Unity vs. Liberty in Captain America: Civil War

Unity and Liberty compete in Captain America: Civil War . And in our churches. Read on KateRaeDavis.com unity captain america

“Staying together is more important than how we stay together.”

In Captain America: Civil War, Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow says this to Steve Rogers / Captain America. It’s her attempt to keep him from leaving the Avengers, from dividing the Avengers into factions.

Romanoff puts their togetherness above all else. She believes that unity is more important than differences. She believes that what they gain from collaboration is more important than any regulations on that collaboration.

Romanoff is willing to have these hard conversations. She’s willing to engage the variety of beliefs. And she’s willing to mediate between these sad and stubborn men for the sake of “staying together.”

Rogers, of course, disagrees. We knew he would. It wouldn’t be much of a superhero movie if Romanoff’s heartfelt interventions with Rogers and Stark were heard and responded to in a mature and reasonable manner.

Rogers reveals his priority in his response to Romanoff: “What are we giving up to do it?”

He’s focused on what they would each lose in order to stay together. Rogers believes liberty matters more than unity. He believes that freedom to live his personal ideals is greater than collaboration.

I love that this conversation is set in a church.

Because this conversation is always happening in the Church.

Following the memorial service, Romanoff and Rogers are alone in the sanctuary when they have this conversation.

I love it because the debate between unity and liberty is the conversation that’s taken place — continues to take place — in the long narrative of church history.

We’re always debating how to maintain unity while trying to discern and follow the movement of the Spirit.

The trick is that the movement of change looks like an improvement and progress to some. Like it does to Stark in the movie. And at the same time, it feels constrictive and dangerous to others. Like it does to Rogers.

How do we discern what’s true? How do we discern what the Spirit wants? How do we discern the balance between unity and freedom when we hear the Spirit differently?

For instance: The Episcopal Church (the USA branch of the Anglican church) was in conversations around the ordination of women to the priesthood. The sentiment was that we couldn’t do it until we all did it together. At least, it was until a few bishops, in very Captain America fashion, gathered and ordained women, forcing the conversation — and the church — to come up with a different action. They felt that what we were giving up for the sake of unity (namely, women’s voices in church leadership) wasn’t worth the cost.

The Church of England had a different answer: they valued unity above all, and so went much slower. Nearly 20 years slower in ordaining women to the priesthood. But they managed to go through that shift with less division.

Right now, many denominations are in the midst of similar debates.

The United Methodist Church, right now, is in the midst of this debate. The Western Division elected a lesbian as their bishop in a claim for liberty — and in defiance of church rules. Now the wider United Methodist Church needs to decide: Will they value liberty or unity?

I’m not sure if I’m devoted entirely to liberty or to unity. There’s a part of me that wants to cheer the UMC Western Division for boldly following the Spirit and standing for love and justice. And there’s part of me that feels the sadness of possible division. That wants to take hands with those who don’t agree or don’t understand and help them take just the next step toward acceptance. That wants to help people stay together as much as possible.

In Captain America: Civil War, the narrative “wants” us to side with Rogers’ ideals.

We hear this in Sharon Carter’s eulogy of her aunt, right before the conversation between Romanoff and Rogers:

[Margaret Carter] said, compromise when you can. When you can’t, don’t. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move. It is your duty, to plant yourself like a tree, look them in they eye and say, ” No…you move.”

The main piece of Margaret Carter’s advice here was “compromise when you can.” And yet Sharon manages to take the nuance, the exception to the rule, and to transform it into the central piece of advice. I doubt this was Margaret’s emphasis — she sounds more like Romanoff in her initial advice to compromise. Her advice is a call for unity. Sharon adds the emphasis in order to give a message to Rogers — and to move the narrative (and the audience) into more sympathy for the team liberty.

I had hoped that Stark and Rogers would move towards one another in the compromise that Margaret (via Sharon) calls for. That they would enter into the messy tension of unity and liberty and figure out a way they can be together and not feel constrained in the process.

Alas, I hope for the Kingdom.

By the end of the movie, the writers believe they’ve swayed us far enough to team Captain America that it’s okay for Rogers to perform a jail break and that we’ll be … if not happy about it, at least tolerant of it.

But I was disappointed. Rogers strikes me as reckless and individualistic, refusing to see the problems of his actions in a larger system. His actions are congruent with his own values, but he can’t see past his own values to understand his actions’ impact on others or to understand the way his actions function in a larger system.

