Friday, March 28, 2014

Can I skip "God's Not Dead"?


Ryan Bell, writing from his Patheos blog "Year Without God", wrote a post called "On missing the point: God’s Not Dead" covering the low-budget Christian movie "God is Not Dead", which finished a surprising 5th at the box office this past weekend, mostly due to pre-sale:

So, Christians went to see a movie that claims, without an ounce of subtlety and nuance, that Christians are being persecuted by atheist professors in universities. The net effect: 
certain fundamentalist, culture-warrior Christians are confirmed in their persecution complex; 
the rest of the Christian world either hangs their head in embarrassment or yawns; 
the various non-theist groups are confirmed in their view that Christians are anti-intellectual and, consequently, not very smart (and bad writers and actors, as a group).

Bell also, in the post, tells why his experience in both "the camp who made this movie" and as a professor leads him to believe the movie is "fundamentally dishonest" (while self-disclosing that he gleamed this only from viewing the trailer and reading about it).

It's always difficult to review or criticize something you have not seen, heard, or read for yourself. I read both the first "Left Behind" book and went to see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" just so I could speak from first-hand experience when people asked me about it, but I admit (again, from what I've seen and read) I do not want to support such a movie for reasons included by Bell. And furthermore, the reviews are simply dreadful.

So, should I go see this film in order to critique it "from experience".  Or is the experience of this trailer enough....



(A version of this post appeared in The Episcopal Cafe)

No comments: