Sedona actress Samaire Armstrong will be appearing in a leading role in the upcoming film “God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust,” which premiered in Dallas on Sept. 4 prior to its run at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre at the Sedona International Film Festival from Sept. 13 through 18.

The film, starring David A.R. White,* also features appearances by actors Dean Cain and Scott Baio and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister.

“It’s about a small-town pastor stepping up and running for Congress,” said Armstrong. “I play a single mother, which I am, who moves back to her home town to raise her son and is asked out of retirement to run the campaign for the pastor … the parallels were just too much of a coincidence to ignore.”

Armstrong ran for Sedona mayor in 2022. She defeated two candidates, including Sedona’s then-incumbent mayor, in the August primary, but lost in the November general election.

“She was fantastic in this movie and a great team player,” director Vance Null said, describing Armstrong’s casting following her own election campaign as “a bit serendipitous.”

“When I was offered the role, they didn’t even know that I had done that,” Armstrong said. “It absolutely lends to the whole process of this storyline, how the political realm operates.”

“She is very much a by-any-means-necessary, get-the-job-done type of person,” Armstrong said of her character and how the tension between her character and the film’s protagonist reflects the larger philosophical conflict between moral absolutism and moral relativism. “I play sort of the more devious side of the political realm … The pastor obviously wants to run by his moral ethics and doesn’t want to play dirty, and doesn’t want to knock the other guy down … My character wants to play by the rulebook of dirty tricks, and if I can’t get them to vote for you, I’ll get them to hate him, which I discovered along my own campaign was a strategy used against me.”

“It takes a lot of inspiration from the Jimmy Stewart film ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ and standing up against a system that’s become corrupt over the years,” Null said.

“It’s very timely in that we have this election, we have these questions about faith and politics and government,” Cain said. “My character’s a bad guy, as usual. He’s the money behind a candidate, but it might surprise you how it all comes about.”

“It sort of propelled me onto a path of discovering my own faith, which has been a really beautiful journey,” Armstrong said.

While “God’s Not Dead” is the fifth installment in a series following the central character of Southern pastor David Hill, Null assured viewers that “you don’t need to have seen the other ones to enjoy this one, it’s a self-contained story.” He worked on the first three films in the series as an editor and later directed “God’s Not Dead 4,” which he described as being about parents’ freedom to homeschool their children.

“Of course the villains in that film are trying to stop it because they feel like children belong to the society, to the state,” Null said. “So there’s a whole controversy that grows there, and the seed is planted in the previous film that ultimately led to this film, No. 5, becoming more politically-oriented” as the protagonist “branches out and gets outside of his comfort zone to get involved and run for office.”

Returning from the second film in the series will be the character of Peter Kane, played by Ray Wise, an attorney who is now the pastor’s political rival.

“It’s more about the villain character wanting the government to decide for people how they should believe … and how they want the populace to not be involved, you leave religion and faith at home,” Null said. “Our pastor character’s like, no, it wasn’t so much to keep religion out of government, it was to keep the government out of religion. That was originally what separation of church and state meant.”

“It seems that more and more the political establishment is going after separating God from collective consciousness and intentionally dividing government away from any moral values,” Armstrong said. “They’re trying to replace God with government.”

Null added that the story is highly structured around debates between the characters, but that there is little emphasis on addressing specific policies or issues.

“We don’t really get into it because we didn’t want the movie to be about a specific policy, because that would take away from the true message of the movie: To become involved,” writer Tommy Blaze said. “Christians should have a voice in the public square … When I was younger, they had this movement called ‘Get out the Vote’ or ‘Rock the Vote,’ back in the ’80s, and I think that’s what this movie is. It’s basically reminding people they should vote, particularly the 40 million Christians who don’t vote.”

“All policy that really matters is what’s going on in your backyard,” Armstrong said. “Local politics changes the way we live so dramatically. People who are so upset at what’s going on often don’t realize the policies that are voted in by our mayor and council, and unfortunately even worse than that is the unelected bureaucratic officials who don’t even live in the town that are making decisions … If policies are voted in without morality that you relate to or subscribe to, then you’re pushed into an existence that isn’t necessarily aligned. It’s important to have a spectrum — and this is what bothered me so much about our council, not just from a religious standpoint, but from a political standpoint, we don’t have a large array of thought.”

“Thematically, it’s the unique challenges a clergy member might have running for government office,” Blaze said.

“The movie talks about how Christians aren’t particularly politically motivated because theirs is a belief that Jesus was about the kingdom of heaven and not so much the kingdom of man,” Blaze said. “He said very, very little about politics other than pay your taxes and pray for your leaders … and yet we’re telling all these apathetic Christians to go see this movie.”

“I think there are seven ordained ministers serving in Congress right now,” Blaze said. “Ninety-two percent of the House of Representatives claim to be Christian.”

“Huckabee actually throws out an interesting factoid, that at this point in history there’s now more ordained ministers in Congress than at any other point in history,” Null said. “So it’s actually a bit ironic that there are a lot of believers in Congress currently, just to prove again that there can be crossover.”

Is “God’s Not Dead” attempting to make the argument that Christians can serve both God and country?

“Yeah, for sure,” Null said. “It’s critical to remember the value of [voting], because if we don’t use votes, nothing will change.”

“While we’re here, we have to do right and make right by standing up for our moral codes,” Armstrong said. “Letting go of that is a detriment to our freedoms, which are God-given.”

“God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust” will be shown at the Mary D. Fisher and Alice Gill-Sheldon Theatres on Friday, Sept. 13, at 3:30 p.m.; Saturday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 14, 17 and 18, at 7 p.m.; and Sunday and Monday, Sept. 15 and 16, at 4 p.m. A Q&A with Armstrong will take place following the screening on Sept. 14.

*Editor’s note: The print version of this story gave the name of the film’s star David A.R. White as David Hill, which is the name of his character in the film.