There Are No Lions Here

A couple of months back, I remember, there were a couple of entries floating around on a few blogs complaining about the portrayal of Christianity in Comics.

They were very eloquent, well reasoned arguments, but something about them left a mildly bad taste in my mouth. I decided to file it aside for later thought.

Very recently I found myself revisiting the idea in my mind. On one level, I sympathize completely. It absolutely sucks to see one's belief system and life-path reduced to a caricature. I've complained about that very thing in my post about Catholicism. It's not fun and can be downright meanspirited.

So I sympathized with the bloggers in that sense, but there was something about their entries that grated on me. A sense of persecution that left a bad aftertaste. Not all of the complaints were like this, of course, but there were quite a few that seemed to be claiming victimhood.

And I'm sorry, but when you are a member of the dominant religion of this country. When your religious creed is regularly used to deny basic human rights to a group of people (regardless of whether you yourself believes this is right or wrong). When people have to fight to keep a scientifically supported theory like evolution taught in science class over religious doctrine and to keep organized institutionalized prayer out of public schools...

Then you can NOT play the victim card here. You CAN'T. Your religion runs this country. Your religion is being shoved down the religious minority's throats every minute of every day. Even if it were true that Christianity is unfairly portrayed in this one area, you still hold dominion over every other aspect of our lives!

Besides, I'm reasonably certain that if you got the major decision making personnel of Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse and so on together and asked each one what their religion is, the majority of them would answer some denomination of Christianity. This is hardly astonishing as Christianity is the dominant religion of this country.

(At the risk of making swift generalizations, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine men named "Didio" and "Quesada" were at least raised Christian, regardless of their religions now.)

Actually, I'm not even sure that the complaint ultimately holds weight. I mean, sure, those mean intolerant preacher caricatures are infuriating, but let's look for a moment at Adherent.com's website cataloging the religious affiliations of comic book characters.

This site is incredibly useful because it categorizes all of the superheroes by their religious affiliations as established in the comics themselves. If you click on the links provided, you'll see that they've gathered a variety of evidence for each, based on creator quotes, scholarly theories, and examples within the text/graphics themselves.

Now, I'd estimate 1/2 to 2/3 of the names on that list to be some denomination of Christianity. Admittedly, the amount that they practice within the text can be debatable. But still the number of Christian heroes vastly outnumber those of any other religion.

Under-represented? Really?

Sure, we rarely see outward expressions of faith by these characters. Except for celebration of Christmas, naturally, or the giant church scene in Infinite Crisis. But we rarely see a Jewish person do anything more than wear a Star of David or light a menorah. Diana gets a little more focus on her pagan religion, sure, but given that the gods created her... It's really not any more focus though, than is received by characters such as the Spectre, Zauriel or Peter David's Supergirl, all of whom became living representatives of a (usually) benevolent Judeo-Christian God.

Even the atheists don't get very much lip-service, honestly. When they do, it's designed to contrast them as a minority against the rest of the DCU. That's hardly counting.

I can see why this can lead to the desire to show more outwardly religious characters in the DCU. And I'm always glad to see that sort of character exploration.

But when you think about it, most of these characters are already living up to the ideals of the Christian religion. They're just, kind, brave. They protect the weak. They act with honor. They do unto others and all that.

Basically, they're living the Christian ideal already. In as much as anyone humanly can.

Finally, there is one main reason that I think the complaints ultimately lose momentum...

Superman.

According to Adherents.com, Superman is a Methodist. While it's not overtly stated in the text, as far as I know, it's pretty clearly a part of the man's life. We've seen him enter into religious dialogues with clergymen. We've seen him attend church. We've seen that he does NOT drink alcohol.

He's pretty clearly portrayed as a quietly pious religious devotee. Perhaps not all the scripture means everything that it once may have, but the spirit is clearly there.

And he's brave, wise, true. He makes mistakes, but only out of the best of intentions. He believes in the goodness of people, in helping where needed and stepping back to let people live their own lives.

He's tolerant. He makes a very visible effort to respect everyone's different beliefs. He's attended Shabbos dinner and made a very sincere attempt in following the customs that were very different from his own.

Superman is one character, yes, but he is the flagship character. Superman IS DC Comics. The image of Superman standing on the world, cape waving like an American Flag. That's an image recognized by people all over the world. He is SUPERMAN.

And he's one hell of a good Christian.

I admit, Superman and other devout Christian heroes will never get the attention with regards to their religion that the loud, obnoxious preacher gets. When people think of Christianity in comics, they're not going to think of the good guys, of the moderates and the temperates, tolerants and true. They're going to think of that raving preacher, threatening fire and brimstone, demonized for hatred and intolerance.

They do say that Art is a mirror of Life.