God's Not Dead: A Review

Hello friends and readers.  A few months ago, my girlfriend and I joked "We should totally review God's Not Dead for YouTube sometime".  Well, not YouTube, but I am writing this review for Facebook and Blogspot.  Before I begin, I'd like to do a bit of housekeeping.  First, I'm a Roman Catholic Christian and former Baptist; I believe in the Nicene Creed.  Short version:  I believe in God the Father, in Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit.  I believe in the ressurection of Christ, the judgment at the end of our lives, Heaven, and Hell.  I believe in sin, I believe in Grace with a capital G. 

What I don't believe in is rampant consumerism.  Aside from theology, that's my main problem with modern Evangelical Christianity.  It's become infected (and the Catholic Church isn't immune either) with the idea of Jesus as a product to be sold, not as a Savior who gave up His life so that we might have eternal life.  And honestly, as we start...that's the vibe I'm already getting from God's Not Dead before it even begins.  I'm trying to not think of the massive ad campaign for it, including multiple commercials at the Winterjam concert I attended in January, but it's hard to forget that.  Popping in the DVD, the first thing that greets me is ads for "Pureflix" a Christian film company that has done a surprisingly large number of films.  Some of them even look kind of decent, which given the low bar of Christian cinema at times, is a good thing.  The good ads give me hopes that this movie will also be good, even if I don't anticipate it rocking my world like The Prince of Egypt.  As for our welcome/intro screen for the DVD, we have a student hard at work studying as soft yet menacing piano music plays in the background, which kind of negates the good vibe I was getting from the ads.

Before I hit play, one other thing I need to confess, as it were.  I'm a college professor.  I've never met the militant atheist professor archetype displayed in the trailers for this film.  However, my old Baptist church warned us about liberal atheist professors who would try to lead us astray from our faiths, back when I was a Senior in high school.  Fortified by that talk, I went into my first class to find a minister and adjunct faculty teaching it, bouncing sermon title ideas off of us before we started.  Anyhow, join me, friends, as we embark on the epic journey into a film that every Evangelical church in America seemed to be pushing on its members with the zeal of a drug dealer in a 1980s After School Special.

We start by telling us it's from PureFlix...I realize this is standard enough to show the production company.  But between the insert in the case for their films, only their movies being advertised, and so forth, it really pushes the line of tasteful self promotion.  That said, I have to admit that I'm mostly enjoying this intro credits thing that's going on.  It's a nice little microcosm of college life:  People shopping, the person whose power went out and slept in past her alarm because it was reset to blinking 12:00, a stereotyped Chinese student, riding his bike and way overdressed.  A very angry looking man I assume is a Muslim, who keeps adjusting his daughter's hijab, which she takes off as soon as he's out of sight.

Wow...registration guy is breaking some federal privacy laws there, or at least heavily skirting them, to warn off our protagonist over the whole Christian thing.  Subplots are developing here.  Kid from China, Alzheimer's old woman and her daughter she doesn't recognize.  Our oversleeping reporter has just ambushed the Duck Dynasty people, and already said to the wife, "I thought you would be back home barefoot and pregnant." And Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, has come in, late and snarky for his first class.  He lists a lot of great thinkers and reveals they're all atheists, and that the students should be too, and uses things which are stereotypical like "fairy in the sky" and such.  Everyone is writing "God is dead", but not our protagonist, he refuses to bow to peer pressure from the other 100+ students. 

Wow, Kevin Sorbo...if you were a real professor you would have been fired already.  You've repeatedly insisted a student's personal beliefs are "Superstition" and such.  You've outright told him you intend to fail him, that you won't be objective in grading, etc.  Any actual university would fire you for this bullying behavior against your students.

Oh come on, the "God is good" "All the time" "All the time" "God is good" thing was just used.  That made me sigh at stereotypicalness.  And his girlfriend is talking about loving him, but forbidding him from going up against a professor.  This movie doesn't know how to do reporters either; this woman's questions are more pointed than a Fox News reporter's and with more of an agenda as she ambushes a Duck Dynasty couple at their church, and the redneck comes off as the sympathetic one due to the hamfisted writing by the people who made this film...and she's busy as her doctor tries to keep telling her the test results.  And this being a PureFlix film, I'm completely unsurprised she has cancer.  But it's okay, I'm sure by the end of the film, she'll at least accept Jesus as her Lord and Savior and repent of her vegetarian, humanist, and evil liberal ways.

