Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Sorry, but Heaven is not for Real

Every once in a while I give myself an analytical exercise. This time it was the film Heaven is for Real. I had heard about it when it came out last year, more because of the mainstream nature of the thing than the actual content. Instead of no-name actors, it features real Hollywood stars like Greg Kinnear and Thomas Haden Church, wrapped up in a beautifully filmed, first-class production. It also had the cache of being based on a “true” story, that of Pastor Todd Burpo from Nebraska, whose son he claims experienced heaven during an operation. In fact, I believe I had even downloaded the sample on my kindle and read a few pages before I deleted it when I realized exactly what it was. This is a propaganda piece of the most blatant variety, and yet considering what passes for intellect today it might as well be the most sophisticated propaganda yet created. Propaganda is best, of course, when it doesn’t look like what it is. If this were a cross-waving movie about how everyone believed in this child’s delusions, then no one would buy it. But that’s not what happens. His visions have to be met with doubt and confusion and even hostility for it to seem genuine to the average viewer, and that’s exactly what the film does.

The film opens by spending a lot of time manufacturing sympathy for the main characters. Greg Kinnear is a rural Nebraska pastor. He has a side business installing garage doors, coaches the high school wrestling team, works as a volunteer fireman, plays on a co-ed softball team and, oh yeah, he also has to find time for his wife and two small children. The family is struggling financially, but the incredibly supportive and sexy Kelly Reilly is there at his side to go through it all with him. Then one Saturday he breaks his leg at a softball game and a week later he collapses at Sunday service from kidney stones. Meanwhile, the bills are piling up with no way to pay them and so Reilly suggests they get away from it all and take a trip to Colorado. When they get back, however, their youngest boy, Connor Corum, gets sick with appendicitis and they don’t realize it until it’s almost too late. They rush him to the hospital and after a lengthy surgery, during which Reilly calls her friends to pray for their son and Kinnear angrily confronts god in the hospital chapel, their son makes it through. The real conflict of the film, however, begins when Corum tells Kinnear about his experience of seeing Jesus and heaven while sedated.

The visual depiction of Heaven as the child talks to his father is the standard one, blue sky and sunlight, with gauzy depictions of angels and Jesus shot from behind as he talks to the child. In order for the film not to be a turn-off at this point, it must sow some doubt in the characters. Reilly tells Kinnear it’s just the child’s imagination, and Kinnear doesn’t really believe it himself. So then comes the requisite moment in the film when Kinnear has to consult with someone outside of the church, preferably outside of religion altogether, and this comes in the form of a university psychology professor, Nancy Sorel. Not only is she not a Christian, but expresses the fact that she’s “not religious,” which is simply code for atheism, and her function in the piece is to stand in for all non-believers. She offers the standard explanations for the son’s “supernatural” experiences, but it’s Kinnear’s argument that cries out for examination. When she has finished concluding the rational explanation that whatever happened to the child simply happened in his mind because of his upbringing and indoctrination, Kinnear asks this question:

          Is it really easier to believe in that, or clairvoyance, or telepathy than it is in life after the physical?

This is huge, because of the implicit, underlying assumption of that question. The implication is that rationalism is the easy way out, that it takes more . . . I don’t know what . . . courage, strength, or stubbornness, to stupidly accept the tenets of religion rather than to look at the truth. After stopping to really analyze this question, it becomes laughable, because the easy way out is to actually believe in the fantasy of religion rather than accept personal responsibility, not just for our actions but for the responsibility of intellectual growth, of philosophical inquiry, for making thoughtful, rational, deliberate decisions about what we believe and why. And more importantly, what we are and why. That takes work, mental exertion, and dogged determination, especially in a society that doesn’t want to think, that doesn’t want to contemplate, that doesn’t want to know who they really are, for fear that they will discover they are actually responsible for their own lives. In that context the easy way out is obviously the panacea of religion. “Turn your life over to god,” actually gives you permission not to think, not to question, and what could be easier than that?