Which could be seen as the criticism of the movie: Captain America is a stand-in for USAmerica. And Rogers is how the rest of the world, perhaps, views us: as a nation that lives our own values and ideals, imposing them on the world without care what other people or groups they hurt, because freedom and capitalism.

Back to the fact that the unity-or-liberty conversation happens in a church:

You only need to glance at a list of denominations in USAmerica to know that divisive idealism can’t be the direction we continue to follow. We continue to fracture and split the Church, and each time we do, an appendage of the Body of Christ is amputated. Such individualism and divisiveness should be a cause of lament, not rejoicing.

And that’s what I felt when I saw the empty cells of the Avengers’ prison. Not rejoicing in their freedom, but deep sadness at an action that would further fracture the Avengers, their relationship with UN, and their relationship with the global community.


In the comments…

Which do you, personally, tend to value more: unity or individual liberty?

Which does your family value more? your community? your parish? your denomination?

How does that value manifest?


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Christian Ritual & Developing Eyes to See God in Secular Culture

Developing Eyes to See God in 'Secular' Culture - the processes of Christian symbol and ritual - KateRaeDavis.com

Maybe it’s confusing that Christians can’t seem to see rain in a film without naming it baptism. Maybe you’re a Christian who would like to more readily see God’s active presence in the novels you read and movies you watch. Either way, this post will help by explaining how Christian sight is formed to see God in secular culture.

For context: this is post #3 in a series on symbols. The first post covered the origin of symbol and ritual, using the example of water. The second discussed Jesus’s remix of symbols, his followers’ ritualization of that remix, and the way we understand those rituals today, continuing with the example of water.

In this post, I’ll discuss the way some Christians — or, at the very least, how I — understand cultural narratives that use elements of symbolic or ritual meaning in the Christian community. I’ll stick with the symbol of water and point to the presence of baptism is present in the film The Shawshank Redemption. (Although this could also be done with many other symbols and concepts, such as breath and blood or the practice of witnessing martyrs; maybe future posts).

If you’re interested in other narratives that contain symbolic baptisms, click here to download my list of 15 movies and novels!

Pointing to the Shared Nature

Ok. So we covered how symbols develop based on the natural, inherent function of an object or element. And we discussed how those became symbols and rituals within just one community of people — Christians.

An object used in a ritual or as a storied symbol is always pointing back to its inherent function.

And in a sense, if you begin to see that object as important in a certain way, you learn to see that object as a living symbol. The object’s presence is always pointing to the inherent function because it now has become inseparable.

And if you’re in a community that uses the ritual, the presence of an object will trigger associations with both its function and its symbolic and ritual meaning.

I tried to make a simple diagram of this and it got complicated quickly, but maybe it helps:

Christian understanding of Symbols in Culture - KateRaeDavis.com

The linking factor is actually the natural function of the object that is inherent to the object and that the object cannot avoid. Spiritual formation simply trains sight for the link. The link doesn’t necessarily exist “naturally,” but it does exist, in a very real way, in our worldview.

This is getting a bit abstract, so let’s turn back to our water example.

Water and Baptism Share Rejuvenation

Water always points back to its inherent function of providing, sustaining, renewing life.

Water, for Christian practitioners, has a storied meaning: the Spirit hovered over water before the creation of the cosmos; the waters of the Red Sea parted to liberate the people of Israel; Jesus refers to himself as living water.

On top of that, water is used in the ritual of baptism, which carries all those stories and then has its own stories on top of it — both the community stories in the ways we “remember our baptism” (for instance, in my church, the priest uses rosemary branches to “sprinkle” water on the congregation) and also in our individual stories.

Much of our time in spiritual formation is spent near water, wet from water, telling stories about water — all in ways that point it back to water’s inherent function as life-giving and add texture to that narrative by saying that God (and God in Jesus) is life-giving.

With water and baptism, that visual looks something like this:

Christian understanding of water as symbol in baptism and culture - read more on KateRaeDavis.com

The link is that both water and baptism point to renewal of life — the former on a physical level, the latter on a spiritual level. Through stories and practices that link water to this spiritual level, it becomes natural to begin to see water as operating at both levels all the time. The world is infused with the holy. The lines between the sacred and the secular blur to the point of becoming inconsequential.

Christian View of Symbols

In film and story, objects that are often used only for their original, natural, inherent function.

And then Christians claim that there’s something more going on, that it’s a symbol for this Christian ritual or moment.

We’re not claiming that the director/author/creator intended the moment to point to Christ. Rather, we’re claiming that Christ — the force that energizes the cosmos with an abundance of goodness and love — is present in the object that the director chose to use.

