God's Not Dead 3: A Light in Darkness

Mark Honeychurch - 25 November 2024

I’m a fan of watching movies and documentaries that contain content that I, as a skeptic, disagree with. I like the idea of challenging myself to spend the time to give these pieces of media a fair shake, so that I can be more confident that I’m not just a skeptic because I haven’t “seen the light”. Instead I like to stare directly into that light, watching anti-vaxx documentaries and trying out alternative medicine treatments.

Having previously watched “God’s Not Dead” and “God’s Not Dead 2: He’s Surely Alive” from Christian movie company Pure Flix over the last decade, the other night I decided to see if “God’s Not Dead 3”, released in 2018, continues the downward descent into bad movie territory. This is an interesting intersection for me, because as well as being a fan of media that promotes misinformation, I’m also a lover of just plain old bad movies. If it has sharks in it, and cost less than $10k to make, I’m there. Llamas with lasers for eyes? Count me in. Anything by Neil Breen, Tommy Wiseau or James Nguyen - yes please. So, if this movie manages to both be horrifically badly made, and have some really awful Christian apologetics in it, it might just make me a very happy man.

For those not in the know, the first movie of this franchise was released 10 years ago, featuring a plot where Kevin Sorbo (a Christian in real life) plays an evil atheist professor who tries to force all of his students to admit on paper than “God is dead”, so that his course in philosophy can skip having to teach about religious thinkers and ideas. One student refuses to sign his name to this declaration, and also refuses to leave the class. With the help of his university pastor, Dave (played by David White), the student wins the day, getting the professor to admit that he hates God, therefore proving that he believes in God. All the students stand up one by one and profess that “God’s not dead”. Later that night, the professor gets hit by a car while crossing the road. Dave the university pastor witnesses the accident, and rather than caring for the dying professor or consoling him in his dying seconds, he pressures him to commit his life to God - which he does. Then the pastor’s friend, Jude, declares that “what happened here tonight is a cause for celebration” while standing over the dead body. Oh, and the movie also has sub plots about Muslim and Chinese atheist students converting to Christianity despite personal risk to their safety, there’s some heavy advertising of Christian band the Newsboys, Dean Cain (who played Superman in the 90s) plays a ruthless atheist businessman, and reality TV “star” Willie Robertson from the TV show Duck Dynasty makes a couple of appearances.

The second movie was a step down in quality from the first, and this time I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to provide the critique:

Like its predecessor, the film received widely negative reviews from critics, who considered it a wildly unrealistic example of alleged anti-Christian legal cases to the point of playing into the Christian persecution complex; the film’s understanding of how church and state are balanced in education was criticized as “wholly divorced from any rational understanding of the topic”. The film is seemingly an inversion of historical cases of prosecution of science teachers over the teaching of evolution, portrayed in films such as Inherit the Wind. As with God’s Not Dead, critics felt that atheists were again portrayed as flat stereotypes and as unrealistic, scheming villains.

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but the third instalment in the God’s not Dead series of movies is actually a huge improvement on the previous two. In the third movie, the dialog is much more nuanced and believable than the previous ones. It’s still awful in places, but some moments feel like a regular budget Hollywood movie. The premise is that the church on university grounds is damaged by fire, and co-pastor Jude killed during the incident, and the university uses this as an excuse to attempt to use “eminent domain” to force the purchase of the property from the pastor.

The main character’s brother, a lawyer who’s an atheist, defends his brother’s right to keep and rebuild the family’s church. His character is humanised, rather than being made out to be an evil, hate-filled atheist like the characters in the previous movies. In conversations between the brothers he speaks like I’d expect an atheist to speak - he disagrees with his brother, but is kind about it and speaks his truth about evidence and science.

Refreshingly the Christians in this movie are not all made out to be angelic do-gooders. One student talks about how in their Christian family, the father used to abuse the mother - and the church’s response was to call the mother a sinner (something that seems to happen all too often in real life). A brick is thrown through the window of one of the university administrators, presumably lobbed by an angry Christian who’s been mobilised by a YouTube interview where pastor Dave asks everyone to let the university employee know how unhappy they are. Then the pastor is told that one of the students started the fire that burned down his church, so he visits him and physically assaults him and a member of the university’s security without even bothering to check if the accusation is true.

