The Walk: A High-Wire Act That’s Not About Faith (But Sort of Is)

This was originally posted on my Patheos blog, Watching God.

When I was youngish, a friend of mine and I went to check out the Black Canyon of the Gunnison during a camping trip. It looks something like this.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia

Very pretty, yes? But it’s also a long way down from the ridge of the canyon to its rocky, watery bottom. A really, really long way down. So my friend and I—brave, stupid fellows who once tried to break through the ice on a lake while standing on it—literally crawled on our hands and knees to look over the edge. Heights are not really our thing.

This made me, perhaps, not the best person to see The Walk.

The Walk, for those of you who don’t know, is based on the true story of Frenchman Phillippe Petit’s illegal 1974 high-wire performance between World Trade Center towers. In real life, Petit spent about 45 minutes on that wire, walking and kneeling and lying down on a thin cable of steel 110 stories above the Manhattan streets. In the movie, it felt like a couple of weeks. It’s intended, I think, to be a film saluting Petit’s bravery, ingenuity and sheer stubborn will. Given my mild acrophobia, I just wanted the guy to get caught before he even started his walk. The ground’s not so bad, Phillippe. Really.

Had I been thinking about how this little tightrope stunt would impact me—in 3-D IMAX, no less—I would’ve brought in a bottle of Tums.

This is not a knock on the movie. Really, it illustrates just how effective it is. And even for me, the flick had some pretty beautiful moments in it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in The Walk

For instance, the moment when Petit (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) first steps onto the wire stretching between the two towers. Clouds envelop the scene, and the wire vanishes in a blue-cotton haze in the distance. Petit speaks of the comfort that comes from placing his foot on the wire—how it supports him, how the towers support the wire.

And in that moment, it felt like a picture of faith.

Faith and tightrope walking, oddly enough, have a strange, shared history. Nik Wallenda, the tightrope walker who walked over Niagara Falls in 2012, is a Christian whose faith is instrumental in his work. “I grew up in a born-again Christian family,” he told QMI Agency at the time. “That’s the way I was raised and I find comfort and peace in that.” Loads of preachers have recounted the story of another famed French tightrope walker, Charles Blondin, who walked across the falls in 1860. He allegedly performed many great feats on that line, including pushing a wheelbarrow full of potatoes across it.

“Do you believe I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow?” he allegedly asked the crowd gathered at the edge of Niagara Falls. “Yes!” the crowd shouted. But when he asked for volunteers, not a one of them took Blondin up on the trip.

It’s an illustration, pastors say, of a weak faith: We say we believe, but do we? Do we really?

I thought of that illustration as I watched the end of The Walk—Petit held up by this thin cord. Petit trusted. He had faith.

It was not a blind faith: He calculated the weight of the wire needed, the stabilizers it would require, all manner of eventualities. He’d been a tightrope walker for years, even practicing on wires that his friends would tug and yank, replicating the high winds he might expect 110 stories up. He trusted his skills, his equipment, his friends.

But the stunt required a severe, unblinking sort of faith even so. Any sensible man might still look at the wire—stretched nearly 1,400 feet up in the air—and grow fearful. I mean, how could a sensible man not? But Petit was taught by his mentor, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), that fear and doubt mean death. When Petit feels an inkling of doubt during his training in the movie, the wire shakes and buckles. Sometimes, Petit falls. He has the skills to make it across, no doubt. But if he doubts his skills? Loses heart in the moment? If he lets the wire’s height or length get to him? There’s no way Petit would make it across.

“It’s impossible,” Petit says. “But I’ll do it.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in The Walk

I was reading a story the other day bySalon’s Darin Strauss about how difficult it is, in this age of rationality, to have faith. “How, against a contemporary background, do you contemplate the almighty?” he wrote. “Who believes there’s an oasis in 2015’s scattered metaphysical sand?” Some say that it’s impossible to believe in God today. Foolish, perhaps. The ground’s not so bad.

But yet, those of us who believe in God feel our faith underneath our feet, holding us up. We feel the strength of what our faith is attached to. This is not a strange, frightening place; it is life itself. We believe. And we walk.

“The wire is a safe place for me to be,” Phillippe Petit once said. “It’s a rigorous and simple path. It’s straight. You don’t have meanders like, you know, on the ground, in life.”

Funny how walking as a Christian is often characterized in the same way. Rigorous. Simple. Straight.