Baptism in The Shawshank Redemption

Let’s look at the infamous “baptism” scene in The Shawshank Redemption. Imagine Andy’s escape from prison on a cloudless night. He crawls through the sewer and emerges into the clear night sky, covered in shit, wipes himself off, walks away. Pretty anticlimactic, right? Lacking in some sense of hope and rejuvenation.

On a very practical level, the rain is necessary to clean off the protagonist for the audience’s eyes, to literally wash away the shitty image of despair and to give the audience a feeling of cleanliness and newness.

On a non-religious symbolic level, the filmmakers may have thought the rain provides an image of freshness and of cultivating new life — the rain marks the possibility of new life for Andy just as it does for young plants.

Water is more than just water when it's part of your story of salvation - read more on KateRaeDavis.com
Photo from The Shawshank Redemption, Warner Bros. Pictures

But Christians have a storied history of water, moments and narratives that adds texture to the way we view water. In the Episcopal Church, the following prayer is spoken over the water immediately before baptism, summarizing the stories that we remember when we engage with water:

We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage
in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus
received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death
and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

Through the lens of Christian narrative and symbol, Andy is being delivered out of bondage, is moving through a resurrection moment, is entering everlasting life right in the midst of this world.

That is not to claim that the director intended the moment to be baptismal. The link exists because water by its inherent nature sustains life. The symbol will always be connected to baptism for those whose eyes are trained to see — not as its progenitor but as a sibling — because both have their root in water.

Some More Baptisms

If you’re curious about other baptismal moments of film and literature, I made a free resource for you! In the free resource library, you’ll find a list of baptismal scenes from film and literature. It’s good for discussions with your friends about the meaning of baptism. Some of them are great to talk with kids about the transformation that occurs in baptism. If you’re in a preaching position, it’s an excellent resource for sermon illustrations. Get access here:

Christian Spirituality of Symbols

When Christians point out the ways in which non-Christian narrative hold Christian truths, the intent isn’t to oppress or appropriate the art for their own purposes.

The intent is to show that God is active and alive in the world, to reaffirm for ourselves the truth that there is something in the world that is concerned with humanity’s well-being and sustenance and rejuvenation.

On a physical level, perhaps that something is simply the intermixing of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. But on a spiritual level, that something is the divine force of the created cosmos who manifests in molecules and manipulates them for the sake of our


I want to hear from you!

What are some of your favorite symbolic baptism scenes in movies and novels?

What are some of your favorite songs that include water imagery?

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What Bing Bong Can Teach Us About Christ

Bing Bong Christ? What does Bing Bong teach us about the crucifixion? - Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com (image property of Disney/Pixar)

It started with a casual suggestion: Bing Bong’s sacrifice is a model of substitutionary atonement.

Summary of Substitutionary Atonement

Substitutionary atonement is one understanding of what happens at the crucifixion of Jesus. This understanding says something like: humanity is sinful/behaved wrongly/is bad, so God is angry with humanity and demands that they be punished and God be “satisfied.” Apparently, the way to satisfy God is with blood and suffering and death of an innocent. So God sends Jesus to satisfy God (the economics of such a transaction baffles me). Jesus suffers in place of you or me or humanity as a whole, which somehow makes things a-okay with God.

It’s obviously not my favorite way of understanding the atonement. Truthfully, it isn’t a beloved atonement model in many Christian circles as it fundamentally relies on an abusive understanding of God, then acts as though a benevolent victim Son makes up for the violently abusive Father as though that doesn’t pose problems for trinitarian unity.

Substitutionary atonement is also known as the atonement model that, it’s been said, “commits the sin” of thinking it’s the only singular way to understand the crucifixion — as though the generations of Christians who understood the crucifixion differently, before this model was developed, “weren’t really Christians.”

Thoughts on Bing Bong & Atonement

All that to say: When a student casually made this suggestion in the school Commons area, it couldn’t go unaddressed. We love Bing Bong, we cried at his memory-dump fade-away death. Certainly he wouldn’t be representing something that’s so problematic. … Right?

But the seeds of doubt and uncertainty were clearly planted, and an increasingly heated conversation followed.

