Batman has been fighting evil since 1939, but Gotham City is still plagued by supervillains. Down every dark alleyway, it seems, there’s a costumed lawbreaker with a psychotic crime theme and a disturbing outlook on life.
These bad guys don’t merely steal your wallet: They rob your hope or pilfer your values. They’re evangelists of evil, in some ways—trying to convince you that they’re right and that Batman is the city’s real loon.
Gotham’s never going to be confused with Eden—not with all the city’s sins hanging thick and dark like they do. It’s a fallen place in a fallen world that, frankly, looks like the rest of the world.
In our world, we’re confronted by threats—only ours aren’t named Joker or Riddler or Killer Croc. They go by other names: Consumerism. Fanaticism. Relativism. Atheism. They’re all card-carrying members of the dastardly League of Isms, and there’s no way to get away from them. And, in a culture that’s growing more pluralistic and more secular by the day, the Isms just grow stronger.
When young Christians grapple with these Isms, the fight can leave them shaken, even broken. What if they take a tip or two from Batman? What if they could unmask these Isms for what they truly are and show the world a better way?
It’s tough work, but someone needs to do it. Let’s see how Batman can help young people understand and confront some of today’s biggest Isms.
The Penguin and Consumerism
In a culture positively bursting with smartphones and iPads, this Ism is easy to spot—much like Penguin himself. He’s a short, well-dressed little man with a fondness for, as he would say, “collecting,” and he’d like nothing better than to collect Batman’s cowl.
Penguin’s not hard to figure out. Like consumerists everywhere, he isn’t motivated as much by thoughts and ideals as he is by stuff. He’s in this world to collect as much as he can and, if he could figure out a way to take it with him to the next, he’d try to do that, too.
But when we see him deal with Batman—a guy who is motivated by an ideal—Penguin doesn’t typically stand much of a chance. Consumerism can’t stand up to conviction. When we lift our goals beyond the latest gadget and set them instead on eternal truth, we become strong.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal,” Jesus says (
Catwoman and Amoralism
Penguin and Catwoman can seem like they’re cut from the same black cloth. But while Penguin’s in it for the stuff, Catwoman just loves the thrill. She flaunts authority, lives for the moment and hates it when anyone tells her what to do. She doesn’t hate Batman: She just thinks he’s a little square.
Catwoman represents an Ism that is incredibly powerful and popular in the world today: If it feels good, do it. Challenge authority. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do. The only thing that matters is the sensate here and now.
And yet, in the 70 years Catwoman’s been tangling with Batman, here’s what we see over and over: Catwoman likes the guy—not in spite of his straight-and-narrow outlook, but because of it. In one of Batman’s alternate universes, Catwoman actually reforms and marries the big lug.
This Ism sometimes tries to tell Christians that a life of faith is one of restriction: We shouldn’t lie or have sex or swear. But in truth, we all secretly long for a little guidance, because we understand that, when we’re living as God wants us to live, that’s where we find real freedom. As
Clayface and Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a hard Ism to pin down. It’s a soft Ism, infinitely changeable and pliable. Instead of hardcore truth, postmodernism emphasizes the importance of relationship. And while postmodernism isn’t necessarily bad, it can be bad when taken to its extreme: When truth comes to mean nothing and relationship means everything. Extreme postmodernism postulates there is no truth, except for what we see as truth. Faith becomes not a matter of truth but of practicality.
As such, this Ism can look a lot like Clayface, because both of ‘em can look like almost anything. Clayface is a guy who can be all things to all people: Infinitely malleable, he can pretend to be your best friend and hurt you when you least expect it.
When Batman deals with Clayface, he must see past the villain’s ever-changing garb and get a fix on the squishy center underneath. And when we as Christians face this powerful Ism, we must do the same: Look past the style, look past the relativism and see what’s at the core: Does this form of postmodernism have, in spite of itself, a moral core at its center? Or is it simply squishy all the way through? If it’s the latter, we must acknowledge it as a villain—and dismiss it as the shapeless mess that it is.
Ra’s al Ghul and Fanaticism
In Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the Dark Knight confronts a villain that, in many ways, resembles him. Ra’s al Ghul, like Batman, hates evil. Like Batman, he fights it tirelessly. In fact, the movie suggests that Ra’s helped Batman become the hero that he is.
