The Purge: Anarchy, Eggplants and the Will of God

We can invoke God's name for the worst of reasons.

It's not a new thing. In the New Testament, you read about lots of folks who claimed to be speaking for God. "Watch out for false prophets," Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew. "They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves." Throughout history, people have done some pretty horrific things in God's name—atrocities that have turned people away from God altogether. It's like a variation on that old Bon Jovi song. Sometimes we give God a bad name.

I was thinking about this a little after I left The Purge: Anarchy, a R-rated horror-thriller that shows just how badly God's name can be abused.

In the movie, the Purge is an annual abandonment to society’s darkest urges—a 12-hour period in which most crime (including and especially murder) is legalized. The Purge is pushed as a societal good (the crime rate has plummeted since its introduction) and a patriotic duty. And most critically here, it's also seen as something sacred.

In the first movie, a dying man is kissed on the forehead by his murderer, almost like a priest would kiss a confessor. "Your soul has been cleansed," he says. Participants even seem to pray together: "Blessed be the Purge," they say.

In The Purge: Anarchy, that sense of the Purge being a divine rite only grows. Killers sometimes sport religious symbols: One has a cross marked on his forehead. Another wears a mask with the word "God" scrawled on it. A woman roams the roof of a building, looking for people to gun down for the grievous sin of, I guess, walking down the street. Hollering into a megaphone, she talks about how often God in the Bible brings torment down on His creation: floods and famine and all manner of terrible things. The woman says she's simply doing God's holy work: She's a "one-woman mother---ing plague," worthy of a spot at God's left hand.

It seems like the filmmakers are critiquing how religion can be misused, and they may be swinging a few punches at the Religious Right here: The country's "New Founding Fathers" manipulate both the language of patriotism and religion for their own ends, as some believe happens today.

Now on one hand, I'd argue that faith is inherently politically active. Both church and state, after all, are built on a sense of shared morality and values. Religion can't help but enter into the conversation.

But the movie does hint at a real danger of religious activism: Nothing kills dialogue as quickly as to declare that "God wills" something. As soon as someone stands on those two words, the conversation has nowhere left to go.

Now, I do believe that God does want us to do certain things. I believe that our lives are, on some level, a learning exercise—where we're educated all the time about how to align ourselves more closely with God's will. When I had kids in the house, most of our household rules aligned with what I believed was the will of God—what to value, how to act and how to treat people. Even most of our secular laws are predicated on the idea of a broadly accepted sense of what's "right" and "wrong," which to me at least partly presupposes a greater power that defines what "right" and "wrong" are.

But I do think we've got to be really careful when we throw around that phrase.

It's like this: Say you've got a friend who loves, I dunno, eggplants. "I think eggplants are God's favorite vegetable," he might say. Or, "I'd imagine that, every day in heaven, we'll be eating eggplants." Now, I'm none too fond of eggplants. And if I was talking with this someone, I'd argue that eggplants were really just a joke of God's—a not-so-subtle spoof on the otherwise sublime world of veggies. I'd declare that, if God wanted us to eat eggplant, he would not have colored it purple. To which he might respond that purple is the color of royalty, and on it would go.

But if this friend said, seriously, that it's God's will that we all eat eggplants—that it's a sin if we don't eat them—we find ourselves in a very different conversation. Suddenly, my distaste of eggplants becomes a moral failing. My dislike of the vegetable puts me, in the view of my friend, in opposition to the Almighty. And by extension, I'm in opposition to my friend. We're on the verge of a holy war over eggplants.

Some true-to-life holy wars have been started over issues just about as consequential.

When you declare something to be God's will, you draw up sides. Either you're on God's side or you're not. Well-meaning people who want to be on God's side may be drawn into something that might not be God's will at all. Others might turn their backs on God: If that really is God's will, I want no part of it, they might say. And when you tie the words "God's will" with the words "the Purge," you've got yourself a real problem.  

When Jesus talked about false prophets, He told us that we would know them by their fruits. "Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?" He said.

The Purge seems like a no-brainer: That's a thistle all the way. As an activist in The Purge: Anarchy argues, it's pretty clear killing innocent people isn't something that God would condone. "We no longer worship at the altar of Christ, of Mohammed, of Yahweh," he says, covering his bases. "We worship at the altar of Smith & Wesson." It's also, I think, easier to see God's will after the fact, and through the lens of history.

But sometimes in the moment, before the figs and thistles have a chance to grow, it can be more difficult.

I'm a skeptical person by nature, and I think whenever someone says they speak for God or know definitively what He wants or wills, I find myself going into heightened alert status. And I try to weigh what they say is “God's will” with what I know and have been taught about God: His love for us. His desire to see us all drawn closer to Him. I believe that God wills us to always hone our character, to be more the people He designed us to be. But, at least in how we saw in Jesus, He does so with kindness and grace and love.