I can’t claim to be free of fears or doubts. If my faith is a wire, it sometimes shakes. I sometimes fall. But I do have faith—faith that something special is waiting on the other side.

A Friendly Response to a Friendly Atheist

I read an interesting little essay from Hemant Mehta, the “Friendly Atheist,” on CNN this morning, outlining some reasons why Millennials are leaving the Christian Church. He suggests that Christianity’s “sloppy defense” (“they’re anti-gay, anti-women, anti-science, anti-sex-education and anti-doubt, to name a few of the most common criticisms,” he writes) is partly to blame. But he also points to the inroads that the atheist movement has made in the culture—the atheists’ large, vocal presence on the Internet perhaps being the most obvious. Of this “impressive offense,” he writes:

Christians can no longer hide in a bubble, sheltered from opposing perspectives, and church leaders can’t protect young people from finding information that contradicts traditional beliefs.

An Agape feast from an early Christian catacomb

I believe Mehta’s right on that score. There is no safe place to hide from ideas in the 21^st century. The Internet has made even traditional notions of privacy feel rather quaint, and certainly we cannot expect our most cherished beliefs to be held without scrutiny.

That said, “hiding” has never been exactly high on a list of Christian virtues, anyway. While keeping a low profile has sometimes been necessary for Christians during the faith’s long and bumpy history, Christianity has always thrived best out in the open, facing the future—whatever it might hold—with a certain boldness.

And well we should be bold.

I’ve seen a great many stories over the last several days that track Christianity’s declining influence in the culture. According to the Pew Religion and Public Life Project, nearly 20 percent of all adults claim no religious affiliation, with nearly a third of people under 30 being unaffiliated. Author Nigel Barber claims in an e-book that atheism will replace religion by 2041.

Numbers like that can fuel a lot of angst among the faithful. We see church attendance dip year by year and congregations grow older. Folks who feel that the country should reflect traditional Christian values lament the tide of secularism. Mehta, with his “offense/defense” imagery, suggests we’re locked in a battle, and Christians can often feel that way, too—a battle in which the best, most persuasive ideology will eventually prevail. We feel like we have to fight.

But Christians must remember that this “battle” is, in the end, almost completely moot. We are not championing an ideal as much as we—both Christians and atheists—are searching for truth. And the truth is not dependent on how many people convert to one side or the other.

Man Reading by Candlelight by Matthias Stom

Religion and atheism aren’t warring over the merits of a political ideology or a plot of disputed land. We are simply asking the same question, but answering it in different ways: Is there a God? The answer, while unknowable, isn’t decided through debate. Either He’s out there or He isn’t. Whether religion or atheism wins this 21^st century war of words is beside the point. It’s like fighting over a vacant lot—but ownership has already been decreed by deed, locked away in a mysterious safe somewhere.

Now, if you believe in a God like I do—one who’s in control—that should give some comfort in these uncertain times. That doesn’t mean we should be passive to challenges to our faith. But we shouldn’t get defensive, sloppy or no. This isn’t a war. We’re simply telling the world the truth as we see it—conveying that truth as best we can all its beauty and mystery and paradoxical rationality. Yes, we may be wrong. Then again, so may they.

If we focus in on those big questions instead of getting tangled up in smaller ones, I think we’ll be better positioned to show people God’s love and grace.

There’s no guarantee that the trends we see will reverse anytime soon, of course. I’d expect that the religious “nones” will continue to rise in influence in the United States. But we must not confuse trends with truth. Christianity has often been threatened. It’s often been beaten, quite frankly. And yet, the faith never seems to lose. It’s remarkable. It’s outlandish historical resilience would be enough to give, you would think, some atheists pause.

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.

I think if Chesterton was alive today, he’d be pretty amused by the Christian hand-wringing over the rise of the “nones.” Yes, Europe is growing more secular—and yet there are more Christians on the planet than ever before. Even as the numbers of the “nones” grow as a percentage of the population, another Pew study tells us that “the unaffiliated have one of the lowest retention rates of any of the major religious groups, with most people who were raised unaffiliated now belonging to one religion or another.”    

Christianity is Cool Hand Luke. It is Rocky. It’s a stubborn cuss. For at least three centuries, atheists have claimed that the end of faith is just around the corner. But we faithful are still here, proclaiming our truth with cheerful boldness. 