I maintain that Bing Bong may be a model of Christ (and maybe a great way to talk to kids and adolescents about Christ), but that he is not a model of substitutionary atonement. There’s no angry third-party involved; the only third-party is Riley, the being they live and move within and for whom they want to do what’s best (which could make Riley into a God-figure, in this one way alone). But Riley isn’t angry and demanding the pain and death of one of the beings inside her. Riley doesn’t need to be “satisfied.” So Bing Bong isn’t substituting himself for Joy’s wrongs; he’s simply doing what is best for Riley — Joy has very little part in his decision at all — and it’s not about paying any kind of debt or covering over wrongdoing.

Which is when another student jumps in and says: There is a kind of debt and wrongdoing, at least in Joy’s emotional experience. Joy feels responsible for their circumstances, feels responsible for getting Sadness back safely, and feels responsible for Riley’s overall well-being. It’s the emotional “debt” of her guilt that Bing Bong pays. So if he’s a Christ figure, it is a model of substitutionary atonement.

And then another student: Why is this even a question? Bing Bong isn’t like Jesus in any other way, so he’s not a Christ figure.

To which I object: No literary Christ figure is ever like Christ in every way, or even in many ways. We use cultural (and human saint) parallels to give an image of just one aspect of Christ’s identity, life, death, or resurrection. (Which I do with Mad Max and Christ, and with a Rothfuss character and God, and will definitely keep doing, so if you’re interested in that, you should subscribe!)

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Join the Conversation!

We never came to a conclusion. Is Bing Bong Christ-like in any way? Not at all? Does Bing Bong point us, in some way, to Christ? Does Bing Bong’s sacrificial death conform to the pattern of Christ’s death? What is it that pulls at our heartstrings, if not Christ? Are we just a group of people who take Pixar movies way too seriously?

Tell us what YOU think about Bing Bong! Weigh in below in the comments. Maybe together we can come to some kind of understanding.

What does Bing Bong teach us about the atonement? - Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com (image property of Disney/Pixar)

Mad Max: Fury Road: Looking for Redemption

Looking for Redemption in Mad Max: Fury Road - Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com // mad max redemption

Because it’s Easter season, I’m hearing a lot of sermons and seeing a lot of posts about redemption.

Which kind of drives me crazy, because I’m mostly unable to hear what these preachers and authors are trying to tell me. The whole time, I’m just thinking, Redemption, what does that really mean?

Because redemption isn’t really a familiar concept in our world, at least outside of Christian vocabulary. So I need some kind of image or metaphor, something to kind of hold onto in order to understand what this mean

And the only metaphor that comes to mind during those sermons is “redeeming” coupons. Which sends me into a whole thought process on trying to figure out that metaphor: Am I the coupon Jesus is redeeming? Is Jesus the coupon? It’s a terrible analogy, and I’m pretty certain it’s not at all what’s trying to be conveyed.

Defining “to Redeem”

So okay. The dictionary Google might be helpful here: “define to redeem.” I learn that to redeem is:

(1) to compensate for faults or sins. You’ve done something wrong, and redemption is the act of making it better, or covering over some poor behavior. The verb can be used for either the one being saved or for the one doing the saving.

(2) to repossess in exchange for payment. Most of these are financial: paying debts, clearing mortgages, those coupons I can’t get out of my mind. One financial use in this category is marked as ‘archaic,’ meaning it’s no longer in use: to buy the freedom of. To redeem a slave means to buy them so that they are no longer owned. (As an aside, it’s absurd that this use is marked as archaic when there are more slaves now than at any point in history. There are groups that buy slaves to free them, though most organizations use other methods, as giving kidnappers money sustains the demand for people being kidnapped into slavery in the first place.)

(3) to fulfill a promise. Pretty straightforward.

What Does It Matter?

The way we understand the use of “redemption” impacts the way we understand our humanity, the world, and humanity’s place in the world.

If our understanding is primarily about definition 1, covering up our mistakes, it means that we largely identify ourselves with our worst moments. We’re likely to become behavior-oriented, living our lives as a kind of social performance in which we’re trying to “pretend to be good always so that even God will be fooled,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it. This understanding puts Christ between humanity and God — as though God cannot bear to look at us and we must have Christ to “cover over” our disgusting, sinful selves.

If our understanding of redemption is primarily around definition 2, financial metaphors of debt, it has the potential to set us up for a substitutionary atonement model in which God looks at humanity, but looks at us in anger that demands some form of payment and vengeance. Perhaps a better use of this sense of redemption is one in which God throws out the accounting book — the debt is not payed, but simply cleared.

And then there’s the archaic use of this definition, in which a person is enslaved to something (drugs, alcohol, sex, money, power…) and God somehow frees the individual from their enslavement.

