Holy Heroes by Scott Bayles

Scott Bayles is a pastor in Illinois who is a big Superman fan. I met Scott at the Superman Celebration in Illinois in 2010. We didn't have much time to talk, but we had that thing in common--we were both writing books about Superman. Scott's book came out last spring. It's called Holy Heroes: The Gospel According to DC and Marvel, and it begins with Superman, but goes beyond to examine numerous heroes for their religious resonance. It's got chapters on Wonder Woman, Flash, Hulk, Thor, and others.

Scott's a founding member of Costumers for Christ, which employs superhero costuming in ministry. He's also a key component of my own book; I interviewed him in 2012 and devote half a chapter to him, his family, and his costuming. He blogs about the spiritual aspects of superheroes at Holy Heroes.

Scott has written two other books: The Greatest Commands and Restoring the Restoration Movement.

Morality

So I found this today and thought it was worth noting. It's an essay about Superman and Jesus, from a site called At the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's interesting stuff, though I disagree with a basic point.

The author, Jack Kerwick, agrees with the common notion that heroes must be relatable. By which I think he, and others, mean that they have to be flawed so that we can see they are human, finding bits of ourselves in them. Now, he's talking about Superman and Jesus. Sure, we can look at their psychologies and see some evidence of humanity there, but I think there we need to consider that there are different rules when thinking about gods.

When it comes to heroes, sure, we need to see their lives as basically similar to our own, different in degree but not in kind. But gods are different in kind. This is, to me, the most interesting intellectual component of Christianity. How is Jesus both human and divine? It's an old question, and it sparked quite the controversy in the early church. I'm not going to even try to answer it here. But...can we ask a similar question about Superman? How is he both human and alien?

John Byrne answered that question in his Man of Steel series. Superman may be genetically Kryptonian, but he was raised on earth and has chosen to stay here to make it a better place. So he's born alien but chooses to be human.


On a related note...

Here's a link to an essay on Superman, Batman, and morality. The author is a Superman supporter, finding that the character's optimism is preferable to Batman's pessimism; that the unattainable ideal is a better model than the lower bar set by Batman. I generally agree, but then he gets into some specifics that I can't agree with. Such as...

Batman is certainly a more tempting role model because his is an attainable standard...

I've heard this argument many times. Batman is better than Superman because he's human. He doesn't have super powers, so his heroism is all the more impressive. Leonard Finkelman, the author of the above piece, doesn't agree that Batman's better because he's human, but he's making that part of the argument. The thing is, Batman's no less superior to humanity than Superman. He's just as imaginary. To be Batman, you've gotta be the strongest, fastest, smartest, richest, and toughest human being on the planet. You've got to have the several lives' worth of time to perfect your mind and your body to that point. You have to have the incredible luck to be born into a phenomenally wealthy family. That's not quite as impossible as being from another planet, but when we get down to it, there aren't degrees of impossibility.

Anyway, there are some great insights in the essay. And he ends on a great, mythological note:

Like Kant, I am continually filled with wonder by the starry heavens above and the moral law within, and to be a Superman is to bring the one closer to the other.

Some new links

At Too Busy Thinking About My Comics, Colin Smith wrote a four part exploration of All Star Superman and Superman: Earth One. It's really, really good. Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4. In-depth, clear, and insightful.

Here's an article about superman's ethics.

This one's from the Superman Homepage: (Not) Believing Again: Superman Returns--From Postmodernism to Faith (and Failure) by Ben Murane. It's an academic approach.

Speaking of an academic approach, here's Brent Allred's thesis from Melbourne College of Divinity, it's about the use of movies and literature in Christian Education of kids, it's got some stuff about Superman.

And another thesis, this time about Superman and America, by Michael Mautner.

That's enough of that for now.

Religious Interpretation

Superman may or may not be Christ, depending on who you ask.

There are perhaps more books and articles concerning Superman's connection to Christ than there are on any other Superman topic. It all seems to have begun with John T. Galloway, jr.'s The Gospel According to Superman, fixing a title that has probably frustrated other authors since it's 1968 publication. This book set out to prove once and for all that Superman is certainly not Christ, and that claiming him to be so is damaging. It explores the character's actions and history and ultimately concluding that Superman is in no way like Christ.

This was before the 1978 movie.

After that movie, articles began springing up proclaiming Superman's Christ-like-ness. It was all very deliberate on the part of director Richard Donner and one of the writers, Tom Mankiewicz. They saw the parallels in the stories and made them explicit, most famously during Jor-El's speech to Superman as the baby travels to Earth:

"They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show them the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I send them you, my only son."

As a kid of 1 when this movie came out, I completely ignored the subtext there.

So soon after you've got Sarah R. Kozloff's "Superman as Saviour: Christian Allegory in the Superman Movies" (from the Journal of Popular Film and Television, 1981). People saw the parallel, and it either made them happy or mad. Apparently the director got death threats.

