‘After Death’ Review: A Faith-Based Documentary That Pretends the Afterlife Is Science
01.11.2023 - 03:19
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the early days of the culture war, science stood on one side and religion on the other. In 1925, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial hung on whether a Tennessee high-school instructor had violated state law by teaching human evolution. He was on trial, but it was really Charles Darwin who was on trial.
Darwin won, and so, in a larger sense, did Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and the whole tsunami of advanced science that was setting the stage for the 20th century. By the time physicists and astronomers were exploring the origins of the universe, the whole “God made the world in 7 days” idea, even if you fervently believed it, did not pretend to be “science.” But with the rise of the American Evangelical movement and its worldly political engine, the Christian Right, what once looked like a science-vs.-faith dichotomy began to break down. You could see this in the rise of the Christian “theory of evolution” — demonstrated in theme parks and museums — that posited the existence of dinosaurs walking side by side with prehistoric man.
This was not your father’s Biblical literalism (unless I’m forgetting some New Testament verse that includes a Triceratops). And it was not something that was taught in anthropology class. Yet it was very much presented as the Christian historical version of scientific truth.
It’s no coincidence that this happened just as science was coming under assault from right-wing politicians. The attacks on climate-change science, the resurrection of the war against Darwin — hell, even Donald Trump’s election denial is, at heart, anti-science (or maybe anti-math), championing Trump’s “faith” (in his own infallibility) over what we once called empirical reality. Part
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