God's Not Dead

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0:00:04.3 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayers. It’s time to change out of that Newsboys T-​shirt and put on your Sunday best because we have got a lot to break down in today’s episode. Joining me today in this shining city on a hill to discuss the indescribable, unchangeable, awe-​inspiringly bad films of the God’s Not Dead series are libertarianism.org’s own, Aaron Powell…

0:00:31.5 Aaron Powell: Thank you. Glad to be here, I think.

0:00:33.9 Landry Ayres: And Paul Matzko.

0:00:34.7 Paul Matzko: Always a pleasure.

0:00:36.6 Landry Ayres: Now, the films in this series all rely on and are focused on asserting publicly and against seemingly insurmountable cultural and institutional odds that God, specifically the fundamentalist evangelical Christian God, is not dead in opposition to this sort of Nietzschean post-​modern moral relativist claim that he has died, such that religion, and once again, specifically fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, is unnecessary obsolete, and in some cases, outright evil. And it’s not just about Christians banding together to provide service and stewardship and love and all of these values that they profess in the film that are a part of Christianity. So it’s really not surprising that a movie that is about professing your faith and proving it starts with a credit billing the apologetics research by before any of the stars of the film, I think. It’s one of the first five. So it’s based on this book that is all just a sort of a handbook of arguments proving the existence of God. And I should say, today we’ll be having a discussion about the films and their arguments, which are related to, but absolutely different and separate from, the arguments for or against the existence of God. So we should say that outright.

0:02:08.4 Landry Ayres: But the movie itself is about proving things. There’s talk of evidence, debate, proof. It has a whole debate me energy, which I think at least a couple of former high school debate kids present in this recording would be able to tell you, are rarely good at actually convincing anyone of your argument. So it just makes me wonder, who is this movie for? David A. R. White, who stars, is the only actor, I believe, in all four films in this series. He plays Pastor David. He said… He’s also one of the producers of the film. He said he wanted to make it to give Christians a voice. But what is that voice being used for, who is it talking to? Is this empowering people to evangelize? Is it actually trying to convince people with these arguments like… Who is this for?

0:03:07.1 Paul Matzko: I shudder at the idea of someone sincerely bringing their non-​Christian friends to a church screening of these movies and thinking that we have an evangelist effect. The cringe factor of that. So it’s not written evangelistically. Whether it thinks is or not, it’s for the choir, it’s preaching to the choir, and it’s hard to overstate just how big apologetics were in… So I grew up in fundamentalist Christianity, still an evangelical, but it’s hard to express just… Everyone was obsessed with apologetics, which ostensibly means defending your faith. And so the idea in theory is that there are all these people out there who are questioning the tenets of Christianity and you need to do apologetics to tell them and show them why they’re incorrect, why Christianity is correct and right. But very often with apologetics, that kind of culture of apologetics, this is a time when people like Ravi Zacharias, the late departed and now we know he was a sexual predator, Ravi Zacharias. His books were everywhere. They mention one of the oldies. C. S. Lewis pops up at one point in the movie, a C. S. Lewis quote, the, “Only a real risk can reveal the reality of a belief” is a big line, that’s a C. S. Lewis quote. L. P. Strobel trouble pops up, who’s a very popular apologetics author.

0:04:37.4 Paul Matzko: So it was a big deal in evangelical circles in the ’90s through 2000s and… But it was always inward-​focused. Ostensibly outward-​focused but, really, it was like, “Oh, you’re a Christian. You’ve heard a tough thing. You’ve heard someone say that Christianity is a lie, or that the biblical canon is incorrect, or that God is dead or whatever, and here’s the reasons why you shouldn’t have to feel bad about that or worry about it, or losing any sleep over it.” So it’s internally focused, not externally focused. And so I think that’s at the core of the thing you’re getting at here Landry, which is this thing that’s supposed to be outward-​looking is very inward and narcissistic, to be honest.

0:05:23.8 Aaron Powell: That was my reaction as the token Buddhist in this conversation. Watching these films, my immediate reaction was, if they are trying to portray these views and the place of evangelical Christianity in American society in a good light, they have completely failed, because it’s ultimately like a deeply condescending… It’s particularly the first movie is a deeply condescending film. You have all of the non-​Christian characters suffer horribly in this, and the implication is that it’s their fault. But it’s all stuff like… It’s the one gets cancer. The atheist girl who has the “Meat is Murder” sticker on her car gets cancer, and then cancer leads her to realizing that her atheism and her progressivism were wrong and she embraces Christianity. You have the Muslim girl who is listening to Christian sermons and is found out and her dad just throws her out of the house. And then he… In the fourth one, it’s not really clear if he converts to Christianity, but he at least becomes sympathetic to it, and then he’s like the good guy again.

0:06:44.4 Aaron Powell: And then you have spoilers at the end. The evil college professor gets hit by a car crossing the street and is dying on the road, and the reverend shows up and is basically like, “This is good. This is good for you. You have this opportunity to convert,” which of course he does at the end, and then they just have this upbeat music swelling as they stand over his corpse.

0:07:09.3 Landry Ayres: They say, “This is a reason to celebrate.”

