Last time we talked about the Oncoming Bus Gambit–that popular Christian thought experiment–because the movie God’s Club is built around this trope. The story centers around the efforts of protagonist schoolteacher Michael Evans to proselytize kids at his public school, the pushback he receives as a result of his “help,” and how he overcomes this persecution.
The central idea in the Christian movie God’s Club, which we reviewed recently and have been discussing off and on, is a very common talking point believed by right-wing Christians all over America: that they are facing unprecedented levels of persecution in this country, and thus are in great danger of losing their religious liberty–and from there getting imprisoned and even executed for their beliefs. Non-Christians may well feel baffled about why so many Christians cling to this idea as hard as they do–and why they seem to genuinely think that they are in real danger.
I’d be hard-pressed to point to a more glaring illustration of that discrepancy than the disgraceful spectacle of Christians making movies presenting themselves as they really truly believe they are–while remaining completely (and, one increasingly suspects, willfully) oblivious to how others see them.
I’ve been doing reviews of Christian movies for a while now. And unsurprisingly, I have been uniformly unimpressed because Christian media is uniformly awful. But to hear Christians themselves talk about “their” movies, these are all masterpieces. Epics. Perhaps marginally flawed here and there, but essentially wonderful. Everyone else is left to wonder if they’re even seeing the same movies these Christians are praising. I’m not surprised at all to see this lopsided reception.
I just noticed a movie pop up on my Netflix thing that sounded so ludicrous that I had to run a review on it as soon as I could. The movie is God’s Club.
This reboot of Left Behind is actually an imitation of a bog-standard disaster-on-a-plane movie.
But even in its attempt to slavishly imitate a specific genre of movies Americans got tired of in the 1980s, it couldn’t come anywhere near the quality and enjoyability of another take on the genre: 1980’s Airplane.
It’s a very ugly fantasy–the demonstration of a very broken psyche on display in the lewdest possible manner–and though the movie itself isn’t a critical masterpiece, seeing that fantasy marched across a screen for that runtime made me feel like I was reading some Nice Guy’s short story about his revenge on all those high school girls who rejected him long ago. It was that obvious and that disquieting to see this movie and think, “This is what they really think of us.”
To my astonishment, a quick search on Netflix revealed not only the new version of the movie but also the original Kirk Cameron version–and the two Kirk Cameron sequels. I feel like a five-year-old on Christmas morning suddenly. I’d say we’re set.
When Christians say they love movies like “God’s Not Dead,” or stoutly defend dreck like it against all criticism, I wonder if they realize what they’re telling me about themselves?
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.