The few people who respond to Christians’ lies and are fooled thereby into conversion–or reconversion, or rededication–are enough of a success that the legions turned off from the religion are totally forgotten. So why is it that non-Christians forget all this stuff when it comes to their own untruths?
Evangelicals are long accustomed to dwelling in a bubble of kiddie league of media and art–dumbed-down, overly-obvious, telegraphed, hamfisted, unoriginal, willfully-ignorant, uninspired, blubberingly-sentimental, sexist (and often racist and bigoted as well), lowest-common-denominator-appealing, and yes, rinkydink. And that’s before we get into their numerous technical flaws, especially in the area of movies: the terrible plotting and pacing, the shoddy characterization, the dropped storylines and overly-simplistic conflicts, the unworldly way people react in them, the scenery-chewing and puppy-kicking villains devoid of any humanity, and the cardboard-cutout heroes.
We’re about to launch into a discussion of the Christians in God’s Not Dead, but before we get rolling on that, I want to spend a few minutes talking about the dissonance between this movie’s stated audience and goals, and what its audience and goals actually are.
Today I want to talk about how this movie presents non-white and/or non-Christian characters. As you might expect of a movie that is made up 100% of wish fulfillment fantasies, fundagelical/Fox News talking points, and the sort of memes your racist cousin keeps chain-emailing everybody, we’re not talking about nuanced, sensitive, sophisticated portrayals. We’re talking about the kind of situations and characters that you’d expect out of a movie aimed squarely at a crowd furious about having to “press 1 for English.”
This movie perpetuates stereotypes, and moreover it finds the worst possible stereotypes to perpetuate. This movie hates everybody who ain’t a nice white evangelical TRUE CHRISTIAN™. It’s not just atheists it rags on.
Has nobody told Christians exactly why shepherds tend sheep?
Changed my mind; we’ll do the Christian episode later. Today I want to talk more about how the movie God’s Not Dead deals with its female characters, because last time we talked I touched briefly on one aspect of the movie–its Read more
Changed my mind; we’ll do the Christian episode later. Today I want to talk more about how the movie God’s Not Dead deals with its female characters, because last time we talked I touched briefly on one aspect of the movie–its Read more
(Please consider all of my posts about this movie to be spoilerrific.) Last week I got hammered and watched God’s Not Dead so you don’t have to. One thing I learned watching it was the rather surprising fact that the various reviews Read more
Good news, everyone! Most of y’all know I’ve been helping the Recovering from Religion group with their Patheos blog, Ex-Communications, for about the last six months. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve really enjoyed helping them in such Read more