"And now I will turn the podium over to Mr. Wheaton to begin making the case for a Supreme Celestial Dictator, otherwise known as God."  Kevin Sorbo, you're the only good actor in this film, and it's proven by your ability to pull off that line without shaking your head incredulous.  He's followed by the African missionary character, who despite my best efforts, I can't find the name of the actor who plays him...he's also a cardboard cutout of a character, but the actor seems to be having such a good time playing him, that I can forgive that. 

It's the job of the missionary to be shown as a contrast to his pastor friend that he's visiting, an overworked man who sees no value in the different church groups he meets with, like the women's crafting group.  Meanwhile our African friend, portraying what Spike Lee dubbed "The Magic Negro", is dispensing wise spiritual advice, and gently chides his American friend to know that God is in the small things, even the everyday minutiae that we may not think of as Godly.  That part of how we live our lives, should be with the knowledge that God is in all we are and all we do, if we are to be a part of the world but not of it.  The missionary's other role is to fulfill multiple stereotypes.  He's wide eyed and idealistic about America, wanting nothing more than to go to Disney and get a pair of Mickey Mouse ears and a photo with the eponymous mouse.  This fits in well with Americans overall worldview of "the third world" compared to the "shining city on a hill" as Reagan called the United States.  The other stereotype is that "Africa is more deeply spiritual and religious than us by nature", which when you have half the main plot being about how religion is nothing but superstition, you get some deeply unpleasant ideas behind how the people behind this film may feel about the continent.  That said, racism and poor stereotyping aside, I'd definitely prefer African missionary preacher to any other religious figure we've seen in the film thus far, because he's the only one who seems to actually care about Christ.

I should also note that we're 30 minutes in by this point and I drink 2-4 drinks per year, usually at 2 conferences I attend.  Never before has my reaction to a film been, "I wonder if this would be better with a Long Island Iced Tea", but God's Not Dead is full of...I was going to say surprises, but what's surprising is how awful this film is.  Nothing is actually surprising, because so far, this is every stereotype anyone who grew up in an Evangelical subculture has ever been exposed to.  From the evil militant liberal atheist professor who wants to destroy faith in God among his students, to how you shouldn't be yoked unequally with those who don't believe as much as you do, which the film has thus far been less than subtle about with Josh (our protagonist) who loves God with all of his heart, and his more worldly, domineering, and *gasp* feminist, girlfriend who refuses to submit to traditional gender roles....who also keeps trying to get him to deny God on paper to pass the class, because she's more worried about their careers than God.  To show just how blatant this is, earlier in the film when she first tells him to deny God for an A, he goes to pray afterward and gets a Bible verse from a campus pastor about if you deny Christ on Earth, He will deny you in front of His Father in Heaven.  She's essentially Eve, trying to temp Josh as Adam into his own Fall from Grace.

Anyhow, our first of a few showdowns between Kevin Sorbo and his student.  Kevin totally destroys him...and what the hell?  He grabs the student in the hallway, shoves him against the window, "There is a God in that classroom and it's me.  I'm a jealous God, and I will make it my personal mission to destroy any chance you have of a law degree in the future".  Again, Kevin Sorbo's character would NOT still be employed at any university.  Seriously.  Oh and look, worldly girlfriend of six years dumps Josh for going through with his argument, as she essentially forsakes God for the world, because the evil liberal education system has gotten to her!  Because yes, after six years of being in love, you're going to totally dump someone for standing up in what you also supposedly believe in.

Meanwhile the "I'm secretly not wearing the hijab" girl is secretly also listening to Franklin Graham podcasts about Jesus.  This is a totally unsurprising development given the course of the film.  Why at this rate, I bet we go back to our reporter friend and she gets dumped too--oh wait.  She just got dumped by her boyfriend who says the cancer violates their relationship agreement, when she thought they were in love.  He meanwhile says love doesn't exist. Turns out he's the son of the poor Alzheimer's suffering lady and he shows as little care for his mother as his girlfriend.  And his sister, the daughter of Alzheimer's woman is Kevin Sorbo's character's wife, sorry, girlfriend apparently (who creepily enough was his undergraduate student when in his class when they began to date after the midterm...he teaches Freshman philosophy).  Oh it all starts coming together.  Oh and she's a Christian too!  "There's only room in this relationship for two.  I don't get a mistress, you don't get to drag around a two thousand year old Jewish carpenter." 

