God's Not Dead

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. Granted, it suffers from occasional cheesiness and bad acting, but it goes so against the grain of modern American life that I couldn't help but admire it. Truth be told, I'm astounded that it made it past our "cultural" gatekeepers at all. A college freshman is a devout Christian and finds himself in a philosophy class where the professor -- Kevin Sorbo of Hercules fame -- curtly demands that all students write "God is dead" on slips of paper during the first day of class as a prerequisite to moving forward. The protagonist politely declines. The professor, slightly nonplussed, tells him that he should just write the phrase and check his conscience at the classroom door. When this doesn't work, the professor grows irritated and announces that the protagonist will have to present arguments demonstrating that the concept of God remains valid, and he strongly implies that this will cause the protagonist to flunk the course. The protagonist accepts the challenge despite great risk to his academic career; as he gets to work we are introduced to various other characters who confront their own struggles, and whose paths eventually converge.

A simple enough plot, but several things happen here that fascinate me.

• The film is unabashedly Christian. Most films dealing with faith do so in a bland, dishwatery manner that avoids all mention of Jesus so as to appeal to the widest possible audience (think Oh, God! and its sequels, Bruce Almighty, Contact, etc.). Not this movie. If you're an atheist or a member of any other religious faith, this movie will bother you, and it should -- "I came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword."

• Regardless of whether you agree with the protagonist's faith, the fact that he refuses to compromise his beliefs or to say what he does not believe remains highly inspiring, all the more so because of the serious consequences he faces. In our neo-pagan times, the concept of endangering your interests for the sake of principle is alien, and I'm glad to see this sort of virtue dusted off.

• The protagonist has a girlfriend who is his childhood sweetheart and who wishes to marry him, yet she is utterly unsympathetic to what he is doing because it might jeopardize his ability to go to law school. She pleads, threatens, and eventually dumps him precisely because of his noble traits, yet he is undeterred and never supplicates or tries to get her back. This is one of the only instances where I've seen a movie portray an ordinary woman (not a ridiculous supervillain) in a negative light, and it's about damn time. While the books remain very out of balance with rampant misandry in the media, this was a refreshing counterpoint to the near-universal portrayal of women as angelic and blameless. Art should imitate life, and here it does.

• Kevin Sorbo comes across very convincingly as the smug, vain, leftist professor whose only god is himself. He exudes contempt for the very Christianity that built the university system he teaches in, not to mention the civilization whose prosperity and orderliness he takes for granted. Like so many today, he is a patricide against the builders of our world. He also reacts belligerently to the protagonist for daring to think critically and to present capable arguments (i.e., the very purpose of higher education). Yes, he is a caricature, but an accurate one who epitomizes the pygmies and trolls teaching in modern universities.

• The protagonist makes a point in one of his arguments that I've tried to make in vain for a long time, as follows: if there is no God, then there is no truth, no right, and no wrong, meaning there is no basis for the professor to claim being right, and no need for a university system. Everything becomes merely a matter of the will (i.e., might makes right), which is the law of the jungle and completely incompatible with humanity, intellect, and civilization. Small wonder that all three are collapsing now that the struts of religious faith have been removed.

So in the final analysis, while this movie lacks the glamor and sleek production values of so many others, it has something they do not: a soul. In an odd way, this mirrors many a Christian's own status in the world.