Category: The Dish

Megan Garber nods in agreement with Forrest Wickman’s declaration that, for the first time, with Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan’s “universe has a God, or something like one.” She remarks on the film’s echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost and its organ-driven score, among other details:

There’s … a lot of talk of good and evil. There’s a lot of talk of faith. There’s a lot of talk of love—love that is explicitly not romantic (Interstellar is as asexual a blockbuster as you’ll find), but that is, in its best manifestation, selfless. None of which is to say that Interstellar is a Christian—or even a religious—film. It is not, and this is the point. The “they” is not necessarily a metaphysical being; Zimmer’s organ was chosen, he has said, for “its significance to science.” Good and evil, faith and love—these ideas, of course, extend far beyond religion.

What it is to say, though, is that Interstellar, like so many space movies before it, has adopted the themes of religious inquiry. The scope of space as a setting—the story that takes place within the context of the universe itself, across dimensions—has allowed Nolan, like so many filmmakers before him, the permission of implication. Nolan has said that one of his primary artistic influences is the postmodern author Jorge Luis Borges; you can, indeed, read Interstellar, in the most generous interpretation, as you would any complex piece of literature.

Alissa Wilkinson is on the same page:

To me it seems that Interstellar, perhaps more than any of Nolan’s films to date, positively resounds with religious—even Christian—stuff that might not ring as loudly if you weren’t steeped in it to begin with.

To wit: Cooper promises Murph he’ll return to earth, and she despairs of his return, then realizes he’s been talking to her and guiding her all along, which rings awfully sharply of the early Christian church’s assumption that Jesus would return within their lifetimes. And Cooper communicates with Murph through books (hello). He has “become” one of those beings who exists on more than three planes—you know, for a while at least, he’s omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent. There’s the somewhat unavoidable new-Adam-and-Eve imagery near the end. And did anyone hear echoes of Lewis’s Space Trilogy?

But there’s also the biggest of big religious questions, like these: who are we? What are we made to be? (And should that be determined by others?) Are we worth saving? Can we save ourselves? And should we?

Brett McCracken adds some nuance to this view, noting that Interstellar “feels a bit like a three-hour church service set in the cathedral of space … yet God is not worshipped here or even discussed”:

Unlike similar films like last year’s Gravity or 1997’s Contact, which engaged questions of God and faith (Matthew McConaughey played a Christian leader in the latter), Interstellar exists in a world where God seems to have gone extinct alongside wheat and okra. Despite God’s absence in Interstellar, the film nevertheless feels “church-like” in its artistic grandeur, intellectual curiosity, and probing of big questions about life, death, sacrifice and love (“the only thing that transcends space and time”).

There is also a decidedly eschatological undercurrent to the film, with its themes of a doomed, burning planet and a hoped-for “escape” to a better place beyond the stars. In contrast to a film like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which accepts earth’s demise and humanity’s extinction with a sort of nihilistic relief, Interstellar sees it as an opportunity for rebirth and renewal. Though equally as secular as von Trier’s film, Nolan’s film is at least informed and haunted by a religious sense that believes in hope: new life out of the ashes, Lazarus-like resurrection.

In the midst of reminding the Church that it “exists for one reason only — to carry the story of Jesus forward in history,” James Carroll laments how that story has been obscured and distorted over time, especially “the way in which the full and permanent Jewishness of Jesus was forgotten, so much so that his story is told in the Gospels themselves as a story of Jesus against the Jews, as if he were not one of them”:

Imagined as a zealot who attacked the Temple, Jesus, on the contrary, surely revered the Temple, along with his fellow Jews. If, as scholars assume, he caused a disturbance there, it was almost certainly in defense of the place, not in opposition to it. The narrative denouement of this conflicted misremembering occurred in the 20th century, when the anti-Semitism of Nazism laid bare the ultimate meaning of the church’s religious anti-Judaism.

The horrified reckoning after the Holocaust was the beginning of the Christian reform that remains the church’s unfinished moral imperative to this day. Most emphatically, that reform must be centered in a critical rereading of the Gospel texts, so that the misremembered anti-Jewish Jesus can give way to the man as he was, and to the God whom he makes present in the lives of all who cannot stop seeing more than is before their eyes.

Such retrieval of the centrality of Jesus can restore a long-lost simplicity of faith, which makes Catholic identity — or the faith of any other church — only a means to a larger communion not just with fellow Jesus people, but with humans everywhere. All dogmas, ordinances and accretions of tradition must be measured against the example of the man who, acting wholly as a son of Israel, eschewed power, exuded kindness, pointed to one whom he called Father, and invited those bent over in the shadowy back to come forward to his table.

(Image: El Greco’s Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, London version, circa 1600, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Laurie Goodstein traces how, over the past year, the Mormon church has quietly posted essays on its website that deal with some of the more controversial aspects of its history, from the ban on blacks in the priesthood to the origins of the Book of Mormon. These include four essays on polygamy, and one of the latest officially admits that Joseph Smith had up to 40 wives:

The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church.

Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives. The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers.

Marcotte applauds the attention given to the women involved:

The picture that accompanies Goodstein’s story—a statue of Smith gazing into the eyes of Emma, his first wife, that stands in the Temple Square in Salt Lake City—drives home how much the other 30-plus women in Smith’s life—including one who was just 14, and some who were still married to other men—have largely been ignored.

In that context, the lengthy essay posted at the Latter-day Saints website detailing Smith’s erratic history of coming up with varied reasons to marry more and more women feels surprisingly frank, particularly the details of how polygamy affected Emma, who married Smith before he had the revelation that God wanted him to be with all the ladies. “Plural marriage was difficult for all involved,” the essay reads. “For Joseph Smith’s wife Emma, it was an excruciating ordeal.” Indeed, quite a bit of emphasis is put on how confusing and miserable polygamy made many of its participants, including the men (though I remain skeptical that so many men would stick with the practice if it didn’t have some upsides).

Michael Peppard explains why this transparency is coming now:

Undoubtedly the past few years have been a “Mormon moment” in the United States. With high-profile public figures like Mitt Romney and Harry Reid, not to mention approximately fifteen members of Congress and counting, the previously persecuted religion has ascended to the upper tier of political power. Only Jews are more “overrepresented” in Congress, when measured as a ratio of seats to overall population (both religions claim about 1.7% of the population).

And with popular culture showing both fascination with and a kind of begrudging respect for Mormonism’s peculiarities—the Book of Mormon on Broadway; Big Love on HBO—the early 21st century is shaping up to be a period of mainstreaming for the LDS church. The “Information Age” catalyzed by the internet may also play a role.

And Elizabeth Dias looks ahead to the debates these admissions could start:

The Church may be talking about Smith’s marriages more openly, but the conversation will lead to topics far more complex than just polygamy. The disclosures raise deeper questions about how faith works. The essay explains that God sanctioned Smith’s polygamy for only a time. That prompts questions about who God is, how God acts, how humanity should respond to the divine, how divine revelation happens, and why it changes. That’s all on top of the particular revelation about polygamy itself. As the essay itself concludes, “The challenge of introducing a principle as controversial as plural marriage is almost impossible to overstate.”