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. 

Review
Culture
Grace
Music
Race
5 min read

Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs

Today’s musicians capture both the barbaric and the beautiful.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

three folk musicians face the camera across a meadow
Angeline, Cohen & Jon.

John Newton’s Amazing Grace was originally written to accompany his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773 and has become the most recorded and most sung hymn in the world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of the hymn’s creation while next year is the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth. 

The former slave trader who became a Church of England minister and abolitionist, preached his sermon on the theme of God’s mercy as outlined in a biblical passage from the first book of Chronicles. There, King David prays ‘Who am I Lord and what is my family that you have brought me thus far?’ Newton found parallels with his own life, having been saved from sinfulness and a storm at sea. 

Among the many events and projects marking the two anniversaries, a folk album entitled Grace Will Lead Me Home may well be one of the most interesting. That is because, while it celebrates the hymn and its legacy, this album also explores “the distance between the world’s most beloved hymn and a most vile and shameful period in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade”. 

As captain of a slave ship when he became a Christian, Newton continued shipping Africans across the Atlantic. Later, he became Curate in Charge at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Olney, where he befriended William Cowper and wrote the words to many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. Later still, he lent his voice to the abolitionist cause. Despite these tensions in Newton’s life-story, the love that people have for ‘Amazing Grace’, including those who are descended from the slaves that Newton shipped across the Atlantic, became very apparent in a series of interviews conducted as part of the project before the songs forming the album were written and selected. 

‘I’m going to hear John Newton preach’ is a key track on the album in which Jon Bickley describes Newton’s transformation from “foul-mouthed drunken sailor” to the captain able to “talk about how Grace can set you free”. In between, however, Bickley notes that the slaves disembark “leaving a trail of blood across the quay” while “the Captain’s in his cabin” writing about grace. Bickley’s songs on the album culminate in a powerful plea for reparations for slavery entitled ‘Sorry’. He writes:  

“300 years after the birth of John Newton the road to redemption for those nations who profited from the slave trade looks long and difficult but surely it starts by saying Sorry.” 

Bickley collaborated on the album with two musicians who have also played on other recent folk albums exploring the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Both Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne played on a project by Reg Meuross entitled Stolen From God, while Morrison had also released The Sorrow Songs, which featured Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, to considerable acclaim. Both artists brought the weight of their study as well as their considerable artistic talents to the Grace Will Lead Me Home project. 

Braithwaite-Kilcoyne brought the profound and arresting ‘Press Gang Song’ to the album. This is a resume of what it takes to become a slave trader from a readiness to “sail the fierce sea” to the willingness to “abuse your fellow man lead him shackled in chains”, “brutalise and violate, disregard their cries of pain”, “cast them overboard to a watery grace”, “for when that you do you shall master your trade”. This was the journey taken by Newton in becoming a slave trader.  

Morrison, whose ‘Grace will lead me home’ is based on the Christian hope of resurrection, also writes from that perspective in ‘The Hand of Fanny Johnson’ from The Sorrow Songs. There, having noted the universality of death which “comes for the rich and the lowly”, she sings: 

“My dear mother said that a funeral is holy, 
The sanctified earth receiving the body, 
And in the hereafter that’s when we will all be 
Remade, entire and whole.”  

Stolen from God, while clearly noting and condemning the way in which European Christians viewed the degradation inflicted on others as their God-given route to wealth, also makes some words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator, central to the song cycle: 

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… so wide that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” 

The song ‘Stolen from God’ makes this contrast its central theme: 

“God made these hands to hold and caress 
He made these hands to worship and bless 
He made these hands to hold my own child 
God made these hands to be mild” 

Yet, those involved in the slave trade: 

“You made these hands to blister and bleed 
To slave for the white man and bend to his greed 
To cut coffee for gentlemen cane for their wives 
At the cost of my family’s lives” 

As a result, your legacy is “written in blood, everything stolen from God”. 

This contradiction in the Christianity that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade is central to the story of Amazing Grace and its legacy (see Bickley’s ‘The choir still sings Amazing Grace’). Newton did come to see the error of his ways and lend his voice to the abolitionist cause in support of those like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano. Meuross effectively captures the beginning of this change in a song called ‘Bridgewater’ about an early petition against slavery: 

“Reverend Chubb Mr Tucket Mr White 
Call on every Christian soul to join the fight 
To stand up as a nation ‘gainst this wicked violation 
Though it might be bad for trade you know it’s right… 
O brother oh brother oh brother 
First the tide must turn before the flood” 

The Sorrow Songs, Stolen From God and Grace Will Lead Me Home are three deeply moving and challenging albums, with Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as the exceptional musicians linking all three, that tackle the history of the transatlantic slave trade, unearthing both incredible tales and uncomfortable truths. The Church is among the institutions that need most to hear and receive the truths and tales these albums share. 

  

Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs (Topic Records 2022) 

Reg Meuross – Stolen From God (Hatsongs Records 2023) 

Angeline, Cohen & Jon – Grace Will Lead Me Home (Invisible Folk 2024)