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Culture
Film & TV
Weirdness
Zombies
7 min read

Why do films portray Christians as crazy?

Exploring why films often portray the god-fearing as ‘always so god-damn weird’, psychologist Roger Bretherton recalls a first divine experience.
A crazed-looking man walks away from a burning backdrop.
Scott Shepard plays the crazed preacher in The Last of Us.
HBO.

We knew we were in trouble when he started quoting the Bible. If there is one rule we should all follow in a zombie apocalypse it is not to trust the isolated community of believers huddled around a Bible-quoting preacher. You know the plotline. The one that never occurs in Star Trek: the crew of the USS Enterprise land on a paradise-like planet only to discover that everything is exactly as it seems. No. The rules of genre television must be upheld. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. 

This was the strong suspicion my eldest child and I immediately leapt to while watching season one, episode eight of HBO’s The Last of Us. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a zombie apocalypse drama, a bit like The Walking Dead, but with more giraffes and fewer zombies. Is it a virus? Is it radiation? No, it is a fungus that has zombified the masses. Starting with a few isolated infections here and there it rapidly mushroomed (I guess) to turn the placid citizens of the world into manic flesh-eaters. All I’m saying is keep applying the anti-fungal toenail cream, it may be the only thing standing between us and the collapse of civilisation as we know it.  

So, when episode eight opened with a previously unknown character quoting the Bible to a fearful flock hiding in a diner, we knew things weren’t going to turn out well. The signs were all there. He was almost definitely a paedophile, possibly a murderer, and very likely a cannibal. As it turned out we’d hit a perfect straight: three for three. He was all of them. I probably should have issued a spoiler warning for that one, but to be honest if you didn’t see it coming The Last of Us probably isn’t for you. You’d probably be happier watching something more sedate. Silent Witness anyone?  

Needless to say, the episode provoked no small amount of theological commentary in our household, mainly querying why it is that anyone exhibiting even a modicum of Christian belief in shows like this, almost always turns out to be completely unhinged. Why do the righteous always have something wrong with them? Why are the god-fearing always so god-damn weird?  

Pray and take the pills 

Just to be clear, I’m not a murderer, nor a paedophile, nor a cannibal (and I have no plans), but somehow the prejudice that Christians must be crazy has come to influence how I view my own spiritual history. I have inadvertently imbibed the simple naturalistic logic that if I am a Christian then there is something wrong with me. Some part of me shakes hands with Freud and retrospectively attributes my conversion to neurosis, a coping strategy, a crutch. The assumption that the only reason I would believe something so unusual, so out of step with the people I spend most of my time with, is that I am weird. Quietly, without realising it that is how I have come to view it - I need God because I am weak. 

Of course, religion can and often is used as a coping strategy. Leading psychologists of religion, like Kenneth Pargament, have made entire careers out of studying this phenomenon. For several decades, he and his collaborators have demonstrated pretty conclusively that people use religion and spirituality as potent sources of coping with the pain of life. From this perspective, religious conversion can be viewed as a transformation of significance. When the things we previously relied on to give us a sense of meaning and stability fail us, when our adjustment to life falls apart and cannot be put back together, we give up trying to conserve what was previously meaningful and instead take a transformative leap toward a new view of what matters to us. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. When the going gets too tough, some people turn to Jesus.  

But there are many ways we can use religion to cope, and over the years Pargament and his collaborators have identified a few of them. Some people defer everything to God, they cope by thinking God will do everything for them, they plead for Him to intervene. Others are self-reliant, they may believe in God, but they don’t expect much from Him; for them prayer is more like therapeutic meditation than anything medically effective. Others cope in a collaborative way. They don’t leave it all to God, nor do they think everything centres on them. They take responsibility for their lives, but view God as a companion, a collaborator, a conversation partner through all the vicissitudes of life.  

It probably comes as no surprise that in studies of religious people dealing with chronic illness, these styles of coping significantly predict prognosis over time. There are many ways it can help us, and some of them are more admirable and effective than others. Those who leave it all to God usually do worse, those who think it’s all down to them do better, and those who pray and take the pills do best. Coping with a painful and bewildering world is undoubtedly one of the benefits of religious belief. It’s one of the things it does for us, but it is not what religion is at core. It may be a function of belief but not its essence.  

That first intimation of divine presence... It was the teaser trailer of a movie I was yet to see. A tiny taster from an infinite menu. 

As a twelve-year old boy, lurking at the back of an old Methodist church, waiting in silence for the possibility of something sacred to be unconcealed, I was not the kind of child anyone at school would ever admire: lonely, bullied, ignored. Relegated to the corner of the playground reserved for the outcasts and untouchables, the overly sensitive gay kid, the boorish tractor enthusiast, and the Dungeons and Dragons players. When I revisit the moment of my first truly transcendent and mystical experience of God, it’s tempting to write it off as an imaginative invention designed to anaesthetise the pain of social exclusion. I needed it to be true, so I made it up.  

Yet there is more to it than that. That first intimation of divine presence was the beginning of a lifelong quest to experience more. It was the teaser trailer of a movie I was yet to see. A tiny taster from an infinite menu. And in the years that followed I pursued it. To begin with, that strange sense of presence was elusive. I couldn’t generate it under my own steam but ran across it every few months, in a small group, a church service, a prayer meeting, a piece of music. Over time the frequency increased, as I learned patterns of prayer and spiritual practice. Eventually, decades later, it stabilised into an almost daily occurrence. I discovered the western mystical tradition, a historical lineage that made sense of what I was sensing, and to which I could belong. I made myself at home with Augustine of Hippo, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton. My new extended family was large and varied. They became my friends and spiritual guides. I had a history. 

