I saw a movie last week. It is a movie in the new genre of faith movies. Others in the genre are the Kirk Cameron movie Fireproof and Courageous. After I left I was happy that I had gone but not really satisfied by the production. I was left wondering why the dissatisfaction. The production values were good, the performances were on a par with other movies and I was entertained and pleased with the way I had decided to spend my time. What was missing? Why had only 20% of the critics given the movie a good review? Why was my internal critic complaining too?
Stepping back from the movie and the fact that I liked it, I think that it may be the subject matter which earns the brickbats of the critics. The very subject matter of a faith movie is faith. It is a way of seeing reality, ultimate reality. This subject is a hard thing to present, a thing unseen but nevertheless perceived. It’s not as if God can be given a speaking part in a faith movie. In a faith movie God is presented through the facts of the lives of people. Cause and effect, the very stuff which moves movie plots forward, is absent.
There are two ways to view a faith movie. First, as a person of faith you see the plot as a way of God working in the lives of His creatures. It is very natural. If you don’t believe, however, what do you see? You see coincidence after coincidence and you see people making decisions based upon promptings from the Unseen. In fact, if you don’t believe, you see nothing at all, just coincidences and delusional behavior. No movie will cause an unbeliever to believe because a movie portrays events according to an author. In a movie, the screenwriter effectively acts as a god to you, manipulating people and events. It is so in life as well, the Author of life is God to you. He works through the way that you perceive what happens to you. This is why a work of fiction, a movie, will never make a believer out of a non-believer. We might all wish that it was different, but it is not. As a work of fiction, in a movie the overuse of coincidence ruins the plot. Viewed from the eyes of unbelief, it becomes far fetched and stupid. Seen from that perspective it is about perceiving the unseen hand of the writers more than it is seeing the actions of the truly Unseen Hand. Faith, to some extent, is about seeing the forces of a huge universe as taking you, a single person, into account. To others, non-believers, this is naive and silly way to see things. This divide can’t change by reason of a movie because it is about the mindset of the perceiver.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a contemporary Jewish leader, has said that there is no word for ‘coincidence’ in the ancient Hebrew language, in other words, “when Hebrew [was] used as God’s language.” I think that this is the point. God speaks to us through what happens in our lives and how we perceive these events. Believers are believers and they just see things differently than non-believers. Believers believe in miracles. The critics and others who view fiction in a certain way will never see faith movies the same way that believers do. I was unsatisfied by “God Is Not Dead” because I already knew that this is the case and I was sad. The faith movie genre is not for everyone.
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