How great is it that Alissa Wilkinson, making her own Christian faith clear, has the opportunity at Vox to expose how the the God’s Not Dead trilogy is misrepresenting the Gospel?
It’s easy, after all, to point out how awful these movies really are. But to do so while highlighting the betrayals of Christianity inherent in these films is, ultimately, a better form of Christian witness than almost all so-called “Christian movies.”
Christians … are supposed to be people who follow the teachings of Jesus, who instructed his followers to practice a fairly extreme form of not fighting back, instead turning the other cheek to someone who slaps you and giving your shirt to the person who sues you for your cloak.
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The goal, in the end of each of the films, is to win — whether it’s vanquishing a foe in a classroom, winning a court case, or gaining the higher ground and being the de facto winner in the court of public opinion.
The greatest offense of the God’s Not Dead series may be its failure to imagine for its audience what a truly radical belief in a living God would look like. The movies, crippled by their own narcissistic inward turn, prove their imagination is far, far too small.