When I think of the creatives I know, the artists, writers, actors, and musicians I have spent time with, I notice that for many of them their art is a response to the tragedy of life. But I rarely judge their work on the loneliness and pain that drives their compulsion to create. All too often it is the aching that lingers just under the surface of their work that makes it poignant and affecting. It is not just the beauty of what they create that moves me to tears, it’s the heartbreak out of which it is composed.  

My spiritual journey seems somewhat similar, a creative enterprise launched and sustained by a new insight into the nature of the world. Faith is more like a new way of seeing, than a new set of propositions to believe. If I’d been happy and fitted seamlessly into the fabric of social life, I doubt I’d have been open to the experience or able to recognise it when it occurred. But just as we might hesitate to reduce an artist’s work to little more than psychological self-help, I find myself increasingly reluctant to view my spiritual history as just an expression of my own neurosis. There is another way to tell the story, one that emphasises not so much the problems that drove me to God, but the presence that drew me to Him. There is more to the story than my own neediness and, in the final analysis, when the zombie apocalypse comes, at least I have retained sufficient sanity to avoid the guy with the Bible. 

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Comment
Digital
Film & TV
Masculinity
4 min read

How our social media turns us against ourselves

We treat others differently when our eyes and hearts are forced inwards.
An unhappy father sits next to a scared son in a police interview room.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper star in Adolescence.
Netflix.

My wife turned to me this week whilst watching the compelling Netflix drama Adolescence and asked if it was based on a true story. That proves the quality of the acting, script, and storyline. But it also demonstrates the drama’s prophetic nature. Conceived two and a half years ago by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the perversion of Jamie’s underdeveloped brain and developing masculinity by social media forces has come to reflect real-life extreme violence by young men. With the sentencings of murderers Axel Radakubana and Nicholas Prosper in recent weeks, Jamie’s actions resonate deeply. Adolescence isn’t based on a specific true story, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. 

What about the role of social media in these narratives? Radakubana and Prosper were radicalised by violent content they had accessed online. With social media, extreme content does well, particularly on sites with no filters on pornography and violence like Reddit and X. We are beginning to discover that content algorithms are not neutral, instead siloing us into echo chambers that are deliberately forming us into better consumers of content, advertising, and objects. Social media harvests our data and sells it on- meaning it cultivates us as the product. 

Yet these manipulations cover over the deepest issue. Social media depersonalises us, preventing us from making genuine human connection and perverting our view of anybody but us. The German philosopher Martin Buber differentiated between two different ways for humans to exist in the world. One was I-It; in a person treats everyone and everything they come into contact with as an ‘It’- something to be used or taken advantage of. 

The other was I-Thou, in which humans approach every other person as a unique being, with resources to offer the I which ensures that a mutual, open, present connection ensues. For Buber, the ultimate ‘Thou’ was God, with whom humans can have the deepest and most transformative connection. 

Social media ensures we see life in ‘I/It’ mode by removing genuine contact with others and providing curated, fake, existences that can never be open to genuine connection with others. Love and affection become commodified; likes, follows, reactions. Our presentation of ourselves becomes more extreme, more perfect, more beautified, to keep mining the commodities. Our eyes and our hearts are forced inwards, and we lose any sense of encountering a ‘Thou’ on the way. We just keep encountering the I: our own thoughts, needs, desires, self-radicalised by our own insular minds. 

This can be our contribution to the conversation on the culture our young people, and particularly young men, are growing up in. To live I/Thou lives.

The great St Augustine back in the fourth century developed the idea of ‘original sin.’ All humans are prone to destruction: it’s in our DNA. The evidence for such an idea is found in every human experience, as the destructor and the one destructed. Left unchecked without genuine connections with others to challenge and expand our hearts, an I/It life digs deeper and deeper into these destructive impulses until our humanity is twisted into violent obsessions. 

The I/It life focuses completely on self-glorification through any means, something amplified by social media. What if we don’t get enough likes, follows, reactions? What if we cannot achieve self-glory through the more banal mediums of attraction, attention, popularity?  

Both Radakubana and Prosper said they wanted to be notorious, attempting to find the most extreme channel for their violence as possible to ensure they are never forgotten. They will not be the last. Jamie continues to deny his crime but in episode three of Adolescence he states that he could do whatever he wanted to Katie, the young girl he murdered. The same impulses come through; others as objects to take advantage of in achieving self-satisfaction. 

The good intentions for human connection that some of those early social media sites were set up for has been largely lost. But the good intention can remain in our own resolution to live an I/Thou life. Putting down social media and picking up connections with humans in the real world by seeing the other with curiosity and openness will ensure that we are constantly turning our heart outwards, embracing genuine relationships, and finding space in our heart to think of the other before ourselves. These are the relationships that will make us more human. 

Ultimately, Buber was right that the ultimate ‘Thou’ connection we can make is with God. The Christian story is full of God’s desire to seek out relationship with humanity, to allow us to find a connection with God that surpasses our own human experience and transforms us to be people that slowly grow away from our destructive instincts.  

What might Christian faith have to contribute to the conversation on the culture young men are growing up in? To live I/Thou lives that are curious, open, and seeking truest divine and human connection. Such a life might even touch those who have been ravaged by social media and ignored by other I/It lives. It might even inspire them to compassion and curiosity that look beyond the content that turns them inwards, to turn outwards and find a healthier future. 

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