0:07:12.0 Aaron Powell: Yes, they say, “This is a reason to celebrate,” while standing over a man’s corpse in the middle of the road. It does not portray them in a good light, and that even sets aside all of the bad arguments that are just peppered throughout. But I think one of the really interesting takeaways from someone who… The two of you grew up much more in these evangelical circles, I did not. And what was fascinating to me watching it was how much… We talked about on Free Thoughts a bit, and Trevor has mentioned this, liked it. Much of American conservatism is essentially a victimhood or a persecution movement. It is… I think there’s a kind of person… It’s a personality trait that is, you’re really averse to change and you’re really comfortable in the familiar, and any change is disorienting or scary to you. But the way that that gets spun out in the political arena is change is seen not as just societies change, tastes change, preferences, beliefs and all that, but that it’s a taking, that if things change from what you were used to, it was because someone was trying to take that away from you. You’re a victim of a concerted effort to destroy the familiar. And that motivates a lot of conservative politics, and that’s very much on display here.

0:08:36.5 Aaron Powell: And it’s particularly acute here because it is elevated to nonsense levels. The level of persecution… If you watched these films and thought this is what it’s actually like for Christians in America, you would… It doesn’t map at all to the way Christians still are overwhelmingly the majority of Americans. I have a philosophy degree. I was in a department at CU Boulder, which is a very progressive place, and we talked about the arguments. We spent far more time in arguments from proof of God than arguments against the existence of God because those are the historical philosophical ones that you get, and they’re all treated very sympathetically. No Christians were being beaten up on by… It is just like utterly unrepresentative of the world, but if this is how you see the world and you see your place in it, then it’s no wonder that we end up with such profound reactionary politics.

0:09:29.1 Landry Ayres: So you’re telling me that in your Intro to Philosophy class, they did not make you sign a piece of paper with your name claiming infallibly that God is dead so that the professor could have proof of a unanimous front, and they could skip the first chapter because everyone fails it anyway, which is already the rules of the universe. I’m like… So we have a professor who was so bad at his job that his students all overwhelmingly failed the first chapter in his Intro to Philosophy course where he demands university level work. You are in an Intro to Philosophy class as a freshman in college. What are they expecting of these people? But what you’re talking about, this sort of appeal to tradition, or the appeal to tradition as a logical fallacy is used by a lot of these very conservative-​leaning people who see these instances of what they conceive as a taking away of their rights. It’s very much… It is overt in the first film, but it is, for the most part, I think, cultural in the way that it is portrayed.

0:10:47.0 Landry Ayres: It is the culture of the institution, of the academy and of this secular world. And I wanna say that we specifically… We watched… For this episode, we watched the first film and we mandated you had to watch the fourth film. We didn’t have… You didn’t have to watch the second and the third, but we wanted to get the journey of where they went. And the leap from the first film to the fourth film is just mind-​blowing, because we go from this persecution complex to outright Christian nationalism in the fourth film. And those conservative ideas are… It brings them up a lot, because now we’re talking about freedom isn’t free ideologies, which you can understand are important because, yes, people went and fought for things, but it is the fact that your liberty only comes from the fact that someone had to fight from it, not being taken from you rather than, you should have liberty because you are a person in the world. And it’s just… It had not clicked with me until I saw the journey from one to the other, the sort of complicated messy way of that rhetoric manifesting.

0:12:04.3 Paul Matzko: Well, there’s natural arc between one and four, and there’s a bright line that connects the two. But I think first, to Aaron’s point about the condescension of it, it’s all caricatures all the way down. So there’s that great scene in the first one where Willie Nelson of Duck Dynasty gets confronted by our PETA friendly I write the New Left blogger, and she says like, “Look… ” So first of all, she is a caricature of what a non-​religious, non-​Evangelical person is. So in the evangelical imagination, people who don’t… Who are not us are sinister scary and of one-​dimensional villains. So she’s… Accuses them of murdering animals, she doesn’t get hunting, she’s shrill and hostile. She’s a journalist, of course, fake news journalist here. She has terrible relationships…

0:13:13.7 Paul Matzko: So she’s a one-​note character of what a secular person must be like. But then what’s interesting is that they then project onto her a view of themselves. Her understanding of Evangelicals is a caricature as well, which is why she asked questions like… To Willie Robertson’s wife, “Why aren’t you in the kitchen with a baby on the hip? Do you listen to everything your husband says” and so on. But the thing is, the only one speaking… This movie is written by and for evangelicals. In other words, it is their own anxiety over how non-​Evangelicals view them that propels that caricature of themselves in the movie. They’re just like self-​referential, self-​generated nestling doll of caricature in the show. But that… To Aaron’s other point, that’s rooted in Richard Hofstadter, his idea of the Paranoid Style view of the right, which isn’t entirely accurate, but I think you see a nice expression of it here, this status anxiety that evangelicals in this movie… I think you have to root it historically. This movie is in the 2010s, and so this period… When I talk about religion in the digital age, religion in the modern American era, I often talk about peak American Evangelicalism is the ’90s, and the aughts.

