1. Julie D says:

    Okay, I admit it–I fall into #3 a lot. Especially when we try to have a family movie night at home with ‘God’s Not Dead’ instead of, say, Inside Out or X Men or that old standby The Princess Bride. Of course, it’s also tied into some hype aversion. Why does it seem acceptable to have a whole church hyped up over one movie and not another? One genre and not another? You don’t see church groups getting together for the latest romantic comedy, action flick, or superhero saga, so why the latest Kendrick brothers film?

    • I think this goes to show that people can certainly obsess over particular genres and thereby provoke irritation. I used to feel similarly about “family” movies, e.g. Disney and/or Pixar, versus stories that increasingly appealed to my enjoyment of fantasy and adventure. Any movie or genre becomes obnoxious when people we love (and/or live with) constantly obsess over it, or refuse to permit other kinds of stories.

  2. Paul Lee says:

    I’m surprised this post hasn’t exploded with comments, so I guess I will comment after all.

    Great post and great review, Stephen. Learning about stuff like this is a real service for me. Part of the reason that I have to learn about Christian culture stuff like this film is that I’ve always been an outsider. My faith community was deeply evangelical, very conservative, and perhaps very typical as a Baptist church. I was immersed in it totally, and church was my life. But I still didn’t grow up with Christian culture all around me, and I never felt like I totally got what everyone was talking about on the Internet. It’s partly because I’m in the unchurched Rust Belt rather than the Bible Belt, but that’s only part of it. Some people I grew up with seem to have had more of a connection to an American evangelical culture, perhaps simply by being more socially connected to various evangelical spheres across the U.S. I guess it seemed inevitable that I wouldn’t find a place in the evangelical Baptist world. I’m unsure of whether or not I really wanted one, but I did really try to do my duty and to fit in.

    Definitely various Christian groups deserve to keep their cultural identities. When I don’t fit in, it it’s my job to make my own culture, and whatever group wants to claim it can have it, since I don’t have time to obsessively try to define what I am and where I belong. I have to live the truest life that I can by God’s grace, and whatever categories my life ends up falling into, I will allow people to cast me as this or that kind of Christian or this or that kind of person, because it’s none of my business how other people see me. But I want to be free to still like cool people who do real things, even if I’m an alien to their sub-culture.

    It’s hilarious that they cast Brett Dalton for this, because he was like some kind of anti-Jesus in S.H.I.E.L.D. It was an enormously playful casting decision that should bring some mainstream acknowledgement.

What do you think?