2008-05-04 15:28:07

PURPLE STATE ROADSHOW: VAMPING BILLY GRAHAM

Filed under: Books, Fangland, John Marks, Movies, Prince Caspian, Reasons To Believe, purple state roadshow
Posted by: John

What does it mean when the non-Christian author of a vampire novel containing graphic gay sex, literal bucket loads of gore and a bloodsucker who has no fear of the cross is allowed to address a gathering of pastors, evangelists, academicians and theologians in a bastion of the evangelical world on the subject of the imagination? Is this a sure sign of the Rapture or is something more earthly–and less exclusive—going on?

Leaving aside the matter of the End Times, one thing is certain. The improbable encounter occurred. I was the author.

The occasion was a round table conference entitled “Imagination and the Gospel”, sponsored by the Billy Graham Center on the grounds of Wheaton College in Chicago. The Center isn’t just one more place named after the world’s best known evangelist. It’s quite literally the house that Graham built and houses most of his collected writings as well as the country’s largest archive of evangelistic material, an institution devoted to the spreading of the news that Jesus Christ is the son of God and died on the cross to save humanity.

I wasn’t there to promote my vampire novel or to act as a living embodiment of fallen man, though as the only certified non-believer at the function, I did represent the other side in the great American religious divide. I was there with my old friend, Craig Detweiler, an evangelical theologian and film maker, to screen our documentary Purple State of Mind, which depicts our own attempt to talk candidly about our beliefs across sectarian lines.

The conference came at an intriguing moment, just weeks before the opening of Prince Caspian, the second film in the Narnia series, already projected by Entertainment Weekly magazine to be the second highest grossing film of the summer. The other conferees would have been justified in feeling euphoric about the impact of the evangelical imagination on the rest of us. The last film in the Narnia series The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe grossed almost $300 million in 2005.

And yet the tone of the discussion wasn’t jubilant. It was perturbed. When it comes to participation in and creation of American popular culture, the consensus seemed to be, evangelical Christians are being left behind, and they know it all too well.

At the conference, I didn’t hear preening about the box office grosses of The Passion of the Christ. Instead, I experienced something more like a rapturous love for the virtuosity and even spiritual power of the secular imagination, a regard for everything from the U2 concert flick playing at IMAX theaters to the films of Wes Anderson, especially Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, to the much darker delights to be found in movies like The Lives of Others, The Departed and this year’s Oscar winner No Country For Old Men.

Successful evangelism depends, above all, on the Good News reaching a wider public. Since the mid 1960’s, right around the time Hollywood stopped making Biblical epics and a godless, sex-drenched youth culture took over the box office, many Christians have felt an impulse to hide from the unruly spectacle, to save as many of themselves and their children as possible from the deluge of offensive images. In the meantime, they have tried to come up with a Biblical pop of their own.

At best, that strategy yielded Mel Gibson’s Passion and the Narnia flicks. At worst, and the gloomy assessment of the conference was that most of the “Christian” narratives of the last few years had been awful, it yielded poorly written blockbuster novels like the Left Behind series and their cinematic transmutations, stuff that triggered mass sales but didn’t do much for mass conversion.

It was time, said Trevor Hart, director of the Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, to start thinking about ways to upgrade the Christian imagination. And yet how to overcome centuries of suspicion that went back at least as far as the King James Version of the Bible, as Professor Hart pointed out, with its identification of the very word “imagination” with scheming and plotting and general malefaction? How to fall in love again with art?

That’s where I came in. As I listened to the discussion, I often felt like the villain of their particular saga. I listened through the first day and a half of the conference to discussion of the “disordered” or “bad” imagination, in other words, the kind of imagination that Christians didn’t want to cultivate or embrace, the kind of imagination to be shunned because it advances the cause of the darkness, in the same way that Milton is said to have made Lucifer the most appealing character in Paradise Lost and therefore an argument against God. To myself, I thought, they’re talking about my imagination.

I had modeled my last book on a novel no one at the conference mentioned, perhaps understandably, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, chock full of repressed erotic and homoerotic desire, the ultimate glamorization of violence, death and despair as a lifestyle. To make matters worse, in an effort to use the vampire trope to get at the darker aspects of human history, I had done my utmost to make that story even more extreme. In effect, I had written a story not about the Good News, but about the Bad.

In our documentary Purple State of Mind, which screened on the second day of the conference, my friend Craig and I presented our differing worldviews and hashed out the implications. I asked Craig how he could believe in a god that had allowed so much human suffering, much of it inflicted in that god’s name? Craig asked me how I could have any ethical core without an absolute basis for ethics?

When the screening ended, I made my confession to the audience. At best, on their terms, I had a “disordered” imagination. At worst, I might even have a “bad” one. Writing about the Bad News was my way of seeking meaning. I expected a cool response, but the evangelists and the theologians surprised me. They were hungry for the conversation, it turned out, on screen and in person. They didn’t pummel me with arguments for their God. They didn’t condescend. They applauded the film, and afterwards, many of them approached me and referred to the lifelong conversation between Christian G.K. Chesterton and Pagan George Bernard Shaw as a model for dialogue.

When Prince Caspian opens on May 16, there will no doubt be talk about its Christian provenance. Pastors across America may reference it in their sermons and may even tell their congregations to go see it because it has God’s blessing. On the other hand, non-believers may refuse to go or take their children because they see it as a by-product of a conservative religious culture. But don’t be fooled. Don’t fall prey to this bad old narrative of the culture war.

There is ferment among the evangelicals. Narnia is not the final heaven. C.S. Lewis is not the Pope of the Christian Imagination. In a quiet conversation being held in churches and conferences and seminaries around the country, barely audible as of yet, the hunger to break out of accepted molds of thought and action is growing. The effort to end the long ghettoization of the Christian mind has begun. Whether secular America will offer itself as a partner in this conversation remains to be seen. For now, a debased vampire or two will have to do.

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1. [...] we’re rapping about Billy Graham and vampires over at Purple State of John, I thought I’d add this unexpected link to Robert Downey’s thrilling turn as Iron Man. [...]

   Pingback by Purple State of Mind — May 7, 2008 @ 1:24 pm

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