God and Superheroes

With Spider-Man 3 hitting theatres today, I thought I'd mention some interesting links to the portrayal of spirituality and religion in comics and Spider-Man in particular. There's one here, here, here, and here. Indeed, they were quite thought-provoking. So many people think that comics are thoughtless and frivolous, but looking at these links makes you realize that they often deal with some pretty serious subject matter; and this is just a small taste.

I must confess, when I was a kid I was pretty fanatical about Spider-Man comics. I must have had hundreds of them! The same thing that drew me to the comics also draws me to the movies--they're both a lot of fun but there's also a thread of humanity that is relatable. The characters are not at all comic-bookey in the more derogatory sense of two-dimensional card-board cutouts and stereotypes, but people that most of us can identify with. That's especially true of Spider-Man, a young kid who receives these incredible gifts and then struggles enormously in how to handle and use them. Peter Parker, the young guy under the Spider-Man mask, already had problems, and becoming Spider-Man just seemed to multiply them. Spider-Man was likable and attractive because he was more like us.

And if it seems strange to write about this topic in this blog, then I would simply say that such cultural icons are often touchstones for discussing universal themes such as forgiveness, redemption, responsibility, love, etc. Most successful stories, including super hero stories, weave arcs of redemption into their narratives. Characters experience challenges and choices, and the choices they make shape their characters and their destinies. As you can see if you follow the links above, even the director of Spider-Man 3, Sam Raimi, speaks of his movie in quasi-religious terms.

This shouldn't surprise us. Super-heroes are mythological characters, cut from the same imaginative cloth as other mythological heroes of literature and pop-culture. Whether we talk about The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, redemptive storylines are usually much more effective if the religious elements are completely absorbed in the story itself. Tolkien, when asked why there is no "religion" and no "churches" in Middle-Earth, commented that this is because the entire story is through and through religious. He wasn't too keen on the obvious allegorical approach of his friend C.S. Lewis's Narnia books. If I'm not mistaken, he once referred to The Lord of the Rings as a thoroughly Catholic work. Even so, there are still narrative hints of a divine presence, not unlike the so-called "Force" in Star Wars. And so it is with super-heroes.

Given that God is the Creator, it's no surprise to me, also, that those who are creative find themselves dealing with the reality of God, whether knowingly or not, positively or not. Patterns of redemption, salvation, and resurrection have been inscribed into the fabric of all that God has made. I'm no pop-culture critic or scholar of literature, but I think that this is pretty obvious. That it is so reminds me of Paul's speech to the Athenians in Acts 17. They had an altar to "an unknown god," and Paul went on to say, "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you." He then went on to proclaim Christ. Intimations of God's presence, however imperfect, broken, sinful, and incomplete, are there all around us. As Bruce Cockburn sings, the world gives us "rumours of glory." We can see them in films, the arts, hear them in music, see them in the people around us, and in trees, fields, and forests, lakes, rivers, oceans, and in all the creatures God has made. As Christians, we need to provide context and shape to these intimations and rumours, and let people know that the God that Paul says they "grope" for "is not far from each one of us." And more than that, as Paul says, using one of their famous poets, it is in this God that "we live and move and have our being." It was true for Paul, the Athenians of his day, and it is true for us. It's also true for all those super-heroes on the page and screen, and for those who put them there.