Imagine a film in which Christopher Hitchens has been born again as The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders. And that he gets endorsement from Donald Trump’s preferred blowhard, Fox News’s Sean Hannity, for a Christian phone app to be deployed against the forces of darkness. You would watch that, right?
Let There Be Light is that movie. Released in the US in 2017, but only now getting a UK release, it stars Kevin Sorbo as Sol Harkens, the self-styled “world’s biggest atheist”, who undergoes a cinematic conversion that for sheer verve rivals Michael Caine’s in The Muppets Christmas Carol.
Sorbo’s name may not ring bells, but his muscles will. From 1993 to 1999 he played the lead in Hercules, which, Sorbo’s website tell us, is “the most watched TV show in the world, airing in 176 countries”. And he has another life as proselytiser for his Christian faith. He recently voiced God in an 18-CD reading of the New Testament. He shares his mission with his wife, Sam, whom he met when she guest starred as Hercules’s love interest Serena.
Over the phone as the pair travel from Munich to Brussels, Sam explains the idea behind the film: “There’s a darkness that wants to enslave people.” She means the growth of secularism and of fundamentalist Islam, typified by Islamic State. “We want people to have hope,” adds Kevin. “The darkness is a loss of faith.”
For Kevin, the movie fights against “the growing hatred of and intolerance for the Christian faith, which has really appalled me”. To get a sense of his worldview, in 2016 Kevin said he believed Jesus would vote for Trump, and later told Fox and Friends: “You look at Hillary [Clinton]. Does He support killing? I’m not saying she’s a killer, but she let people die in Benghazi.”
Sam tells me she was inspired to write the film by “raising three Christian children in a largely secular world and their faith being challenged every day”. Her kids – Braeden, Shane and Octavia – are all home-schooled.
When we first see Sol Harkens in the movie, he’s demolishing a Christian author in a live debate. His agent suggests Sol capitalise on the resulting media furore by making T-shirts bearing the slogan “Isis = Church”. Sol, when not depleting world’s vodka stocks, has loveless dalliances, the latest with a Russian sportswear model. I didn’t catch her name, but if she was the sister of Austin Powers’ Ivana Humpalot, it would have been no surprise. But his atheistic cynicism and concupiscence are responses to tragedy: his son Davey died aged nine from cancer.
His estranged wife, Katy, and two surviving sons stay on the path of Christian righteousness in chintzy suburbia. One of the boys is planning to dig a well in Haiti with his church group. “Can’t the people in Haiti dig?” asks Dad, with the smug cynicism we’ve come to associate with the Dawkins-Hitchens secular-industrial complex. “Don’t you believe in doing good?” retorts the son, with the youthful ardour of a canine foil in a Lassie movie.
Then, one night, Sol crashes when driving home drunk from the launch party for his new book, Aborting God. For four minutes he is clinically dead. As he stands in a CGI tunnel of light, his dead son materialises, hugs him and gives him his mission, namely to bring light to the world. Sol seeks spiritual guidance from Vinny, his estranged wife’s mobster turned pastor whose argument for the truth of the Gospels includes the phrase “bada bing”. In the next reel, Vinny baptises Sol in a brook; soon after that, Sol remarries Katy.
Kevin directed and played the lead, while Sam co-wrote and played Katy. The Sorbos’ sons played the couple’s children. “They’ve been going to acting classes for four years,” explains Kevin to justify their casting. “What they did in the film blew us away,” adds Sam.
Now reunited, the Harkens family can pull on figurative tights and do battle in Manichean approximation of The Incredibles. Their task? To unleash on this fallen world a Let There Be Light app, which will invite users to shine their phone torches up to heaven on Christmas Eve, creating a band of light that will serve, as Katy puts it, as “a selfie for God”.
But who will publicise this project? Step forward Hannity, who appears as himself and invites the newlyweds on his show. “What right do you have to impose your religious values on to somebody else?” Hannity asks. “Well, what right does Isis have to cut people’s heads off?” Sol snaps back.
The lamestream media were largely unimpressed by the film. The New Yorker called it “a cynical, xenophobic morality tale, as bitter as it is saccharine”. When I ask the Sorbos what they think of such critical reaction, Kevin talks box office: IMDb estimates the budget to have been $3m (£2.3m) while, as of February 2018, it had grossed more than $7m in the US. Sam stresses the emails she has received from people who want to unite on Christmas Eve to produce a real-life God selfie that, she hopes, will be filmed from the heavens by Nasa. Isn’t it odd that a Christmas movie is released here in the spring? “We think Easter weekend is very appropriate release date for a Christian movie,” says Sam.
She’s plotting a sequel to Let There Be Light, but won’t disclose details. Hopefully it will answer questions I had as credits rolled. When will Sol wake up and smell the sulphur? When will he realise that Hannity’s stars-and-stripes lapel badge just distracts from his cloven hooves? What I want to see in the sequel is the Christian Incredibles reform one last time and go Old Testament on Fox’s diabolical fake-news führer. I’m happy to draft a script. Provisional title? Born Again – Again. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t watch it.
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