Puriteen Dream: The Impact of Biblical Literalism on Fandom and Media

Like many millennials, I read the Harry Potter books as a child. Whatever I may think of their writing quality now, they were fun and age appropriate for me at the time. At the age of about eight or nine, I had a rude awakening when an uncle of mine, a sedevacantist Catholic before it was popular and, ironically, my godfather, insisted that the books were evil for their inclusion of witchcraft. I was too young to remember the Satanic Panic that targeted rock music and supernatural-themed TV shows and role playing games, so this was the first time that I had experienced something that I enjoyed being on the receiving end of religious opposition. Even as a child, I was confused. Sure, the characters practiced magic, but they were not real, so what did it matter? I did not yet know terms like “symbolism” or “plot device,” but I understood on some level that the magic in the stories was more incidental and they were about something beyond  being an instructional on the practice of magic. I was assured by my parents, who had raised my older sister and I in a more typical modern Roman Catholic church, that my uncle, love him as they did, was a “religious nut” who went to a crazy church where they still gave mass in Latin and required female head covering and eating restrictions. However, I would find that his small church was clearly not the only one that felt that way as I would hear similar sentiments expressed from various conservative media talking heads and even some of my classmates, who largely belonged to Evangelical Protestant sects. I remember the news report that showed members of a church hosting a burning of Harry Potter books, seared into my brain as someone whose then-undiagnosed OCD would later take a pyromaniacal turn. Fire is cleansing; it burns evil away. What could be more powerful than the words of a book when the words of their own was held in such high esteem?

As I got older, I saw religious fervor come not only for works of fiction, but academia itself, particularly history and science. Parents did not want their children to partake in the religion unit of sixth grade world history; what if it made them want to convert? Better to leave knowledge of other religions a mystery. They tried to keep their children from taking part in the health class lessons centered on the reproductive system, for what if learning the correct anatomical terms made them want to have sex before they were married? Better they not know what a fallopian tube is. In a more relatable story, they did not want their kids to learn about prehuman life or evolution, for different life forms could only have possibly arisen independently from clumps of dirt. Suddenly, why a fantastical mystery novel was seen as such a threat became much clearer: magic must not be seen as symbolism for some nonconformity as readers interpreted it for many years, but only in the most literal and instructive light. 

However, I did eventually find a large subset of this very sort of Christian in fandoms of these fantastical pieces of media, from that beloved by millennials and our elders like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars to later works such as Game of Thrones, Vampire Diaries, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, its inspiration in the previous category. This subset of Christian fans were not simple fans at all, but the participants in cosplay, attendees of conventions, and the creators of fan art and fan fiction. With the participation to this level, in something perceived as so inherently supernatural, surely these Christians had a more progressive approach to the world and a less literal interpretation of these works and, by extension, their holy book? 

Alas, while there are plenty of members of fandoms who belong to branches of Christianity, the Christian fans that I will be discussing are just as fervent with their Christianity as their fandoms. This particular subset are likely to have been homeschooled or attended Christian school rather than public or secular private school. It is important to note that people are homeschooled for a slew of reasons, such as a child’s disability or extracurricular activities, and there are those who attend religious schools who do not belong to that religion or consider it an all-encompassing definition of their personality, but that is not the case with those who I will be discussing. It almost seemed contradictory at first, finding all of these homeschooled Baptists and such being so involved with genre media consumption compared to those of similar religious fervor who cleared those works sinful.Even more surprising was learning that some created fan art and fan fiction, coming from a generation where both were seen as the creations of perverts who wanted to imagine the characters in sexual situation, the more taboo the arrangement, the better. Where did Biblical literalist purity culture play into all of these? Was I not giving them enough credit? 

The manner in which this subset of fandom interacted with that particular media and media in general proved that, for many of them, their approach was barely different from their contemporaries who participated in book burnings. Being allowed to consume such media did not indicate a more open mind; for example, the granddaughters of Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church fame openly read Harry Potter in their youth without familial backlash. To many, these fantastical tales were not without directive, but instead of how to practice magic; it was the fight between good and evil and the triumph over those predetermined to lose.