The story is still daft, with a made-up legal issue and some weird ideas of what secular student life is like, along with holier-than-thou unrealistic Christian romance scenes where everyone keeps their pants on and is very well behaved. But at least they’ve fixed a few things in this movie - as well as the more human-feeling portrayals, there’s some actual humour in this movie, and some dialog that wouldn’t be out of place in the real world. I assume this change is due to the switch from Harold Cronk directing with Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon writing the first two movies, to Michael Mason both writing and directing this third movie.

Interestingly, according to IMDB, this is the only movie Michael Mason has ever directed or written, or indeed had any involvement in. Given how professional both the writing and the directing are, it makes me wonder if maybe it’s a pseudonym for someone who’s actually good at his job, but doesn’t want to be associated with this.

As an aside, it used to be that if a director wasn’t happy with having their name attached to a movie (usually due to their creative vision not being reflected in the end product), their name would be replaced with a reserved pseudonym, Alan Smithee. This practice was discontinued by the Director’s Guild of America in 2000 - possibly in reaction to the 1997 release of the movie “An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn”, the plot of which involves a director who wants his name removed from the credits of a movie, but he can’t do this as his name is Alan Smithee. Before the movie’s release, the director complained that he wasn’t happy with the direction the producer had taken it, and had his name replaced with Alan Smithee - presumably a deliberate attempt at ironic humour.

Back to Michael Mason. Try as I might, I’ve not been able to find any answers to this riddle online. I have found a couple of other people asking the same question I have - who is Michael Mason - but nobody who’s managed to solve the puzzle. As Jordan Hoffman wrote for The Guardian:

A Light in Darkness is written and directed by Michael Mason, a man of mystery with no other credits. He has an eye for framing that previous PureFlix directors lack. (The first entry in this series really looks like a cobbled-together student film.) And there are even some moments in the narrative that feel inserted as some sort of appeasement to those that haven’t already drunk the (non-alcoholic) sacramental Kool-Aid.

The only potential thread I’ve found is an article written by one of the cast, the lawyer brother (played by John Corbett):

John wrote an article for NBC News in the US about the movie, justifying his work in Christian movies in general and giving some details about God’s Not Dead 3. In the middle of the article he said of the movie:

This time, a lot of factors and a little luck went into me taking the part: I knew the director, Michael Mason, from 10 years ago.

So, it appears that John has known Michael from earlier on in his life, likely from working together on an earlier movie or TV show. I’m not about to trawl through John Corbett’s IMDB history and research every writer or director he’s ever worked with, to see if any of them stand out as being likely candidates. I will at least, however, take this connection as evidence that “Michael Mason” is probably a pseudonym. If the assumption holds that John knew Michael because they’d worked together previously (rather than knowing each other in a personal capacity, outside of their professional lives), we should expect Michael to have multiple movie/TV credits from the last ten years or more.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to see if you can find out who the heck Michael Mason is. My money is on them being an established writer and director who was paid well to make this movie, but decided that it would be detrimental to their career to have this movie franchise connected to their name. But I’d love to know for certain who this person really is, and why they chose to hide their real name (if, indeed, this is what actually happened). Maybe the answer’s out there somewhere, and my ability to Google has simply failed me.

For now, I have some more movie watching to do. Since 2018, two more God’s Not Dead movies have been released - “God’s Not Dead: We the People” in 2021, and “God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust” recently, in September 2024. I’m a little concerned these later movies may revert to being god-awful (excuse the accidental pun), as the writing and directing credits shift again, with Cary Solomon making a return, joined by Vance Null and Tommy Blaze (which I have to say are two very Hollywood-sounding names). If you’re really lucky, I’ll watch the next two and write a combined review of both of them - after all, they’re already lined up in my media server, ready to go.