Hercules and Sabrina in ‘The Mystery of the Missing Messiah’

There’s a saying that “there are no atheists in foxholes”, which I suppose is one potential takeaway from the 2014 film God’s Not Dead. The film purports to take the form of a debate between a young Christian college student and an atheist professor (the one and only Kevin Sorbo) who asks his students to bypass the debate over the existence of god by admitting that “god is dead”. It turns out, in a shocking twist, that the supposedly atheist philosophy professor is not so much an atheist as a fallen Christian who’s grrr, mad at god. It’s easy to debate an atheist when that atheist secretly believes in god.

So when that not-atheist professor is killed by a vengeful god at the end of the film and finally acquiesces to Christianity with his dying breaths, you might say “there are no atheists in foxholes,” but really, there were no atheists to begin with. For all the film’s pretense of a debate which will prove the existence of god, the best God’s Not Dead can do is throw out some half-assed arguments and then just give up and suggest that all non-Christians are evil and murder one of them for good measure. The moral of God’s Not Dead is that it’s easy to debate an opponent when you get to write their lines for them.

And that’s just part one. They made three whole movies despite ostensibly proving in the first film that reports of God’s death were greatly exaggerated. Perhaps that’s because the trilogy is less about proving that “god’s not dead” so much as arguing that people are trying to kill him. I can only speculate, but I suspect the bulk of people watching God’s Not Dead fall into two broad categories: Christians who don’t need to be convinced and heathens like me who will never be convinced and mostly want to mock the silliness of Christians in the United States constantly reveling in their own perceived victimhood.

As these films progress, they become untethered from that central thought experiment / philosophical exercise style of the first film. God’s Not Dead is a fringe example of that Ben Shapiro “facts don’t care about your feelings” garbage, even though so much of Christianity hinges on feeling the presence of a deity; the film is predicated on argumentation and a fetishization of what passes for Christian and right-wing logic. This desire to present the film as a seminar as much as a narrative gets to the heart of the matter, though: even though feeling god is important, god’s existence is taken for granted as fact, and anyone who disagrees with god’s existence is, like the former Hercules, letting feelings get in the way of celestial fact, of the sort that belong in a classroom as much as any church.

Speaking of classrooms, God’s Not Dead 2 follows a high school teacher (deprogrammed teenage witch Melissa Joan Hart) who is put on trial for mentioning Jesus in her classroom. No longer content with a mere philosophical threat to god’s existence, the series introduces a tangible legal threat to both god and good Christian schoolteachers, which I think the filmmakers think is a realistic premise. Once again there’s a lot of lip service toward empirically proving tenets of Christianity that mostly amount to preaching to the converted. This is certainly the filmmakers’ prerogative, but I personally fail to understand the appeal of a softcore religious sermon.

Still, the courtroom is another place that Christians can play-act their belief that they have facts on the side of their religion. Again the film can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a lecture or a story, but given the increased material stakes at hand, the film leans into the story of a beleaguered schoolteacher.

The third film, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, fails to follow through on the final button of part two, in which the pastor featured as a side-character in the two films is arrested for failing to turn over his sermons for governmental review. Instead, the bulk of A Light in Darkness is not the pastor’s legal fight against government intervention in his sermons but against the college who wants to shut down the church after it burns in a fire that kills off the only worthwhile character in the series.

By this point the series has devolved into just another bad Christian-themed drama, dropping the partially didactic nature of the previous films that at least amounted to some laughable attempts to logic-wrestle atheist (not actually an atheist) professors and the evil ACLU (personified by the ever-demonic Ray Wise). And I honestly struggle to care about anything going on in this terrible excuse for entertainment. Something something something Christianity under siege blah blah blah what the fuck ever.

The God’s Not Dead films are indicative of that particular line of U.S. right-wing and in particular right-wing Christian thought that is obsessed with its own persecution complex. Astute observers may note that Christianity is still the dominant school of thought in the United States, but this misses the point. For Christians like the ones who made God’s Not Dead or the ones who enacted Texas’ new abortion ban and even those justices who let the law go into effect, the goalposts are drastically, irrationally distant from any sensible reality. Because when you spend decades, centuries even, in a dominant position, even the slightest pushback feels like persecution rather than what it is, which is a (very gradual) path towards equality of thought in the public sphere. Everything less than total world domination is persecution to these people.

Anyway, since I’ve given the God’s Not Dead trilogy more time and thought than I ever wanted to, here’s a list of films to follow-up this article that I think would really be offensive to the people who made this movie (filmmakers, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong):

1. Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast
2. Crash (David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, not that other one that somehow beat out Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture)
3. The Invention of Lying
4. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (almost any episode of the series will work too)
5. anything by Michael Moore
6. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
7. Evolution

In short, I don’t know if god is alive or dead but I sure as hell hated these movies. They’re more right-wing political statements than Christian polemics, but it’s hard to argue I would have enjoyed the latter more. At least I can engage with an argument. These films are not arguments, even though the act of arguing is prominently displayed. God’s Not Dead and its sequels are feature-length advertisements for politically conservative Christianity disguised as a set of beleaguered people and institutions: scare the populace into supporting you lest the unthinkable happen, like the death of god, or something. It’s more dangerous than it might initially seem; the silliness of believing that the dominant religious tradition in the United States is under threat gives way to the realities of right-wing Christian power grabs and oppressive laws. If I may quote another movie I suspect these filmmakers would not appreciate, because it depicts abortion: “be afraid… be very afraid” of people who think like this. Not that god’s alive, but that people are trying to kill him.