Christian Schlock And Awe
Michael Gerson, an Evangelical, can’t get over the awfulness of the new Christian movie God’s Not Dead. Excerpt:
But while “Noah” tries (and fails) to reconceptualize religion, the surprise hit “God’s Not Dead” positively discredits it. This movie is an extended exercise in evangelical wish fulfillment. (Freud is evidently not dead, either.) The plot: Fresh-faced Christian lad bests abusive, atheist philosophy professor at his own game, and then the professor converts just before he dies. Along the way, a Muslim girl gets beaten by her father and converts, and a liberal blogger gets cancer and converts. Everyone is a willing, pliant participant in a vivid fantasy, vaguely bringing to mind a very different kind of film.
The main problem with “God’s Not Dead” is not its cosmology or ethics but its anthropology. It assumes that human beings are made out of cardboard. Academics are arrogant and cruel. Liberal bloggers are preening and snarky (well, maybe the movie has a point here). Unbelievers disbelieve because of personal demons. It is characterization by caricature.
Gerson says most Evangelicals he knows don’t see human beings as “moral types and apologetic tools,” which means “Evangelical lives are better than their art.” Gerson continues:
[True religious art] finds hints of grace among the ruins of broken lives, where most of us can only hope to find it. Art is truly religious only when it is fully human.
True. You all know how much the Divine Comedy means to me. I believe that God spoke to me through it, calling me out of a dark wood I found myself in as a result of my spectacular defeat in moving home. The Commedia comes out of a place of profound brokenness in Dante’s life, and the characters he creates in the poem are so intensely, vividly human. I had always kind of assumed that the Commedia was a medieval Christian morality play, with Good and Evil neatly and boringly drawn. Not at all. Not at all! Good and Evil are plain as day in the poem, but Good and Evil as they are incarnated in flawed human beings — and we are all flawed human beings — is anything but clear. And that’s why the Commedia speaks with such revelatory power even today, seven centuries later. The Commedia revealed love and redemption in the ruins of hope. And it helped me find meaning and a new, very different kind of hope.
I looked at the website for God’s Not Dead, to see what more I could learn about it. Here’s one testimonial to it; all the others are like this:
“God’s Not Dead- the movie is a rallying cry for Churches to equip and encourage believers to reach non-believers with the Gospel. It provides reasons to believe and confidence to take a stand for Christ in an increasingly secular society.”
If Michael Gerson’s description of the plot is accurate, then the blindness of people like this commenter as to how storytelling works is really something else. Is there reason for anyone who isn’t already converted to believe after seeing a propaganda movie like this? Once I was at a private screening of an expensively produced teaching series intended to help college students confront pressing moral questions from a Christian point of view. The production values were high, and the intentions of the filmmakers were impeccable, but the content was so canned, the answers all pre-digested and formulaic, that the thing most probably would act as a vaccination against contracting an interest in what Christianity truly has to say about life and its challenges.
You’ve heard me say it a million times, and you’ll hear me say it again: At 17, I thought I knew everything there was to know about Christianity. It had pat answers for everything, and existed to build a tidy, happy-clappy structure within which to shelter from life’s tragedies and life’s big questions. And then I saw the Chartres cathedral, and knew from my shock and awe that I had been all wrong.