Are there Christian themes in superhero movies? What can we learn from superheroes? - Podcast Ep 112

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. Today's episode we'll be discussing a fun topic, but also a topic that can really lead into some really good conversations about faith, about Christ, about life.

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We'll be discussing the topic of superheroes and the popularity of superhero movies and TV shows and comics and all of those things.

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Hugely popular. So joining me is

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Frank Turek, we've had Frank on before, and he's just recently with his son, written the book,

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Hollywood Heroes. So Frank, welcome back. Shea, thanks for having me on. Glad to talk about this.

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This is a kind of a fun topic, movies and fantasy movies, superhero movies. It's great that so many of these movies can actually help us discuss theology, biblical life lessons, and apologetics.

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So that's what this book tries to do. For sure. So to start out, what do you think is the root cause behind such a fascination in superheroes?

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I think since God has put eternity on our hearts, and he's also put on our hearts the idea that we wanna be taken from this world of pain, evil, and suffering to a place of bliss, that these superhero movies do that, and so that's why they resonate with us.

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We all wanna be taken out of this world of pain and suffering and taken to a place of bliss, and that's, of course, what

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Christianity promises. And that's what these superheroes do. In fact, it's interesting, Shane, if you look at the top 25 grossing movies of all time, 23 out of the top 25 are in some way fantasy movies.

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They have an element of the paranormal or supernatural in them. There's only two on there that I don't think have any supernatural aspects in it.

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That's Titanic and Furious 7. Out of that, the other 23 all have supernatural elements in it.

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Because people wanna be taken from this world to, as they say, a place of bliss, and that's, of course, what

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Christianity promises, and it makes these movies so likable and so enthralling and so enchanting because it fits what's on our hearts.

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As C .S. Lewis famously said, if I find myself with a desire for something that this world can't satisfy, it probably means

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I was made for another world, and we are. Yeah, absolutely. And just to let you know, so Fast and Furious 7,

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I'm pretty sure I've seen that one, but with some of the ridiculous things they do with cars in those movies, it would take the supernatural to accomplish some of the things they do with those cars.

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So yeah, 24 out of 25, how about that? That's right, that's right. I agree with you, okay.

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So I'm, again, I'm a big fan of the genre. I grew up reading comic books, and so I really enjoy the superhero movies now because now it's like all the stuff that was going on in my imagination as a kid, seeing it on the screen.

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So I really enjoy it. But also kind of struggle is, I've heard a lot of people give, like the

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Jesus is the greatest superhero speech, and trying to stretch the analogy just a little bit too far.

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And at the same time, I see how it can be used positively. Just a really quick example. My wife is the director of our church's

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Awana program, and we had a special night where everyone came in dressed as superheroes. And I actually have a

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Captain America costume. So I dressed up as Captain America, and then went to each of the age groups and actually presented the gospel.

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And I found out later that a little boy who was also dressed as Captain America thought

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I was the real Captain America, and he was so enthralled that he at least made a profession of faith in Christ as a result.

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So I recognize how God can use something like this, but at the same time,

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I don't wanna take the superhero thing too far in applying it to Jesus. What have you learned kind of in comparing the two?

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And there are some analogies, but you don't wanna take it too far. Yeah, I think that when you look at these superhero movies, they do demonstrate aspects of what we call the ultimate hero,

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Jesus. Now, Jesus is not a superhero, he's God. And we draw a distinction in the first chapter of the book,

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Hollywood Heroes. We draw a distinction between the true God and the attributes of superheroes.

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And we say they're in two different categories, but there are some things that parallel God in these superhero characters.

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They're just not to the same degree, quite obviously. And so, so many of these stories, and here are the stories we go through, the movie franchises we go through in the book,

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Hollywood Heroes, How Your Favorite Movies Reveal God. We cover Captain America, Iron Man, Harry Potter, I know some

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Christians have problems with Harry Potter, we can talk about that if you want. Lord of the Rings, Wonder Woman, Batman, Star Wars, Superman is in there as well.

