If you live every day with a level of physical comfort, security, wealth, and peace that almost no one in history has ever enjoyed, yet every day is filled with anger, anxiety, and despair, then perhaps it is time to consider that your hell comes from within.
In yesterday’s post I examined how torture and threats of violence to loved ones are used as tropes in Hollywood to transfer power and knowledge from the hero to the villain. I suggested that the frequency of this pattern might make us believe that these are foregone conclusions, it might train us to give the same response if ever we face the same pressure in our own lives.
One might argue, these are simply narrative tricks, and all they are looking to do is move the story along, not influence personal perceptions in the real world. I would agree that these films may not have the intention of cultivating a defeatist mentality in their viewers, but that can still be their effect when compounded all together. And what’s more, there are examples that are much more explicit in their message.
Silence is a film based on a 1966 novel where Jesuit priests witness the torture and killing of Christian converts in 17th century Japan. While the priests do not actually have their faith broken, two of them ultimately decide to renounce Christ as it is the only way to get the Japanese officials to stop murdering the people. In the film and novel this denial of faith is presented as a morally correct choice, and one that Christ would approve of. However, that argument is not rooted in any actual words of the Savior, it is justified by inventing a message from Christ within its fiction.
I certainly would never dismiss the seriousness of such a situation in real life, and if I ever met a person who abandoned their faith in such a moment, I would firmly leave the judgment for that in the hands of God. But I will judge fictional and solipsistic media that tries to say that sometimes the right thing to do is the wrong thing to do.
Let us look at another example actually from history, one that is actually encouraging. Joan of Arc lived in 15th century France, and she proclaimed to have had visions with angels, which called her to fight for France’s liberation from England. While she went to battle and achieved great victories, ultimately, she was captured and stood trial before the English church.
Joan was found guilty of various sins, including heresy, and brought to the Tower of Rouen and shown the instruments of torture that would be used on her if she did not recant her spiritual claims. She bravely refused, and the judges thought it unwise to actually go through with the torture, so she was spared. Two weeks later, though, she was brought to the execution platform and told she would be burned at the stake that very day. This time they meant it, and this time her conviction wavered. She signed a confession that all her claims had been false.
But that was not the end of her story or her convictions. Only a few days later, pained by her false confession, she reasserted all her previous claims, and accepted the consequences that would follow. On May 30 she was put to the flames, and as she burned to death she called out to Jesus. Today she is considered a saint.
As I said yesterday, I cannot know whether I would prove faithful or not in such a trial. And as I said today, I leave to God the judgment of those who cannot hold to their convictions in such moments. But what I can do and say is that faithfulness to the truth is always the right answer. I can say that I hope to always be true to my Lord. I can say that we have sufficient evidence that people really can remain faithful, even in the face of torture, death, and the loss of loved ones. When evil comes in all its power, there is no foregone conclusion that we must fall to it. We may yet prove faithful and true; we may be martyrs rather than traitors.
A movie trope is a recurring plot element that is seen across many different titles. They are a quick and easy way for a writer to reuse patterns that have worked before, and a movie that is full of them is considered lazy and unoriginal.
Tropes provide easy answers to moments of necessary transformation. One common transformation in movies is where the villain needs to gain knowledge to foil the hero’s plan. Another is where the hero has the upper hand, but then that dynamic is flipped, putting the villain in the position of power. In both of these cases, the hero and his allies have something important, knowledge or power, and there needs to be a way for the villain to take that from them.
Common tropes to quickly achieve both of these transformations are to have the villain torture a member of the hero’s group, or to threaten the loved ones of the hero.
You can see this in Pan’s Labyrinth, where Captain Vidal tortures a member of the Spanish Maquis to extract the location of the rebel group. You can see this in Gladiator, where Commodus threatens Lucilla’s son to get her to divulge the plot to overthrow him. And these tropes show up again and again in many, many other stories.
These serve as a narrative shorthand, but what sort of message do they send to society when used so constantly?
The truth is that torture and threats to loved ones have been used throughout history to try and break the convictions of real people. Early Christian families were burned at the stake, or had their bodies mangled, rather than deny their fealty to their Lord. I’m not saying that such firmness of character is common, or that all of us would hold up under that pressure, but I do think it is important to recognize that the way movies portray such moments as an already foregone conclusion is untruthful.
Whether I could withstand torture or threats to my loved ones, I do not know, but it is good for me to remember that with God people have been able to endure these things and more. Rather than let these fictions poison me with the notion that everyone has a limit on their faithfulness, I’d rather be encouraged by true stories that show that the determination of the soul can be immeasurable.