Finally, if our understanding is primarily about definition 3, God fulfilling a promise, we risk reducing the divine force of the cosmos to a morality that says “Keep your word.” Not that it’s a bad rule to live by, but to reduce a human being to such a rule would be diminishing — how much more so for the creator of everything.

More Complications

It strikes me that in both theology and life, these definitions often overlap; we often use the word to mean multiple senses at the same time. It gets messy. An example from google: a sinner who is “redeemed by the grace of God.” Is this in the sense of compensating for sins, or of having been freed from the bondage of a destructive way of life? Depends who you ask. Some people it’s one or the other (Google places it in the first category). For many Christians, the answer is: both.

Biblical Redemption

There’s another sense of redemption that we don’t really capture from Google’s dictionary.

In Leviticus, which was a book of law for the tribe of God, the word “redeem” is used often. It carries a sense of “restoring to the proper owner” — whether what’s being restored is land, homes, or slaves.

Let’s say you sell a field. In the year of jubilee, that field would be returned to you under the rules of redemption. The land is returned to its original (and therefore “rightful”) owner. When the land is returned to the original, rightful owner, it is redeemed.

In other words, “selling” in the levitical understanding is more similar to how we think of “leasing” today. You’re paying Honda to use the car as though it’s your own; in some senses, it’s your car, but in another sense it’s still Honda’s car. After the lease is up, the car is redeemed — returned to its original and rightful owner.

This also applied to bodies and labor. If you owed someone a ton of money, or you needed cash fast, you could sell yourself into slavery to cover the debt. But in the year of jubilee, your body and labor would be redeemed — restored to the rightful owner; yourself.

Redemption on the Fury Road

Furiosa’s (and Our) Understanding

Mad Max: Fury Road provides a really helpful narrative of how to understand biblical redemption. Oh, and here’s your SPOILER ALERT.

When Max asks Furiosa what she’s looking for, she replies: Redemption.

It’s unclear precisely what Furiosa means in her reply. Redemption is distinct from the hope that the wives seek…but we don’t know much else.

My guess is that she means it in one of the modern senses of the word. It’s safe to say that she’s “buying” (in a metaphorical sense) the freedom of the wives, and that by getting them to the Green Place she’ll be fulfilling this promise to them.

Something in Furiosa’s tone — the pained look into the distance, the despair — leads me to think that she’s relying heavily on that first definition, that she’s trying to address some wrongdoing in her own dark past. (I’ve read an interpretation that, because she’s driven to the Green Place “many times,” that she had previously kidnapped girls, maybe even the wives, to help Immortan Joe in his quest for a healthy heir.) In this sense, she is saving herself, redeeming her own life narrative; she is at once savior and saved.

Max’s (Biblical) Understanding

It is Max who introduces a levitical sense of redemption. He chases onto the salt flat to turn them around (we might say to call them to repent, if we wanted to be super technical about it).

A hundred and sixty days’ ride that way…there’s nothing but salt. At least that way [going back] you know we might be able to…together…come across some kind of redemption.

From a man of few words, in a script of few words, it strikes me that one was included here: together.

With that one word, Max turns Furiosa’s understanding of redemption to a wider narrative. He helps her look beyond her own wrong-doings to see the wider world, the entire system of oppression, of which her actions were only a small part.

With that one word, we-the-audience are able to see that what needs redeeming is not only the individual of Furiosa. What needs redeeming is not even a collection of individuals of the wives. What needs redeeming is the entire system, the whole world.

In this dystopia, humanity as a whole has become enslaved under corrupted power systems, enslaved to the hoarding of resources, the mentality of scarcity, the dehumanization of women and of outsiders. Everything needs to be redeemed, returned to its rightful owners — the water needs to be restored to the land and the people, especially to “the wretched.” The wives’ bodies need to be redeemed — we can recall the prophetic cry of Immortan Joe’s wife, “They are not your property!” Furiosa’s agency and Nux’s life must be redeemed, no longer be on behalf of a select few but for the good of all. Max’s body and blood need to be redeemed, no longer exploited as a dehumanized resource.

This is the levitical, biblical sense of redemption, requiring the participation of all for the restoration of all. The redemption is bigger than any one person, bigger than any personal salvation. It is the salvation of the whole world.

As the war boy Nux says, that “feels like hope.” And it sounds like good news.


What do you see enslaving humanity in the Mad Max world? What do you see enslaving humanity in our world? What needs to be redeemed?

Comment with your thoughts and responses below!

