NO SPOILERS: God’s Not Dead, but Michel Foucault Might Be

For anyone interested in any of the intersections between law, philosophy, religion, media, and popular culture, the 2014 enigmatic masterpiece “God’s Not Dead” gets you there at breakneck speed.  Some argue the film is a microcosm of a politico-legal climate that demonizes academia and even the possibility of intellectuality. Others laud the films portrayal of what feels to many a very real and especially concerted, Christian persecution. One could never be accused of spurious intent for suggesting that this very real persecution stems from, at least conceptually, nonbelievers daring to question any one of the totalizing structures that serve and have served to prop up a very particular American governmentality.  In the film this astonishment is subtle, but in the public square it is quite prominent, grandiose even, and, come to think of it, it is directed at few more fiercely than Michel Foucault.  Now, given his concerted and expansive critique of governmentality, it stands to reason that Foucault would take a sizeable portion of rebuke for at the very least making known the potential ways in which, according to Foucault, some cryptic “regimes” of “power” undergird those totalizing structures.  But the ire and angst directed at this “celebrated” and “venerated,” towering intellectual is more than that—its spiteful, as much personal as it is political, concerned as much with acceptable ways of being as it is with the mere annunciation of theory.  In fact, Foucault might just be a stand-in for the antithesis of a God that is not only not dead, but is, more to the point, thriving.  If one didn’t know any better, one might be led to believe that it is actually Foucault who is dead?  Curious.

In the film itself, it doesn’t take long for this stage to be set.  Critics and “scholars” attest that what the film represents is clearly conjurable from the title alone; regardless, within the first 10 minutes, the film shows makes it known: “Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bertolt Brecht, Frederick [sic] Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, George Santayana, Democritus, Denis Diderot, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Albert Camus, Richard Dawkins, Sigmund Freud, Noam Chomsky, and the list goes on. Philosophers, poets, scientists, authors, towering intellects, all of them. But what do they all have in common?”  The answer, of course, is that they are all atheists! Or, so one Herculean, albeit cartoonish, philosophy professor would have us believe—minus the fun songs and animation that might portend those characteristics in a more secular medium.  Leaving the truth of that assertion for another day, what interests me is why Foucault is emphatically (and emphatically pronounced, to boot) at the very top?  Further, what is it about the French theorist that conservatives, Christian nationalists, and the nebulous “anti-woke” seem to hate so much?

The film’s title and conceptual thrust is of course an allusion to Nietzsche’s infamous albeit famously misunderstood line from The Gay Science: “God is dead.”  That he remains dead and who killed him are never taken up in the film, or its three sequels, but they do flesh out the thought, at least for Nietzsche, and leave thinkers like Freud, Camus, and a few others from the list above to ponder why such a death would matter at all.  With that in mind, sternly, one couldn’t possibly be left to wonder anything substantive, other than why Foucault tops the list? Nietzsche wrote it after all; why isn’t he at the top?  Why not Camus, who famously penned a line about not wasting time on God.  Why not Freud, whose disdain for religion is nearly as famous as his linguistic sure-footedness.  Perhaps fame has nothing to do with it at all.  In fact, giving the filmmakers their due, genealogically it does make some sense; Foucault is unequivocally indebted to Nietzsche, has mused on the quotation directly, and is perhaps more immediately recognizable.  But that still doesn’t quite explain this stylistic choice, whose unquestionable intentionality unequivocally warrants this high-level analysis.  A cynical interlocuter might suggest Foucault’s visible homosexuality and association with postmodernity are the obvious culprit, but that feels too simplistic.  Superficially that might justify why Foucault tops the list and why he is hated, but still, surely there is something deeper that explains why Foucault has come to represent all of the worst excesses of intellectualism, both inside and outside of academia.

In what follows, that depth will be explicated through a strategic unfolding of the various competing discourses at issue: law, religion, philosophy, media, and popular culture.  Ambitious and excruciating as it may be, this paper will walk, carefully, through the themes, performances, and mise-en-scène of “God’s Not Dead,” couching what can best be described as tepid film criticism between a barrage of Foucauldian insights and the seemingly never-ending supply of reactionary, vitriolic even, scorn leveled against Foucault the philosopher and, more often than is potentially warranted, Foucault the man.  This angry, crass, and pejorative material, from popular and scholastic commentators alike, all juxtaposed neatly with/against tidbits of Foucault’s "essential" work on art, critique, the author, truth, power, knowledge, governmentality, normalization, repression, and even biopolitics, will fuel this dialectic exercise, while uncovering the structural parameters by which we can make sense of the film and perhaps the anti-Foucault climate in which it came to exist.  Left only to question, in what ways does the "law" contemplated by Foucault clash against the idealized culture projected (explicitly or otherwise) by the film's target audience?  Are religion and philosophy at odds?  More specifically, what role has Foucault played in that conceptual discord?  To be explicit, when religion, nay, when Christianity is being systematically removed from popular culture, what role does “law” play in defending this righteous, moral order?  Is concerted media messaging enough to counteract this convergent removal, or is it only the first step in a cultural (and potentially juridical) call-to-arms?  All of these ponderances at the very least buttress the notion that Foucauldian thought is dangerous, and thus, organized, ideological pushback is warranted, because ironically, “[God] must be defended.”