In the 2014 tour de force “God’s Not Dead,” Michel Foucault is the first figure listed by the film’s antagonist—the rancorous philosophy professor—as having already accepted that God is dead. Fourteen other alleged “atheists” are written on the board, but Foucault is emphatically at the top. This paper simply asks, why?
What follows does serve to answer that basic, albeit searching question, but in understanding the scorn and vitriol levied against Foucault will also contextualize the film and make sense of the culture in which it came. Necessarily, this cannot be done with film criticism alone, so key insights from Foucault’s own works will need to be juxtaposed with/against his most audible detractors. This combative pairing uncovers that as much as Foucault symbolizes the worst excesses of postmodernism (ostensibly, that which killed God), his mere and continued existence necessitates that "[God] must be defended."