Viewed against the writer-director's real-life religious odyssey, however, the film can be seen as the culmination of Dutcher's spiritual existence -- the product of a moment of self-realization followed by an existential crisis, a sudden plunge into what he terms "an earth-shaking moment of spiritual terror" that caused Dutcher to literally lose his religion.
"In one moment, I went from being a true believer to knowing that everything I had thought about God, everything I thought about the universe, the way I looked at the world might be off," Dutcher said. "Ironically, it's the films that allowed me to progress spiritually to the point I left Mormonism. If I hadn't been making films, I doubt I would have reached that point."
When "God's Army" began to connect with audiences in 2000, a handful of movie reviewers in and around Salt Lake City seized on it as a cultural tipping point, anointing Dutcher "the father of Mormon cinema." "At that point, the representation of Mormons on TV and in movies had been pretty negative -- it was all polygamy and crazy people, really extreme and marginal," Dutcher said. "One of my main impulses was to portray Mormons as real people."
Rather than repeat the formula of his breakout feature, Dutcher followed "God's Army" with 2001's "Brigham City," a faith-based work about a serial killer set loose in an idyllic Mormon town. The film's unusual subject matter prevented it from connecting with audiences as did "God's Army." And less than half a decade after having launched a new wave of Mormon film -- a batch of nearly 40 movies made by and for Mormons -- Dutcher began to fear that LDS cinema was "dying." A casualty of what he would later describe as "too many badly made films in the marketplace, too few good ones" in that widely publicized 2007 piece for the Daily Herald.
More confounding for the Illinois-born 44-year-old Brigham Young University grad (who converted to Mormonism at 8 when his mother remarried): He underwent a consciousness-rattling realization that he says shook him to his spiritual core. It was a life-changing event that left him feeling "enlightened" but that ultimately compelled Dutcher to leave Mormonism.
"One day in prayer, all by myself, I asked myself the question: What if it's all not true?" Dutcher recalled. "It was an earth-shaking moment of spiritual terror, such a profound experience. It was such a sense of loss. I felt my faith leaving me and never coming back."