Oh nice an evil cabal of professors meet in Kevin Sorbos' home and they're all militant atheists!  Laughing at his wife's (sorry, girlfriend's) belief in God, which he shouts down and claims "She's a work in progress".  Again, this resembles no faculty I've ever shared a workspace with.  Meanwhile, Chinese kid calls home, and Good Communist Yet Businessman Stereotype dad reassures his son that the professor is right, that God does not exist.  And after being ripped a new one all night, the wife tearfully announces, "it's time for the help to leave".  And of course her pastor is our frustrated American pastor.

I would go into this film's views on evolution, but that would take more knowledge than I have.  I can, however, safely state that almost everything the protagonist says from "Darwinists believe" onward is wrong or misinformed or misconstrued at best.  In fact, he rips Darwin himself for thinking evolution was in place of God.  Meanwhile, anyone who has actually read Darwin's works will tell you that he once stated he saw no reason why a person could not remain a Christian while believing in evolution.  "Nature does not jump" he quotes Darwin, but in a way such as Darwin renounced evolution.  And now we read from Genesis as a literal account.  Only to find that twelve year old Kevin Sorbo's character watched his mother die of cancer, and that's why he doesn't believe in God.  Sorbo delivers one of the most true statements of the film in this bit of exposition, "Some of the most ardent atheists were once Christians". 

Third best actor in the movie is an actress.  Our Humanist Vegetarian Reporter is actually developing a reasonably strong character in the face of her cancer.  The actress portraying her has done a brilliant job of going from bubbly, perky, and silly person with an agenda to grief stricken and lost in a sea of grief and emotion.  Also as we move to yet another subplot, "Angry Muslim Dad" as I called him has lived up to his stereotype by finding out his daughter listens to Christian podcasts and flies into a rage.  Slapping her, throwing her against walls and furniture, then throwing her out of the house with his hands around her throat, before deciding not to kill her.  He slams the door in her face as she tries to shove her way back in, and goes to cry.  How one dimensional are the characters in this film for the most part?  Well, so far there's been nothing I had not already predicted from the very first time we met any of these characters, because all we're doing is using well worn tropes of Christian fiction that have been shown to work time and again.  Speaking of, there's "China is evil" as the excited Chinese kid talks again to his dad on the phone about how the arguments for Jesus are making sense and his father's reaction is "you don't know who is listening, you are jeopardizing your brother's chances to study abroad".   Girlfriend leaves militant atheist prof too.

This forms an interesting dichotomy as it were, and a roll reversal that I expected from the beginning of the film.  Arguable, as we enter the zenith of this, we find that our protagonist, the Christian, Josh and the Atheist, Kevin Sorbo's Character, are alike.  They share much the same experiences.  At the beginning, the students side with Sorbo against Josh, Josh loses his girlfriend over his faith in God, and Josh must fight an uphill battle.  Meanwhile, as things shift, Sorbo loses his girlfriend over his being a douchebag (pardon the language) and over reasons of faith, or lack there of.  The class is also turning against Sorbo, siding with Josh, as they are being won over by strawman arguments against atheism and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.  Two sides of the mirror, yin and yang, light and dark, good and evil, Christian and Atheist.  This is the main plot of the film, even though it continues to be lost in an altogether too large number of subplots. 

"Yes I hate God.  He took everything from me.  All I have for Him is hate!"  "Well, how can you hate someone who doesn't exist?"  Actually I know plenty of atheists who hate God and religion while still refusing to believe in His existence.  Oh look, one by one, starting with our Chinese student, every kid rises to say "God is not dead" one by one.  No one stands with the atheist professor, who leaves the room.  Have to admit, saw that one coming from a mile away.  Just as it was inevitable that the lawyer son would visit his mother, who would be perfectly lucid about life, faith, and give a speech about the Devil to her son...then asked who he was.

