The last few years may well be looked at someday as the age of the political documentary. Michael Moore has broken every box office record for a string of documentaries — “Roger and Me,” “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “Sicko” — and even former Vice President Al Gore made an enormously influential documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” about global warming. All of these documentaries came from a liberal perspective, and all were greeted almost immediately by long lists of alleged errors in them (and some of those allegations, to be fair, were accurate) posted on conservative blogs and Web pages.

As political documentaries have proven highly influential on public opinion, the right is now rushing to catch up, and their first major attempt at a documentary from their perspective, “Expelled,” opened last week on more screens than any documentary in history. This is not a shoddy production put together by a couple guys with handicams and laptop. This is a major effort that cost $3.5 million to produce and millions more to market (the producers have used no fewer than four public relations companies to promote the film, including the one that helped turn Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” into a blockbuster. They even got a big star, Ben Stein, to narrate the film.

“Expelled,” produced by Premise Media, claims that those who speak out against “Darwinism” — a term they never define and seem to have no coherent conception of — are punished and persecuted by the academic and scientific establishment. They have several examples of such alleged persecution, none of them remotely authentic and all requiring exaggeration, selective citing of evidence or outright lying to make them sound plausible. In a recent interview with Newsweek, Stein said that of the examples used in the film, “The most egregious is Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian, the editor of a magazine that published a peer-reviewed paper about ID. He lost his job.”

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There’s a kernel of truth in the statement. The man’s name is indeed Richard Sternberg and he was the editor of a magazine that published a paper about ID (”Intelligent Design,” the latest incarnation of anti-evolutionary creationism). Almost nothing else has even the faintest connection to reality. Sternberg did not lose his job, which was with the National Institutes of Health, not the Smithsonian. He had a courtesy appointment at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as a research associate, an unpaid position offered to scientists that gives them a small office and access to the specimen collections at the museum. Sternberg had that position when he published the paper, and he still has that position, though he apparently hasn’t shown up there in several years.

Now here’s some of the information they leave out of the film: In the very last issue of the magazine (Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, which is not affiliated with the Smithsonian), Sternberg slipped in this pro-ID paper by going around the usual review process. He did not, as required by the rules, have the paper reviewed by one of the associate editors of the magazine, including several of them who were much more qualified to review the paper than Sternberg was (there were three experts in Cambrian invertebrate paleontology, the primary subject of the paper). And he did this despite admitting on his own Web page that he knew the paper would be controversial, and despite the fact that he had solicited the paper himself and the author of the paper was a friend and fellow ID advocate. All of this is ethically dubious at best.

When the paper was published, there was great embarrassment from the many Smithsonian scientists who were involved with the magazine (there is no official connection, but many Smithsonian scientists were on the publication’s board) and they began to ask some obvious questions to which they did not know the answer. Was Sternberg an advocate of ID creationism? Had he followed proper review procedures for this article? Or did he just skirt the regular process to sneak an ID paper into the journal in the last issue over which he had control (he had resigned several months earlier and knew this would be his last issue as editor)? The answers to those questions: yes, no, and yes.

Many of the folks at the Smithsonian were very upset by this and they began to send e-mails back and forth. A couple of them wanted Sternberg’s courtesy position as a research associate withdrawn and were quite vocal about it in e-mails to the Smithsonian administrators. So what actually happened to Sternberg? Absolutely nothing. Despite initial false claims that they had taken away his keys, his office space and his access to the collections, Sternberg still has an office and full access to the collections today, nearly four years after the controversy still took place. As it turns out, the “most egregious” example they could find of this alleged persecution was a man who acted unethically and had a few mean things said about him in private e-mails that he never even saw. That’s it. That’s the full extent of the martyrdom of Sternberg.

The other examples fare no better. There’s Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer at Iowa State who was denied tenure. The ID movement exploded with accusations of anti-religious bias, but a detailed examination of his six years at Iowa State revealed that he lagged behind on every key measure by which the tenure of a junior scholar in the hard sciences is judged. His defenders pointed to the fact that he had co-authored 68 scientific papers; what they neglected to mention was that vast majority of those papers came from his post-doctoral positions at Texas and Washington prior to coming to Iowa State. In terms of new research done while at Iowa State, his production was very low. That’s the first key criterion for getting tenure in the hard sciences.

The second is bringing in research grants. The average tenured professor in physics and astronomy at Iowa State brings in $1.3 million in research money to the university. Gonzalez brought in less than $200,000. Of that money, $64,000 was used to pay a grad student at another university and $58,000 was for the writing of a popular ID book. That leaves virtually nothing in actual research money in six years at Iowa State. Add to that the fact that in his time there, he did not graduate a single graduate student, and it becomes quite obvious why Iowa State chose not to grant him tenure. He simply did not measure up.

The other examples in the film are even weaker. But perhaps the most galling aspect of this documentary is the attempt to tie evolution to Hitler and his Nazi regime. The film claims that the theory of evolution leads directly to “social Darwinism” which then leads directly to eugenics and the Nazi obsession with building a pure race. Again, this is mostly lying by omission. Nowhere do they mention, for example, that while Hitler often did use science (or at least his distortions of it) to justify his actions, he also time and time again invoked Christianity in defense of his final solution.

They view any mention of a scientific justification by Hitler and his minions as evidence that evolution was the cause of the Third Reich, yet they ignore statements like this from Hitler himself:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross.

The movie also fails to mention the long legacy of German anti-Semitism that can be traced directly to the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther. Luther despised the Jews, and his own demands of his followers, expressed in a vile book called “On the Jews and Their Lies,” foretold Hitler’s actions almost perfectly. He urged his followers to burn down Jews’ homes and synagogues and remove the Jews from German society. It was that long history of Christian anti-Semitism that made the ground fertile for the sowing of Hitler’s seeds of madness.

Does this mean that Christianity caused Hitler? Of course not. It means that Hitler was an opportunist who seized on any justification he could at any given time to convince whatever audience he was speaking to. And it means that the groundwork for the destruction of the Jews in his country was laid long before Hitler and even before Darwin himself lived. Racism does not need evolution to survive; it survived quite well on its own long before Darwin ever boarded the Beagle.

The bottom line is this: “Expelled” is a movie full of half-truths, exaggerations and outright lies. The great irony at the center of it all is that this highly dishonest polemic is brought to us by those who continually claim that evolution leads to immorality. Perhaps they should read their Bibles in more detail; I seem to recall something about removing the log from our own eye before pointing to the splinter in someone else’s.

Disclaimer: Ed Brayton is a founding board member of Michigan Citizens for Science, an organization that actively works against the actions of the ID movement. For a more thorough examination of the various claims regarding Richard Sternberg, see Brayton’s recent article in Skeptic magazine.