God's Not Dead [2014]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

After "Last Ounce of Courage" this was inevitable really. "God's Not Dead" is a wildly popular Christian movie with far too many sequels and more to come. As connoisseurs of Christian movies, we wanted to find a reason for why this particular Christian movie has so captivated its target audience. It's higher quality production value wise than a lot of the Christian movies we saw for one thing. It has actors who people have heard of even though they are basically C-list at this point (Kevin Sorbo aka Hercules and Dean Cain aka Superman). It also features the Newsboys who are apparently a really popular Christian rock band. Really though, the reason this movie seems to be so popular is the premise of the main plot: a fervently atheist philosophy professor goes up against a fervently Christian freshman. I have written before about how Christian movies always want to set up the Christians as persecuted people, but I think the idea of setting most of the film in the world of academia makes more sense than usual in a way. Colleges are seen as liberal (see: godless) places, hostile to religion. While this is the marketing of colleges, like the marketing of America, this idea is false. To quote Adam, an actual philosophy student, "Philosophy classes are actually overwhelming tolerant of every single person's stupid ideas." I could actually just write a whole post about how over-the-top evil the philosophy professor is or about how every single character in the movie builds their theories on fallacy, but this post would be way too long. However, I do have pictures of our logical fallacy Bingo cards. The writer of this blog won. Next week we will be watching "God's Not Dead 2" with Christian movie Bingo.

The main plot centers around a college freshman, Josh Wheton (not to be confused with Joss Whedon). At his registration for his general education classes, he is warned by a student helping him not to take the philosophy class he is taking, after seeing his cross necklace. We find out why pretty quickly. The professor has a bunch of names written on a white board, which we immediately noted as not being a list of all philosophers. 

Turns out it was actually a list of atheists, which he was using as justification for why atheism is better. He then makes all the students write "God is dead" on a piece of paper. Josh refuses and they argue, which concludes with the professor saying he must give three speeches to the class defending his position. By the third, the whole class is on the "god's not dead" bandwagon. Of course, you find out that the professor used to be a Christian before he lost his faith and got angry. The movie ends in the most cheesy and forced way possible. The professor gets hit by a car driven by a reverend who begs him to accept god in his dying moments, which he does.

This isn't the only plot, although it is the most prominent. There are subplots all over the place that loosely connect to the two mains. The professor's girlfriend is a Christian who is  taking care of her dying mother and getting made fun of by her boyfriend and his educated friends so she dumps him. A Chinese student in the class calls his dad a lot to talk about how he is starting to like god in spite of his communist background. Josh's reverend has a guy come over from somewhere in Africa to . . . hang out and talk about god? I don't know. A liberal blogger who is in a bad relationship with her business boyfriend finds out she has cancer and finds god. And finally, in the most painful subplot, a Muslim girl secretly listens to Bible audiobooks and is kicked out of her house by her overbearing father. In the end, everyone goes to a Newsboys concert and texts everyone they know about how god is not dead. Oh, and some "Duck Dynasty" people are in it.

Overall, this movie isn't really funny but it is fascinating. The way non-Christian characters are presented is so exaggerated that it's practically parody, albeit with a solely judgement and mean-spirited lense. But then, the creators of this movie have probably never met an atheist or secular person.

Spoon Rating: 5