God is Jehovah-jireh-the Lord will provide. That seems to be the lesson that Dave learns by the end of the film: He rescinds the lawsuit and says the church will move off campus. “Let’s stop shouting at each other and start listening,” Dave says. So a call to “stop shouting and start listening” – especially one that takes place on a college campus, the locus of debates over free speech and its limits – plays differently to its audience than it might to those outside its bubble. That gives the sense that the trouble St. James is encountering is happening all over the country. After the vandalism results in a fire that kills Pastor Jude, Dave becomes convinced that God “called him to fight” for St. James to stay on the campus. But Pearce, exasperated with Dave’s insistence that St. James is being targeted for being Christian, tells Dave that “you guys love to play the victim card,” and that he’ll help him with his legal battles around eminent domain but won’t play into the “false narrative” that Dave believes.

Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton play a separated couple on the verge of making history in this 1996 thriller. Couple that with Dana Loesch’s brief appearance as a voice of reason, and the series’ continuing fudging of the line between truth and fiction – starting with Pastor Dave’s imprisonment – is an indication of what’s really going on in the God’s Not Dead franchise. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the past couple of years, it’s that Americans are all too happy to swallow things that seem like they could be true, as long as it supports what we already think. It’s actually sort of shocking to see an arc like that for a figure like Pastor Dave in a Christian movie, especially since the things he says sound a lot like things that you might expect the movie to agree with, given the past two films’ stories. Celebrities from both the Christian world (like apologist Lee Strobel and the rock band the Newsboys) and the Fox News world (like Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson and, believe it or not, Mike Huckabee) made appearances as themselves in the first two films, giving audiences not just a Ready Player One-style thrill of recognition but also the sense that this story was happening right here, right now.

But the series has almost entirely abandoned figures from the Christian world (the Newsboys make a very brief appearance in a Christian talk show) in favor of the Fox News set. What we cannot do, Hume argues, is explain away all evidence of this kind by way of assuming that this world is the perfect creation of a perfect being. Pearce, calling his legal assistants in full-on lawyer mode, keeps name-checking court cases that are, once again, only kind of related to the matter at hand. Dave’s brother Pearce, a “social justice attorney” (played by John Corbett) who walked away from his faith during law school, has come at Dave’s request to help him fight the university. But it’s not doing any favors to their faith. But even setting that aside, it’s important to remember that when a movie explicitly serves up a message, you have to look at the plate it’s served on.

He even fights back through the media, going on TV to call for a grassroots campaign by people who support the right of the church to remain. People of different faiths join together to serve their communities and even host other groups when they’re in need. What if it was about serving these other groups of people? The other religious groups on campus that have difficulty getting support – which presumably, if Hadleigh is like most colleges in America, includes organizations for Muslims and Jews, two groups that really do face increased rates of persecution in America – are never mentioned again. Would we heal Trump’s divided America? Talking with guests on a show about the case, she suggests that the problem in America is that we don’t listen to one another. What Are the Main Religions in North America? However, there are a handful of other moments in which God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness verges on realizing that the persecution complex that undergirds its predecessors’ stories might not be all that airtight. It sounds like God’s Not Dead finally has gotten a conscience about its culture-wars attitude.