University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Summer 2016
"Look up in the sky:" Superman as lived religion in
contemporary American culture
Brandon O'Neal Dean
University of Iowa
Copyright 2016 Brandon O'Neal Dean
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2065
Recommended Citation
Dean, Brandon O'Neal. ""Look up in the sky:" Superman as lived religion in contemporary American culture." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2016.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2065.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Religion Commons
“LOOK UP IN THE SKY:”
SUPERMAN AS LIVED RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE
by
Brandon O’Neal Dean
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Religious Studies in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
August 2016
Thesis Supervisor:
Professor Richard Brent Turner
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
____________________________
PH.D. THESIS
_________________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Brandon O’Neal Dean
has been approved by the Examining Committee for
the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in Religious Studies at the August 2016 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
____________________________________________
Richard Brent Turner, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________________
Kristy Nabhan-Warren
____________________________________________
Jordan Smith
____________________________________________
Corey Creekmur
____________________________________________
Deborah Whaley
To Samantha and Harper
ii
“This is an imaginary story…aren’t they all?”
Alan Moore
“Whatever Happen to the Man of Tomorrow?”
Superman #423
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my committee for their guidance in the process of compiling this
work. It has been a pleasure working with all of you.
Thank you Dr. Richard Turner for being a great mentor and all your words of
encouragement.
Thank you Dr. David Ede, Dr. Stephen Covell, and Dr. Kevin Wanner for giving me the
courage to pursue my ideas in the early stages of my academic career.
And lastly, thank you to Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and all the thousands of others who
have helped to shape Superman over the years. You gave the world a shared dream of heroics and
an idea of what it may truly means to be human.
iv
ABSTRACT
This study argues that, rather than simply reflecting the religious worldviews of his
creators and readers, the presentations of Superman that span more than 75 years in a variety of
mass media have produced a mythology, iconography, ethical code, and set of practices that
reflect a dynamic relationship with the complex religious systems in the United States. The
presentation of Superman by his creators and the reception of Superman by his readers are
heavily influenced by Christianity, Judaism, and American civil religion (he does, after all,
represent “truth, justice, and the American way”) along with many other religious worldviews.
This study also explores the dynamic and complex interactions between Superman and his fans
and shows that the figure of Superman is used by his fans to understand theological and ethical
issues, while, at the same time, their understanding of Superman shapes those theological and
ethical opinions and ideas. American religious traditions influence the popular images and
representations of Superman, but Superman also influences the understanding of religious
traditions across a breadth of historical and cultural contexts.
Superman’s as a site of multiple expressions of permanent liminality allows the character
and his stories to be useful sites for people to perform the religious work of constructing,
strengthening, and/or negotiating boundaries between categories, such as the human and the
divine or the secular and the religious. It is through these boundaries that people define and
interpret their religious worldviews.
v
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
First published in 1938, Superman has an undeniable impact on American and global
popular culture. Superman is a strange and foreign alien who is extremely human and
quintessentially American. He is mortal, yet he possesses a level of power that is godly. It seems
only natural that the cultural influence of this character enters the religious sphere as well.
Superman’s creators and audience read him through their particular religious worldviews, but he
also has an effect on those worldviews. This study will explore a variety of ways that Superman
and his stories have been encompassed and expressed by American religions to define what it
means to be a god, to be a human, to be an American, to be a Christian, to be a father, and/or to
be a man. Ultimately, it will demonstrate the importance of American popular culture when it
comes to how Americans construct the religious worlds in which they live. The importance of
Superman as an object of analysis exists in its ability to reveal meanings of religious experience
in twenty-first century America.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE: BEYOND TRADITIONS ................................................................................. 5
Religion and its Permeable Boundaries ...................................................................................... 6
A Brief Origin of Superman ...................................................................................................... 11
Early Superman Scholarship ..................................................................................................... 12
Superman: Jewish, Christian, or Other? .................................................................................... 13
A Billion (and Counting) Supermen ......................................................................................... 15
Superman as Religious .............................................................................................................. 18
Superman and Liminality .......................................................................................................... 19
Superman’s Liminality and its Religious Use in Boundary Maintenance ................................ 25
CHAPTER 2: BOXING SUPERMAN ......................................................................................... 29
American Civil Religion and Superman ................................................................................... 30
Muhammad Ali ......................................................................................................................... 32
The Racial Politics of Heavyweight Championship Boxing ..................................................... 35
Ali, the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X .................................................................................. 39
1960s Mainstream Media and Ali’s Image ............................................................................... 43
Superman vs. Muhammad Ali................................................................................................... 47
CHAPTER 3: A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY .................................................................. 59