0:14:41.4 Paul Matzko: So you to cast your brain back. It’s the 90s, it’s the 2000s, the Cold War we’re victorious, America… God and country won over the atheistic communist regime. If you go to the Billy Graham Museum… Notably, his son, Franklin Graham, is who the Muslim girl is listening to on her iPod. That’s his… Billy Graham’s son. But if you go to the Billy Graham Museum, there’s a huge exhibit with a recreation of the Berlin Wall with an actual piece of the Berlin Wall, with the implication being that Billy Graham went to Berlin and Christianity helped win the Cold War for America and the West. So you’re coming off this real high geopolitical high. If you’re a kid of the 90s, you went to the… Every mall similarly had a Thomas Kinkade art gallery, the painter of light. You would hear acoustic CCM playing over the speakers. Every strip mall had a Christian bookstore. Of course, Born Again W is an office in the 2000s. So there’s this moment of peak evangelical position in social life and in politics, and… But there’s this constant undercurrent of anxiety that things are okay now but when is the other shoe gonna drop, and this fear of others. Eventually that gets sublimated into a fear of, I don’t know, Hillary Clinton and her emails. It gets sublimated into a fear of Muslims, post-​9/​11 Islamophobia, and there’s artifacts of that here too.

0:16:13.4 Paul Matzko: But there’s that constant fear that the other shoe is gonna drop. And that… So that then connects… You see that in the first movie. There’s a line where our protagonist… Forget his name offhand. He says, “I feel like God wants someone to defend him,” which is not a thing to say from evangelical theology, that a sovereign God needs you to defend him. But there’s a line from that rooted in the sense of anxiety, this fear of others, of hostile university professors, of sinister Muslims who strangle their daughters when they listen to Franklin Graham of whatever, to… From that to the kind of activism of the fourth movie where it’s, “Hey, we gotta go to DC and fight.” And I’m reminded here of a Baptist pastor, another Texan, Landry, like yourself, Robert Jeffress, who supported Trump in 2016 saying, “Government is to be a strong man to protect its citizens against evil doers. What I’m looking for is somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS. I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary. I want the meanest, toughest son of a you-​know-​what I can find, and I believe that’s biblical.”

0:17:26.9 Paul Matzko: So that attitude… From that, “Hey, there’s these threats out there.” These big, scary, somewhat inchoate threats, and that justifies us going on a wartime footing, taking extreme measures and engaging in a political fisticuffs to protect what we have from these sinister forces. That really, we see that arc in this movie, and it’s interesting to see.

0:17:51.7 Aaron Powell: That was the interesting political undertone of the second one, or of the fourth movie, the second one that we watched, was on the one hand that we are on war footing, our continued existence is contingent at best, which is just… And the portrayal of Congress as there’s the one evangelical Republican, but most of Congress is these progressives who will… That a ranking committee member would say, “Belief in God is irrational,” is just… That is crazy. I looked this up, I was curious. So about… Between 65% and 75% of Americans identify as Christian. Only about 23% of Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated or atheist, and I didn’t have the numbers, but I’m certain the vast majority of those are not atheist. They’re just like, “I don’t belong. I believe in God, but I don’t belong to a faith.” And yet in Congress, there is one person who, both in the House and the Senate, one person who identifies as religiously unaffiliated, not atheist, and 88% of Congress is Christian. So about 20 points higher than in the general population. Our government is drenched in Christian imagery, God Bless America is said at the end of every single speech, this was just totally disconnected from the reality of our…

0:19:28.0 Aaron Powell: The nature of our government. It’s just… But what was interesting was that that sense of being the persecuted minority, when in fact they are the majority, and often the persecuting majority, was coupled with this theme that runs in the first one and then is very explicitly articulated the second one, of everyone but us, because they reject God, which of course most Americans don’t, but because they reject God, therefore are moral relativists, so therefore are like they have no sense… They have no ability to believe in absolute truths, and we are the only ones who can be… Who can understand what is moral, what is right because we get it from… It’s a divine command theory. And, on the one hand, divine command theory, not even most theologians believe the divine command theory is the proper way to draw morality from religion. It’s a deeply problematic theory. This was Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma I think arguably puts a stake through it before Christianity even started. This is… The question is… There was a guy who was very pious, and the question came up. Is it pious because God likes it, or does God like it because it’s pious?

0:20:50.1 Aaron Powell: And if you put that in a moral context, the question is, is it moral because God says it is? But the problem with that is then we can’t know that God is good because basically, by definition, everything God says would be good. And so goodness is… So you end up with a circular argument. To claim God is good is just basically to say God gives commands, which isn’t what’s meant by the view that God is good. But then if God says these things are moral because they’re good, then that means there’s an external standard that we’re pointing to, and so we don’t need the commands. We can just say there’s this goodness out there and we should follow that. And so it’s a problem for divine command theory. But there are much more sophisticated arguments for religious morality. These films seem unaware of the actual state of Christian philosophy, and they would benefit a lot from reading the best in Christian philosophy.

0:21:44.9 Aaron Powell: But there’s this authoritarian undertone that comes out of this, which is, if the government is corrupt and has been taken over by these progressives, who by definition, because they are atheists, cannot be moral, or if they’re moral, it’s only accidental and temporary, and they stumbled into it, but there’s nothing tying them to it, and we as this persecuted minority Christian community are the only people with access to absolute truth, then we can assert ourselves and should assert ourselves through the state. If we can take it over through… Whatever it takes, because it’s us against an evil world. And that is just a recipe for, in this case, a nationalist, because it’s also clear the only good foreigners in these movies are the ones who give up their foreign-​ness, who give up their culture, who give up their religion, who become obsessive about the American founding and so on. And so it’s this nationalist authoritarian world view that is also… Can’t be reconciled in a liberal way. You can’t have a pluralism with it because, unless you accept these fundamental metaphysical beliefs, you can’t be a good person.

