Friday night is usually “movie night” for Lori and me, with Lori being the “movie-finder,” narrowing our choices to two or three, from which we mutually decide, although the genre for this last one was not for me. I’m not a horror movie guy. I like to go to bed with pleasant thoughts. But last week was an exception. She found a horror movie that drew me in and kept me focused for two hours.
Heretic is not a movie for the faint of heart, not so much for the blood and gore so typical of horror movies but for the suspense this movie maintains throughout the film. It’s more of a suspense thriller, focusing on psychological torment than a typical horror movie.
The object of that tormenter (“Mr. Reed,” played by Hugh Grant) happens to be two Mormon missionaries. The movie’s writers use Mormonism as a straw man for religion in general. Hugh Grant’s character mounts a formidable frontal attack on all faiths. The arrows, which he fires in a shotgun-like fashion, casts doubt on all religions. Because it’s a movie (not a documentary on the validity of or abuses in religion), there’s no time to examine flaws in his analogies. Only once does one of the missionaries counterattack, “I think you’re rhetoric is thin…”
Mr. Reed argues forcefully and convincingly. He’s even likable. (But I’m a Hugh Grant fan, anyway.) The audience gets the impression he knows what he is talking about. “He has a point,” you find yourself thinking.
The writers are correct: if religion is all about control (the old Karl Marx accusation of religion as the “opium of the people”), then the adherents of religion are a deluded mass. And we are in a mess, for then we, the people, become our own higher power, each of us being a god unto ourselves, with the result that “right” and “wrong” mush into matters of personal preference. As Fyodor Dostoevsky famously quipped, “Without God all things are permitted.” For the sadistic character Grant plays, what is permitted is frightening but no worse than the actions of many demented religious misleaders through the centuries.
It’s become an accepted truth that we each choose our own truth, and that becomes truth. But that assumption points to something beyond ourselves, for it begs the question: where did the idea of truth come from? If truth is not eternal, we contradict ourselves in our denial. As philosopher Ronald Nash said, “Any denial of the eternity of truth turns out to be an affirmation of its eternity.”
Exploring the notion of eternal ideas presents the atheist with the bigger problem: explaining the existence of stuff and where it came from. Before the “Big Bang” ever “banged, what was? Go back even further: try wrapping your mind around nothing. How did something come from nothing, existence from non-existence?
For the Apostle Paul, it all comes together in Christ, who was before all things and in whom His creation “holds together” (Colossians 1:16-17), inviting us into eternal Truth through his life, death, and resurrection.
Religions can become exercises in trying to reach God by acts and rituals that presumably please God, and, in so doing, evolve into complex systems of controlling others where its respective adherents step on each other on the way up the ladder.
But Christ is about having a relationship. Religion says, “Do,” while Christ says, “Done.” Religions require more and more to make ourselves right: do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign? Christ says, “Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
The irony of ironies is that’s where the work begins, for following Christ is no easy business; dying daily to self and taking up the Cross is humanly impossible; it’s a supernatural act of God’s grace. As C.S. Lewis said, “If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
Maybe it’s too much to ponder for Friday Night Movie Night. Maybe I should pick the movie for next time.
Mary Poppins, anyone?
That was a difficult one, David. Job well done!