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And we say the storylines, the good versus evil, and the idea that somebody has to come in and sacrifice to save people, that all points to the greatest story ever told.

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It's partially borrowed from the greatest story ever told. And the attributes that some of these heroes exhibit, primarily sacrifice being the biggest one, is of course the greatest form of love, as Jesus said before he went to the cross.

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So kind of as an example of that, I'm sure you're familiar with the Matrix trilogy movies, the original series, the directors, producers were as diehard atheists, anti -Christians as you can get.

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They produced a series of movies where a hero who is known as the One has to sacrifice himself to save all of humanity from, it's like, it's just amazing how that's so interwoven,

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I think into our very being, the recognition that we have a problem that needs, for which we need a savior.

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Yeah, in fact, if I could use an example from the book to illustrate the power of that in our hearts and minds, one of my favorite movie franchises is

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Iron Man, The Avengers, because Tony Stark starts out a lot like us,

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Shay, he starts out as a flawed individual who you never think is gonna become a hero, right? He's a playboy, he's a billionaire, he's an amoral arms dealer, he's got what we think we would want to be happy, he's got money, he's got power, he's got a great girlfriend, you know, sex, money, and power, the three big things that we think are gonna make us happy, but Tony Stark isn't happy, why is he not happy?

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Because he has no purpose in life, he has no identity, he doesn't even know where he's going or why he's here, he has everything to live with and nothing to live for, and then an event occurs that turns his life around, one of his own weapons that his company sold to terrorists explodes near him and put shrapnel in him, in his chest, and he has to have a device installed in his chest to guard his heart from encroaching shrapnel, if that device fails, he dies.

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Now for me, I don't think the movie writers intended this, but for me, what a great visual illustration of what

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I think is the second most important verse in the entire Bible, second only to the gospel itself, for today's generation, and it's

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Proverbs 4 .23, which says, above all else, guard your heart because everything you do flows from it.

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Our culture says follow your heart, the Bible says guard your heart, Tony Stark has been following his heart and he's miserable, he's full of anxiety, he doesn't know where he's going, what he's doing, he's about to be alone because his girlfriend's about to leave him for what he's done, he's just not dialed in, but as soon as he begins to guard his heart, he eventually, through a long series of sanctification acts, becomes a hero to, at the end of Endgame, spoiler alert, he sacrifices himself to save the world, and that resonates with audiences.

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Now imagine this, Shay, if instead of that, at the end of Endgame, Tony Stark got to the end of Endgame as Iron Man with his other

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Avenger buddies and they're about to take on Thanos and he looks at his Avenger buddies and he goes, guys, I'm just not interested in taking on Thanos today,

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I'm just not feeling it, you know what, I gotta get back to following my heart and taking care of just me,

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I'm out, and then the movie ended. Would anybody be enchanted with that movie? Would anybody be inspired with that movie?

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No, even though the culture says follow your heart, follow your heart, follow your heart, as soon as we see someone follow their heart and make it all about them, that's not inspiring, that's dispiriting, we don't like that, right?

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What inspires us is sacrifice, what inspires us is love, what inspires us is a story like Jesus.

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That's why we say in the book Hollywood Heroes, if you like Iron Man, you're gonna love Jesus, if you like Harry Potter, you're gonna love

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Jesus, if you like Batman, you're gonna love Jesus, why? Because they're all sacrificing in order to save people from evil, and that's what

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Jesus does. Absolutely, so I'm more of a Marvel guy myself,

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I'm familiar with the DC as well, but I was interested in your portrayal of Captain America, what's a few things you've noticed in Captain America's story that you found?