Tomorrow I’ll conclude this little study by looking at two more examples of conviction and those that surrender them and those that hold on to them.
I recently concluded a study related to false moral dilemmas, where I sought to dispel the notion that there might ever be a time where we have to make a morally compromising choice. I asserted that there are always the options for finding an outside-the-box moral solution, or the ability to refused to engage with the situation entirely and still keep one’s conscience intact.
As I did this study, I started to notice something else, something that I was going to write about then and there, but I realized it warranted a study all its own. It is a theme that is even larger and broader, something that false moral dilemmas is but a subset of. What I have noticed is that our Western culture and media seem to be preparing us to give up on our ideals when certain triggers are met. Not only the false moral dilemmas that I already explored, but any time that there is a threat of torture or harm to a loved one.
Usually when either of these occur in our modern stories, the victim gives in to what the villains want. Obviously, it serves a narrative purpose to have a way for the villains to obtain their desire at certain points of the story, but the fact that it so commonly comes as a result of these specific methods is very interesting. We may view these sorts of stories passively, but each time we see the pattern repeated it is as if our minds are rehearsing that trigger and response, training itself to make the same surrender if we ever face the same sort of opposition.
In my next post I will examine these movie tropes of how the hero is forced to surrender his ideals, and what the long-term effects of repeated exposure to this pattern might spell for us. I’ll see you there.
Permitted does not mean equally valid.
Not all disparity is injustice.
Civil rights are a distraction when the soul is left enslaved.
If God isn’t real, then nothing matters.
If God is real, then nothing else matters.
God is all that matters.
In this series I explored the world’s strange fascination with moral dilemmas, noted how many of them are unbelievable and contrived, and how even the ones with a historical precedent always had a moral option, even if you have to look outside the box to find it. Another key point that I mentioned was the importance of recognizing disengagement as an option. If you are presented options A and B, and both would compromise your conscience, you could always just do nothing at all.
I also pointed out how both outside-the-box thinking and moral inaction are demonstrated in the life of Jesus. It is from him that we see that the perfect path, with no moral compromise, is actually possible.
At least, it is possible in theory. I also acknowledged that each of us will, of course, compromise ourselves at some point, but that we need to accept and confess that failure, not try to sweep it under the rug by saying we had no choice but to do wrong. We can both have grace for our poor choices while admitting that they were, indeed, poor choices.
Accepting these truths can be uncomfortable as they leave us no way to hide from the reality of difficult moral choices. Believing that there is no good choice is the easier option, as it justifies us in shrinking from painful consequences. Once we accept that there is always a good path, then we can no longer betray God in ignorance. Then, any time that we do something to get what we want or to avoid pain, we do it with eyes wide open, and we know that we will have to account for it someday.
It is, therefore, both a blessing and a burden to know that choosing good is always an option. That knowledge might condemn us to dissatisfaction or pain in the short term, but it is also the path to ultimate redemption.
At the end of the last post, I acknowledged the fact that each one of us will break conscience at some point or another, but that it isn’t as though we have to do that. We do it as a choice. We have an alternative path that remains morally upright, and we reject it, and choose something wrong instead.
In my personal experience, and in my daily observations, I think that this is one of the most difficult things for us to accept. Truly owning our failures does not come easy. We shrink at the notion of saying, “I hurt someone. I didn’t have to, but I chose to because I’m selfish, and there’s no justifying it. It was just wrong, plain and simple.” I think we all know that this is true of everyone else, so certainly it must be of ourselves also, but we keep trying to distance from it. Even when we do acknowledge our failings, we prefer to do it for past versions of the self. “The old me did that, the current me never would.” Thus, even harder than admitting that we did wrong is admitting that we are wrong.
And with this in mind, I think I think one of the reasons why we would be obsessed with so-called moral dilemmas is clear. We can deny all our guilt once we assume a paradigm that this world is fraught with no-win moral dilemmas. We tell ourselves that all of us must face choices where moral compromise is the only option, that sometimes doing wrong is better than doing the worse wrong, so there’s no helping that we have soiled our souls. If we convince ourselves that all the world is gray, then it is a meaningless homogeny where our own “gray” choices can’t be held against us.
From this perspective, false moral dilemmas are not simply a misrepresentation, they are a coping mechanism for our shame. We rely on them because saying “there were no good options,” is much easier than saying, “there was one good option, but I didn’t have the courage to face its consequences.”
The solution, then, is having the honesty to admit that we are flawed individuals, guilty of choosing wrong, and needing grace to get by. We need to be able to acknowledge the perfect path that was available and how we far strayed from it. When we have courage enough for this, then we won’t need to cast the world in shades of gray, we will be able to admit the white that was there, the black that we are, and the grace that makes us pure again.