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0:23:07.3 Paul Matzko: Maybe I should just note, we’re not really talking about the content claims of the show, which is fine, ’cause I don’t… Funnily enough, we’re actually going to be… I’d be relatively sympathetic to the… I think people should be allowed of homeschool their kids. I don’t think overweening bureaucrats should tell parents how to homeschool their kids. If a university professor really did do that, they should… That’s not appropriate to shove… To literally physically assault a Christian student for not signing your silly pledge. So I’m sympathetic actually with the actors, or the agents, if you will, here. But it’s this weird… That combination of anxiety propelling support for an authoritarian style of politics shows up in… There’s actually a connection to the real world. So in the show… The first… I’m not sure if in the fourth one that shows up in the notes. But in the credits of the first show, the Alliance Defending Freedom is prominently featured in all of the cases.

0:24:11.1 Landry Ayres: It’s in every one of the movies.

0:24:12.9 Paul Matzko: It’s in all of the movies. Okay.

0:24:13.2 Landry Ayres: They list all of the court cases in every film’s credits.

0:24:16.7 Paul Matzko: So the CEO of the ADF, and again, situationally, sometimes Libertarians have things to agree with these folks. This is not a critique of the organizations per se. But Michael Farris, who is the CEO of the ADF and was the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, he was the author of Texas’ legal complaint trying to overturn the 2020 election, basically saying that Texans rights as citizens and voters were being violated by Pennsylvania, Arizona and whatnot for not acknowledging that the election had been stolen by Joe Biden. And it didn’t go anywhere in the court system, but it’s notable that the animating force behind the organization that clearly has some role in these movies supported an overactive authoritarianism out of, I assume, that sense of anxiety, that fear that if Joe Biden wins, if Hillary Clinton wins, if Bill Clinton wins, you can go probably all the way back down the chart through the aughts, ’90s and ’80s, then the progressives are gonna take away our basic civil liberties and freedoms, which means, “Hey, it’s okay to support authoritarianism very literally.” So I think thematically you’re right, Aaron, 100%, but that is then translated into actual political action in a disturbing way.

0:25:34.9 Aaron Powell: All of those cases also that are listed after all of these films, it’s interesting because for a movie that is so much about discussing and using the language that non-​religious people would use when arguing about faith… They’re talking about proof and evidence, and you come to a point where you just have different meaning-​making processes opposing each other. There is eventually, like the character in the first film who is debating Kevin Sorbo about the nature of the existence of God, he eventually… When he’s standing up at the front of the class, is using sources and drawing and sort of almost steel-​manning a sort of way of portraying atheism, it seems, but really it’s a secret straw man. But he’s using the language of the people that he’s debating in order to sort of level the playing field and make himself seem reasonable as orator or something. But at a certain point, he starts citing the Bible.

0:26:47.7 Aaron Powell: There is a shift and they don’t call attention to it, but the evidence that we start using suddenly becomes tautological self-​evident claims but they treat them the same way, but… And they start doing them really quickly so that you can’t catch them, and it becomes fueled by emotion. And he starts screaming at Kevin Sorbo telling him, “Why do you hate God?” And Kevin Sorbo breaks down and finally cracks and tells them that, “Yes, I hate God because something was taken away from me.” Because, apparently, that is the only reason that anyone in any of these films… That’s the only motivation they have for claiming that God doesn’t exist is that something was personally taken away from them and someone was hurt, rather than the belief and all of the evidence that they claim to support.

0:27:38.0 Landry Ayres: But then they continue to use proof of the basis of these films is that there are actual instances of anti-​Christian persecution occurring in the United States every day. And at the end of the film, it’s very much based on a true story, like, “And then this happened.” But they list all the ADF cases in these two big columns with big paragraphs explaining decisions and the court name, so it looks all very official and detailed. But if you pause the movie and you read all of them, half of them have nothing to do with actual religious liberty. They very rarely actually end in a success. Some of them are about education, some of them are just about parents rights more generally. The only thing that seems to unite them is that the ADF was somehow involved in the court case. And many times they’re listed as not even going to trial. It all has the veneer of evidence, but it’s really just like a Gish gallop of evidence, so and so. So it made me wonder. I wanted to understand and come at this thinking, “Yes, there are obviously religious liberty things that happen that violate people’s religious liberty, and we see evidence of that, and there have been court cases where people have answered to that, but it is not as widespread as these films purport to.”

0:29:22.3 Landry Ayres: So are there genuine threats to religious liberty in the United States today? Specifically, the film portrays this secular United States, but we have talked about how Christians overwhelmingly have much more power than any other religious minority. So are there religious liberty limits and risks happening today, but maybe just not what the film wants to say?

0:29:54.8 Paul Matzko: So there’s a kernel of truth to all of it, which is that there really are overweening bureaucrats who would love nothing more than to shut down homeschool co-​ops and whatnot, but it’s all blown out of proportion. So I think, actually, my guess is the proximate cause for the “God’s Not Dead 4”, the 2021 film, was the brouhaha in 2020 in homeschooling circles over a Harvard Law professor, Elizabeth Bartholet, who wrote an article for the Arizona Law Review where she basically was like, “If you homeschool, homeschooling it’s basically child abuse. It’s anti-​social. It’s… And shouldn’t be allowed.” And so that was a real thing that happened. A professor said that. But it’s… Here’s the thing. It was in the Arizona Law Review. This is not some kind of mainstream position. It’s like finding some crazy state legislature in Iowa, where you can find seeing some idiotic thing about how you can’t get pregnant if you’re raped and… But turning that into the mainstream position of all right-​wing people. That’s the thing that happens every now and again. It’s the flip side of that, which is like finding some crazy out there and legitimately wrong, and it would be dangerous if their views were mainstream arguably for the cause of homeschoolers, but turning that into, “Well, look, everyone who sends… All public school supporters don’t want you to have the right to homeschool,” and blowing it out proportion.

0:31:35.3 Paul Matzko: So a lot of these are rooted in legitimate kernels, legitimate challenges to religious freedom, but then it gets turned into this all-​encompassing cloud of constant threat to religious liberty and blown out of proportion. But that’s what we do. To make something politically useful, that’s what you do. You tell a story in which you blow threats out of proportion. Paranoia works as a movement building exercise, and so I think that’s what’s going on here. So, yeah, again, it’s one of those funny things where it’s… These are folks… If the events in this movie were grounded in reality, if these things actually happened, I think we should be the first to sign up in the cause of trying to stop them from happening. But is this a reflection… Is this an accurate portrayal of most people’s lived reality? No, no, not at all, right?

0:32:31.4 Aaron Powell: Yeah. And I think picking up on that and then going back to what Landry had said about the way the argument plays out in the first film, this shift from… To basically just drawing from approved sources and throwing out things. I think that this is all the microcosm for how much our politics works in general. That not just within the small community that this movie is made for, but we are constantly… So we all know that making arguments… You wanna be able to say, “I have evidence for my position” in politics or anything else. You don’t wanna say like, “I believe this without evidence,” because that feels sketchy. It’s like you know that people aren’t going to accept it, it’s… We all wanna be able to say we have good reasons for our views. But at the same time, most of the views that we hold didn’t come to us from evidence. They’re driven by taste, they’re driven by beliefs that we… Were given to us when we were too young to evaluate them based on evidence, they’re given by cultural tides, whatever. They’re just not just gut reactions that drives most of our beliefs, including in the political arena, but we can’t say that and so then we look for evidence. And so this happened in the gay marriage debate. They didn’t…

0:33:55.5 Aaron Powell: The people who opposed gay marriage and gay relationships didn’t say, “I think we should make this illegal, or we shouldn’t give this this legal stamp of approval because gay marriages are yucky. I find them yucky.” They couldn’t say that. They couldn’t do the emotivist thing. And so instead, they started digging up all this “evidence” about the effects of gay… Same-​sex parents on children and all this other… They turned it looking for evidence to support the underlying this is yucky claim. We get the same thing now with transgender stuff. The people who oppose a rise of transgender rights are like, “Oh, it’s dangerous for children,” or, “They’re in the bathrooms” or all that, and that evidence doesn’t hold up at all. In fact, it turns out most of the violence is directed at transgender people by non-​transgender people and so on. But it’s this same I can’t just say that I’ve got this underlying gut thing. But it also… It shows up in… The Left does it too of like people who disagree with me, like these billionaires must be evil, or the people who wanna support markets must be greedy, like we can’t…

0:35:10.5 Aaron Powell: I can find ways to dismiss their beliefs rather than engaging with the evidence, or I will latch on to… There’s a reason Robert Reich is as popular as he is on Twitter because he gives an air of evidentiary support to kind of just progressive prejudices, and the people who understand the economics look at his… Just even on the left, they kind of laugh at his tweets because they’re so nonsense, but they get passed around on the left because they look like evidence for these underlying gut thing.

0:35:42.1 Paul Matzko: And notably, he looks like an authority too. So there’s this interesting function of the way… Most of the arguments made, especially by our atheist philosopher and by our anti-​pathetic Planned Parenthood supporting Congress people in the fourth movie are arguments for authority. So the Christians will say something like… Our Christian student will stand up and say a thing, and Kevin Sorbo responds like, “But Stephen Hawking is the smartest human ever… Who’s ever existed. Who are you, a freshman, to challenge Stephen Hawking, author of 17 books and chair of the Department of Physics?” And that keeps happening, which is weird because that’s not how academic debates actually happen generally. And… But it’s… But what it exposes, I think, is… To Aaron’s point that it’s easy. We have a thing we wanna and a Congress… A congress person from the Republican or Democratic Party, they have a position they want in advance… To advance, and they will go and find experts… In a court room, you find expert witnesses who are… Will say whatever you want them to say or already believe whatever you want. You select your expert witnesses to fit. So that’s how we act in the political sphere anyways. But it also, I think, says something about…

0:37:10.6 Paul Matzko: I don’t wanna get too inside baseball here, but there’s an evangelical historian named Mark Noll who wrote a book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, it was a big deal in the evangelical scholarship circles half a… A quarter century ago. And in there, he… The problem with The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is, there’s not much of one, is the famous line from the book. And what the critique was was this simultaneous… That evangelical circles in America tend to have this simultaneous fascination with and yearning for intellectual respectability, but then also revulsion and distaste towards it. They both desire it and fear it, and you kinda get that in here. Their idea of what those people out there, those dangerous secularists and Congress people and whatnot, that to them, all that matters is intellectual respectability, chairs of this and smart people that arguments from authority. But they think that… Again, this is all generated in the evangelical imagination. They think that because at their core, they worry that they don’t have that thing. They don’t have that respectability so… Anyways, for those who are interested in that topic, go read Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason on this topic. But you see that surface in here. To the…

