One of last year’s biggest surprise hits was the faith-based film God’s Not Dead, the Kevin Sorbo-starring response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (We hope it goes without saying this was a domestic surprise hit.) The movie, which we haven’t seen but appears to consist entirely of hilarious bloopers involving actors mistakenly saying God exists, took in $60 million and change in grosses. And, as Jesus can attest, God loves second acts, so a sequel film is off to the Christian-pandering races. Variety reports The Goldbergs star Hayley Orrantia has been cast as the lead in God’s Not Dead 2, now filming in Arkansas.
The story involves Orrantia playing “a student whose family sues her high school teacher over the teacher quoting Bible verses in class.” So, instead of the original’s atheist college professor getting schooled by the irrefutable evidence that bananas exist, therefore God, this time it’s a wise Christian educator being harassed by the evil machinations of people believing in separation of church and state. The teacher is being played by noted right-winger Melissa Joan Hart, and with any luck, the character is named Clarissa. Since the first film involved flawlessly demonstrating the existence of God’s omnipotence, we can only imagine this one deals with the embarrassment caused when it turns out the first movie was totally wrong about that. It will end with Orrantia and Hart, bound together with pagan symbols, dancing around hellfire while Obama gets gay married in the distance.