Prophet of Zod | I Watched God's Not Dead 4 Every Day for a Week @ProphetofZod | Uploaded November 2023 | Updated October 2024, 15 hours ago.
Last month, I watched God's Not Dead 4 every day for a week straight. In this video I analyze the movie and discuss what it told me about extremist Christian thinking in our society. This will be VERY different from most of my videos. I'm showing my face and not reading a script, so it will look and sound quite a bit different.
The video is also quite long. I put a lot of detailed chapters for each topic I talked about so you can skip around to whatever interests you if you don't feel like watching the whole thing.
In order to avoid the headaches of automated copyright flagging, I didn't use any audio or video clips from the movie.
_______________________________________________
MORE NOTES ON THINGS I WANTED TO SAY BUT DIDN'T HAVE TIME FOR:
HOMESCHOOL SPORTS: This movie is set in Arkansas, which allowed districts to include students and now requires school districts to include homeschool students in sports and to transfer in credits earned while homeschooling. This movie is obscure about its setting, but this shows how utterly sloppy it is with its facts. Also, Dave says homeschooler families should be able to participate because they paid taxes (dinner and dessert). That’s not how it works at all. It’s not like everybody who pays taxes can participate in high school sports, because there are rules for enrollment and residency, right. This is a transparent example of just how totally unserious this movie is.
COMMON CORE: This movie acts like Common Core is the first set of national educational guidelines and thus some major overreach by a controlling secular Federal government. This is simply not true. Various forms of educational guidelines have been getting set up on the Federal level for decades - and Common Core isn’t even one of them! The Federal government was not involved in Common Core. It’s a set of guidelines set up by a co-op of state and local governments, and it was offered as something states/districts could voluntarily opt in to in order to meet existing educational standards. This movie is as demonstrably wrong about Common Core as your average drunk uncle ranting at Thanksgiving. It’s embarrassing.
YET *ANOTHER* NOTE ABOUT MINORITY CHARACTERS: One thing I didn’t say explicitly enough is that I don’t mean to imply that minorities lack their own sense of political agency and cannot choose to adopt the conservative points of view espoused by this movie. The point is just that IN THIS CASE, we are clearly looking at a situation where minority characters are reciting lines from white writers (Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman).
MUSLIMS IN THIS MOVIE: Compared to earlier movies (especially God's Not Dead 1), this one appears to be trying to come to an uneasy truce with Islam in the battle against non-believers. References are made to the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China, and Ayisha's father is shown in a much more sympathetic light. Of course that sympathy is shown alongside some kind of growing recognition of and drift toward Christianity, so...
_______________________________________________
00:00 Introduction
02:23 Sunday: Thoughts before watching
03:35 Sunday - First reaction: The opening montage
04:36 Sunday - First reaction: The movie escalates quickly!
06:44 Sunday - First reaction: Public schools and militaristic/civil war rhetoric
11:09 Sunday - First reaction: Are kids parent property or public property?
12:09 Sunday - First reaction: Mean atheist Congressmen and the “Christianity is true vs there is no truth” false dichotomy
14:28 Sunday - First reaction: “We the People” and Christians pretending they don’t want religion to be an issue
17:46 Monday - The movie’s idealistic portrayal of homeschooling
24:32 Tuesday - Funny random things about the movie
29:25 Wednesday - The story of a homeschool kid and his “girlfriend”
38:42 Wednesday - The story of chain email character “poor mom” and her surprise twist
52:01 Thursday - This movie is starting to wear on me!
54:42 Thursday - Martin and Ayisha recite Christian talking points
01:07:31 Thursday - Mister Smith goes to Washington and discovers mean atheists
01:17:24 Friday - A few more funny random things before I watch
01:20:41 Friday - How the movie represents public schools
01:29:55 Friday - The movie’s bad guys (the social worker)
01:38:25 Friday - The movie’s bad guys (Congressmen)
01:42:41 Saturday - The movie’s apologetics
01:58:36 Saturday - The hidden aggression of Evangelicalism
02:08:32 Saturday - The court cases in the end credits
02:13:19 Conclusion
STUFF ABOUT ME AND WHERE TO FIND ME
My Patreon: patreon.com/prophetofzod
My Facebook: facebook.com/Prophet-of-Zod
My Twitter: twitter.com/Prophet_of_Zod
My Email: poz@prophetofzod.com
My mailing address:
PO Box 773024
Eagle River, AK 99577
Website: prophetofzod.com (Still under construction, but you can find a little merch and an incomplete set of links to my back library)
Last month, I watched God's Not Dead 4 every day for a week straight. In this video I analyze the movie and discuss what it told me about extremist Christian thinking in our society. This will be VERY different from most of my videos. I'm showing my face and not reading a script, so it will look and sound quite a bit different.
