God’s Not Dead: A Brief Review and Analysis

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Top Highlights

• od’s Not Dead is not a particularly good or even enjoyable movie, but being one was not the filmmakers’ primary goal.

• Who cares if it is frequently boring, has extended scenes with little relevance to the main storyline, characters of no real significance, or an ending with multiple loose ends?

• It is a movie meant to comfort and awaken those who are already faithful, not garner Oscar nominations or critical acclaim.

• The movie acts as a nearly two hour palliative telling Christians how very right they are and how awful and coldhearted those liberals and atheists and Muslims are

• This film is also tremendously racist in its portrayal of people of color and, unsurprisingly, displays pretty overt Islamaphobia as well. There are two notable characters in the film who are not white, a Muslim woman and a black missionary.

• her father, who is a devout Muslim, is made out to be a fanatical fundamentalist who kicks her out of the house when he discovers her Christian faith

• The lone black man in God’s Not Dead fulfills all the characteristics of the “Magical Negro” stereotype. The only words he ever utters are Christian koans of sorts meant to encourage and give strength to the white characters, to offer them faith when they have none

• exist as an actual person, but as a plot device whose sole existence is devoted to helping the movie’s white characters actualize themselves through his uttering of hackneyed and trite phrases.

• Recently, a trend has emerged within evangelical Christianity of demonizing intellectuals and intellectualism. The atheist professor has become a stock character within these folktales of religion triumphing over godless intellectualism

• In this movie’s universe, one is expected to submit oneself to God’s will no matter how inexplicable, or frankly awful, it may be.

• If this is the God that this movie is attempting to “prove,” then I think that conception of God is better left dead.

• religious belief is not something to be proven or disproven – it is something to be believed or not believed.