God's Not Dead 2 (GAM033)

### Starring:

Jesse Metcalfe, Robin Givens, Melissa Joan Hart, David A. R. White, Hayley Orrantia, Sadie Robertson

## Hosts

Noah Lugeons

Heath Enwright

Eli Bosnick

***God's Not Dead 2*** is the story of a highschool history teacher who refuses to pledge her undying allegiance to atheism, even if that means she gets fired and… also possibly executed by the state. So really, it's the story of every Christian teacher in the entire public school system.

### **Opening Phrase**

Where each week we sample another selection from Christian cinema, because we don't want to show up at the therapist with no trauma.

### **How Bad Was It?**

Look, there will be a day when I hold my firstborn son in my arms, and on that day I will lean down to him and whisper, "You're meh.", because of how *fantastically* terrible this movie is. It's… honestly, it's like whoever made the first movie listened to our episode and was like "Oh yeah, mother fuckers? Well how 'bout this? The first movie at least made *little* sense; like, you can imagine a professor—I mean, you can't really—but you can imagine a professor doing that. *This* movie, we're just going to crazy town."

### **Best Worst**

* Noah: ...I never saw the original.
* Eli: …black character so stereotypical and offensive that I had to wear blackface in the theater to balance him out.
* Heath: ...backstory of the one old guy in our theater.

### **Notes**

* The previous movie was reviewed earlier on *The Scathing Atheist*, and again later in GAM054.
* Watched in-theater (everyone in Eli's NYC theater was seeing it ironically).

### **Jokes**

* [Noah: Now, honestly though as I'm watching this scene and he throws out that line, I'm thinking to myself "I kinda hope that we look at David A. R. White's work in forty–fifty years the way that we look at the portrayal of black people in the thirties and forties and shit. I kinda hope this is the Mickey Rooney of atheism, going forward or something.] [Eli: I mean, I'm doing it now— I'm looking at it that way now. I'm like the guy who saw *Breakfast at Tiffany's* opening day and was like "That's weird, right?", and everyone was like "Shut up, ya mamaluke! Banana oil! Look at that Chinaman go!" Also, he says—and this will be repeated several times throughout the movie and is the most terrifying is that the movie proposes, which is—"The most basic human right of all is the right to know Jesus." Which… is *crazy*, 'cause even by their own metric you have to be *alive* to know Jesus.] (25:51)
* [Noah: So now the evil bad secular guys on the other side are like "Aw Jesus, how are we going to get out of this?", to which one of 'em suggests "We'll leave it to the \*dun dun duuuuun\* ACLU."] [Eli: And they migh as well go "Mwahahaha!"] [Heath: Exactly. And this is the *second* time one of our movies got this wrong—Eli, you already mentioned this—the ACLU would be representing the *teacher* here, if this happened. There's no civil liberty called "Never Hearing the Word Jesus." That's not a thing.] [Eli: So Christians, if you accidentally stumbled across this podcast: first of all, apologies for the language; second of all, the one you want in your movie is the FFRF. We're the "bad guys", the FFRF. ACLU's on your side—here I'll make a little song on it: [SUNG] "ACLU helps you stay super crazy, FFRF makes you stop being lazy!" There, use that poem, you've got it forever now.] (42:29)

### **Interstitials**

* "God's Not Dead, He Was Never Alive" (5:58) [Song]
* David A. R. White and the FFRF (1:19:53)

### **Tropes**

* ACLU is the Bad Guy
* Atheist Converts to Christianity
* Bible Reading Montage
* Boss in a Bit Part
* Christians Don't Know How the World Works
* Disappointing Christian Celebrity
* Heroes are Villains, Villains are Heroes
* Looks Like…
* Minority Best Friend
* Pearl Clutching
* Persecuted Christians
* Reprehensible Moral Message
* See You In Court

### **Links**

* Episode on Audioboom
* Episode on YouTube
* Trailer on YouTube
* IMDB