With this didactic perception, a shallowness comes with their analysis. Oddly enough, many of them fancied themselves artists and certainly some did have some sort of technical skills in drawing pictures or sewing costumes of some pre-existing character. I would like to harken back to my previous writing about spirituality-inspired facism in which I referenced the prevalence of people in reactionary movements who considered themselves artists, from Rudolph John Gorsleben to Adolph Hitler himself. There are even modern day examples, with Michael Knowles and Ben Shapiro (himself an Orthodox Jew rather than a Christian) were an attempted actor and screenwriter respectively before The Daily Wire began. It makes sense. If one cannot study history or even modern people and science is seen as evil, the arts are one of the more obvious remaining paths.   Certainly, art has been used in different forms of worship for years. Photography is a particularly common profession among conservative wives and mothers, perhaps due to its use in celebrating the family and other life milestones such as marriage and graduation. I would also like to call back to my previous writing about classism in art. Those who are able to homeschool or send their children to private schools are often more financially comfortable. Between the encouragement of extracurriculars among homeschoolers as another mean to socialize and the often greater funds available to arts programs in private schools, and it is not as if that money will be supporting the science programs or updating textbooks in social studies classes, involvement by these sorts in the arts is common. Anyone who has been to an Evangelical church’s Christmas pageant can attest to their fondness for making a spectacle. With all of these factors, we have a population primed to create art and be its patrons. How is the actual art that they create, though, and how do they engage with the art of others? I would like to specify again that these Christian fans and artists are not simply those who happen to identify with some branch of Christianity. Martin Scorsese is a Catholic and Don Bluth is a Mormon, but one would not categorize their work as purely reflective of or made for those who share their ideologies, hence my emphasis on a very specific upbringing and community, the community that prefer to be unquestioning sheep to their shepherd. 

To comment on this population’s manner of media involvement, I would like to bring up a meme that was popular in the early 2010s, one that may not have originated with a Christian artist or fan, but that went around in their circles for a reason. It describes an English teacher going over a passage in a novel that mentions blue curtains. The silly English teacher insists that the blue curtains are symbolic for depression, but the author of course simply mentioned there being blue curtains for no reason other than the curtains literally being blue with no possible deeper meaning than that. Th%is perspective is not surprising considering their interpretation of their most important book in life: the world literally created in seven days, not millennia. The antichrist is to be a literal person in the future; Revelations was not written as commentary on the Roman Empire and Emperor Nero’s rule specifically. The forbidden tree of knowledge that is science and history would be required to even consider these contexts. It is such a shallow reading. One considers the complaints that newer adaptations or remakes of series such as Dune, Star Trek, or The Twilight Zone have “gone woke.” This is an odd way to speak about a book series that was commentary on British imperialism in the Middle East and two television series in which there is a barely-concealed social message in every episode. Of course, the fans with these complaints did not notice that, something that was not overtly stated. They are referring simply to there being characters portrayed by people of color and/or women, a purely visual, shallow analysis. I consider a conversation I had with one of these sorts. When he was not posting about the latest news on whichever new DC Comics adaptation, he was posting archeological “proof” of the Nephilim, the giant children of fallen angels and human women from the Book of Enoch, images that a more deciphering mind would recognize as doctored. I told him about Krampus, the figure of Central European folklore that punishes naughty children. He commented wondering if it was based on an actual entity. He could not conceive that a character was creatively conceived as a story to make children behave; it had to be a story that actually existed. Like many homeschoolers, he was an artist in his own right as a talented concert pianist, though his main ambition in life was to become a filmmaker. His short films were blatant in their symbolism and his feature-length script was a veritable self-insert fantasy, overtly stating its messages with annoying narration. Narration in scripts, as with first-person in narrative writing, is not always a bad thing, but there is a reason that it is associated with lazy creators. He differed from usual Christian fans and artists, however, in that he did appreciate villains and include what were at least intended to be dark themes, though his work often came off as what others would colloquially refer to as tryhard edgelordery.