Now, Amy, the reporter, bursts into a random Newsboys concert and demands to know how they know God exists.  "When pressed you quote ancient scribblings and say it's all in there".  And they ask her where she finds her hope, and she replies after silence, "I'm dying".  The Newsboys realize she's not there to trash them, but hoping that Jesus is for real.  Because one felt that was what God was saying to tell her.  She's not alone either.  Everyone's showing at the concert from the youth demographic:  Beaten ex-Muslim girl looking happy, Sorbo's ex girlfriend, protagonist and Chinese kid. American Pastor and his African Missionary friend are stuck in traffic due to the concert, and once again, the missionary character is an utterly stereotypical yet great straight man about it all, "Shouldn't we be happy they're all here to worship God?"

Meanwhile Sorbo reads his mother's deathbed letter that begs him to remain with the Lord and says how much she loves him.  He calls his ex and asks her to call him, showing true emotion; I'm betting he goes to the Newsboys too.  Oh there he goes, he sees an ad for their concert.

Okay movie, you got me there, Kevin Sorbo gets hit by a driver, who drives off, in the rain.  "I can't die, I'm not ready" he tells Pastor Dave and African Missionary.  Pastor Dave is trying to do a deathbed conversion here, realizing it's all been leading to this with his car trouble.  "I'm so scared to die", "If it helps, so was Jesus."  "Are you willing to put your faith in Jesus Christ, are you willing to take that chance?"  "Yes."  "Do you accept Him as Lord and Savior."  "Yes...I...I accept him."  And Kevin Sorbo dies in the street, converting only before death...i have to admit, I sort of appreciate that.  It's a bit trope-ish, but fits well with the Parable of the Worker in the Vineyard and how the Master paid each the same, no matter when they learned of the job and began it.  The Kingdom of Heaven is the same way, according to the parable; even by coming in at the end, one can receive the same reward as those who have been working towards the goal for years.  Because that is God's mercy.  Even someone like Professor Raddison, Sorbo's character, who persecuted those who follow God is welcome in the end if they but acknowledge Him and what He did on the cross.  We also have the subtext here of "only the fool says in his heart that there is no God" and "do you not know that this night your life will be demanded of you?"

As the film ends, people joyously text "God's not dead!" and the viewer is invited to as well.  The formerly Muslim girl flirts a bit with Josh, hinting that he will be equally yolked soon with a Godly woman.  Martin, the Chinese kid, texts his father that God isn't dead and is Saved. 

God's Not Dead has several themes and briefly I'd like to go over the ones I saw in this excruciating viewing.  The first theme is that of "the world hates Christians".  This is a theme which is pretty subjective.  In the Bible, Jesus tells His followers that the world will hate them, because it first hated Him.  And this is true on a sliding scale of hate quite often, from simple derision to more drastic things.  Honestly, I think this theme is part of why I disliked the movie as a whole...I'm supposed to sympathize with a protagonist who is facing an unrealistic depiction of an evil militant atheist academic who really wouldn't still be employed, when yesterday I saw photos of decapitated children who died for Christ.  American Christianity likes to paint itself as an entity under siege and attack from all sides, and yes, while it faces pressures, it's just that...pressure.  American Christians aren't dying for Christ like others are in some nations, including Iraq, where ISIS is systematically beheading Christian children as their parents watch.

Second would be, "a career isn't as good as God".  Time and again this gets demonstrated.  First it's Josh's girlfriend of six years, who ends up leaving him, because his zeal for God is jeopardizing her future career.  Ditto with the humanist atheist vegetarian reporter with terminal cancer; she gets dumped for being dead soon, and had a hatred of God and made sport of making fun of Christians in her job with the "liberal media".  She, however, comes around with her conversion at the hands of the Newsboys.  Sorbo's career drove away his girlfriend, who valued her faith more than his atheism. 

Third is "deathbed conversions".  Professor Raddisson has one in his last moments of life, previously described.  And Amy, our liberal media member, has one as well, and finds the love of God is enough to face her impending death with dignity, thanks to being Saved by Jesus. 