The Conjuring: Good Exorcise

Demons are not very subtle.

Every demon I've ever seen—restricted, thankfully, to movies—have been about as restrained as Lady Gaga after chugging a few Red Bulls. They stomp around and scare people and spit pea soup. They scream profanities and chant in Latin and sometimes twist the folks they're possessing into pretzels.

If I was a demon, I think I'd try to play it a little cooler. Because as soon as your host starts to weep blood or levitate out of bed, it's sure to bring the exorcists around, and before you know it, poof! You're being cast out and forced to endure interminable lectures from your higher-ups.

Of course, subtle demons would hardly be the subject of wide-release movies, either. Maybe demons just like the attention. Or maybe there's something in the very character of a demon that makes it impossible to be demure. After all, isn't self-restraint some sort of a … virtue?

The demon from The Conjuring certainly could use some counseling on how to control one's impulses.

She wasn't always a demon: Back in the 1800s, she was simply a witch named Bathsheeba who, shortly after her son was born, sacrificed the child to Satan. As soon as the deed was discovered, she ran out of her lovely Rhode Island home and hung herself on a tree outside—using her final breath to curse whoever might dare to buy the property forever after.

But unless you put these sorts of things in writing, people tend to forget. And so a century or so later, the Perron family (hubbie Roger, wife Carolyn and their five girls) move into the house and live quite peacefully for, oh, five minutes. And then things start to unravel.

The very first night, they find mysterious boarded-up cellar—something you'd think would've been spotted by an inspector. The next morning, the family dog is dead. Before long, the girls are screaming and sleepwalking and playing with strange, invisible playmates—and it's clearly about time to bring the professionals in—Ed and Lorraine Warren, two demonologists who'd go on to earn a measure of fame dealing with a certain house (and its undesirable inhabitants) in Amityville, New York.

The Conjuring, like The Amityville Horror, is allegedly based on a true story straight from the real case files of the Warrens. While I’m sure the makers took a few liberties (and frankly, I hope they did), the real Lorraine Warren said they got the crux of the story right. Moreover, the Warrents are fervent Catholics who believe very sincerely in both demons and the power of God to dispel them. At the end of the movie, we see a quote from Ed Warren:

"The fairy tale is true. The devil does exist. God indeed exists. And for us, as people, our very destiny hinges upon which one we elect to follow."

As such, The Conjuring is a pretty interesting feature for a Christian movie reviewer such as myself. The movie takes its faith seriously—so much so that faith-based marketers Grace Hill were involved in the publicity push. It's the sort of movie that embraces not just a generic sort of supernatural happening, but a real devil poking at a real, Christian God.

It's not the first horror flick to tackle spirituality so sincerely, of course. The original The Exorcist—the scariest movie I've ever seen—was based on a book written by a Christian (William Peter Blatty), who intended it as a "sermon that no one can sleep through." Scott Derrickson, who directed the well-regarded The Exorcism of Emily Rose, told Christianity Today that "horror is a perfect genre for Christians to be involved with."

I know of people who've felt the first real tug of faith through movies such as this.

But many Christians, particularly conservative Evangelical Christians, don’t typically like horror. It’s dark stuff, after all. Disturbing. They're certainly never very "nice" movies. Rarely are they uplifting.

Derrickson again:

To me, this genre deals more overtly with the supernatural than any other genre, it tackles issues of good and evil more than any other genre, it distinguishes and articulates the essence of good and evil better than any other genre, and my feeling is that a lot of Christians are wary of this genre simply because it's unpleasant. The genre is not about making you feel good, it is about making you face your fears. And in my experience, that's something that a lot of Christians don't want to do.

I have a complex reaction to horror movies—too muddled with personal baggage, perhaps, to be completely fair. I understand the unease that many Christians feel, but I'm sympathetic to Derrickson's point of view.

Horror movies are designed to move us away from a place of comfort, and I wonder sometimes whether we Christians can sometimes be a little too consumed with making ourselves comfortable. We sometimes tune out ideas that threaten our worldview, shun people who might challenge us. Sometimes, it seems the evangelical subculture goes to some pretty great lengths to keep us from encountering anything that might discomfort us: We can spend our childhood in Christian schools, go to Christian colleges, do all our business at Christian establishments (helpfully noted by Christian business directories). Yes, the Apostle Paul did tell us to "not conform to the pattern of this world," but I don't know if he would've advocated building a whole new world so we wouldn't have to deal with the other one at all.