It’d be nice if it was always as easy to see the fruits of a false prophet, as we see in The Purge. But it’s not always so simple.

Noah: Lots of Baggage, But It Floats Somewhere Special

I just received a letter from a reader who, very politely, said my Plugged In review of Noah “missed the mark.”

“This film is a mocking, blasphemous, butchering, occultic, science fiction affront to the God of Genesis on every conceivable level,” the writer said. “This movie should have received the lowest recommendation possible. Seeing this movie will not benefit ANYONE.”

And you thought the Flood was bad.

The storm around Darren Aronofsky's film has been pretty crazy. I don't think I've ever reviewed a movie so polarizing. And I get the Christian backlash against the film. The source story is, after all, quite literally sacred. So when Aronofsky turned the story into a Tolkienesque fantasy epic for his own storytelling ends, well, many folks were bound to be upset. I think they have the right to be.

But I’d disagree with my critic saying that the movie won’t benefit anyone. I actually found the movie pretty interesting—sometimes even inspiring. And I think perhaps where Aronofsky went most “wrong” is where the movie is at its most intriguing. An example: The issue of discerning God’s will.

In the Bible, of course, Noah had pretty direct marching orders from God. Our old sailor was not only told to build the ark, but how big to build it and out of what. Sure, Noah’s neighbors may have thought it was a crazy thing to do, but Noah trusted God. And I think most of us, if we heard a booming voice from on high a la Bill Cosby, we’d be inclined to listen and trust, too.

But in Aronofsky’s vision, God does not communicate so clearly. The Creator (as God is called here) speaks to Noah through dreams and visions, and rarely even those. And for everyone else, the Creator is silent. Even the Watchers—semi-fallen angels—are left to wonder what God would have them do.

Tubal-cain (who I hope to write about more fully later on this week) is the movie’s clear antagonist. But for all his bluster, the villain is surprisingly complex: Tubal-cain would tell you that it’s not that he’s turned his back on God, but that God has turned away from him.

“No one’s heard from the Creator since He marked Cain,” Tubal-cain says. “We are orphan children.” At one point, he even seems to beg for God to speak to him. And so he feels like, if God’s not going to take care of them, it’s up to these “orphans” to take care of themselves.

(Of course, Tubal-cain ignores the fact that God, clearly, is talking with someone. Noah. Why else would the villain be so sure the rains were going to come, and why he made such an effort to build an army to take over the ark?)

But even for Noah, God’s wishes are not always clear. And once the floods hit, Noah’s interpretation of the Creator’s will takes center stage. He comes to believe that all men have evil in them. As such, humanity does not and should not have a place in the new world God’s preparing. He believes that God wants them all to die—if not in the flood, then afterward. And the Creator chose Noah because he was the only one with the strength to see this terrible task through.

Now this, of course, is horrifically unlike the Noah we read about in the Bible, and if the guy had managed to live a few millennia longer, he’d have a heckuva libel case.

But narratively, this controversial choice works for me because it illustrates a frustrating problem we modern-day believers struggle with all the time. What does God want us to do?

We hear this question in news stories every day. Would Jesus bake a wedding cake for a gay couple? Would He go see Noah? These questions are predicated on a deep uncertainty that many people of faith deal with every day. We pray and talk and parse Bible verses in the hopes of getting some insight on what’s the “right” thing to do. But sometimes, even when we search most fervently and pray most sincerely, we come to different conclusions.

And sometimes the folks who are most convinced they’re in the right are the ones that, in my eyes, seem to be the most wrong. The late Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church never seemed to have any doubt about what he was doing.

I’m not suggesting that certainty is necessarily wrong or bad. But knowing God’s will can be tricky. Moses’ wife, Naameh, and daughter-in-law, Ila, also felt that they knew what God would want. They pointed to certain signs. They pointed to what they knew of God’s character. Noah would not be swayed, barreling forward in his single-minded understanding. He had no Bible at the time to guide his actions, no kindly pastors to talk with. He was alone. And the Creator, unlike God in Genesis, did not choose to speak so definitively.

In the end, Noah makes the right decision—even though, in the moment, he feels as though it’s wrong. He looks at his own progeny and finds that he has nothing but love for them. Sure, he knows that they still have evil inside, that they might make another wreck of creation. And yet he loves them and saves them.

He kicked himself mightily for that lack of “obedience.” And yet, knowing what we do of God’s loving character through Jesus, Noah was being deeply obedient. For God sees us the same way. He sees our sins. He sees our imperfections. He sees the evil inside us all and knows that we can mess up His creation mightily. And yet, he looks down on us with love. He saves us.

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength,” we read in 1 Corinthians 1:25. Never is that foolishness more obvious, or beautiful, than in His reckless love for us.