Fourth, we've got "the international community needs Christ if only America could develop some missionary spirit again".  This is exemplified in a number of ways.  First, by the African Missionary character, who I still think was awesome, despite the racist undertones.  His American pastor friend describes him as "being on the front lines, winning souls for the Lord".  The girl who was Muslim is Saved by Franklin Graham's podcast on 1st Corinthians, though this costs her in the form of her family, as Jesus said, His coming would pit family against one another.  The Chinese student is Saved as well, and once knew about a hidden house church in China.

Fifth, "academics are evil atheists who want to steal your children's souls".  Again, pretty self explanatory, but a real talk that people often have with their kids before sending them to the university. I know this sort of talk, though not as dramatically phrased, came up in my old Baptist church before I went to college.

The last major theme of the film is an unintentional one.  And that theme is "Evangelical Consumerism".  This film is like one giant generic Evangelical commercial.  We start with Pureflix advertising its own films.  Then we start advertising everything from Franklin Graham's products to the Newsboys music (their latest hit song is the film title) to Duck Commander duck calls.   No, secular films aren't angels either at this, but quite frankly, I expected more of a Christian film.  I expect product placement from secular cinema, but it came off as tasteless and downright tacky in this, much like when K-LOVE advertises different movies...including this one. 

All in all.  God's Not Dead is exactly what the title says.  Our God is not dead.  He's alive!  The same cannot be said of my brain cells, however, after watching this piece of cinema that falls drastically short of any number of standards, ranging from the script to actual character development.  Despite it's awkward beginning, plethora of subplots, and seeming to be composed of every Christian chain letter and trope to have ever existed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States...the film really wasn't too bad overall.  Yes, it was stupid.  Yes, there are probably pornographic films out there with more character development than anyone short of our liberal reporter went through.  Yes, it relied heavily on the "we're persecuted" mentality that certain groups in American Christianity try to drum up.  Yes, I predicted the fate of almost every single character (except Raddisson and Amy's deaths) and how they'd end up...the first time we saw them.  Yes, they got evolution wrong factually. 

However, the ending, for the most part, makes up for this.  As the voiceover from Raddisson's dead mother read her deathbed letter to him, I choked up a bit.  Not because it was well done, but because it sounded like something my own mother would write.  And the filmmakers actually did a pretty decent job tying every single subplot together at the very end.  It shows that while at first it all looked like someone threw crap at a wall until something stuck, idea wise, that it was all planned and interwoven before hand.  This isn't something that's readily apparent as you're watching the film, even when you guess how the characters will end up. 

Really, from a Christian standpoint, most of our characters get happy endings too.  That's a refreshing change compared to some cinema.  Yes, Amy is going to die, but at least she's at peace with it now, and will go to Heaven.  Likewise, Raddisson dies on the street, but at the last minute, he is Saved.  Christian pastor guy with car issues gets to actually do something "worthwhile" as he had put it earlier, helping lead Raddisson's girlfriend out of a bad relationship, and making sure Raddisson avoids the fires of Hell.  The son of the woman with dementia must face the fact that his mother gained lucidity enough to tell him the Devil likes to trap people in guilded cages, and it seems like he's questioning his own lack of belief at the end of the film.  Martin, our Chinese kid, embraces Christianity because of the witness of our protagonist Josh, who is probably soon to have a new girlfriend in the girl who left Islam thanks to Franklin Graham.  Happy endings all around.

God's Not Dead isn't a good film.  However, I expected far worse, from the reviews I read of it, where even Christian reviewers were calling it "Spiritual Masturbation".  I would definitely put it in the "Preaching to the Choir" territory, and deeply inside it at that.  It's biggest weakness is its lack of follow through; it never makes an actual argument against atheism in favor of Christianity.  Likewise, it's atheism is made of similar straw.  It's greatest strength is that despite it being cheesy, poorly written, and relying heavily on tropes...God's mercy and grace still manages to shine through.  God's Not Dead probably won't be winning a lot of converts, but if even one person comes to Christ, then PureFlix should say that it was worth its $2 million budget...and if that's not enough for them, after budget it still made $60 million at the box office.

In conclusion, God is NOT Dead.  However, my desire to speak any further about this film is.