This is not to equate a dislike of horror movies with our sometime impulse to protect and even isolate ourselves. But still, it’s interesting. At times, I think we long to make earth a little more like heaven. Horror flicks, and often even the world around us, remind us that heaven is a long way off. We live in a dark, uncomfortable and sometimes frightening place. And movies like The Conjuring—in their own rather unsubtle way—hint at how frightening, without God, it might be.

Could America Use More Secularism?

In 1971, John Lennon asked us to Imagine a world without religion. Turns out, a good chunk of us would rather not.

American pollsters have been seeing an increase in the country's "nones" for years now: About one-fifth of Americans say they have no religious preference, up from about 15% who said the same just five years ago. But according to a recent study by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, many Americans see the decline of religion as a bad thing. And that includes a surprising chunk of nones.

Odd, huh?

Actually, all of Pew's numbers are pretty interesting—even if some of them make perfect sense. I, for one, am not too surprised that about half of Americans (48%) believe that the country's rise in secularism is a "bad thing." We're still a very religious country: Even with the rise of the nones, 80% of us are at least nominally affiliated with a religion of some kind. And it stands to reason that most of those affiliated would see some sort of tangible benefit to having faith.

But drill down to how the "unaffiliated" answered, and things grow more curious. While 24 percent believe that the erosion of religion is good (perhaps agreeing with the late Christopher Hitchens that "religion poisons everything"), nearly as many—19 percent—say it's bad.

The numbers are almost as surprising for my own demographic block—that of "white evangelical protestants.” While a gigantic 78 percent of them say that they're bummed by the country's growing secularization, 4 percent say they're kinda happy about it. Granted, that's not a huge number, but still. Why would evangelical Christians—a demographic prone to handing out Bibles and shouting from street corners and, sometimes, baptizing children against their parents will—be happy about our country's growing secularization? Do we just want there to always be a steady supply of people to heed our Baptist church altar calls? Do we love our Luis Palau crusades that much?

The whole study left Hemant Mehta of Patheos' Friendly Atheist blog a little perplexed. "I don’t know what’s weirder," he writes. "That there are evangelical Christians out there who are happy that more people are becoming non-religious… or that there are a lot of unaffiliated people who are upset by it."

But on further reflection, maybe those numbers aren't so weird after all.

First, the "nones." These are people who don't have a religious affiliation, but that doesn't mean they're happy about it. Maybe there are lots of people who'd like to believe in something but can't. They'd like to have faith, but they haven't found a compelling reason to go there. I know folks like this. I also know atheists or agnostics who reject religion, but they appreciate all the good that religion can do. Faith-based groups are behind some of the world's most beneficial charitable efforts. Religion can foster a tremendous sense of responsibility to the poor and needy. And even when we leave altruism out of it, churches can be great places to meet people and find community. Even if God's not in the picture, the Church (with all due respect to Mr. Hitchens) is responsible for a great deal of good in the world.

As far as those 4 percent of evangelical Christians who think a more secular culture is a good thing, maybe I can help answer. In a way, I think I might be in that 4 percent.

Don't misunderstand me. I think religion is a really, really good force in the world. I'd like for everyone to see not just how beneficial, but how beautiful and how real it can be.

But at the same time, I think that when Christianity goes unchallenged, it can get soft and even a little mean. We can take the beauty of the faith for granted. And then when we are challenged, we sometimes lose the knack to express our own views with kindness and thoughtfulness. "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another," the biblical proverb says, and I think there's some truth to that when it comes to faith, as well. I like to talk about this stuff. I like to be challenged some. I think it's healthy. Whether we're Christian or atheists or Muslims or Buddhists, we should know what we believe and why. We should know why it matters to us. Why it's important. Do you agree? 

Iron Man 3: Stripped Down and Saved

Iron Man 3 does not pretend to be profound.

Oh, it's a fine movie—fun and funny and thrilling and full of Robert Downey Jr. cracking wise and all that. Moreover, it allowed me a pretty cool pair of 3-D glasses. A fellow reviewer said that he was going to use his for his next welding project.

