Can ‘Midnight Mass’ Explain Evangelicalism?
[Spoilers ahead. So if you haven’t watched Midnight Mass and plan to, you might want to turn back now. But if you’ve already seen it—or don’t plan to!—welcome to the party. But it’s a grim party, because also TW: violence, abuse.]
The recent Netflix horror series Midnight Mass is about a lot of things. Religious zeal. Spiritual abuse. Death. Miracles. Vampiric demons.
Relatable stuff.
Jokes aside, from what I’ve seen on social media, this show is striking a chord with many people from different backgrounds. That probably shouldn’t be a surprise, given the first two themes listed above. Responses I’ve seen from across the religious (or at least Christian) spectrum include:
“MM is a poignant commentary on religious abuse and shame in the Church.”
“MM is a reflection of the ongoing Trump movement.”
“MM is nuts.”
“MM taught me there’s a line between believing God and being religious fanatics.”
“The scariest part of MM is how much religious trauma it’s unearthing.”
Of course, you can find religious villains in countless books, movies, and TV shows. Why is the evil portrayed in Midnight Mass so resonant? What does it reveal about how religions can so easily go wrong and inflict harm?
The Crucial Theme
There are many helpful insights from the tragedy that befalls the fictional town on Crockett Island. But, for me, there is one that stands out above the rest, a central theme that I’ve been thinking about ever since I watched the climactic finale:
When people commit to a bad belief, and they shape their other beliefs and practices around it, eventually they will justify all sorts of evil.
This pattern, so clearly at the heart of this horror series, is also at the heart of the horror that is US American evangelicalism. Let’s look at how this theme shows up in both the show and the church.
In the show, an elderly priest traveling abroad stumbles upon a vampire (or demon, or whatever the wingéd creature is supposed to be). If you haven’t seen the show, just picture a scaly vampire monster. The thing bites the priest but also lets the priest drink his blood, turning him into a vampire-human. As you’d expect from common vampire lore, the priest develops some interesting new traits: immortality, youth, healing abilities, extreme sensitivity to sunlight, and, oh yeah, a nearly insatiable thirst for human blood.
It’s hard to imagine how any of us would react to this. But just after the event, before all these traits become clear, in light of his newfound youth/healing, the priest makes a catastrophically bad interpretation of the event: an angel of God has given me the gift of eternal life through a sacrament of drinking its blood. Note that the priest is incentivized to believe this, as ridiculous as it seems, because the belief assures him that he will live forever in good standing with God.
And this is the point: by committing to this false belief, doubling or tripling down on it when needed, he unleashes a Pandora’s box of evil. First of all, he believes this gift needs to be shared with his beloved hometown, so he brings the “angel” back to his island. Beyond that, each new piece of data is forced to conform to the vampire/angel fallacy. His lethal allergy to the sun is simply a protection for the apocalyptic times to come. His thirst for blood will serve to push forward God’s will of spreading the sacrament to others. People murdered along the way who do not receive the immortality were exactly those not chosen by God to receive the gift.
An Evangelical Parallel
How does this relate to conservative evangelicals? I think they also start with a bedrock belief that is simply bad. Like the show’s priest, they have looked at an event—or, in this case, a Book—and committed to a really bad take on it. I would summarize the belief as something like this: we must obey the most plain, literal reading of the Bible, and the unchanging, flawless, universal meaning of the text is the same regardless of the reader’s place, time, and culture. (If you have the stomach for it, you can read exactly how this belief is explained in great detail in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy.)
Note that evangelicals are incentivized to believe this for just the same reason as our vampiric priest: it assures them that they will live forever in good standing with God (because this is what they have concluded the “plan, literal reading of the Bible” tells them).
But the belief is bad. It’s bad on so many levels. First, this is not how the Bible was ever intended to be read. (For more on this, I highly recommend Pete Enns’s excellent book, How the Bible Actually Works). Second, this “plain, literal reading” only brings them the assurance of eternal life through exclusivism, damnation for nonbelievers, the all-important sinner’s prayer of conversion, and on and on.
And so, like the religious zealots of Crockett Island, when true evangelical believers commit to this faulty belief about the Bible—when they double down and shape their other beliefs and practices around this central claim of “biblical inerrancy”—they will eventually justify all kinds of harm and evil.
We’ve seen this play out in our churches, youth groups, and ministries:
A true believer tells a Muslim or Jew they are going to hell, but this isn’t cruel; it’s “loving,” because the believer is trying to help them get to heaven (as the Bible clearly explains).
A true believer tells a queer young person that they are an abomination, but this isn’t evil; it’s “loving,” because the believer is speaking the truth (as the Bible plainly lays it out).
A true believer encourages an abuse victim to reconcile with the perpetrator—say a husband or a pastor—and remain in a dangerous situation, but this isn’t cruel; it’s “biblical” because it promotes forgiveness, the godly institutions of church/family, and the divine order of male leadership (as the Bible establishes very directly).
I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. When one of our foundational beliefs is bad, everything we build upon it is subject to crumble—on top of us and the people in our communities.
It’s sort of like building a house on sand.
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