This is a movie far less concerned with Christ than it is with secret Muslims, “elitists,” and all manner of yellow-fanged secularizers. They can’t really, right? And I don’t mean the parts about Christ and the resurrection, I mean all the different groups who are supposedly a-comin’ for your Bibles. God’s Not Dead 2 is a movie about belief whose main function is to make me wonder if the writers actually believed this stuff. But even I was occasionally surprised by the sheer cynicism of this whole endeavor. I guess I should’ve expected exactly this.
Why challenge urban legends when you can retell them? “ My Cousin Jimmy Says Girls Pee From Their Butt: The Movie.” Which of course raises the question, what did I expect? What could one conceivably expect from a movie called God’s Not Dead 2, anyway? The title itself combines a hot take on Nietzsche while advertising itself as a sequel to a film that was essentially an adaptation of the Marine Todd meme. God’s Not Dead 2 is almost two hours of paranoid misinformation lifted from email chains, a film that uses faith as a wedge issue, repetitively slaughtering straw men they barely put clothes on first, and one that spends most of its running time disproving an argument no one made. My main takeaway was that sometimes a cat turd tastes just like it smells. Cross the imaginary cultural divide and report back, that’s classic gonzo stuff! Turns out, it wasn’t an especially illuminating experience. Subjecting myself to God’s Not Dead 2 in its entirety was one of those things that sounded like a good idea at the time.