It's traditionally been very rare for syndicated reruns of shows to outlast those shows' run on the air. Actually, because of cable, the syndication market is much MORE profitable right now than it was even five years ago.

One of the things I found most shattering to my own fundamentalist belief system was reading a passage by Martin Luther, in which he was troubled by the notion that if God is both omniscient and omnipotent, and he also created the universe, then there really was no free will, because the only act of free will was his…

I am not an atheist.

Thinking of eternity in terms of being on a winning team versus a losing one is almost exactly the reason I left the fundamentalist church behind. The New Testament is full of passages where Jesus communes with sinners or earnestly entreats his followers to bring them to salvation. It is not full of passages where he…

Not all of them.

I'm surely alive!

Every movie in the box office top 10 has substantially more "MUST GO!" ratings than more middling ratings, simply because we tend to only go to movies we are pretty sure we're going to like and/or not want to criticize too heavily things we spend money on. This isn't an indication of the film's secret quality; it's an…

That stuff being removed was all me. I decided it was too spoilery in the context of the next episode (which I hadn't seen before this interview was conducted). Granted, it happens in the first five minutes, so it's not REALLY spoiling anyone, but it's definitely played up as a big reveal, so I deleted it to preserve…

A fucking Irwin Allen TV Club 10 would be the bomb.

I'm Todd VanDerWerff.

I have this crazy idea that a different person should do it every season, just to see if anyone will not be broken by it. But then I would probably have to do it at some point, and I'm not into that.

Not really.

If I believe in any god, that, by definition, does not make me an atheist.

It mostly has to do with campus discrimination against religious groups, which is a real thing that sometimes happens, but is rarely as dramatic as what happens in this movie. It generally takes the form of a fundamentalist Christian group breaking some campus rule (like proselytizing or something), then getting its…

I am not an atheist.

The movie ends with those court case summaries, but not a one of them seems to have anything to do with what's in this film. I guess that's because the evil college professor is such a trope in fundamentalist Christian stories.

I might ironically.

I have no problem believing a plurality or maybe even a majority of Christians the world over believe in evolution, perhaps even without divine intervention. But the kinds of characters God's Not Dead is portraying absolutely would.

I am a semi-permanent part of the Watch This rotation, and I have reviewed a handful of movies here, mostly things that nobody cared to read about until this one.

I would suggest to you that placing adhering to a certain political philosophy (in this case conservatism) as most important to being a "true" Christian, instead of simply being a follower of Christ, is placing that political philosophy ahead of Christ and, therefore, idolatry and a sin.