But there’s one big difference between the hero and the villain: Batman’s sense of justice is seasoned with mercy and he always plays by the rules. For Ra’s, mercy is a weakness and his quest for perfection has no rules. In his search for justice, Ra’s becomes the very thing he hoped to eradicate: A villain.
The history of Christianity, sadly, is full of folks who—despite their great intentions, became villains in the end. Sometimes in our quest to be righteous, we forget that we’re dealing with real people with complex problems. We condemn the sin and the sinner.
Batman, for all of his zeal for justice, never lost sight of the people he was fighting for—or, for that matter, even the people he was fighting. His break with Ra’s comes when he refuses to kill a peasant (“I’m no killer,” he says), and he risks his life to keep Gotham safe from Ra’s. When we deal with people who disagree with us or are going the wrong way, we, too, must keep Batman—and Jesus—in mind. No matter how much we love righteousness, we must never lose sight that our first love should be for the people we’re trying to help.
Gotham’s Citizens and Moral Therapeutic Deism
MTD describes the faith of many young people: A kind and good God who serves as a sort of spiritual mascot, but otherwise doesn’t involve or interfere with our lives much. It’s very live-and-let live Ism—and perhaps it’s this Ism that’s at the root source of many of Gotham’s problems.
When we believe that we’re all good people in no need of correction, and when our god becomes nothing more than a supernatural Swiss army knife—there to bail us out when we need Him—it makes us passive, too accepting of the evil all around us and in us. We begin to rot. And when the rot begins, it tends to attract worms.
Batman, clearly, isn’t an “I’m OK, you’re OK” kind of guy. He understands his own weaknesses. He understands the city’s weaknesses, too. And he’s always working on ways to push past his own failings and help correct Gotham’s in a quest for both peace and justice.
Two-Face and Materialistic Atheism
It’s a cold, empty universe out there, this Ism tells us. There is no God, no guiding force, no karma or sense of morality. We’re on our own, left to find our own sense of purpose and right. And when we’re left to make our own morality, that can lead us into some pretty strange places.
Take Two-Face, one of Batman’s most tragic villains. Once one of Gotham City’s most laudable heroes—the city’s “white knight,” we’re told in the movie The Dark Knight—Two-Face is literally burned by circumstance: A terrible accident left one side of his face charred and disfigured. Now, with his beliefs in justice and goodness left in tatters, Two-Face is left to find new meaning. And his god becomes the two-headed coin he carries.
“The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance,” he tells Batman.
But Batman knows better. He tries to tell Two-Face that it’s our choices, not chance, that make the world as it is. And we as Christians know that to be true. Like Two-Face, we know the world can be cruel. But more often than not, it’s we who make it that way. Our hope isn’t left to chance. Our hope is in God.
The Joker and Nihilism
There aren’t a lot of folks out there who would claim to be nihilists—folks who just, in the words of Batman’s butler Alfred, “want to watch the world burn.”
But a sense of nihilism slips into a lot of contemporary thinking. “It just doesn’t matter,” you’ll hear some people say: It doesn’t matter whether we work hard or treat other people nicely or serve a higher purpose. For them, nothing matters.
The Joker embodies that “it just doesn’t matter” philosophy. And while the villain expresses this philosophy with a smile on his face, this Ism has deep roots in hopelessness and despair.
“See, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke—dropped at the first sign of trouble,” he tells Batman in The Dark Knight. For Joker, morality is a joke. Hope is a joke. Batman is a joke. And for this Ism, Christianity—full as it is with morality and hope and a Batman-like derring-do—is a joke, too.
How can Christians combat this manic laughter? By doing what Batman does: We persevere. No matter how many times the Joker escapes from Arkham Asylum, Batman’s there to put him back. No matter how often the Joker guffaws with maniacal glee, the Dark Knight always gets the last laugh. It can be tough: We’re all susceptible to despair and heartbreak.
Sometimes we feel like giving up. But he—and we—must remember that what we do and how we act does matter. Always. It’s this understanding that makes Batman a hero. And it’ll make us heroes in our own, quiet ways, too.
Paul Asay, a regular contributor to YouthWorker Journal, is the author of God on the Streets of Gotham: What the Big Screen Batman Can Teach Us about God and Ourselves, available June 2012 from Tyndale. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife and two children. See more at PaulAsay.com.