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Well, unlike Tony Stark, Steve Rogers doesn't need moral development, right? He's good from the beginning, even though he's so weak physically when he starts out, that nobody thinks he can be the super soldier except this one doctor, even though he starts out really weak, he's the guy that agrees to dive on the grenade to save his friends, even though it was a fake grenade, he thought it was a real grenade, all the other folks scatter and he dives on the grenade, right, and then we see in Iron Man's, I'm sorry, in Captain America's character, he's always ready to sacrifice to save somebody else from the very beginning, he's even ready to take on Iron Man who wants to take out

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Captain America's friend, Bucky, right, he's gonna sacrifice to save Bucky, he's gonna sacrifice himself to save the world,

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Captain America is always ready to do that, you never have to worry what Captain America's gonna do, like Jesus, right, he's always righteous, you never have to question that, you do have to question whether Tony Stark's gonna do the right thing, he needs a lot of sanctification, but Captain America doesn't, but Jesus goes further than Captain America, where Captain America will die for his friends, only

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Jesus will die for his enemies, so while there are parallels, Jesus is perfect and Captain America isn't,

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Captain America can still, even though he's righteous, come across as a self -righteous hair splitter, right, he can annoy people, notice

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Jesus never does that, even though Jesus is righteous, completely righteous, he's also full of grace, right, he has both sides of what appear to be opposing attributes, he is completely mission -focused, but he's also loving and people -focused, he's fully confident, but he's also humble, he is quite powerful, but he's also tender, you don't see this in other characters, only in Jesus do you see it, nobody in the history of fiction or non -fiction other than Jesus has these kind of qualities.

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Yeah, so, yeah, again, the two chapters that resonated most with me were the

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Captain America and Iron Man, because I'm just so familiar with the franchise, but some other people in the office would not forgive me if I didn't give you an opportunity to talk about Wonder Woman briefly, so what are some of the parallels you see in the story of Wonder Woman?

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Well, Wonder Woman, her two superpowers are unlike the superpowers of the other superheroes, her two superpowers are love and truth, right?

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She carries the lasso of truth, and she's trying to get people to love one another, the other characters are just trying to use force to overpower their enemies, but not

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Wonder Woman, in fact, in the second feature movie with her in it, Wonder Woman 1984, the villain is

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Max Lord, and I don't have time to tell you the whole plot, but basically this guy is in it for himself, and he's ignoring his son, and the way

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Wonder Woman defeats this villain, who, by the way, is really causing the entire world to about to go into a nuclear exchange, the way she overcomes him is not with power, it's by getting him to repent of what he's done, and to focus back on his son, and she has the lasso of truth that helps her do that, and of course, the fact that she's trying to ensure that she shows him the proper love to get him to repent, this is unlike any other superhero, also

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Wonder Woman is not someone that follows her heart, Wonder Woman would love to keep her romantic life alive with her love interest,

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Steve Trevor, but she knows if she does that, then a lot of people are going to die, so she doesn't follow her heart, she follows the truth, which is another thing that is a great lesson for our culture, you don't follow your heart, you follow the truth, and that's what

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Wonder Woman does. Absolutely, and I enjoyed that movie as well, and even like,

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I can enjoy a movie just for entertainment purposes, but then I like to get together with my wife or whatever friend

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I have to see to kind of talk through, it's like, what do you think about this, and what's the movie trying to communicate, and in contrast, what should we actually take from it?

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You know, there's a lot of things I would not have noticed unless I was writing this book with my son, but in writing the book, it takes you into a place where you have to analyze the movies a little bit more closely than just sitting back and using it as entertainment, because I'm like you, when

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I go to a movie, I just want to relax, I don't want to try and figure out, you know, what's the moral behind this, even though sometimes it's obvious, well, sometimes it isn't, but there are so many parallels once you look at these movies, and some of them are put in deliberately, some of them are not put in deliberately, but they're still there because the movie makers are still living in God's world.

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They know intuitively what inspires people and what doesn't. Yeah, so I know a lot of the ministry that God has called you to is focused on apologetics, on the defense of the

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Christian faith, and I was surprised to see how much apologetics there is in Hollywood Heroes, but what do you see as the connection there, and what led you to include so much apologetics in Hollywood Heroes?

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Well, first of all, every fantasy movie and almost every superhero movie,

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I guess every superhero movie, when you think about it, it's always a fight between good and evil. That's what makes it interesting.

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And so you have to be able to address what is evil, why does evil still exist if God exists, what is good, what is the purpose of life, why do these stories resonate with us?

