Two Films That Defined the Future of Christian Politics

How "God's Not Dead 2" and "Silence" predicted the fracturing of American Christianity

This is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.

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In 2016, three major movies came out that claimed to answer the question of how to live as a Christian in a post-Christian society. Now, in 2025, we can see much of the fruit of the vision they cast for Christians in how they engage with politics, for good and ill.

2016 was a time of great anxiety for Christians. Christians were increasingly aware that they were entering a “post-Christian society”, which Aaron Renn eventually labeled the “Negative World”. The “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens were at their cultural height, mocking Christianity was common on TV shows like South Park, The Simpsons, and The Daily Show, and the steady decline of Christianity among young people was growing year by year. The Christian book market was flooded with books on how to keep your kids in the faith, like How to Stay Christian in College.

As anyone will tell you, when there is a widespread cultural anxiety, it will eventually make its way into the stories we tell. And that includes movies. While Hollywood traditionally has been largely secular, and therefore doesn’t typically focus on Christian-specific anxieties, 2016 featured three high-profile films all wrestling with the fear of Christian cultural marginalization: Pureflix’s God’s Not Dead 2: In God We Trust, Martin Scorsese’s Silence, and Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge All three of these films pretty deftly captured the different takes of Christians on how to deal with the Negative World, and the fallout is instructive as to how we got where we are.

God’s Not Dead 2: In God We Trust

God’s Not Dead 2: In God We Trust is the sequel to the 2014 surprise box office hit God’s Not Dead, about a college student who had to defend his faith from his atheist college professor. In this new film, high school history teacher Grace Wesley (Melissa Joan Hart) comes under fire for answering a student's (Hayley Orrantia) question about Jesus. When Grace refuses to apologize, the school board votes to suspend her and threatens to revoke her teaching certificate. Forced to stand trial to save her career, Grace hires young lawyer Tom Endler (Jesse Metcalfe) to defend her in court. Endler devises a powerful strategy to show the jury the historical significance of Wesley's classroom discussion.

Of the three films, this one is the only one that was made as part of the growing faith-based film industry, which was growing at the time thanks to the success of films like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in 2004 and the Kendrick Brothers' inspirational family dramas like Facing the Giants and Fireproof. The faith-based film industry is made by conservative Evangelical Christians for conservative Evangelical Christians, and therefore tells you something real about the pulse of that community.

According to the God’s Not Dead franchise, the reason we’re entering a post-Christian society is because of the ruling powers in our society actively attempting to secularize us. In the first God’s Not Dead film, it was academia attempting to bully and brainwash students. In God’s Not Dead 2, it was politicians trying to bully private citizens like teachers or pastors. In each case, the solution was for Christians to fight back against their enemies. In God’s Not Dead, it was to challenge the professor to a debate and win. In God’s Not Dead 2, it was to challenge the persecution legally in the courts and win, or it was to refuse to comply with the bullying even when it risks putting you in jail.

The God’s Not Dead franchise has been often criticized (including by me, more than once) for its caricatures of secular atheists and its numerous inaccuracies toward the academic and political realms, as well as exaggerating the extent of persecution against American Christians. But there’s no doubt that the films captured how the religious right felt about their place in America at the time. Released on April 1st, the film made 24 million on a 5 million budget, becoming an unabashed success. It reflected the goodness they saw in their communities and the constant institutional and cultural bias they saw against them everywhere else, hence why Fox News was so successful, regularly highlighting stories that reinforced the same narrative.

Silence

Silence, directed by legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese and based on the book by Shūsaku Endō, follows two 17th-century Portuguese missionaries, Father Sebastian Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), who embark on a perilous journey to Japan to find their missing mentor (Liam Neeson). While there, the two men minister to the Christian villagers who worship in secret. But when the priests are caught, the local rulers use a unique method to stop the spread of Christianity: they force the priests to renounce their faith to save the local Japanese faithful Christians.

The film was Scorsese's passion project, which he’d been trying to get made for 28 years. Unlike God’s Not Dead, while this film portrays persecution of Christians, it forces the heroes to wrestle with whether their rigid adherence to orthodoxy, narrow-mindedness, and assumption of religious superiority are the real problem. Eventually, Rodrigues determines (assisted by a vision of Jesus) that it's more important to love his neighbors than be loyal to Jesus. So Rodrigues renounces Jesus.

Released on December 23rd, the film was part of a larger trend of “Christian Deconstruction” movies that were released in the 2010s, like Blue Like Jazz, Calvary, and First Reformed, which reflected the wider “Christian Deconstruction” movement of people who grew up in conservative Evangelical Christian contexts were either leaving it all together (see Rhett and Link) or hopping to more progressive/mainline Christian traditions.

Both the movies and the movement saw the growing marginalization of Christians as the fault of Christians and their moral failings, whether it was church sexual abuse (Calvary), traditional views on sexuality, adherence to conservative politics (Blue Like Jazz), a lack of environmental activism (First Reformed), or cultural arrogance (Silence). Like Silence, deconstructionists were convinced that maintaining traditional Christian beliefs about gender roles or sexuality was harming people, and that the most loving and Christian thing to do was abandon those beliefs. Restoration required repentance from the sins of Christianity toward the less backward, wider secular culture.

Silence exposed major fault lines between Evangelicals in elite institutions and the rank-and-file members. Christian critics at major institutions like Christianity Today loved the film, while most conservative Evangelical Christians ignored it, making the film a box office bomb (24 million on a 50 million budget). While technically the same as God’s Not Dead 2, this was considered a failure because of its bigger budget and higher quality. Christians like Tyler Huckabee at the popular Evangelical magazine Relevant blasted Christians for not supporting good religious movies.

