A Rant on God's Not Dead

So yesterday in class we discussed Christian movies and God’s Not Dead came up. So I’m going to go on a rant about this movie.

I’ll start with this. I HATE this movie. It’s boring, insulting, annoying, and more concerned about making Christians feel good about themselves than telling a good, truthful story.

The main character (can’t remember his name) who defends his faith in class is incredibly bland. He’s got very little personality to him and is not relatable at all. I get that the filmmakers are trying to make him likable because he’s so willing to defend his faith no matter what happens, but I don’t really know why he is that way so I don’t care. I also don’t like that he never struggles with himself about having to defend his faith, which makes him even less relatable. Sure, he loses his girlfriend and has a point where he doesn’t have an answer for a question from his professor who’s attacking his faith, but he never questions himself about if he should be defending his faith in the first place and immediately comes back with an answer the next day.

As for the rest of the characters: while there are a few characters I like, a majority of them come off as bland or unrealistic.

Now on to the story. I get the message the filmmakers going for and I think it’s a good one: God is real and still at work in the world. But the way this story is written and directed completely screws up this idea to the point that it just becomes the ultimate make-Christians-feel-good story. As Professor Leeper stated in class, it mostly uses the easy objections to the existence of God so that the filmmakers can easily defend God’s existence.

I’ll finish with my least favorite part: the ending. At the end of God’s Not Dead, during the Newboys concert, they bring up a video of Willie Robertson. He tells the people at the concert to text, “God’s not dead” to their friends. The film then brings up text onscreen telling you to text your friends this same thing. I hate this. Now there might be some of you who are thinking, “Wait Jon. Why is this so bad? There’s just trying to get you to share your faith.” My response to that would be this: first of all, I don’t think a film should ever directly tell you what to do like that. If anything, it should inspire you to text your friends because characters that you like are doing it, which it fails to do. Second, look at the way you’re told to do it: by the famous good Christian Willie Roberston, at a Newboys concert, (insert sarcastic voice) so that must mean that it’s the right thing to do. The movie is basically guilt-tripping you into it so that way, once you have done it, you can feel good about yourself as a Christian because you’ve told others about your faith and you know everything you believe it right. Finally, I question how effective this texting idea really is. Sure it might allow you to start up a conversation, but in most cases I imagine it would just be an annoyance to others and not be all that effective in spreading the gospel message. I would much rather talk directly to people about my faith. Maybe the filmmakers should have encouraged people to do something like that instead… but wait… that’s hard and takes real work…

I still can’t believe they’re making a sequel to this movie…