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So we fold in all those questions into the chapters in Hollywood Heroes.

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Why does God allow certain evils that we can't explain? We answer that in the book as well, because in fact, one of the questions we deal with in the introduction is why does evil even exist if God is so good?

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Why doesn't he just stop all the evil in the world? And so these questions seem to just flow right out of these movies.

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If you're gonna analyze these movies, you've gotta deal with that question. In fact, that question is explicitly brought up in a movie called

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Batman vs. Superman, where Lex Luthor actually quotes Epicureus, who basically says that if there is a good

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God, why is there evil in the world? And the movie actually explores that. So we, of course, explore it in the chapter on Batman and Superman in Hollywood Heroes.

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So these questions naturally come up, right and wrong come up.

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So we deal with morality in the book. We deal also with the beginning of the universe and the design of the universe.

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That comes up in the Star Wars chapter. In fact, one of the things we ask is, suppose you're in the

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Millennium Falcon with Han Solo and Chewbacca, and Han Solo gets out of his seat and he goes, kid, get in.

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So you get in his seat and he goes, punch it, we gotta outrun this Imperial warship, right? So you immediately go to light speed.

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How long does it take you to get across our galaxy at 186 ,000 miles per second? And so we ask, what does he think?

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It's like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour, a day. How long does it take you to get across the galaxy?

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If you could go at 186 ,000 miles a second, you know how long it would take us? 100 ,000 years just to cross our galaxy.

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And so then we start talking about how big the universe is and what could have created the universe. So we fold it right into the

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Star Wars chapter. It's fascinating to this.

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Like I said earlier, I don't go to movies to engage my brain that much, but knowing enough of science that I do, it's knowing like that wouldn't work at all.

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And even some of the scenes, and I think it's Captain America Civil War where Spider -Man is commenting about what

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Captain America does with his shield. It's like, that is not obeying the laws of physics at all.

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So it's fun to disengage, but it's also fun to think about, huh, what a wonderful universe

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God has created that we can even dream these type of things and think about them and try to discover the meaning behind them.

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And the beauty of this is that when young kids especially or teenagers really get into these movies, this is a tool you can use to get them more interested in God and Christianity.

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I mean, we anticipate parents and youth pastors using the book

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Hollywood Heroes to do movie night every now and then. And I think that's a good way to communicate biblical truths, biblical life lessons, apologetics by watching movies and then discussing them after reading the chapter in the book.

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So, I mean, you're probably not gonna get an eye roll from your teenager if you say, hey, let's do movie night tonight rather than let's have another lecture about why it's wrong to do

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X, Y, or Z. Absolutely. Why don't we just see it on the big screen and then we can talk about it.

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Yeah. No, that's awesome. That's one of the things I was thinking through. I was like, I wish more youth pastors would get a hold of this because getting teenagers interested in movies is usually pretty easy.

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Easy, yeah. And getting them to talk about it afterwards. No, that'd be fantastic. Maybe asking for this question for kind of our closing question here of all this different superhero stories you've either watched or read or even thought through, which is your favorite and why?

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Well, my favorite's Iron Man, as I said earlier, because Iron Man is most like us. He's fallen, he's flawed.

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And I just like the way Robert Downey Jr. actually played the character. In fact,

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Robert Downey Jr. really was Tony Stark in real life. I mean, we say in the

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Iron Man chapter how there's probably, there hasn't been a parallel between a person's real life and the character he plays on screen any better than Robert Downey Jr.

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played Tony Stark. But if you're gonna say which movie series out of all of the series parallels

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Jesus the most, this is gonna be shocking to some Christians. But believe it or not, it's Harry Potter.

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People are gonna go, what? This is the movie that Christians boycotted. I know. They boycotted it because of the magic in it.

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And look, I agree with parents. If parents don't want their kids watching that, then

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I support that completely. But I've noticed there's a bit of a double standard, Shay, in some Christians. Because on one hand, they don't like Harry Potter, the magic in Harry Potter, but they're fine with it in Lord of the

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Rings and Chronicles of Narnia. I mean, why is that? I mean, after all, in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is a wizard.