Unlike the God’s Not Dead 2 audience, evangelical elites largely agreed with the deconstruction narrative that the moral failings of Christians and their toxic subculture were responsible for the culture turning against Christianity, even if they still held to orthodox beliefs. This meant they saw a posture of repentance and faithful engagement toward secular culture as the way forward (what Renn called the “Cultural Engager” posture in Life in the Negative World), rather than fighting them (Renn’s “Culture Warrior” posture). This one difference would end up causing a bigger break between Evangelicals than anyone expected.

Hacksaw Ridge

Released on November 6th, Hacksaw Ridge was a war film directed by Mel Gibson that tells the true story of Pfc. Desmond T. Doss (Once again, Andrew Garfield), who won the Congressional Medal of Honor despite refusing to bear arms during WWII on religious grounds. Doss was drafted and ostracized by fellow soldiers for his pacifist stance but went on to earn respect and adoration for his bravery, selflessness, and compassion after he risked his life -- without firing a shot -- to save 75 men in the Battle of Okinawa.

The film has a very different take on Christian marginalization and persecution. Doss is part of a Christian tradition that was always marginal, and therefore hasn’t ever dealt with the loss of cultural status. He’s deeply patriotic and never tries to fight to change the culture he’s in, nor attempts to conform to the culture, but merely wishes to serve his country without violating his own religious convictions. By doing so, and living out his faith, and loving and serving even those who mistreated him, he becomes a hero to those around him who defend him from others.

The film was a critical and box office hit, and went on to be nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The message for modern Americans to respond to marginalization by serving your culture while not compromising your faith personally was inspiring to everyone. Evangelical Christians loved seeing a Christian stand up for their beliefs. But it had a lot of resonance to other religious minorities like Jews or historically less represented Christians like Catholics (which Mel Gibson is) and Black Protestants. It was also a watershed moment for Mel Gibson, who had been marginalized in Hollywood due to a history of antisemitic and racist rants, but who was welcomed back partly due to the good word of people like Robert Downey Jr., who Mel Gibson had helped when he was down (much like Doss from Hacksaw Ridge).

With such universal success, you would think that this film’s vision of Christian engagement with culture and politics would be the one that was most widely adopted. And yet, it’s likely the least influential in the bunch.

Legacy

Ironically, God’s Not Dead 2 became the winner in the contest of visions for Christian cultural engagement. The “culture warrior” conservative Evangelicals who went out to God’s Not Dead 2 overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump for president that very year, while the “cultural engagers”, those who resonated more with Silence were aghast, with many once high-profile evangelicals (such as Russel Moore, David French, and Phil Vischer) publicly fighting against Donald Trump and his supporters ever since. Despite this, their influence was continually marginalized within the movement as explicitly culture war figures like Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and Elon Musk gained popularity, and entertainment/news platforms like The Babylon Bee and The Daily Wire took on the Fox News legacy for a new generation.

Why did the “Culture War” model become so popular with Christians? One likely reason is its seeming success. Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks overturned Roe V. Wade. Conservatives have successfully shifted public opinon to the right on issues like transgenderism, and other LGBTQ issues, companies like Disney have erased gay and transgender storylines from their projects, and shifted LGBTQ and DEI marketing and policies in response to boycotts and backlash. Culture warrior Christian-friendly thinkers like Jordan Peterson have helped attract men back to church–something Christians have been trying to do for decades. The apologetics movements–which tie back to the first God’s Not Dead film–have also successfully moved the needle in drawing men and intellectuals back to faith. Despite claims by cultural engagers that indulging in culture wars could contribute to Christianity’s collapse, it looks like the rise of the nones has peaked as Christians have embraced it.

Another reason is natural selection. As sociologists like Ryan Burge have pointed out, the religious left in America (represented by the American mainline) has been bleeding members like an open wound since the 70s. Tim Keller argued that this is because progressive Christianity primarily uses secular sources as final authority and values, and therefore has a difficult time presenting itself to most people as a viable source of Christianity. This means that, unsurprisingly, the people most likely to resonate with the message of Silence are the people least likely to remain Christians, and therefore the least likely to influence Christian cultural engagement.

By contrast, Hacksaw Ridge, in its universality, may have actually become something of a Rorschach test. Everyone saw themselves in the story, so it didn’t clearly represent or shape a particular form of Christian engagement. Mel Gibson himself endorsed Donald Trump for president and was rewarded by being appointed a “special ambassador” to Hollywood.

All this means that, for the foreseeable future, some version of the God’s Not Dead 2 culture war model will remain dominant in Christian cultural engagement. This may lead to the marginalization of Christianity if right-wing politics define it and if the wider culture moves away from conservative politics. However, the opposite could also happen. If the phenomenon of “male flight” might partly explain the decline of church attendance, and religiously invested fathers are more likely to pass their faith down to their children, the modern male-skewing church might help to reverse church decline. Meanwhile, the religious right is disproportionately the main people still having kids. If the religious right can shore up its entertainment-information infrastructure, it may be able to prevent generational churn.

Movies reflect the cultural anxieties of the places they come from. The 2010s were a huge transition in the American religious landscape, and that story can be seen in the movies we make. As religion plays an increasing part in mainstream film and TV made by Christians themselves, it will be increasingly worthwhile to look at these films to see where the tide is going.