This fellow’s work may have stood out because it was marginally less moralistic, viewing himself as quite the libertine, but he shared the simplicity and conspicuousness in the message of the creations of more successful Christian artists who specifically made their Christianity a stated part of their work. There are a myriad of pieces of Christian literature and cinema these days with its religious messaging front and center expressed in the most didactic manner possible. One of the most famous modern examples would be the soon-to-be five movie series God’s Not Dead. In the first film, first year college student Josh Wheaton, portrayed by Shane Harper, is a dedicated Christian thrust into a battle of with his staunch atheist philosophy professor, Jeffrey Radisson, portrayed by Kevin Sorbo, one of the better actors in the movie and incidentally the writer of The Test of Lionhood, the closest thing conservative children’s books publishing company Brave Books has to an actual good book. Sorbo’s charisma aside, the movie starts to fall apart in Radisson’s class when the professor tells his students to sign a sheet declaring “God is dead,” lest they fail the class. Nietsche’s referenced quote is much longer than simply “God is dead” and, while Nietsche was a critic of religion and possible atheist, this quote is more about society and tradition as a whole, something that someone with a PhD in philosophy, like Sorbo’s Radisson, would likely know, hence making anyone with this knowledge realize that the film cannot possibly be based on the filmmaker’s own experience and that they did not bother to research much about what they were quoting. Without spoiling the film, it wraps up with Josh, his Reverend Dave Hill (to be a recurring character in the series, portrayed by Dave A.R. White), and the characters in the numerous side-plots dropping lines for the Christian audience to nod along to. This made a lot of money and was therefore followed with another nod-along sequel, starring Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame as Grace Wesley, a high school history teacher who finds herself in a legal battle for mentioning Jesus in her class. Once again, anyone who has been to public school knows that Jesus and Christianity are perfectly allowed to be discussed in history classes to the extent that happens in the film. The third film, God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness, took a surprising term, perhaps due to taking on a new writer/director Michael Mason. The initial antagonist is another angry atheist (Mike Manning) who destroys Reverend Dave’s church in a moment of anguish. Reverend Dave gets involved in a legal battle as the college wants to use that spot for a student center. However, many happenings go against the simple nod-along of the previous films. The atheist student is still very much a “Hollywood atheist” who lost his faith due to personal tragedy rather than his own perception of the world, but his reason is not “my mom died of cancer and I’m mad,” but a painful tale of his mother’s banishment from their church and being declared a sinner after she divorced his abusive father, a familiar story, but going against the previous presentation of Christianity being a religion of safety, the way it was for a Muslim girl in a side-plot of the first film. Reverend Dave even reaches out to his atheist brother for help, showing that the faithless can be sources of knowledge. There is even a scene in which Reverend Dave laments about the persecution of Christians to his friend, a black reverend (portrayed by Gregory Alan Williams), only for him to point out the attacks against his own church for the race of the congregants, going poking a hole in the persecution complex of the predominantly white Christian audience’s idea that there could be something other than their religion that could bring difficulty to their lives. Josh tells the agnostic girl that it is OK to have doubts, perhaps to show him as a more understanding fellow than Radisson in the first, though also perceived by some viewers as a departure from his staunch certainty. Without spoiling the ending, though the Christian characters are still portrayed as the most righteous, it ends not with a grand triumph, but an act of mercy - turning the other cheek, if you may. While the bad-movie-watchers across the Internet who included the Pureflix creations among their rotation praised the film for giving its characters a modicum of depth compared to the rest in the series, it was not received as well with its target audience and it did not make as much money. The message to the producers was clear: do not challenge your audience. Michael Mason was replaced and the fourth film returned to form with the conflict focused on a legal battle with a Christian homeschooling group, the only demographic that would consider the plotline of the second film at all believable. 

While that explicitly Christian media is quite niche, their influence is everywhere, especially as far as genre fiction is concerned. In fandom spaces, moralistic declarations are everywhere. These come in the form of complaints about villains being too likable, as if bad people in real life could only ever be recognized as such by everyone and universally despised, or, on the contrary, about heroes being bad people for their flaws, as if they are supposed to be perfect specimens to emulate rather than representations of actual people. Even characters who improve past their flaws are chided for having ever not been perfect from the beginning, as if they should be Jesus Christ himself, or at least as some portray him. A worse crime is a bad character becoming redeemed. For all the talk of forgiveness in some Christian denominations, the predetermination of Calvinism is favored in these spaces. The only tolerable redemptions are followed soon after by death; let them enjoy their redemption in the afterlife!

The worst part is when creators of all stripes start listening. I cannot hold it against them too much; everyone has to eat. Characters are simplified. Villains become unambiguous monsters recognizable to all who are a threat because…? How? The only flaw left for a protagonist is being awkward. Messages are stated outright rather than left up to interpretation. Why let someone think for themselves? That could lead to questions or the creation of something unfamiliar.