0:38:31.0 Paul Matzko: To the… I think there’s another point though. I think Aaron’s right, that this isn’t, if you will, an agnostic tendency, that it’s not just a conservative thing, it’s a progressive thing, it’s not just a Republican thing, it’s a Democratic thing, that these were describing what marks the human condition in American politics and discourse. And another… I think there’s another theme that fits with that, that I think where we can say, “Hey, yes, in this case, we see it being displayed by the new Christian right folks in “God’s not Dead”, but that’s more generally true of America.” So the fourth movie has a lot of that Christian nationalism symbolism. They go to DC… And if there’s anything that new Christian right folks love doing, it’s doing tours of DC where they point out all the bible verses inscribed marble. I did one. There’s a guy named David Barton, who’s an amateur historian.

0:39:23.5 Landry Ayres: Oh, WallBuilders, baby.

0:39:24.9 Paul Matzko: WallBuilders. You know WallBuilders? Okay.

0:39:28.1 Landry Ayres: Aledo, Texas’ own.

0:39:31.4 Paul Matzko: Yeah. It’s always come back… It always comes back to Texas. Even the Christian nationalism is bigger in Texas. And by the tour with David Barton when I was a high school student. He would do these free tours for high school kids and… Yeah, every time like, “Oh, there’s Moses in the Supreme Court chambers. There’s a Bible verse there.” Of course, they would leave out all the symbolism that doesn’t fit that Christian nationalist’s vision. So there would be Muslim iconography. Even I think some place is Buddhist, but not so much Buddhist because it’s a little bit late for the arrival. But there would be other great religious figures from world religions along with Moses or Abraham, or other great texts from world religions other than the Bible. But those, of course, got left off. But that, again, that Christian nationalist re-​imagining of our civic space, that civic religion, is not just a new Christian right thing.

0:40:28.1 Paul Matzko: Every time that Ronald Reagan talked about… Or Bill Clinton would talk about a city on a hill, they are buying into that idea of America as this special exceptional space chosen by God, lower case G or capital G, depending on who’s speaking it, that habit of going to DC and seeing it as this sacred space, whatever that might mean, that’s a broadly American… Well, depending on one’s priors, American heresy. [chuckle] And so we have… So it’s easy to make fun of the movies for their particularly brutish version of this, but it’s a sin common to, I think, American politics and American political mind. We all do this.

[music]

0:41:19.4 Landry Ayres: When you were talking about the sort of parallels between new Christian right and hardcore left, and the it’s all dirty capitalists versus… It’s these academics who are stripping our schools of… There’s no prayer in schools anymore or whatever, all I could think about was the scene when they… The dinner party scene in the first film when they go to either Kevin Sorbo or his girlfriend’s house… ‘Cause we found out they’re not married, they are dating. I don’t know whose house they were at. It was very nice, so he can just have a very, very lucrative college professor position. He’s apparently trying to be a chair or something. I don’t know how ’cause… Anyway, it looked very nice, and all of him and his friends from the department who are in there like tweed and their sweater vests are sitting around there with giant glasses of red wine and he’s holding court and laughing about this silly student who could prove the existence of God, and they all ha ha ha and they sniff… They sort of spin their wine.

0:42:31.7 Landry Ayres: And I’m like… All I could think about was, if this was a movie from the left, it would be a bunch of old men in suits with cigars pushing money across a table. It’s the same imagery going on. They’ve just changed the sort of icons of what these powers represent, and that’s… Throughout the entire film it gets like that. So that was just one of my favorite parts in the movie.

0:43:01.1 Paul Matzko: That scene’s great because it’s like… ‘Cause his girlfriend who’s Christian and who… Which clearly today that would be all kinds of Me Too issues with him…

0:43:11.4 Landry Ayres: Dating her as a student.

0:43:12.7 Paul Matzko: Dating a student, yeah.

0:43:14.4 Landry Ayres: “At least I waited until you aced the mid-​term.” I was like, “Oh, my God.”

0:43:20.6 Paul Matzko: Yeah, yeah. Leigh Anne’s a little differently now than in 2014, or whatever. But then he makes fun of her for not knowing how to handle the Merlot. And like… But you can imagine the flip version of that, where it’s like a bunch of white billionaire guys being like, “Oh, my wife doesn’t know how to deal in NFTs. Silly… ” It’d be the same… Same kind of mood. It’s something. Hey, I gotta give a shout-​out to Kevin Sorbo. Of all the actors in the movie… It’s over the top, sure. But by the standards of the rest of the cast, he brought everything to it. And…

0:43:56.2 Landry Ayres: He acts circles around everyone in the cast. And I was looking through and watching… I watched little bits of the middle two films as well, and then along with the second. They blow the budget. It must be on one casting choice, every film. They’re like, “We gotta get one people. We gotta get a ringer in here who’s gonna fix everything.” And they get Kevin Sorbo for the first one, but I guess they couldn’t afford him for two films, so they were like, “Bring in the car.” And then in the second film, we get Melissa Joan Hart, my childhood crush, Melissa explains it all. And then in the third film, we get John Corbett of Sex in the City fame. And in the fourth one, Isaiah Washington, who is not… He’s on Grey’s Anatomy, and I will say he’s committed to the bit in this film. Everybody else is kinda like… It’s very infomercially stiff, but there is one person in every single movie that is committed 100% Michael Caine in The Muppet Movie level dedication to the role. And I do have to give it to Kevin Sorbo. It is a, pardon my pun, Herculean effort that he has undertaken here.

