It is unclear how much of the money that Sound of Freedom made came from people buying a seat and then actually sitting in it, but the faith-based crypto-QAnon thriller inspired by the anti-child-trafficking exploits of a man accused of sexual assault and abuse by multiple woman sent a clear message last year: Faith-based cinema is still a lucrative market. In a post-pandemic exhibition space, no sensible capitalist can turn that down.
But Sound of Freedom, from the now-prolific Angel Studios, was explicitly adversarial, imbuing its characters with an unflinching righteousness and a doubt that conventional law and order (read: the Democrats) could save victims of trafficking. It’s a faith-based movie made with specific electoral optics in mind, and the growing zeal of right-wing fanaticism in the past decade bolstered its success (as did the realization that churches can exploit Pay It Forward campaigns on a scale big enough to purchase bigger box office returns). But 10 years ago, when two films grappling with ancient and modern faith landed near the top of the box office, the future of faith-based cinema was prophesied for all to see.
The Culture Wars have fatally wounded a great deal of online minds, but in 2014 the initial battles were just being fought. On the eve of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump dominating online discourse, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and viral sensation God’s Not Dead landed at the first and fourth spots of the box office (God’s Not Dead released a week earlier and would peak at the third spot in its third week of release).
Even though they are drastically different beasts, both films seem quaint when viewed today. Noah adapts the trials of the Biblical Noah as he tries to save two of every animal and about seven humans from God’s wrathful flooding of an unclean world. The all-white cast—including Jennifer Connolly, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Ray Winstone and the daddy of 21st century epic cinema, Russell Crowe—is similar to more overtly religious revisionist Christian films of the 20th century. After all, Noah isn’t actually Christian, but an Abrahamic figure shared with Judaism and Islam.
The whiteness of a religious story that, arguably, white people came to last is a strange oversight from Aronofsky, and a thorn in the side of the lengthy film that unpacks the religious trial from a modern perspective. To Aronofsky, Noah’s prediction of a world engulfed by environmental catastrophe speaks to the director’s spiritual inklings, ones that had already been deftly explored in The Fountain and would later be clunkily emphasized in mother! It’s a noble vision for a filmmaker, and the fact he was given $125 million to explore it is worth celebrating. (Noah ended up raking in nearly $360 million dollars—a bonafide hit.)
With its tactile, volcanic production design and apocalyptic timbre before and after the earth-flattening flood, Noah offered a new vision for spiritual blockbusters—albeit a compromised one. The central drama, Noah’s teetering and ultimately ruinous allegiance to a God asking too much from him, is deployed without sophistication and with troubling, regressive connotations, landing with the subtlety expected from a Darren Aronofsky joint. In trying to stage one of the most foundational stories of religious devotion, Noah refuses nuance, and its meek dramatic merits would later be trampled by films like Silence, First Reformed and Women Talking.
Still, Noah is less of a failed thesis than a “pass with revisions required.” Crowe is, as expected, terrific as an exiled man caught between his duties as a father and his responsibilities to his Father, and for all the animated rock giants and watery purges of antediluvians, the film sings in the Ark-bound second half as Noah gets cabin fever brought on by being a Biblical Chosen One. One standout scene, where Noah recounts how God made life on Earth, set to time lapse footage of planet formation and biological evolution, is an inspired Aronofsky-ism, a way of acknowledging the limits of creationism without undermining the legitimacy of faith—a thoughtful, if blunt, mission statement.
This scene also exemplifies why some Christian audiences decried Aronofsky’s vision: It wasn’t Christian enough. Despite not inventing Noah’s story, there was a perceived ownership among Christian voices who found the environmental messages absurd and thought that the essence of the Biblical story about God’s judgment had been mutated beyond recognition. Perhaps Aronofsky needn’t have extended his olive branch to the faithful—a select group of Christians are always going to denounce films not made for them and them alone.
Boasting a budget 1/60th of Noah, Harold Cronk’s God’s Not Dead also believed itself to be updating questions of faith for urgent modern concerns. Fueled by culture war paranoia and inspired by cases of college professors undermining the legitimacy of faith, the evangelical God’s Not Dead made over 30 times its budget thanks to word of mouth from sincere fans and, probably, the online flocks mocking its premise. In the film, devout freshman Josh Wheaton (Shane Harper) attending a nondescript university challenges his brash atheist professor Radisson (Kevin Sorbo) on the claim that “God is dead,” a statement Radisson makes all his pupils sign to in their first class.
