It’s easy to dismiss God’s Not Dead, the cringe-inducing film about an evangelical undergraduate who takes on his atheist professor, but Robert Geroux sees it as an emblem of what’s wrong with too much of conservatism, and conservative Christianity, in America these days:
I have a theory about contemporary conservatism generally, and the religious right more specifically. They’ve studied the post-68 playbook of the center-left. They’ve appropriated the language of civil rights, the student movement and identity politics and turned it in a new direction: targeting “religious discrimination,” cultural indifference and even aggression (the “War on Christmas”), and so on. Both then and now, many of these battles took place on college campuses. Kevin Sorbo’s arrogant professor is surely a distortion, but the persona is meant to resonate with conservative viewers, especially young people who have been told repeatedly that the secular classroom is the place where faith commitments are deconstructed and stripped-away, often painfully. In God’s Not Dead this myth becomes hyperbole: no philosophy professor requires – on the first day no less! – the disavowal of God. What the distortion discloses however is the cynical belief that the role of authority in the pursuit of knowledge and even wisdom is nothing more than a sham, a mere power trip, intellectual combat for its own sake. According to these terms, the young man in question doesn’t really belong in a Philosophy class, since he already has all the wisdom he needs.
We have to strip away the image here to get at the reality.
What parades as a liberating experience of “speaking truth to power” is in fact profoundly disingenuous. The position and situation of the young man in the film is merely one of nothing more than a mobilized series of stale tropes, tableaux that support a worldview in which evangelical Christians are an oppressed minority. That we know this isn’t true is beside the point. Films like God’s Not Dead are the ideological expression of this stance, of a piece with the Creation Museum and Fox News histrionics around the holiday season. What we see in films like this is the elaboration of a closed circuit, a symbolic gated community in which to live. No thanks. And it has to be said as well: the ideological edifice just isn’t a very good one. So far, every overtly evangelical work of pop culture I’ve experienced is a transparent piece of unconscious self-parody and abysmal kitsch.
The Dish 