My Iron Man 3 glasses, as modeled by my daughter's stuffed dog, Mr. Reeces

But while the original Iron Man and its (admittedly disappointing) sequel had some reasonably obvious messages of purpose and redemption, this chapter felt a little depth-challenged—a pure popcorn muncher on the surface. Sure, I understand that superhero movies aren't necessarily (ahem) suited to Russian novel-level musings about life and death and whatnot. But Christopher Nolan's Batman movies spoiled me—and the Iron Man 3 trailers got me primed for something grittier and deeper than we've seen lately from the Marvel movie universe.

(An aside: Can you imagine what sort of movie this would've been had Terrence Malick directed it? I imagine Iron Man walking through wheat fields. The armor surrounds me, binds me, imprisons me, he'd say, staring at a sky smeared with irredescent clouds. Please, restart my faulty ARC reactor. Make me whole again.)

But there's an element here worth, I think, a bit of space. And it centers on the fact that Tony Stark spends so much time outside his suit.

Now, I touched on that topic in my Plugged In review (you can read it here, if you like), but to recap a bit: The bad 'un du jour here is The Mandarin, a nefarious Bin Laden-like bully who promises to engulf the United States in a storm of terror. And when Tony Stark (Iron Man) calls The Mandarin out on national media, the villain blows Stark's Malibu casa into tiny cornflakes-size pieces.

Now, this is critical, because Stark's power is mostly derived from all his metal suits, all of which he builds in his state-of-the-art workshop. The attack sends his favorite suits, his workshop and most of the rest of his worldly possessions down to the briny deep—and Iron Man himself, for that matter. Stark survives, but just barely. And his suit is much the worse for wear. It gets him to Tennessee but conks out right after. Even Jarvis, Stark’s ever-present computerized helpmate, goes silent. And while Stark thinks the suit can be fixed and recharged, he's largely suitless and gadgetless for a good chunk of the movie. The guy goes from having everything to having nothing in one quick helicopter attack.

We're all familiar with the whole "rags to riches" narrative—something like you'd find in Victorian-era books by Charles Dickens or whatnot, where a slave or street urchin or down-and-outer reverses his luck through talent and gumption to success, fame and fortune. But Christianity (a faith that’s positively revels in paradox) features far more in riches to rags stories (that often still have, again paradoxically, happy endings). Take a look at Joseph, who started out rich, then was sold into slavery, got rich again, then was thrown in jail, then finally rose to political power where he saved his whole formerly estranged family. Or there's King David, who after a pretty good run as king of Israel, was usurped by his own son and forced to flee. He eventually reclaimed the throne, but learned a lesson or two from his experience. Everyone from Adam to Paul experienced a material fall of some sort. And indeed, you could cast Judea's Babylonian exile as a riches-to-rags honing. God often seems to be a proponent of the whole "no pain, no gain" school of thought: When we get too comfortable and self-assured, we find ourselves in a period of sometimes extreme discomfort, where we rediscover meaning and realign our priorities.

Dickens wrote a riches-to-rags-to-salvation story of his own, by the way: A Christmas Carol. In it, Ebenezer Scrooge begins the story rich and bitter. But through a night full of scourging, suffering and self-revelation—when he's shown his past impoverished state and comes to grips with his own present moral bankruptcy—he awakes to find himself a reformed man, rich in every sense of the word.

This is particularly interesting, considering that Iron Man 3's makers had A Christmas Carol in mind when they produced the thing, which explain why the summer's first blockbuster was set at Christmastime. Stark must deal with the "demons of his past," as he calls them, struggle with today's trials and recast the future in a more positive light.

But there's more at work here that feels even more spiritual. See, Stark isn't just stripped of his metal wonder suit as a sort of psychological boot camp: He must humble himself in order to be saved.

We all know that Stark, as Iron Man, is a superhero. Superheroes save people. And he does his share of saving here, too. But without his bulletproof suit, Stark is vulnerable. He's in the need of saving—and in this movie, he is saved, repeatedly. By his girlfriend. By his best friend. By some kid he meets in Tennessee.

And that, in a roundabout way, is a deeply Christian message as well. The faith tells us that we can't rely on our own powers (supercharged armor or no) for salvation. We can't save ourselves. We are in need of saving.

Now, I’m pretty sure the movie’s makers didn’t intend to slap in a spiritual metaphor. It doesn’t really feel like that kind of movie. Still, it is interesting. And a little profound, whatever the movie’s actual intentions might’ve been.