Then there's The Man from Krypton: The Gospel According to Superman, by John Wesley White. I haven't read it yet, but it's on its way to me even as we speak.

More recently, there have been lots of these. I suspect the more obvious Christian imagery in Superman Returns and the widened audience for it provided by the internet has sparked the books and articles.

Anton Karl koslovic's "Superman as Christ-Figure: The American Pop Culture Movie Messiah" came ahead of the rush in 2002 in the Journal of Religion and Film. He's all for the subtext, as it points toward Christ.

There's Stephen Skelton's The Gospel According to the World's Greatest Superhero. There's Ken Schenck's "Superman: A Popular Culture Messiah" in the book The Gospel According to Superheroes, edited by B.J. Oropeza. There are chapters in books such as Holy Superheroes by Greg Garrett, and H. Michael Brewer's Who Needs a Superhero? about this sort of thing.

Sort of Related are books such as Christopher Knowles Our Gods Wear Spandex and Don LoCicero's Superheroes and Gods. Both of these books look for early parallels (which they see as forerunners) to superheroes in myths and legends, not specifically in Christ. They both devote some pages to Superman. Also in this category I'd put Josepha Sherman's Once Upon a Galaxy, which does the same thing with various films and has a chapter on Superman.

Aside from a score of newspaper articles and hundreds of blogs and other websites, that's about it. People like to point out how similar Superman is to Christ, and then they like to argue about it.

I actually have a lot more to say about this, as you may expect. I sat down to take what I thought would be a page of notes and found myself with eight pages of a chapter, and I hadn't even gotten to Christ yet. So, no real commentary or analysis here, but there will be a bit in the book someday, I hope.

Two things

This project began as a study of jokes, but that soon led me to studying religious implications of Superman. This blog seems to be an obvious one to study from that perspective (see also entries for Feb. 25, . The writer calls Superman "an archetype of radical giving and effort for a greater good." That seems accurate enough, to a point. If we take archetype as he is using it, Superman is also the archetype of individual achievement and greatness at something, such as sports, sometimes in service to a team.

On an unrelated note, here's an article imagining what it would be like to be Superman's kid. There's been a lot of this sort of thing--working out the real-world possibilities of Superman's existence. Perhaps most famously, Larry Niven wrote "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", which was all about the problems of Superman and Lois Lane's physical relationship.

A central focus of my book is the morality at the heart of Superman. The jokes about him lead me there, as do the conversations I've had about the character. So I'm glad to see essays like this one, at FaceTheReckoning.com. It's a response the idea that Superman's morality would be shaped by his powers, that he would inevitably give in to the temptation to use them for his own selfish ends and because he doesn't, he's not an interesting character. The response is well articulated.


The list of people given the nickname Superman grows every day. Here's Shane McConkey, extreme skiier. Then there's Dr. Gahl, about whom I know nothing other than that he's associated with the fight against Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome.


The title for the Dr. Gahl post refers to him as "our Superman." I recently read that superheroes are not so much gods in the sense of a lot of gods whose nature gives them provenance over some force of nature or human institution (i.e., Zeus was god of justice and lightning; Athena was god of wisdom in battle and weaving), but rather superheroes are tutelary deities who protect specific cities. It's not entirely true, but super heroes are first and foremost associated with cities, especiallly Superman. Superman is also associated, with varying degrees of agreement, with "the American way," which makes him a patriotic figure more so than pretty much any other super hero. The iconography supports the argument.


What I'm getting at here is the "god's on our side" attitude. It crops up in sports, in war, and probably in lots of other places. Several religious people have written books on Superman, mostly to point out the parallels with Christ and show us the way, so to speak. John T. Galloway, Jr. wrote perhaps the earliest one of these, The Gospel According to Superman. More recent books attempt to demonstrate that Superman is Christ-like, and that this is a good thing. Galloway goes in the opposite direction, labeling Superman a false god and saying that the best response to his story is to compare it unfavorably to the gospels. In particular, he notes that Superman is "on our side," which he criticizes because of his belief that god is on everyone's side. I've simplified his argument perhaps too much, but I hope the point is clear.

If there's "our Superman" there can be one for other people, too. All of which is sort of beside the point. I think the post I've been discussing labels Dr. Gahl as Superman because of his tireless efforts attempting to find a cure for the disease in question. So "our" here isn't a form of patriotism, and in fact includes everyone. I don't even necessarily agree with Galloway. Just writing and writing and writing. Here's a patriotic picture:







Interestingly, the image came up on a website devoted to stem cell research, something Christopher Reeve advocated, if I recall correctly, because it could lead to advancements in treatment for the injuries he sustained. There was an episode of South Park about this, which pitted Reeve against Gene HackMan. Funny stuff.





Then there's this: