Fantasy League Ethics: Good versus Evil

By far the least interesting characters in the Star Wars sagas are the emperors. With men totally committed to the possession of power there is no place for character development. You know they will never be good or do good, so the only question is whether they can be tricked and thus defeated. Their capacity for strategic thinking rather than moral reasoning is all that is at stake.

Obi Wan and Yoda aren’t much better. They aren’t perfect, but they seem to be perfectly good, so again the plot for them doesn’t turn on character development but on whether and how they might make a mistake. 

The real characters in these films, and indeed in all films worth watching and stories worth telling, are those who must make real choices about who they are in the midst of a definitive crisis. That is where the real battles are fought: in the complexities of the human person who is neither good nor evil, but is drawn in different directions by the complex variety of competing goods. 

A film that pits pure good against pure evil would be pure boring. It doesn’t matter who wins, because nothing is going to change. 

This is the genius of Rice and Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. They understand that Judas is choosing between competing goods in his final decision about who he will be. And he is haunted by the fact that history won’t understand this and will paint him as evil. Pilate is in the same position, and likewise knows the judgment that awaits him. And Jesus? In the musical he too must make painful choices - although he is distinct precisely in not knowing, never knowing, how he will be understood by his disciples and the crowds who cheered him to Jerusalem and then jeered him to the cross. All three of them, and even Mary Magdalen and Simon Zealot speak to us, draw us into their crisis and decision as one that we ourselves might live through. 

If only the authors of the current UMC drama, or for that matter progressives and evangelicals in American Christianity were so skilled. 

In fact the current dramatics in the American church have become boring. They pitch a fantasy good that doesn’t exist in the real world against an equally fantastic evil. Of course each side disagrees on which fantasy ethics team they represent, which goal of the Manichaean League game they are defending.  But neither expects to change in any significant way no matter what crisis they face. 

Like the Emperor or Obi Wan the only question is which tactics will succeed, not who will be changed in the process. Whether they are for or against LBGTQ marriage and ordination, for or against reproductive rights, for or against Trump they know they are good and the other is evil and therefore all that’s left is to win or lose. And we all know whether this or that incarnation of the dark and light sides of the “force” is finally vanquished it will be back. Like Freddy Kruger, it always is. 

So who cares about Church Division the movie, episode whatever? 

Fewer and fewer people as it happens. That is why American Christianity as a national institution is dying and deserves to die. It can’t write its own story with even the artistry and humanity of a couple of atheist kids from England or a myth obsessed Hollywood director. It can’t understand that a battle between good and evil is a farce, not drama, and what counts are the countless battles as humans in complex situations try to discover who they are amidst competing goods. 

Fortunately that story, that real drama, that real re-enactment of the gospel narrative is happening in Christian congregations on all sides of the ostensible divide between good and evil. And the more intense and real the conflict within and between the individuals of those congregations the more real their witness to the power of Christ. Not because good triumphs over evil, but because real people stand before the pharisees and Herods and Pilates of this world and choose who they will be not knowing what they will become in the greater drama of the world. 

We see as if in a mirror dimly and still we must and do choose. And that is the kind of faith that follows Jesus our pioneer in faith and draws others to his path. That is the good news. That is the kind of story that people don’t just read, they join.