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

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Mad Max: Fury Road: Witness Nux

Witness Nux in Mad Max Fury Road - Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

SPOILER ALERT – In this post we witness Nux in the most significant 24 hours of his life. It pretty much opens with spoilers. So seriously, go watch the movie already! Then come back. I’ll be here.

Transformation

Nux may be the most drastically transformed character over the course of Mad Max: Fury Road.

We meet him as a happily indoctrinated war boy, but hours later he fully commits himself to the destruction of Immortan Joe’s empire and the overthrowing of the Citadel.

At the start of the film, his body is “battle fodder” (as the Splendid put it) in the service of the empire, but in the end he sacrifices his body in order to destroy the empirical forces.

And he’s the one character the audience sees progress through all the types of hope.

Kamakrazee War Boy

When we first meet Nux, he’s resting and connected to his “blood bag” — death is imminent. And yet, hearing of betrayal, he’s energized, determined to die for the purposes of the empire and to please Immortan Joe. He refuses to stay at the Citadel and “die soft.” “If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die historic on the Fury Road.

We see him cheer as a pierced war boy shouts “Witness!” and jumps to his death, taking out an enemy vehicle. When a war boy dies for the purposes of the Cult of the V8 (the religion of the empire), there seems to be a tradition of witnessing. Part of what makes the death worthwhile is the memory of the way in which the death occurred, the way it benefited the empire.

When Nux goes on his own kamakrazee drive, dumping gallons of gasoline into the car and riding into the apocalyptic desert storm, he shouts to Max, “Witness me, Blood Bag!” He’s thoroughly committed to the Cult, determined to “ride eternal on the highways of Valhalla” with Immortan Joe.

Nicholas Hoult, the actor who plays Nux, says, “He’s very hyped up and running on this enthusiasm and belief that he’s destined for something great.”

Despair to Hope

That enthusiasm dissipates when he fails to kill Furiosa on behalf of Joe.

Capable finds him at the back of the War Rig, hitting his head in punishment, “He [Joe] saw it all. My own blood bag driving the rig that killed her [Angharad the Splendid].” He laments that he “should be walking with the Immorta.” “I thought I was being spared for something great.”

At that point, he aligns himself with Furiosa and the wives — not because he thinks what they’re doing is right, but because he believes himself to be exiled from the empire and faith of Immortan Joe. His very survival is dependent on getting somewhere livable with the traitors.

It’s not until Max reveals the plan to take the Citadel that Nux fully recovers from his despair, acknowledging the opposite of despair: “Feels like hope.

Eyes to See

When we first meet Nux, he’s in standard war boy makeup: blackened eyes and powder-whitened body.

By the time he claims hope, this layer has begun to fall away. The white powder has been sand-blown off; we can see that he is living flesh. The blackness around his eyes gradually clears; Nux develops clear-sightedness.

Which reminds me of another man dedicated to his religion and transformed through a shift in sight — the Apostle Paul. Saul (as he was then called) was on his own Fury Road in pursuit of traitors. The opening sentence of Acts 9 tells us that Saul was seeking permission to capture those who betrayed the religious establishment of his day. Perhaps Saul even understood himself to be anointed, shiny and chrome, for exactly the task of recovering the traitorous souls.

But Jesus appeared to Saul and struck him blind. Days later, he regains his sight, is renamed Paul, and begins championing the Christian cause. His mission began when he regained true sight.

Nux, like Paul, is an image of conversion — and, also like Paul, a martyr for the coming of the Kingdom.

Witness

They’re on the road back to the Citadel when Immortan Joe is finally defeated. Cheedo shouts back to those in the War Rig: “He’s dead! He’s dead.” For just a moment, the camera lingers in a closeup on Nux’s face. The last scales fall from his eyes.

If Immortan Joe has died, then Nux is not in exile from the true faith of the Cult of the V8. Joe will not carry him into Valhalla. Joe was not an Immorta; perhaps there are no Immorta; perhaps there is no Valhalla. The entirety of that faith is proven false, even foolish, in light of Joe’s death.

Nux is free from his religious and empirical ties, free to choose his commitments, free to act for the interest of goodness for the world rather than simply for the best interests of Joe.

Nux is free to love.

And he loves greatly. Jesus claims that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Earlier, Nux had told Capable that he thought he was being spared for “something great,” and in this moment perhaps he realizes that he was, and that the moment of greatness has arrived, greatness for a cause he could never have imagined the day before.

Nux points to Capable, his beloved, and whispers (not shouts — no, there is no need to shout for glory when the very act contains all the glory of God) “Witness me.”

