorious born-again phase of the ultimate Boomer culture hero, Bob Dylan. Had Ms. Pelosi used Mr. Dylan’s messianic and even belligerent religious songs — e.g., “He’s the property of Jesus / Resent him to the bone / You’ve got something better / You’ve got a heart of stone” — on the soundtrack, the level of cognitive dissonance created in her target audience would be something to behold.

bbernhard@nysun.com