Perhaps the most surprising moment in God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness — the third installment in the wildly popular and commercially successful Christian movie franchise — comes when the beleaguered Pastor Dave (David A.R. White) goes to visit Pastor Roland (Gregory Alan Williams), the minister at the nearby predominantly black church, and Roland reads him the riot act.

It’s a startling moment because it’s one of several in the movie in which it seems that the God’s Not Dead series might have become self-aware.

Dave is certain that his church, St. James, is under attack from people who harbor an anti-religious political agenda against Christians. When Roland counsels him to pray and be patient, Dave is not having any of it, telling Roland that he might feel differently if it were his church being attacked. Roland looks at him in disbelief, and for just a moment, his voice gets heated. “Brother, who do you think you’re talking to?” he says to Dave. “I’m a black preacher in the Deep South. I could build a church with all the bricks that have been thrown through my windows.”

In this moment and a few others, it seems like A Light in the Darkness is about to reevaluate the God’s Not Dead series’ own narrative about Christians in America, one that’s been far more interested in bolstering a certain sort of persecution complex than in encouraging its audience toward Christlike behavior. But in the end, this God’s Not Dead installment is just like the others: putting on a pious face but failing to imagine what real sacrifice might look like.

God’s Not Dead has never been warmly welcomed by mainstream critics. The problem isn’t really the production value (which is mostly fine), or even the statement in the title, a contradiction of a willful misreading of Nietzsche that’s so generic and bland that few people would find it offensive.

But the movies are offensive, and not only to those who aren’t in their target audience. (This is where I state my bona fides: I’m a lifelong Christian who was raised in a conservative evangelical home, and I’ve been writing about these movies since I was the chief film critic at Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine started by Billy Graham.) Most people outside the series’ target bubble notice its outsize, navel-gazing persecution complex right off the bat.

The thesis of the God’s Not Dead series is that Christians and Christianity are under attack in America, and that the way to fight back is through exercising First Amendment rights, mostly in educational settings. In the first film, a college freshman named Josh Wheaton (Shane Harper, who returns as a campus minister in the new film) intellectually conquers his caustically atheistic philosophy professor in three classroom rounds of debates about the existence of God. The professor gets hit by a car at the end and dies, but not before he becomes a Christian.

In the second, a high school teacher named Grace Wesley (Melissa Joan Hart) lands in court after answering a student’s question about Jesus by quoting the Bible. She wins the case, defeating the ACLU lawyer (Ray Wise) who vows to prove that God really is dead.

In this third installment, the historic building in which the St. James congregation meets was damaged in a fire caused by an act of vandalism that killed Dave’s co-pastor, Pastor Jude (Benjamin A. Onyango). Following the fire, the board of Hadleigh University, on whose campus the St. James building has been located for 150 years, has been trying to seize the property under eminent domain laws in order to build a student center.

Hadleigh argues that it’s unfair to favor one religion over another — that some student religious groups can’t even get funding, while the one hosted by St. James gets support from the university — but Pastor Dave thinks it’s because the university wants the public Christian presence off the campus. (And, privately, some of the board members think that would be best for the students and the university’s image as well.)