But that’s just the opening salvo. From there it’s time to talk to the church members, starting with one of the deacons, Thomas Hayden Church. In their conversation Kinnear wonders if in asking children to believe in the fantasy world of religion, whether they are actually responsible for their children’s delusions. But he has to ask that question. In an argument it’s called a concession. He has to address the opposition’s viewpoint in order to come back with a rebuttal later in the film. So now Kinnear has to go through a period of doubt, when he questions his own indoctrination, and must put himself at odds with the rest of the church and the community over his unwillingness to dismiss the visions out of hand. Here we have the martyr story, one that goes back to Noah. When a reporter writes about Corum the community members begin making fun of Kinnear, children at school tease his kids, and most importantly the church itself begins to rebel because he won’t stop talking about it on the pulpit. But this aspect of the story has two purposes. The first is the obvious one, to garner sympathy for Kinnear and Corum because of their mistreatment by the community. But the other message is for Christians themselves, in order to shame them out of their country club churchgoing and get them to question their own lack of conviction about what is supposed to be a given tenet in their belief system.

Another moment of concession comes as the deacons of the church gather to tell Kinnear they are going to begin the search for a new pastor. Margo Martindale must express another view from outside, the historical influence of the church in attempting to control people. It’s no accident that the most vociferous supporters of the idea of religion in this country are from the right wing. The rich and powerful have been subjugating the poor for centuries using the religious threat of damnation to maintain that control. From the strong-arm tactics of the Vatican as well as the threat of hell from nearly every denomination, to the Southern control of slaves in the American South, right on up to the Moral Majority and the modern attempt by the church to legislate morality in this country. Martindale says it this way:

          I don’t like how it makes our church a magnet for everyone who wants to take the brain out of
          their head and beat it to death with the bible, and then seem to want to show off how much
          they believe. Heaven and hell have always been concepts that have been used to control and
          frighten people

Again, the irony couldn’t be clearer. The entire idea of religion is to take the brains out of people’s heads. Belief, or faith, is not supposed to be intellectually based. This concession also serves the same two-pronged attack. It placates those outside of the faith by having someone in the church express their very feelings, and at the same time it shames those inside the church for not believing enough, for not having faith enough to know that everything in the bible is literally true.

Finally, it’s time to bring everything home. Corum says he saw Kinnear’s grandfather and identifies him in a photo from when he was young. Then he tells Reilly that he has another sister that died in her tummy, and that Jesus took him to her. At the cemetery Martindale sees Kinnear putting flowers on her son’s grave and the two make up. When another reporter calls, Kinnear tells him he’s going to talk all about it on Sunday and the church is packed. Kinnear then goes into an impassioned speech about what his son saw and how if all of us knew that heaven was real we would act differently. But again, this defies the law of religion itself. Because his son saw it, the proof of its existence is what makes Kinnear finally believe, when it’s supposed be the other way around. Faith is supposed to determine a person’s belief, not evidence. Then Kinnear gives everyone a way out by turning it into a metaphor, saying that he believes god is love, and that we experience a little bit of heaven every day in the acts of kindness all around us but chose not to see them as such. Finally, in the worst moment of the entire film, he looks out into the congregation and sees psychology professor Nancy Sorel in attendance. See, the film seems to crow, even she is convinced and the atheist has been saved. Then, in a co-opting of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, all of the congregation, beginning with his wife, Martindale, and Haden Church, leave their seats to embrace Kinnear and his family.

Heaven is for Real is an incredibly well made movie. It’s also incredibly insidious. And it would have to be the former in order to be the later. Throughout the film the underlying assumption of it all is that Christianity is the natural order of things. There are shots in the opening of all the nice people in the community, and even the firemen praying together. In fact, there is no one who isn’t incredibly nice in the entire picture. Real life is distinctly different from that, and in that sense life as it is shown in the film is a decidedly false one. The fact is that human beings have been worshiping deities for thousands of years, and the presumption it takes to imagine that this two-thousand year old deity is the only true god--which means that everyone who existed before the god of Israel is being tormented in hell as we speak--makes no sense on it’s face. It is time to retire spiritual mythology as an unnecessary holdover from an unenlightened past and begin using our brains for their intended purpose. Films like Heaven is for Real are very clever in their insistence on maintaining a religious status quo but, as hard as they try, under even the most superficial of inquiry they fail to persuade. As if they ever could.