A decade ago, Barack Obama was president. Louis C. K. was hosting Saturday Night Live. And the first film in the God’s Not Dead franchise was in theaters.
You may know the concept: A college student stands up to an atheist philosophy professor who’s trying to bully his class into denying God. The two engage in several debates; the student successfully defends God’s existence. The professor ends up turning his life over to Jesus before he’s hit by a car and killed.
The movie was a massive box office hit, earning over $60 million on a budget of just $2 million. It’s not hard to understand why. Though much has changed in ten years, evangelicals then as well as now were reckoning with the prospect of an increasingly post-Christian United States. The rise of the religious “nones” had begun. Conservative Christians who felt that pop culture portrayed their views as stupid or evil—see The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show—finally got to see one of their own play the hero, trouncing a Richard Dawkins–like adversary. (And saving his soul too.)
But God’s Not Dead also met with criticism from Christians and non-Christians alike; it became the poster child for what’s wrong with faith-based films. Viewers mocked the movie for its bad acting and poor writing, and they condemned it for its dumbed-down arguments about God’s existence and its caricatures of atheist villains.
Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for The New York Times (also a former critic at Christianity Today and my professor at the late King’s College) has commented extensively on the failures of God’s Not Dead. “It’s always been easy to poke holes in the movie’s fast-and-loose relationship with reality and its essential fantasy of persecution,” she wrote for Vox in 2019.
“The film heralded a future,” she continued, “one that has since arrived, where culture is fully bifurcated—where the streaming services you subscribe to can double as markers of identity, and where selecting the inspirational Christian option means making a proclamation about your politics.”
That future has indeed arrived—and so have more God’s Not Dead movies. In God’s Not Dead 2 (2016), a teacher fights for her right to talk about Jesus in the classroom; a law is passed requiring pastors to submit their sermons for government review. In God’s Not Dead: We the People (2021), government atheists attempt to ban homeschooling.
And now, one more: God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust premieres in theaters on September 12. In this iteration, the government will no longer fund a women’s shelter because a Bible study is held on its premises. Reverend Dave, whose church supports the shelter, is persuaded to run for office so he can allocate money appropriately. At the movie’s end, onscreen text tells audiences to “vote.” God’s Not Dead has come full circle—from the relatively small stakes of a classroom and a passing grade to a call for Christians to grasp political power.
If it’s not already obvious, I’m no fan of the God’s Not Dead movies. But that’s not because I dismiss the concerns that motivate them.
There’s some potential in the In God We Trust story. Reverend Dave’s dynamic with his reluctant political strategist, Lottie Jay, is a classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington setup. One scene, in which Lottie advises her candidate before a talk show appearance and he interrupts her to pray, got a genuine laugh out of me.
Imagine a well-made, Aaron Sorkin–esque, legal-political drama from the perspective of the Religious Right. Such a film might pose questions like: What does it look like to have Christian convictions in a pluralistic, secularizing nation? How do Christians in positions of authority bravely speak scriptural truth while also loving their neighbors well? These questions are far from irrelevant for evangelicals like me.
But God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust squanders any opportunity it might have to weigh in on them. Characters don’t dialogue with each other so much as trade ham-fisted buzzwords. The acting ranges from wooden to wildly over the top. The religious and political arguments are lazy and surface level.
And crucially, reality is distorted. The bad guys are motivated by a shallow hatred of religion as something that stands in the way of personal power. The media and government are so universally anti-Christian that even in a state like Arkansas, cynical Lottie tells Reverend Dave to stop discussing his faith.
These distortions matter. Embracing a caricature of your opponents’ views makes you ineffectual at both loving them and addressing their real concerns. On the flip side, thinking that any politician who speaks about God publicly must be honest makes you vulnerable to charlatans. Insisting that Christians on “our side” won’t be seduced by political power makes us less watchful.
It’s not that Christian claims of marginalization are wholly wrong. It’s that marginalization hasn’t happened in the way that God’s Not Dead warned it would. The original film implied that sending kids to college would endanger their faith—though actually, the college educated are among the most likely to attend church. The US government has not stripped Christians of their rights; in fact, in recent years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in favor of religious liberty. (Though what constitutes free exercise is far from settled; see Bethany Christian Services’s recent suit against Michigan.)
Instead of facing outright persecution for being Christians, Christian marginalization is happening around particular social issues as our culture increasingly demands conformity on gender, sexuality, and abortion. Most US evangelicals aren’t suing the government or giving apologetics-laden speeches to defend the Incarnation; we aren’t being imprisoned for being caught with Bibles.
But many US evangelicals are facing pressure—in workplaces, schools, and other organizations—to either quietly go along with norms that are now increasingly taken for granted or else face accusations of bigotry. And as this cultural pressure increases, so too is legal or policy pressure for pro-life activists or parents who hold traditional views on gender.
It’s far simpler to wail about “Christian persecution” than to deal thoughtfully and faithfully with this reality. The problem with “simpler” is it doesn’t actually help Christians navigate their world. Perhaps that’s why God’s Not Dead has largely dropped out of mainstream relevance. Its last two movies were both distributed as Fathom Events (an alternative to a traditional release), and hardly any reviewers covered them.
There’s one exception to the rule of this franchise: God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (2018). Reverend Dave works with his atheist brother to fight his church’s removal from school property but eventually realizes that his efforts are only contributing to hate and division on campus. He gives up the cause, even though he’s winning, and apologizes to everyone.
The movie is well written. It’s well acted. It portrays atheists sympathetically and gives them a chance to verbalize their legitimate grievances against Christians. In fact, you could argue that it went too far in the other direction, acting like any criticism believers faced was always their own fault.
What happened to the movie? Nobody liked it; it made only $7 million at the box office. And critics, both Christians and non-Christians, panned it. As Wilkinson put it, “In the end, this God’s Not Dead installment is just like the others: putting on a pious face but failing to imagine what real sacrifice might look like.”
I found most criticisms of the film to be “straining at gnats.” Giving up power is heroic, even if you wish someone gave up more. A Light in Darkness showed a willingness for Christians to start a dialogue, to apologize, to put down their defenses and listen. It began to make a case for the Christian way of doing things, with peacefulness and humility.
Ten years after its inception, it’s hard not to see the God’s Not Dead franchise as a wasted opportunity. The movies emerged at a time when Christians needed a way to wrestle with our decline in numbers and cultural influence. We needed stories about how to stand up for ourselves in the world as it really is without becoming what we’re fighting against. We still need those stories. Here’s to praying that in the next ten years, other storytellers come along who can do better.
Joseph Holmes is a Christian culture critic and host of the podcast The Overthinkers.