“The Power Within” (1988-1989) ............................................................................................. 60
The Kingdom (1999).................................................................................................................. 64
“Angel” (2007) .......................................................................................................................... 66
Superman’s Mistaken Identity as Religious Work .................................................................... 68
CHAPTER 4: SUPERMAN ON A SUNDAY MORNING ......................................................... 74
Selling Movie Tickets to the Religious: Historical Context ..................................................... 81
Superman: Silver Screen Savior ................................................................................................ 84
Man of Steel Ministry Resources ............................................................................................ 102
Drawing the Line, Forming the Boundaries ............................................................................ 107
CHAPTER 5: FATHERING THE MAN OF STEEL ................................................................ 114
The American Bible Society’s “Father’s Day Conversation Guide: Man of Steel”................ 116
Man of Steel and the Fatherhood Blogosphere........................................................................ 121
The Father and Christian Male as Superman .......................................................................... 132
vii
The Superman Mythos as a Site for Fatherhood and Masculinity .......................................... 136
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 141
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 145
viii
INTRODUCTION
“As a distant planet was destroyed by old age, a scientist placed his infant son within a
hastily devised space-ship, launching it toward earth!”1 With these 24 words of text, along with
the accompanying drawing of a rocket ship blasting off through the roof of a building, a title, and
the credits “Jerome Siegel & Joe Shuster,” a story that has been continuously written and rewritten for over 75 years began. Although this initial story lacked many of the details that would
develop within the eventual mythos,2 Action Comics #1, published in early 1938, gave to the
world one of the most well-known and important creations of the 20th century American
imagination: Superman.
A focus on Superman reveals the ways that Superman’s various creators and audiences
use the character and his mythos to construct and define their religious worldviews. Superman
operates as a site where both creators and readers engage in religious play and meaningformation. By looking at the stories created by the writers and artists who contributed to the
Superman canon as possible locations for meaning-making, the Superman narratives become
theological, metaphysical, and/or spiritual exercises and enter the realm of religious mythology.
On the other hand, by examining audience reception of the stories and participation within fan
communities, I explore the ways Superman’s audiences use the character to form their
worldviews and as a lens to reinterpret older, pre-existing religious systems of meaning-making
or to explore and invent new modes of religious identification.
I will examine the religious work that people do through the figure of Superman. My
research will show that the producers of Superman’s media content obviously used religious
traditions to construct the content for their cinematic and comic book representations. Superman
strikes poses reminiscent of the crucifixion of Jesus or Michelangelo’s Pieta. Angels and demons
1
make appearances throughout the comics. Superman is referred to by other characters within the
comic-book narratives as an angel, a golem, or even a god. However, the use of religious
iconography, mythology, and ideology is not the main focus of this study. I am far more
interested in exploring how the producers of the comic books and films use their Superman
narratives as a means to work out personal, cultural, religious questions and issues by using the
Superman mythos as a site for religious play and creativity.
Perhaps an even more important phenomenon is the role Superman plays in the lives and
imaginations of his audience. By applying different approaches and methods from the humanities
and the social sciences, I demonstrate the multiple ways that Superman and his use by the culture
fulfill religious functions and contributes to a broader religious understanding among its
audiences and fans; while also showing the diverse ways that that audiences receive and embody
the larger Superman narrative and mythology. My research will fill an important gap in the
scholarship on the religious dimensions of the superhero that emerged from the fictional
narratives constructed since the 1930s.
For the most part, the textual-analysis here is limited to the various forms of the
Superman narratives (comics, television, film, etc.) produced after the release of Superman: The
Movie (1978). The popularity of this film serves as an important starting point to explore the
cultural presentations and understandings of Superman among a general audience and,
specifically, an increase in Superman fandom tracing from the late 1970s to our present moment.
For a case study on the way Superman is used by a contemporary audience to produce religious
work, I will focus on the recent faith-based marketing strategy surrounding the release of the film
Man of Steel (2013).
2
In the first chapter, “Beyond Traditions: An Examination of Superman as Religious,” I
argue that Superman exists as a religious character outside of the religious traditions of the men
and women who tell or consume his stories due to his characterization as a figure who straddles
the boundary between human and divine. This characteristic is what allows Superman to exist as
a site of projection for more established religious beliefs and worldviews (i.e. Superman as
Moses or Superman as Christ-figure) while at the same time allowing for the construction and
reimagining of being human or divine in the context of the 20th and 21st centuries. In order to
argue this position, I make a case for viewing religion as constituting non-religious/secular
elements that gain religious significance because of the influence and effect of other nonreligious elements. The next chapter, “Boxing Superman: Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (1978)
and the American Pantheon,” is an analysis of the comic Superman vs. Muhammad Ali and its
part in transforming the image of boxing great Muhammad Ali from controversial member of the
Nation of Islam and opponent of the war in Vietnam into a member of the American civil
religion pantheon. The third chapter, “A Case of Mistaken Identity: Why Must Superman Deny
Divinity?” examines three examples from Superman comics published after 1986 where an
individual or a group believes Superman to be a divine agent. A common element of all three
stories is that Superman attempts to discourage such religious devotion and repeatedly stresses
his own humanity. This chapter highlights the uses of the Superman mythos in maintaining the
boundaries between the human and the divine through the imaginative play of the comics.
