Two Gospels, One Church: What “Wake Up Dead Man” Reveals About American Christianity
Rian Johnson’s latest “Knives Out” film pits faith as power against faith as discipleship—and makes clear which one looks like Jesus.
Caution: Spoilers for the new Netflix film “Wake Up Dead Man”.
Wake Up Dead Man is the third installment of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise, featuring private detective Benoit Blanc. While toeing the line between police procedural and comedy, Johnson has managed to craft an enjoyable franchise with marvelous whodunit mysteries that also speak to our current social situations. The first film, Knives Out, focuses on wealth inequality and anti-immigration sentiment. The second, Glass Onion, continued the theme leaning into comedy and satire to expose the vapidity and greed of the billionaire class.
In the third film, Johnson does the unthinkable. In an era when popular media often collapses “Christianity” into either cartoon villainy or nostalgic wallpaper, this film makes a sharper, more uncomfortable distinction. It places two versions of Christianity in direct opposition—and in doing so, it offers one of the clearest cinematic critiques of American Christian nationalism we’ve seen in recent years.
The story revolves around the town of Chimney Rock and Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude Catholic Church, led by one Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Wicks is a charismatic and authoritarian leader. The church is shrinking, but the core that remains are heavily devoted to Wicks and his fire-and-brimstone preaching. Into this comes Father Jud Duplicenty. Jud—a former boxer with a rough past—has sought to atone for his past by a new life in the priesthood. After punching a deacon during a dispute, Jud is sent to Chimney Rock as punishment—but also because the Bishop knows that if anyone can release Wicks’ stranglehold on the church and town, it’ll be Jud.
Wicks and Jud become embodiments of two fundamentally different gospels—two competing visions of Christianity struggling for the same sanctuary.
Christianity as Power: Wicks and the Nationalist Imagination
Monsignor Wicks is an authoritarian leader with an iron fist. His faith is inseparable from authority, inheritance, and control. It is less about discipleship and more about maintenance—of institutions, hierarchies, and narratives that benefit those in power. And this is the logic of Christian nationalism.
American Christian nationalism is not primarily about church attendance or doctrinal orthodoxy. It is about identity and power. It frames Christianity as the rightful cultural owner of the nation, equates faith with patriotism and fidelity to power, imagining moral decline as something imposed by outsiders rather than exposed by internal corruption. It does not ask whether the church looks like Jesus—it asks whether the church is still in charge of the Empire.
Wicks’ Christianity functions in exactly this way. His moral certainty is rigid, but his moral accountability is nonexistent. He speaks fluently about sin while remaining untouched by repentance. Truth matters only if it preserves authority. Even resurrection—the central hope of Christianity—is hollowed out and weaponized. Wicks’ faith is about himself. The church—“my church” he warns Jud repeatedly—is there for the worship not of Jesus, but himself. It is a faith that sees no need for a cross—the cross is conspicuously missing from Wicks’ church—but places at the center of faith a bully pulpit and a throne.
In a particularly poignant exchange, Father Jud and Monsignor Wicks argue about the church. Jud confronts Wicks, “Every week now, it’s just this hardened cyst of regulars and it seems like you’re intentionally keeping them angry and afraid. Is this how Christ led his flock?” In return, Wicks punches Jud in the mouth, sending him to the ground: “Anger. Anger lets us fight back, take back the ground we’ve lost. And we’ve lost so much…Your version of love and forgiveness is a sop.”
In American life, we have seen this version of Christianity in the public square. It drapes itself in flags and slogans, insists the nation was founded “for Christians,” and treats political power as a divine right. The message of Christian nationalism says that to protect Christianity, we must control the nation. The problem, as Wake Up Dead Man insists, is that this is not the Christianity of Christ at all. It is worship of power and empire that uses the name of God in vain.
Christianity as Discipleship: Jud and the Way of Jesus
Jud, by contrast, is not presented as impressive. He is not charismatic, polished, or strategically powerful. His faith does not grant him leverage, but costs him credibility. Where Wicks manages appearances, Jud tells the truth. Where Wicks protects the institution, Jud protects people—even when doing so destabilizes the institution itself. Where Wicks turns every interaction with a parishioner into a scheme to enhance his own power and standing, Jud literally interrupts a phone conversation that could exonerate him to engage with a stranger as their pastor.
This is not accidental. The film frames Jud’s Christianity as inconvenient and disruptive. He believes confession matters. He believes repentance matters. He believes the church exists to serve the vulnerable, not to preserve its own image. His authority does not come from position but from presence. Despite—or rather, because of—a rough exterior and difficult past, Jud carries with him a gentle empathy that is deeply relational. This is Christianity as relationships rather than identity.
Near the end of the film, Father Jud explicitly states his purpose as a priest: “My real and only purpose in life. Which is not to fight the wicked and bring them to justice, but to serve them and bring them to Christ…We are here to serve the world, not beat it. That’s what Christ did.”
Jud’s faith looks far closer to the Jesus of the Gospels than the Christianity that dominates American politics. It echoes a Christ who refuses coercive power, who tells his followers that the greatest must become the least, who warns religious leaders that their certainty may be blinding them to truth. It is a faith shaped by the cross rather than power.
Two Gospels, One Church
When these two conflicting ideologies, represented by these two men, come under one church, the result is the murder mystery about which the story is consumed. Wicks is killed, stabbed in the back, with Jud being the obvious primary suspect. These two ideologies cannot coexist in the same house for long. And it is up to master detective Benoit Blanc to exonerate Father Jud and unearth the real killer.
The brilliance of Wake Up Dead Man lies in what it refuses to do. It does not present Christianity as inherently corrupt, nor does it present it as beyond critique. Instead, it exposes a fracture at the heart of American Christianity—one that has perhaps always been there but with the rise of Trumpism has become impossible to ignore. We have watched crosses and banners that read “Jesus saves” carried alongside Confederate flags. We have heard pastors describe political opponents as demonic. We have seen January 6 framed by some Christian leaders as a spiritual battle rather than a violent insurrection. We have heard political leaders—who control all three branches of government and increasingly the media—insist that they live in “enemy-occupied territory.” We have watched the language of faith used to justify exclusion, surveillance, and state violence—all while invoking “religious freedom.”
Christian nationalism insists that Christianity must win. The gospel insists that it must die and rise again—redeemed and transformed. Wicks’ version of faith cannot tolerate vulnerability. Jud’s faith is built on it. One needs enemies; the other needs confession. One seeks dominance; the other seeks truth.
The film’s implicit claim is that these two cannot exist forever. It would be easy to dismiss Wake Up Dead Man as just a movie, but stories shape our moral imagination more powerfully and long before didactic debate. This film arrives at a moment when many Americans—inside and outside the church—are asking whether Christianity still has anything to offer beyond power struggles and culture wars. What Rian Johnson’s film suggests is both hopeful and unsettling: Christianity may yet be worth defending, but not in the way many are trying to defend it.
The solution to Christian nationalism is not secularism, nor is it a louder and more rigid religiosity. It is repentance. It is a return to a faith that looks more like Jud than Wicks—more cross than crown, more truth than triumph. For those who have walked away from the church because they have only encountered Wicks’ version of faith, Wake Up Dead Man offers a reminder: that version is not the only one that exists—nor is it the truest.
By the film’s end, Wicks’ version of faith has been defeated. Wicks is dead and his ideology has been exorcised from the church. Father Jud is left to pick up the pieces—physically and metaphorically—and rebuild the church and its reputation within the community. This is Johnson’s call to the American church. Christian nationalism is not a faith that needs defending, but a dead religion that must finally be laid to rest so the gospel can live again.