In my previous post I discussed how Jesus managed moral quandaries and snares that his enemies tried to set for him. Another example that I did not mention was how he would employ silence, rather than engaging in the problem at all. We see this in his trials before the Sanhedrin, Herod, and Pilate. With the Sanhedrin and Pilate, he did not speak until the time was right, or to correct their faulty framing. To Herod, a most wicked man, and the murderer of his cousin John, he never said any word at all.
From Jesus’s example, we see that sometimes the outside-the-box moral solution to a moral dilemma is to just not engage with it at all. When the entire framework of the problem is flawed, when the premise of the whole thing is set to entrap us, there always remains the option of moral non-engagement.
I previously gave silent non-engagement as a solution to the supposed moral dilemma of Nazis at the door asking where the Jews are hiding. Once again, if there are no good options to engage in, you can just not engage. Sometimes inaction is the most moral choice that there is.
This is a critical thing to understand, as it breaks the last parts of the illusion that sometimes we must choose one evil or another. If there are truly no good options, just choose none of them at all. No situation or contrivance can ever force us to do anything. They cannot make us break conscience. We only ever do what we allow ourselves to do.
Of course, all of us will compromise ourselves at some point. We will all break conscience. But it is important to understand in those moments that we didn’t have to do that, we chose to. That’s something I’ll explore more with my next post.
In the last post we discussed so-called moral dilemmas present us with only bad choices, each a compromise of conscience, but if we are willing and creative enough to find it, there is typically another option that sidesteps the dilemma and allows us to keep on the straight and narrow. First, we have to move outside of the manufactured box that our tester has put us in, then see the full range of possible choices, and finally be willing to accept the consequences for sticking to what is right.
Indeed, a common theme all throughout the Bible is people who are faced with exactly these sorts of situations, who then have to step outside the bounds of their initial perception and rely on a miracle to accomplish good and retain their souls. Think of Lot, who saw his only choices as letting the wicked men of the city either rape his guests or his daughters, but who was then saved by angels. Think of Joseph who could either put Mary away in secret or have her stoned for adultery, but who then received a heavenly message to show him that she truly bore the son of God. Think of Solomon who had two women claiming to be the mother of the same child, with nothing in their testimony to show him whom to believe, but who was blessed with wisdom to find out the truth.
Moral dilemmas, and their outside-the-box solutions, are a key theme in the scriptures. When the righteous are faced with no-win scenarios, that’s when the hand of God becomes manifest to show them another way. Indeed, the entire point of the gospel is that it provides a surprise solution to a damned situation. Many of us will sin and earn the suffering of hell, while those that die in their innocence are still swallowed in the grave. No matter which path we take through this life, we’re damned, at least we were until a Savior presented us a miraculous alternative.
It comes as no surprise that Jesus, himself, was a master of resolving seeming no-win, moral dilemmas. I think more than any other figure in the Bible he was put to the test with contrived situations that tried to get him to compromise himself one way or another.
Think of when the Pharisees brought him the woman taken in adultery, and asked if he would uphold Moses’s law, which required the stoning of the woman. Would he deny the law? That would be heretical. Would he condemn her to death? That would go against his mission to forgive and to save. Jesus stepped outside of their trap, though, and said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” In so doing, he touched their guilt and got them to slink away in shame.
But it’s not as though he was denying the justice of the law. Jesus was still worthy to stone her, but also, he was able to forgive her because he would take her stoning upon himself when he laid his life down as a ransom for the world. Thus, Jesus did not transgress justice, nor embrace condemnation. He found a third way to satisfy justice and make space for mercy.
Think also of when he was asked whether the people should pay taxes to their oppressor Caesar. On the one hand, he could say that yes, they were required to pay their taxes, which would offend the people. Or he could say no, that they should defy Caesar, which would make him an enemy of the state. Jesus, however, chose a third option. He showed the people that their entire framing was wrong. They were putting too much value in worldly currency, thinking that it amounted to anything of moral weight in the eyes of the Lord. He reminded them that worldly treasure and spiritual sacrifice were two separate things, one properly pertaining to the world and one to God. By helping to disentangle the two, and setting the spiritual as superior to the temporal, Jesus found a third path that both approved the paying of taxes while also diminishing its importance in the broader scheme of things.
The stories of Jesus and others in the Bible shows us that we may be given traps where it appears that there are no good solutions, but that if we have some ingenuity, or even some divine intervention, the moral way is still there for us. As Paul told the Corinthians, “With the temptation,” God will “also make a way to escape” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
Spiritual Wanderings 