0:45:11.6 Paul Matzko: Well, and there’s that great shot of when he gets hit by the car. It’s actually like Matrix, like he’s up in the air and like…

0:45:19.0 Landry Ayres: They also really love to make you feel things by hitting people with cars, ’cause the same thing happens in the fourth film, which… And it comes out of nowhere. It really just… It’s one of those… They throw the curve ball in, but I was like, “Oh, another car. Another car accident,” which is true. Car accidents are very dangerous and prevalent so you should wear your seatbelt and look both ways before crossing the street.

0:45:44.6 Aaron Powell: What I found… I was reading some reviews of the movies, and this struck me in the first one, speaking of that car thing is it’s… That whole scene is not particularly well-​shot or it’s not well edited, and so it’s not like… A lot of people in reviews, and I confess I thought this for a moment and then realized like, “No, it was the shot-​cutting,” is… It looks like the pastor is the guy who ran him down.

0:46:11.3 Landry Ayres: Yes, that’s true.

0:46:12.3 Paul Matzko: Yes.

0:46:13.0 Aaron Powell: ‘Cause they cut from them in the car to him getting hit by a car, and then it’s only like a later shot where you see… And a lot of the reviews, people are like, “Oh my God. They had the pastor run him over and then tell his this was cause for celebration,” which is not…

[laughter]

0:46:26.4 Aaron Powell: Which is, like I said, not actually the message of the film. But it is… The quality of filmmaking could have been better.

0:46:35.0 Paul Matzko: I have a fan theory. So in Game of Thrones, people had their fan theories. Here’s my fan theory, which is that… So the car that actually hits him is anonymous. You don’t really know who it is. But here’s my theory, is that that you then see a car later on with the boyfriend, like hedge fund manager/​business guy…

0:46:54.4 Landry Ayres: Yes.

0:46:54.9 Paul Matzko: And he gets a text, the text that says, “#GodisNotDead,” and then he throws it to the side. But here’s my fan theory, is that that’s the reason why he hit Kevin Sorbo, the God is Not Dead text, when distracted him while he was driving, he kills Kevin Sorbo and keeps going.

0:47:11.9 Landry Ayres: Or at least… ‘Cause I think he’s parked when he gets the text ’cause he’s just left the home. But fueled by his rage, he hits him. Wow. They pulled this Cloud Atlas, Love Actually synergy of bringing all the stories together, and for 50 minutes of the film, you have no idea how they’re gonna tie this together. These films have no dramatic structure. It is just scene, scene, sad songs set to music, scene, scene, sad song set to music, and then 30 minutes of speeches for the last third of the film. And it is just like, I cannot take it the way that they do that. It’s exhausting.

0:47:56.8 Aaron Powell: The end of the last one, the speech, not his speech, but there’s the scene where the homeschooling parents are standing around and they all… In the round “the Constitution”, and then… And it…

0:48:09.9 Landry Ayres: They all do the preamble.

0:48:12.5 Aaron Powell: And it has this part where it’s like teeing up that there are other… That there are homeschoolers who aren’t just Christians and it’s going around and it sees families have like…

0:48:19.4 Landry Ayres: Which, fair point. I think that’s great.

0:48:22.2 Aaron Powell: Good reason. So you get the one couple who’s like, “The schools in our area are terrible, and so we want our kid to get a good education.” Cool. And then the person who, I think their child is special needs or maybe gifted and is not gonna get cool. And then you get the mom who’s like, “I just don’t wanna give my kids safe life-​saving vaccinations, and so I’m… ” It’s like they just are bringing…

0:48:48.3 Paul Matzko: Something for everyone.

0:48:49.7 Landry Ayres: But they all listened to the Schoolhouse Rock song of the preamble, and they memorized it just like me.

0:48:57.0 Paul Matzko: Yeah. What is the theory of government in the fourth movie? I got confused that somehow there’s congressional hearing and that will just become a law somehow. And then there’s the local…

0:49:06.1 Landry Ayres: At one point, they even say… They also say at one point, “I think you misunderstood what the purpose of this hearing was.” And the parents are like, “What do you mean? Isn’t this gonna change anything?” And I was like, “No, they have no purview over the Family Court in Hope Springs, whatever-​ville, in whatever state Judge Jeanine Pirro is the judge of Family Court for. Also, I will say, the congressman who chairs the committee at one point says that they have an 83% approval rating. Who has an 83% approval rating? Is he talking about Congress? Is he talking about him? Is he talking about the administration? Who… What person will be like, “You know what, 83% of people support this.”

0:49:56.3 Paul Matzko: There is a serious point here though, which is that, again, that sense of there’s this vaguely defined sinister other that’s oppressing us, the persecution complex. Is that… Yeah, it doesn’t really matter. All these different government entities are all part of this inchoate, ill-​defined oppressive mass that are coming down on Christians. And so there is this vague sense… They didn’t even have to bother tying things together. It’s just the Family Court judge, the state level bureaucrat from child protective services, the congressional… The congressional hearing is… It’s all just kinda one big mass out to get us. So it kind of feeds into that persecution complex.