When Nux finally dies, he dies historic on the Fury Road. He was right from the very beginning. He dies historic — dies in such a way that a barrier is provided to protect his friends and to protect the hope that they will carry to the Citadel.

A day earlier, he was willing to die in hope of personal gain — glory in Valhalla, feasting with the heroes, perhaps being honored as a hero himself. Here, he dies for a hope in this world, hope for an abundance of green things and clean water for many. He dies for a hope that he knows he won’t get to participate in.

I can’t help but think that the entire film is a witness to Nux’s conversion and to his great love.

Saint Nux, who gave his life so that the world might be saved.


This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

For discussion: What other saints and martyrs do you notice in Mad Max: Fury Road? What do you think it means to witness to the life and death of another? What might need to die so that you are more free to love greatly? What are you willing to risk your life for, or to die for?

Respond in the comments below!

Mad Max: Fury Road & Competing Hopes

Mad Max: Competing Hopes - read on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

Mad Max: Fury Road offers a post-apocalyptic image of the future in order to push audiences to ask questions about our present. The film seems to center around hope and its role in these character’s lives. The various factions offer a couple different ways of understanding hope, highlighting the problems of each, before providing an ultimate resolution through offering a framework for a healthy way to hope.

Tunnels and Directions

Eschatology is the aspect of theology that concerns the “four last things:” death, judgment, heaven, and hell. The eschaton is shorthand for the place where we hope all this — all our prayers, policies, and parenting  — the place that we hope everything is headed.

Sometimes when talking about eschatology, theologians use the metaphor of the light at the end of the tunnel. In the tunnel metaphor, the eschaton is the light towards which we move. In Mad Max language, we could say the eschaton is the Green Place.

The metaphor we use matters — deeply — to the way we understand the world. The metaphor we us shapes our actions in the world.

The tunnel metaphor is an enclosed line, and the confines of the tunnel mean that it’s impossible to get off track. As long as we keep moving, we’ll end up at the destination. There are only two options: (1) going back to where we first came from; in scriptural language we’d say “back to Eden,” to the garden in Genesis 2, or (2) going forward to the light at the other end of the tunnel; we might say heaven or the city described in the Book of Revelations.

What’s problematic is that the tunnel metaphor allows us to believe that absolutely anything that happens — fossil fuel consumption, nuclear weaponry, murder — is all part of a linear history that God has laid down. It’s all part of the tunnel line that will eventually bring us to the light.

The metaphor offered in Mad Max: Fury Road for the eschaton is the Green Place, and they get there by “a long night’s run, headed east.” The image retains the darkness/light metaphor of the tunnel (the Green Place will be on the other side of darkness; it is associated with the coming light of dawn), and adds greenness — the color associated with vibrant life, from vegetation.

This driving metaphor solves the issue of the linear history of the tunnel metaphor. On the drive, it’s possible to get off track — they could begin to head too far north or south and miss the Green Place. They could find themselves going the wrong direction entirely, a direction that’s neither “back to Eden” nor “ahead to the City.” The driving metaphor preserves potential for missing the mark, the potential of human error.

Where is Hope Located?

The film asks us to consider where we place our hope by juxtaposing two eschatons, two places that hope can reside.

Hoping for Death

The first form of hope we see epitomized in the War Boys, especially Nux. For the first portion of the movie, Nux represents disembodied hope, meaning that arriving at this eschaton requires the loss of one’s body. The eschaton, called Valhalla (sometimes written Walhalla), is reached only through death. Early in the film, we see Nux screaming “I live. I die. I live again!” Death is the gateway to the paradisiacal afterlife.

In this theology, the individual’s arrival will be more honorable if the death happens in combat that furthers the cause of the empire. Immortan Joe tells the war boy Nux, “Return my treasures to me and I myself will carry you to the gates of Valhalla.” He anoints Nux with chrome spray and the blessing that he will “ride eternal, shiny, and chrome.”

I’ve read some commentators who were quick to interpret Nux’s disembodied hope as a parallel for Islamic extremists. Which, sure, and those similarities don’t need yet another summary. What I haven’t read much of is the parallel that Nux also represents the disembodied hope found in many religions, including some forms of Christianity.

The belief that death is more honorable if done to further the religious cause is as much a Christian belief as an Islamic one. Many early Christians died to uphold the Christian cause; we refer to them as the martyrs. And when we tell the story of martyrs, we witness to the importance of their lives and deaths.

