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May I never be accused of telling people only what they want to hear: I’d like to talk to you about my underwear.

Truth be told, I don’t think that I have a ton of skeletons in my skivvies closet, except maybe this one––I have a pair of Captain America briefs.

They were a gift, I swear! Back when I was living in Texas circa 2011, a buddy of mine who knew how excited I was to see Captain America: The First Avenger wanted to make sure that I was subtly star spangled when I went to see the movie. (I’ve been a reader of Cap comics since elementary school.) As to whether I followed through on donning this particular bespoke unmentionable to the screening––well, are the stars at night big and bright?

With the appropriate laundering along the way, I've Captain America-clad for every MCU theater viewing, at least until relatively recently. After Marvel’s “Phase 3” culminated with Avengers: Endgame, I’ve steadily lost interest in subsequent offerings. I’ll skip some Marvel product Disney+ here and there, and Eternals was the first MCU installment that I failed to catch in the theaters. Somewhere along the way, the Captain America briefs were retired to that great Avengers armoire in the sky.

On Tuesday night, I broke my missed-it-in-theaters MCU streak and caught Thor: Love and Thunder on the silver screen. I’m just a humble pastor, but here’s my verdict: woof. Love and Thunder, as aficionados know, was written and directed by Taika Watiti, the dude that likewise made the spectacular Thor: Ragnarok. Let’s say that this newest Norse tale was every bit as good as its predecessor, only minus the joy, humor, pathos, stakes, and basic coherence. I may as well start to rent out my Captain America Underroos in my Etsy store.

Lots was wrong with Thor: Love and Thunder, but apropos to Letters to You, here’s an admittedly minor quibble that nevertheless stood out to me. This flick was yet another entertainment product that, while it could have asked some interesting questions about the nature of faith and skepticism, it swung and missed.

Allow me to spoil the first ten minutes of the movie DIRECTLY BELOW.

There’s a monster at the beginning of this (celluloid) book, namely Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher. (Great name, by the way.) Before Gorr has received his nom de guerre, we first encounter him and his daughter wandering through a desolate, desert landscape. Both are clearly near death due to starvation and lack of water, and Gorr prays to his deities that they would send rain. He pleads his case fervently, since he’s been a devout follower who’s always obeyed and never doubted. Sadly, it appears that Gorr’s prayers are unanswered as his little girl expires. Shortly thereafter, a now horribly sunburned Christian Bale stumbles into what looks like an oasis, where he encounters in the flesh the god to whom he’d given his devotion. Gorr genuflects and asks for his heavenly reward, only to discover that this god is actually a hedonistic buffoon that has blithely led on his followers and has tricked them into believing that he cares about them at all.

Gorr doesn’t take this news well and kills the guy. A God Butcher is born.

Thor: Love and Thunder isn’t Citizen Cane (or even Winter Soldier), but I can’t help but wonder if an opportunity hasn’t been missed. The god that Gorr discovers is so comically and obviously absurd that any faith in this deity can easily be written off similarly moronic. The movie seems to imply, “Hey everyone, we all know that faith is dumb!”

Now, I’m not writing this to start a culture war or suggest that Taika Watiti made this movie in order to deeply critique and ridicule people of faith. Still, I believe it would have been more interesting if Love and Thunder hadn’t portrayed Gorr’s faith as such a caricatured house-of-cards. What if instead Gorr’s gods had been trying their best, but didn’t come through? Or if Gorr learns of a larger, “greater good” type of rationale from these deities that at least in their mind would justify the drought on his homeworld? What if said gods turned out to deeply care about the plight of their followers but were simply not powerful enough to help?

Over the past few years, I’ve witnessed many professing Christians deconstruct and/or abandon their faith commitments. They are asking harder questions than what Love and Thunder gives them credit for.

If the entertainment industry’s somewhat lazy Door #1 when it comes to belief is an all-too-easy straw man (“faith is clearly stupid”), what I perceive as Door #2 is to “postmodernize” faith in such a way as to render any kind of religious commitment in a manner quite different from how historic faith traditions of the world tend to self-conceive.

A case in point is a new comic book series called We Have Demons from the creative team of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, whose work on Batman a few years back I adored. The series features a young woman named Lam whose father was a priest and who after initially rejecting his faith system embarks on her own journey of spiritual discovery. The problem to me, though, is that it seems that the faith to which our hero tends is pretty mealy mouthed and vague. In the description of one review, “Snyder [the book’s author] implores his audience to honor the strength of human morality. He expresses this by showing that Lam [the protagonist] doesn't need to believe in God to access her powers. He also communicates to his readers that temptation is not the ultimate sin. Forgetting to believe in the righteousness of people is the worst act that can be committed by humankind.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. I’ll just mention that the Christian story gives a quite different spin than We Have Demons when it comes to its view of humanity.  The Bible teaches that we’re both good/righteous but also broken/sinful. From my perspective, both of those aspects are crucial in order for us to properly make sense of ourselves and our world.

Worth highlighting for our purposes, in addition, is that even though Lam’s powers in We Have Demons are faith-derived, it doesn’t matter if she believes in God at all. This is the postmodernizing part. As another example, in a climactic moment featured in Joss Whedon’s Firefly serial, the character Shepherd Book (a pastor of some kind) exclaims to a skeptical colleague, “I don’t care what you believe, just believe it!”

I don’t know any pastor, priest, rabbi, imam, or other cleric that would ever say such a thing. Even if various religions have quite different views on plenty of things, we’re fairly united in holding that our faith systems are staking claims on our larger views of what reality is and isn’t. They’re irreducibly metaphysical statements, while the faith systems expressed in We Have Demons and Firefly are in contrast weak sauce. Those kinds of faiths are subjective in the extreme.

The good news is that there are better examples out there. Ethan Hawke’s First Reformed considers a Christian pastor in the midst of deep turmoil, and in it there are genuine and powerful questions raised. Within Marvel comics, I find Daredevil’s struggles with his Catholic beliefs truly compelling precisely because to Daredevil, believing in all of this stuff means something.

All that is to say, don’t skip Thor: Love and Thunder because it fumbles the faith football. But you’re good showing up to it in normal clothing.

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