0:50:37.5 Paul Matzko: I was gonna say, I have another… One more fan theory I’d like to throw out there, which is that secretly almost in a alternate reading way that this is… The first movie is actually an advertisement for why universities are great. It’s like a pro-​university statement, ’cause when you think about it, if you just change the framing a little bit, it’s like, “Hey, look, isn’t this good? A Christian kid can go to Philosophy class and the professor will give him half of his lecture for three lectures in a row to argue about his faith, and it ends in this standing ovation from… The whole class declares that God isn’t dead, and students from around the world come and learn how wonderful America is, from China, from Africa, from the Middle East, and they can find Jesus and learn things, and… ” It’s… The whole thing, funnily enough, is like… The kids are alright. Universities are pretty cool. [chuckle]

0:51:34.5 Landry Ayres: It very much plays against the fear that we see a lot in cancel culture about the decline of… You could say cuddling of the American mind or other sort of… This fear that is obviously… There is some reality to it, but this movie does a good job of being like, “No, we have open debate on the college campus and no one… No one was like, “I don’t wanna be a part of this.” All of the students are like, “Yeah, I’ll come to class every and listen to a freshman debate my philosophy professor, and then we’ll all stand up and say that God’s not dead because, apparently, that’s how they’re doing the vote. One of the students just decides that, no, we’re not gonna write our vote or raise our hands, we all have to individually stand up and say what we think.” And then they all get covered up. There’s probably some of those students that voted that God was dead already but because everyone’s shouting their votes over each other, you don’t really hear it.

0:52:35.0 Landry Ayres: So given all of this, and given this… We discussed this kind of… This world view, which, of imagining the threats are much greater than they are, imagining that there’s more opposition to your views than there actually are, imagining yourself to be a persecuted minority when you’re not… And that this is unique to the evangelical community that’s watching these films, but is a theme that runs through, how do we dig out of that? How do you… How do you convince people that, in fact, there’s not nearly as much of a threat to them as they believe there is, which seems to be imperative for not just the health of the country, but for a more pro-​Liberty politics, because people are much more willing to let others live the way they want to and go about their lives if they don’t perceive those other people as a direct threat to themselves.

0:53:33.8 Paul Matzko: That’s a good question. It’s… I just actually… I just wrote a book review of a biography of the founder of the John Birch Society, and one of my takeaways from it was that the best way to combat conspiracy theories, conspiracism… And there’s a lot of conspiracism in this, if it’s a little bit more sublimated, is not… That it’s downstream from usually more structural and institutional problems. So the best way to combat this sense of embattlement is to be sure that these… Is to do what you can to remove the… There’s that kernel of truth to most of these things. So put yourself in the shoes of this family in the fourth one, where they’re afraid that there are people who are gonna come and shut down their homeschool and co-​op. Well, there are stories of overzealous bureaucrats who do mess with the rights of homeschoolers, and I think our colleagues in the Education Department at Cato would say, “Look, here’s a great example of why we need more school choice. Why… ” We’re setting ourself up for these conflicts between people who don’t understand each other by forcing them all into the same space, by forcing them all to educate their kids in the same way.

0:54:54.8 Paul Matzko: Take, for example, the big horror moment with like, “My kid brought home from school a lesson about birth control.” And I was like, “Wow, we really are… ” It’s like a throw back to the 1970s and all the birth control debates in school education. But I… And it was a second grader. I have a second grader. I would be happy for my second grader to learn about basic sex ed and birth control in second grade, not because I want him to go and have sex, but because, at some point, you have to start that. I’m comfortable with that as a parent. But at the same time, I recognize that that’s not true for all parents, but because he’s in the same school system with a one-​size-​fits-​all curriculum, we’re pitting two communities against each other. Someone always has to lose.

0:55:40.9 Paul Matzko: And so maybe we do less of that, maybe we do less of pitting people against each other by forcing them into a one-​size-​fits-​all industrial modeled educational system run by the state. So we are setting ourselves up for this kind of failure. We’re setting ourselves up for lots of misunderstanding, for conspiracism, for irrational fear, for blowing legitimate threats into big threats. So maybe we do less of that. Maybe we get the state out of things it doesn’t absolutely have to be in. I don’t know. That’s… I think that’s my response.

0:56:12.1 Landry Ayres: If we wanna really appeal to the people that… Honestly, I would understand if people… If the Christian crowd would be angry and sort of frustrated with the way we have portrayed a lot of them. I would stand by what I said, but I think I would understand that they have the value of… And even people who are not Christian would understand that you should treat people the way that you would want to be treated. There’s… It’s the golden rule. And so appealing to those people by understanding where they’re coming from, and at least offering them the respect that you desire, and I think everybody needs to do that, and there might be some people that need to do that a little bit more than others, but I think it’s up to every single person to remind ourselves of that virtue and what that means and the objective good that that type of heuristic drives us towards.

0:57:10.9 Landry Ayres: And so, constantly reminding ourselves of that religious motivations or completely atheistic is a good way of looking at things, and it’s at least a starting point to start having those conversations that Paul was talking about specifically. So whether or not you think it is because God is not dead or he is dead, I think that is a logical affirming and community-​driven response to wanting to build bridges between people and create a shared understanding that allows everyone’s individual liberty to flourish.

[music]

0:58:00.2 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E like the philosopher, Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, and please rate and review us if you like the show. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, is produced by me, Landry Ayers, and is co-​hosted by myself and our director and editor, Aaron Ross Powell. To learn more, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.