"God's Not Dead" is a bad movie. Not just a bad movie -- I hated this movie. I do not speak for all one billion plus Christians, but if I did, I would apologize to all atheists, film editing aficionados, Muslims, women, academics, evolutionary biologists, vegetarians, the script writers' union, Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and anyone capable of more complex thinking than the crap your rwnj uncle constantly forwards to your email that this movie is.
In fact, this whole movie seems to be based on one of those emails. It even ends in one of those explicitly implied threats that if you don't forward the eye-rape to ten of your closest friends you will be abandoned by God. You may have been asking yourself why you keep getting texts from acquaintances stating "God's Not Dead." This movie has one of those duck whistle making scruffy guys tell the audience to send that message out to ten people if you love Jesus. That texting is why I allowed that horrific, rwnj mythomaniacal load of human excrement to be shown in the church where I am pastor. [sigh] Over the jump...
I knew I would hate the movie. That's why I didn't go see it when it was in theaters this past summer. And then the star, Kevin (Hercules) Sorbo, made a flap by yammering about the Jews being in charge of Hollywood.
So I admit that I approached this with a bad attitude (perhaps a closed mind which is anathema to my personal and denominational self-image). I have been waging a long war of attrition on the concept that Christians are an oppressed minority and the godless are at our doorstep ready to kill the men and haul away the women-folk. This siege mentality and fear based living is not how Jesus wants us to live. We are called to live gratefully, hospitably, generously, bravely, lovingly, truthfully. Fear based living makes a person the opposite of all that -- entitled, exclusionary, greedy, bullying, scared and myopic. This movie, I suspected, would only further that fear based mentality.
Wow, I was right. This defecatory jaunt into victimhood is clearly designed to leave gullible audiences feeling that all the vomitous sludge spewed on FOXNews and right wing talk radio and a great many of the praise-Jeebus-and-pass-the-ammunition-on your-way-to-the-GOP-caucus churches that are popping up like WalMart across this great land is real. The audience who buys in to this and who are immune to critical thinking will have all the fear based propaganda they have been fed reinforced in cut rate cinematography. They will leave having had all their opinions hand-jobed to climax.
I'd had several church people ask me whether I'd seen this great movie. It, according to them, drove them to tears of joy and really reinforced their faith commitment. They had obediently texted ten of their friends the "God Isn't Dead" meme and they think I need to see it and have the confirmation class and high school group see this movie.
Pretty sure I knew what a load of scatology this movie was and knowing so many of my people had been seeing it and recommending it, I thought it might be a good idea to host a screening under my direction and accompanied by my commentary. So we set it up for all the kids and the many adult volunteers to view.
I gave a prebuttal because I knew the running time would not allow a post-viewing rebuttal and I did not want the kids and adults to rush off without some urging to take this with a grain of salt. But the kids were squirming and fiddling with their popcorn and gigging so I highly doubt they heard me. Then we rolled the movie. Oh, good Lord.
This movie is so cartoonishly two dimensional that I actually laughed a few times. The baddies are so bad that I could have sworn they were about to blink and have the kind of black eye balls that would make the Winchester boys leap into action. The main baddie is a philosophy prof who forces all his students to reject the existence of God or take a 30% cut in their final grade. Either that or else conquer the prof in a public debate -- the atheist prof being the judge. Only one freshman student refused to deny the existence of God and so he had three turns at beating the prof in debate. But he got the prof to agree to let the class be the judge.
So we have our main goodie and our main baddie. Then the movie sets up several other side stories that relate to the main characters. Each one presents a complete dichotomous atheists/Muslims/anyone who is not the right kind of Christian bad side vs. the right kind of Christian good side.
The prof butts heads with his Christian girlfriend too. But the poor guy is not out numbered. Fortunately for him the entire philosophy department are in his corner. At a dinner party the bad guy is hosting academics uniformly and cartoonishly raise their eyebrows and curl their lips when the Christian girlfriend serves wine that does not meet their sophisticated tastes and they pish-posh her when she speaks a demure defense of the poor college kid her boyfriend is persecuting. Those damned liberal egg heads are all alike!
There are several other cartoonish baddies presented for the audience to boo and hiss. The college kids' girlfriend does not want him to defend God. She is so shrill and controlling and selfish and dismissive that you'd think you'd just wandered into an episode of "Eff that Bitch" on the Bro's Network. There is also the evil atheist business man who dumps his girlfriend about 4 seconds (not exaggerating) after she tells him she has cancer because that cramps his career plans. That demonization of the bankster surprised me a bit since the same party line this movie seeks to promote also promotes lionization of wealthy heartless businessmen/capitalists/captains of industry. Here, heartless money making is paired with atheism rather than the heights of Christianity. I think the producer was napping during the planning of that character line.
And there is the odious, truly bigoted story line of the college girl from a devout Muslim family. Her glowering Central Casting father forces her to wear a full face cover. He tells her, it is not easy being in a culture that does not revere God the way we think God ought to be revered. And that is when my hypocrisy alarm when full on. The oppressive theocratic Muslim father was presented about 1 chromosome differently than the makers of this movie were behaving themselves. Different clothes, same victimhood and judgmentalism against culture.
A couple pieces I was pleasantly surprised by: The two pastors in the movie were presented as pretty darned normal. Now, I'm not claiming victimhood here but I have yet to see a Christian cleric presented in a movie or tv who is not either stupid or evil unless it's a priest confronting a pea soup barfing tween. The other pleasant surprise was the actual three part debate which took about 10 minutes combined. The kid did well in the face of withering fire and he even [gasp] acknowledged that the earth is 4 and a half billion years old rather than 6,000. That fact probably didn't focus group well when they screened this for the target audience but the producers left it in there anyway because the kid then slid into the fallacy that there was no life until the last tiny percentage of time and so we can infer that God zapped life into existence relatively recently (on the geological scale). FYI, life has been evolving for more than 3 billion years -- 3/4 of the earth's life span.
The thing that will drive kossacks most crazy was the final conclusion of the movie. The oft argued idea that there are no atheists. The atheists turn out to be theists who are just mad at God. Note to producers: Atheists exist.
This movie sucked so bad that I had to rant here. I plan to follow up with my congregation on this because it was so wrong and so bad that it has to be re-rebutted. You might want to watch it just to laugh at it. But too many people lacking in critical thinking skills are watching this movie and going out in the world convinced that Christians are an oppressed minority who have our backs against the wall. Angry and fearful people and religion do not mix well.
Kevin Sorbo is half way right, Hollywood does not and apparently can not make a decent movie about Christians. It's just that this move proved his point.