The video is also quite long. I put a lot of detailed chapters for each topic I talked about so you can skip around to whatever interests you if you don't feel like watching the whole thing.
In order to avoid the headaches of automated copyright flagging, I didn't use any audio or video clips from the movie.
_______________________________________________
MORE NOTES ON THINGS I WANTED TO SAY BUT DIDN'T HAVE TIME FOR:
HOMESCHOOL SPORTS: This movie is set in Arkansas, which allowed districts to include students and now requires school districts to include homeschool students in sports and to transfer in credits earned while homeschooling. This movie is obscure about its setting, but this shows how utterly sloppy it is with its facts. Also, Dave says homeschooler families should be able to participate because they paid taxes (dinner and dessert). That’s not how it works at all. It’s not like everybody who pays taxes can participate in high school sports, because there are rules for enrollment and residency, right. This is a transparent example of just how totally unserious this movie is.
COMMON CORE: This movie acts like Common Core is the first set of national educational guidelines and thus some major overreach by a controlling secular Federal government. This is simply not true. Various forms of educational guidelines have been getting set up on the Federal level for decades - and Common Core isn’t even one of them! The Federal government was not involved in Common Core. It’s a set of guidelines set up by a co-op of state and local governments, and it was offered as something states/districts could voluntarily opt in to in order to meet existing educational standards. This movie is as demonstrably wrong about Common Core as your average drunk uncle ranting at Thanksgiving. It’s embarrassing.
YET *ANOTHER* NOTE ABOUT MINORITY CHARACTERS: One thing I didn’t say explicitly enough is that I don’t mean to imply that minorities lack their own sense of political agency and cannot choose to adopt the conservative points of view espoused by this movie. The point is just that IN THIS CASE, we are clearly looking at a situation where minority characters are reciting lines from white writers (Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman).
MUSLIMS IN THIS MOVIE: Compared to earlier movies (especially God's Not Dead 1), this one appears to be trying to come to an uneasy truce with Islam in the battle against non-believers. References are made to the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China, and Ayisha's father is shown in a much more sympathetic light. Of course that sympathy is shown alongside some kind of growing recognition of and drift toward Christianity, so...
_______________________________________________
00:00 Introduction
02:23 Sunday: Thoughts before watching
03:35 Sunday - First reaction: The opening montage
04:36 Sunday - First reaction: The movie escalates quickly!
06:44 Sunday - First reaction: Public schools and militaristic/civil war rhetoric
11:09 Sunday - First reaction: Are kids parent property or public property?
12:09 Sunday - First reaction: Mean atheist Congressmen and the “Christianity is true vs there is no truth” false dichotomy
14:28 Sunday - First reaction: “We the People” and Christians pretending they don’t want religion to be an issue
17:46 Monday - The movie’s idealistic portrayal of homeschooling
24:32 Tuesday - Funny random things about the movie
29:25 Wednesday - The story of a homeschool kid and his “girlfriend”
38:42 Wednesday - The story of chain email character “poor mom” and her surprise twist
52:01 Thursday - This movie is starting to wear on me!
54:42 Thursday - Martin and Ayisha recite Christian talking points
01:07:31 Thursday - Mister Smith goes to Washington and discovers mean atheists
01:17:24 Friday - A few more funny random things before I watch
01:20:41 Friday - How the movie represents public schools
01:29:55 Friday - The movie’s bad guys (the social worker)
01:38:25 Friday - The movie’s bad guys (Congressmen)
01:42:41 Saturday - The movie’s apologetics
01:58:36 Saturday - The hidden aggression of Evangelicalism
02:08:32 Saturday - The court cases in the end credits
02:13:19 Conclusion
STUFF ABOUT ME AND WHERE TO FIND ME
My Patreon: patreon.com/prophetofzod
My Facebook: facebook.com/Prophet-of-Zod
My Twitter: twitter.com/Prophet_of_Zod
My Email: poz@prophetofzod.com
My mailing address:
PO Box 773024
Eagle River, AK 99577
Website: prophetofzod.com (Still under construction, but you can find a little merch and an incomplete set of links to my back library)
