One of the featured events at Sundance this year was a panel on faith-based films. Several attendees I spoke with were disappointed that panelists focused predominately, once again, on the “faith and family” audience—the same underlying market confusion I’d observed all year. One attendee, Ryan Daniel Dobson, is a Christian filmmaker developing a project based on the Biblical story of Hosea, in which the prophet is told by God to marry a prostitute, who repeatedly abandons him. A project like this will likely interest many people of faith, but not those looking for a “family film.” Like a growing number of Christians who work outside both the Hollywood system and the Christian film industry, Dobson sees films like God’s Not Dead as nearly antithetical to his understanding of what film ought to do and what faith ought to look like.

“Several times ‘faith films’ were compared to superhero movies, where a studio can’t stray from what their fanboy audience wants, because it would guarantee a box office fail.” Dobson told me. “Several times, it was said, ‘We’re doing this for them’—the audience. I find that particularly heartbreaking when said on the grounds of a festival where stories are told with such honesty that it forces the audience to admit they might be wrong.”

Most of the filmmakers who made this year’s spiritual indie films aren't even religious. The director Justin Kelly made his feature debut with I Am Michael, but faith isn’t exactly his hobby horse. “I never intended and still don’t to be talking about religion and sexuality so much,” he told me. “The fact that the film is being seen as controversial means that these things come up, and it’s new and weird to me.”

The film sidesteps the easy caricature of religious characters, a move Kelly attributes to meeting the men with whom Glatze had relationships. “All they cared about was how Michael would be portrayed, and they didn’t want him to be vilified,” Kelly told me. He found this mystifying at first, but their concern helped the director see how to depict characters he might not understand. “I thought, I have to be fair about this, in the same way that I would want him to be fair with me,” he said. Similarly, Don Verdean skewers the jargon that surfaces in American religion. But it isn't fundamentally critical of religion—rather, like many of the films at the festival (including Prophet’s Prey and Going Clear), the film is critical of misuses of power.

Filmmaker Paul Harrill’s indie feature Something, Anything—in which a character experiences a spiritual crisis and seeks answers in a monastic life—has played at festivals all over the country. Harrill also doesn’t count himself among the traditionally religious, but articulates well the sentiment behind this resurgence. “Spirituality is part of many people’s lives, and I wanted to depict that on film with compassion and respect,” he says. “But the last thing in the world I wanted to make was some ‘faith-based’ movie, some advertisement or propaganda for a set of beliefs. If anything, I wanted to make a film that was an antidote to those kinds of movies.”