#1653: Brian Godawa

Brian Godawa is a screenwriter (“To End All Wars” and “The Visitation”) and author of books like the Chronicles of Nephilim series and Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. Godawa also produced the documentary “Wall of separation”, which attempts like so much fundie pseudohistory to claim that the Founding Fathers sought a government based on the Bible and therefore that the “wall” between church and state should be removed. (It’s remarkable that the Founding Fathers should have wanted this but actually failed to put it in there.) The documentary is, of course, riddled with factual errors (some discussed here), but more striking are, of course, the errors of omission of all those details that don’t quite fit. The whole thing fits the standard reconstructionist narrative (i.e. paranoid conspiracy theory) nicely, and it is worth mentioning that Godawa himself is affiliated with the Chalcedon Foundation, the home of Christian Reconstructionism.

Indeed, Godawa used to write movie reviews for the Chalcedon Foundation’s website. As you’d expect, he called “Brokeback Mountain” “a brilliant piece of subversive homosexual propaganda,” since it depicted gay men as “manly” instead of “fey queens,” which is an example of “the normalization of the freakish minority,” and concluded that “homosexualism” is “an ideology and religion whose goal is to overthrow the Christian paradigm of morality.”

Godawa was also one of many people upset by “historical inaccuracies” in the Aronofsky movie, “Noah”, calling it a “postmodernist fancy” and writing that the script “is deeply anti-Biblical in its moral vision.” Ooh, and what moral vision might that be? Killing everyone on Earth for their perceived moral failures? Why, yes, precisely that: “Killing all humans but eight in order to start over (as the Bible portrays) may seem harsh to our thoroughly Modern Millie minds … it reaffirms that Image of God in Man that gives man value despite the evil.” Hubris does not come hubrier than that last sentence, but at least we get to know the types of actions Godawa considers to be objectively morally acceptable but which postmodernist sensitivies have told us are not. (He was also concerned that this “uninteresting and unBiblical waste of a $150 million” would make it difficult for Christian screenwriters like him to find employment).

Diagnosis: Let’s hope that last prediction comes true – but we fear not. (Ok, so that’s more of a conclusion than a diagnosis, but we’re pretty sick of these people by now.)