Both religions (the Cult of the V8 and some forms of Christianity) are headed by men believed to be immortal (Immortan Joe; Jesus) who will deliver their followers to a paradisiacal afterlife (Valhalla; Heaven). Death for the sake of the leader’s teachings will lead to glory and honor after death — it is this glorious death that Nux desperately seeks.

So what’s the alternative to hoping for life after death?

Hoping for Life

The Green Place — spoilers abound from here on

We see the alternative to the War Boys’ disembodied hope in the located hope of the protagonists, and especially of the escaped breeders/wives. The wives’ eschaton is the Green Place — a located place that they can physically access in this life.

The wives have never been to the Green Place. Their hope rests on what they have been told about the place, presumably from Furiosa. Furiosa believes on the faith of a distant memory; the wives believe without seeing. And the belief is a great comfort to them; it’s in the moments they are most stressed and uncertain that one of them will repeat, “We are going to the Green Place.”

They are willing to risk everything to reach this place — even death. They are willing to die as a result of their hope, but their hope does not necessitate their death. When we locate the eschaton in this world, it instills us with a hope so compelling that we are willing to die to get there, yet death is not required to get there. That relationship between hope and death is a far cry from the War Boys, who are willing to die because they must die in order to reach their eschaton.

This is why the War Boys cheer when they watch one of their own go to his death — early in the chase, an injured man anoints himself with chrome spray, shouts “Witness me!” and jumps to his death while taking out an enemy vehicle. The War Boys shout victoriously.

But when Angharad the Splendid falls, those present are tearful. It’s not only because they were close to her — the War Boys have also lived together; they’ve probably grown up together; they are close. Their grief is a result of their hope. They know the Green Place, no matter how good it will be, will be somehow lacking without Angharad present. They grieve because she will never get to arrive at the place she had put her hope.

What the seekers of the Green Place share with other forms of Christianity is that they follow a real, flesh-and-blood person: Furiosa for the wives; Jesus for the disciples, who had no idea, when they started following him, that he would resurrect. They both look for the already existing presence of the eschaton, with their own vocabularies: the Green Place; the Kingdom of God that is within us or among us.

Repentance

When the group discovers that the Green Place has become a swamp of poisoned water, we would expect their hope to die or to shift to hope in an afterlife. And for a moment, that despairing moment when Furiosa takes off her metal hand — hands are a symbol of agency; perhaps she feels she is nothing left to be done — and she kneels in the expanse of the barren desert and she silently wails her lament — for that moment the audience and Furiosa alike are swallowed by despair. All hope is deferred.

Max tells Furiosa that “hope is a mistake.” But I think what he’s actually saying is that the headstrong hoping for something out there is a mistake. To hope that someone else has solved what their society wasn’t able to solve is a mistake.

It seems that they gather themselves in a hope-against-hope, rouse themselves to keep going east, continuing to do what they’ve been doing for the last day. Max rides after them and calls them to repent — a word that literally means to turn back.

When Max had claimed that “hope is a mistake” he added: “If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.” Which actually points the audience to a new sort of hope.

Hope that is not somewhere out there; that is the kind of hope that is a mistake. True hope relies on “fixing what’s broken,” mending what is fractured, fighting to restore goodness with what we have. Hope is in redeeming (“regaining possession”) of what has been used for evil. Hope must be found within us and among us.

When Max calls them to repentance, the response to the plan is clear: “Feels like hope.”

It’s Nux, newly converted, who names it so.

(Post concludes after image)

Mad Max: Fury Road and Competing Hopes - read on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

True Hope: The Green Place is Within You

This is the turning point of their journey and of the film’s eschatology. In this moment, Nux — previously a subscriber to disembodied hope — converts to hope in a real place. And the women — subscribers to a hope located outside of themselves — find a resilient hope that exists in and among their own selves.

Far from the despairing lament, this type of hope is stronger than any hope they had experienced before.

This is the hope that Jesus tried to instill in his followers. Jesus repeatedly proclaimed the Kingdom of God as a present reality. Jesus proclaimed that this Kingdom is “within us” and “among us.” Hope exists within an individual and among a community. Hope likely requires real work to effect changes in the way a community structures itself — fixing what’s broken will not be easy. But we must have this resilient internal hope that the broken can be mended in order to act faithfully and step into the Kingdom of God that is both already present and not yet fully manifest.

The Green Place still exists; they carry it within them. They carry it in their imaginations and their desires. They carry it into reality in the Citadel.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is the tree of life.

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.


Questions: How do you speak about your hope? Where do you locate hope? How do you tap into the Green Place within your own self?