Column
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.

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

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. 

Snippet
Culture
Fun & play
Romanticism
2 min read

Cosy season: creating meaning amid the mundane

We’re romanticising our way through the year.
A set of be-socked feat rest on a leaf strewn step beside a book and a cup of coffee.
Alex Geerts on Unsplash.

Have you heard? It’s cosy season.  

And such a season comes with instructions: light your candles, put on your thick socks, order the pumpkin-spiced latte, and dig out the Nora Ephron movies. Wade through piles of crunchy leaves. Cook a roast dinner. Wear your woolie sweaters, re-read Jane Austen, ruminate on the sheer romance of Tom Hanks offering to send Meg Ryan ‘a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils’ to celebrate the arrival of Autumn (if you don’t know that reference, you haven’t dug out the Nora Ephron movies yet. Chop chop.) 

Do it all. And document it, too. Create montages accompanied by the Gilmore Girls theme-tune and share them with the world. 

Why?  

Well, because that’s what we do in cosy season (Or ‘cozy’, as Nora would spell it in America.) You see, we’ve acquired this new way of being. It’s a social-media phenomenon: we make our mundane feel like a movie, we romanticise our way through the year.  

And I don’t think that’s as trivial of a craze as it sounds. I actually think the contrary, I think it reveals something true and profound about us. If anything, my only critique is that the imperative to ‘romanticise your life’ doesn’t actually go far enough.  

The social media trend, which took off in the dark depths of the pandemic and has stuck around ever since, is a kind of relinquishing of control and a rebellion against a disenchanted life. For example, ‘cosy season’ encourages us to think about Autumn as something that is happening to us, personally. We can’t control the arrival of this seasonal shift, our only choice is how we respond to it: we can greet it, we can notice it, we can celebrate it. We can, if we so wish, imbue it with meaning.  

And we should.  

Because to do such - to permeate the mundane with joy, beauty and meaning - is to defy distraction and disenchantment. It is to be in the present without wishing it were somehow otherwise. It’s a good thing.  

I just wonder if it’s enough.  

Because, the thing is, I don’t think it’s a romantic life we crave. Not really. I think we’re seeking something deeper. I think it’s a holy life we’re in search of – holy, as in, a life that has a dusting of the divine. A life that is soaked in seen and unseen goodness, permeated with the essence of eternity. A life that has heavenly fingerprints all over it.  

Ultimately, a life that means something. Not just on the obviously catalytic days – but on the days that fly right under the radar. We want to be sure that those days matter, too.  

What if ‘romanticising our life’ is a secular way in which we’re trying to hallow the ordinary? What if it is an acknowledgement of the sacrality of the monotonous? Just, without the God bit. If we were more in-tune with spiritual realities, more able to identify our soul’s deepest cravings and wonderings – would we be sacralising our lives, as opposed to romanticising them?  

I reckon so.  

 

Snippets are a new Seen & Unseen format. Short takes on the current moment.