Radisson, a mustache-twirling intellectual straw man whose atheism stems from an acute and neatly explained psychological backstory, allows a debate on the issue, which takes up no more than 15 minutes of the 113-minute runtime and forgoes every basic rule of debate: Josh’s opening argument flips the burden of proof for God’s existence onto his professor and then proceeds to gesture at legitimate arguments against a non-theist belief system.
When viewed today, God’s Not Dead’s bad faith arguments come across as timid and naïve compared to your average blue-check Twitter thread, but they are exemplary for how the evangelical drama narrative functions. A hermetically sealed world, abstracted from reality, is created where the filmmakers control what their opponents say, how they behave (Radisson physically threatens Shane) and where the consequences of such an argument are shown as limited—the only positive to arguing on behalf of God is that Josh eventually converts people.
As critic Alissa Wilkinson so deftly argued, the God’s Not Dead movies are about a “persecution complex.” They don’t want to prove God’s existence, but rather vent frustrations that Christian authority and influence is being encroached upon in America. This is despite religious lobbies and political groups holding a steadfast grip on access to reproductive healthcare, tax exemptions and queer education. (The first God’s Not Dead sequel sees Melissa Joan Hart taken to court for sharing her Christian beliefs with students in her class, when we know that the exact opposite reality is far more common.)
God’s Not Dead restructures the arguments against Christianity in America so they can present a hackneyed and manipulated version, in order to appear most reasonable. But nobody hates American Christians because they believe in God—it’s because too many of them use their entrenched power to be horrible to others, attacking the marginalized to a fascist degree out of a deranged sense of persecution. Noah never should have bothered offering a compromise to its religious audience (Noah tested poorly with Christians but the director maintained final cut) because any mixed message will only be received in the poorest faith.
In this Godly dyad, the future of faith-interested film was laid out clearly: An amateurish film taking a hard stance against an anti-Christian boogeyman will please the faithful more than thoughtful movies trying to strike some middle ground. Faith cinema, like much politically motivated art, has become polarized over the past decade—you don’t hold attention with sensitive artistic statements.
And yet there was another proven path for these movies, one that was in theaters around the same time. Another faith movie saw box office success alongside Noah and God’s Not Dead: Son of God, Christopher Spencer’s adaptation of the History Channel’s The Bible miniseries. Its artistic and political ambitions were safe and modest—there were no Culture War screeds nor revisions to the classic, safe interpretations of Christ’s life and Passion. It’s noteworthy simply because it bled into the background, as 20th Century Fox appealed to a demographic successfully enough to turn a profit, but not to affect the zeitgeist.
And yet, a lot of Christian film audiences aren’t really interested in what a filmmaker has to say about God and Christianity, and have grown tired of being pandered to by safe productions. They don’t just want to hear what they already know, they want to hear their cause defended, and they want to see their enemies painted as uncharitably as they see them. The point of God’s Not Dead and its ilk is not to convince atheist skeptics of their stance, but to double down on it themselves.
Films like Son of God, or recent efforts like Cabrini or Ordinary Angels, may keep the lights on, but they don’t stoke the flames. God’s Not Dead came out when divisiveness and controversy were intensely valuable in political discourse—so long as they were also didactic and unwavering, as evangelicals have no use for the sensitive, searching and personal imaginings that you see in Noah. Costing a mere $2 million and bringing huge amounts of online generative marketing, God’s Not Dead was a winning ticket, and its merits as an argumentative text are kind of irrelevant.
To producers tapped into the merits of religious scandal as marketing, a film like Noah didn’t work hard enough for their dollar. Why stoke controversy with $125 million when you can do it for under five? Noah was not one of the best films of the decade, like Silence or First Reformed, but it predetermined their fate in the cultural memory; the future of faith cinema is not inquisitive, but declarative, and only the top auteurs can afford to make thoughtful Christian cinema. God’s Not Dead’s success, and the movies it encouraged, can be understood through its title—one giving answers, not asking questions.
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.