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Well, so is Harry Potter, right? There's all sorts of stuff going on in there. And I think one of the things that caused parents to immediately shut off from Harry Potter is because when

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J .K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, she wasn't known. Nobody knew her. This didn't come out of a

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Christian publishing house. But everybody knew Tolkien was a Christian, Catholic. Everybody knew C .S. Lewis was a

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Christian. So they just assumed, it's gotta be okay, right? But they didn't know that with Rowling. But Rowling herself said the entire series of Harry Potter can be epitomized by two

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Bible verses that you see both in the books and in the movies. One is the last enemy to be destroyed is death from 1

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Corinthians 15. And the other is where your treasure is, your heart will be also from Jesus' Sermon on the

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Mount. She said those appear in the books and the movies, but I never wanted to talk about them that much because I didn't want readers to be tipped off as to where we're going.

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You say, well, why? Because the storyline in Harry Potter is basically the Bible storyline.

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Think about it this way. There are four attributes about Harry Potter that are parallels to Jesus, big ones.

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Number one, he's prophesied to be the savior of his world before he's born. And then an evil force tries to kill him as an infant.

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Does that sound familiar? Secondly, he has to live a moral life in order to be the savior of his world. Thirdly, he sacrifices himself in order to defeat the

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Satan figure, Voldemort. And then fourthly, he then resurrects from the dead and his followers then have to put their faith in him,

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Harry, in order to ultimately defeat Voldemort. This is basically the biblical story. And so you say, what about the magic in there?

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Most of the magic in the Harry Potter series is not the kind of a cult the Bible's talking about. We don't think that anybody can get on a broomstick and fly around and play a modified game of soccer like they do in the

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Harry Potter story, right? This is made up of it out of J .K. Rowling's mind, just like it was made up out of Tolkien's mind and made up out of Lewis's mind when he did

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Chronicles of Narnia. But again, if you think watching this stuff is gonna cause your young child to get involved in the occult, then don't let them watch it.

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But I don't think that's really what the movies are about. In fact, J .K. Rowling herself says, the movie is really about human nature.

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She said, Harry has to be a moral being in order to save his world. She said, you can't overcome human nature even if you have a wand.

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You've got to overcome human nature in another way. And that's what the whole movie series is about. Yeah, that's fantastic.

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I didn't read the books, but I did see all the Harry Potter movies and I even noticed some of the themes, but then reading through Hollywood Heroes was like, oh, it makes even more sense.

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And then I knew a little bit about Rowling's story, but not until really after I had read all the books did

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I hear about her faith background. So that's fascinating. Yeah, she's an Anglican actually.

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Whether she's born again, I have no idea, but she's an Anglican. Although she's been standing very strong on this trans issue.

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I don't know if you've noticed that. She's been actually just excoriated by the left because she said, look, if you're gonna say that trans women, really biological men are women, then you're just erasing women.

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You're erasing all the gains women have made. You're saying there are no genders, that there are no genders, there are no women.

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So she's been pretty strong on that issue. She has. Well, Frank, again, thank you for both writing the book,

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Hollywood Heroes, and we'll include links in the show notes at podcast .gotquestions .org and also at the

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YouTube description when this video goes online where people can purchase the book and learn more about you and Cross -Examined and the different apologetics ministries you're involved in.

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But thank you for joining me on the show today. I truly enjoyed our conversation. Oh, thanks, Shay. I enjoyed it as well.

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And thanks for telling other folks about the book. We hope it's gonna be useful for, particularly for young people and other people interested in movies.

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Again, Hollywood Heroes, I think it's a fantastic book. And I think if I were to, kind of what we discussed, if I were to say who this book most be useful for,

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I think the context of like a parent or a youth pastor wanting to discuss movies with their child or with the kids in their ministry would probably be an amazingly effective use of this book.

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And even training you how to recognize Christian themes in other movies as well. So Frank, again, thank you.

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This has been the Got Questions podcast. Got questions? The Bible has answers. And we'll keep fighting.