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.
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.
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 sheer dismissiveness toward them, and their utter two-dimensionality. Remember our Read more
Here’s why we’re going to be talking about “God’s Not Dead” for a while.
When a horrible remake gets made of a movie that was already horrible to begin with, though, that’s when things have potential to get really bad. Left Behind is one such movie franchise.
Today we’re going to talk about how toxic Christians (who can be loosely defined as “those Christians that sane, normal, loving Christians instantly try to distance themselves from the moment they say something stupid”) mischaracterize non-believers and what that means for their religion. A meatspace friend of mine called to Read more
Continuing the long tradition of evangelical urban legends and worn-out tropes in movies*, I’m in Love With a Church Girl offers up a rehashed and cliché-riddled bit of schlock that is “based on a true story,” which means it bears only the faintest hint of a trace of the real story. This movie looks at the topic of mixed-faith relationships–and it does so in quite possibly the most offensive, misogynistic, and insulting ways possible.