Chapter 4, “Superman on a Sunday Morning: The Faith-based Marketing of Man of Steel
(2013),” shifts away from textual analysis of the Superman narrative to examine the multiple
(and often conflicting) ways in which American Christian pastors and bloggers used the
marketing of the movie Man of Steel among Christian groups as a way to negotiate the boundary
3
between Christianity and secular culture. The final chapter, “Fathering the Man of Steel: Man of
Steel (2013) as a Site for Fatherhood and Masculinity,” continues to focus on the American
Christian reactions to and readings of Man of Steel as a means to define “proper” fatherhood and
masculinity in the contemporary American context.
Through these case studies, I present a small sample of the diverse methods comics
creators and religious audiences use Superman to perform an array of religious work. The larger
issue here is how people draw upon multiple sources and influences outside of their primary
religious designation to supplement, support, and/or redefine their personal religious worldviews
in a dynamic process. Although Superman is only a small part of this larger idea, he serves as an
important exemplar of how popular culture, either religious or secular in orientation, interacts
with existing religious ideas and practices that alter both secular and religious traditions in the
process.
Jerry Siegel (w) and Joe Shuster (a), “Action Comics No. 1: Superman, Champion of the Oppressed!,” in The
Superman Chronicles Volume One (New York: DC Comics, 2006), 4.
2
Examples of Superman’s expanding mythos after his debut include that the unnamed “distant planet” would soon
be identified as Krypton, the “scientist” would be revealed as Jor-El, the “passing motorists” who delivered the alien
infant to an orphanage would eventually be known as Jonathan and Martha Kent who will raise him in Smallville,
Kansas rather than turning him over to the state, and the ability to “leap 1/8th of a mile” will morph into full-fledged
flight.
1
4
CHAPTER ONE: BEYOND TRADITIONS
He was standing among a group of admirers in a grassy area underneath the shade of the
trees near the Massac County Courthouse. My daughter was watching him from a distance for
several minutes; she had just turned four and was nervous about meeting new people. I asked her
if she wanted to say hello. She shyly said she did and we walked towards him. He knelt down to
her level and said, “Hello Harper.” He then picked her up and allowed her mother and me to take
a couple of pictures. When he set her down, she came running to me. “Daddy, Daddy, I just met
the real Superman!” Strangely enough, Santa Claus always has to ask her what her name is;
Superman must have used his super-hearing to overhear our conversation from several yards
away.
This event took place during the 36th Annual Superman Celebration in early June 2014 in
Metropolis, Illinois. Underneath the spit curl and red cape was not Clark Kent, but Jason
Boultinghouse, who has been playing the Man of Steel for the festival since 2008 and does
indeed look the part.1 Metropolis, on the other hand, bears little resemblance to its DC Comics’
counterpart. It is a small town of approximately 6,500 people located in southern Illinois on the
banks of the Ohio River across from Paducah, Kentucky. There are no skyscrapers to leap in a
single bound, but there is a 15-foot tall statue of Superman, standing in the iconic hands-on-thehips, cape-blowing-in-the-wind pose.2
The festival stretches from the statue of Superman’s paternal gaze for three blocks on
Market Street and ends at the statue of Lois Lane, modeled after actress Noel Neill, who
portrayed Lois Lane in the 1940s movie serials and the 1950s television show Adventures of
Superman (1951-1958).3 People of all ages walk up and down the street and some of the people
are dressed in superhero costumes.4 They pass the Super Museum & Gift Shop, which houses the
5
Superman collection of Jim Hambrick that contains over 20,000 items including a Superman
uniform worn by George Reeves in Adventures of Superman.5 The street is lined with booths
selling comics and Superman merchandise and carts selling typical Midwestern carnival food.
There are pony rides and inflatable playgrounds for the children to enjoy after begging for
money from their parents. During the festival, attendees can obtain autographs from celebrities
associated with superhero properties (Candice Patton, who plays Iris West on the CW’s Flash,
and Caity Lotz, who plays Black/White Canary on the CW’s Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow,
were present in 2015) or from comic book artists and writers (Kurt Busiek, writer of Marvels
(1994) and Astro City (1995-present) was also there in 2015).6
As I was walking the street, observing the people in the crowd and, yes, perusing boxes
full of comics looking for old issues of Man-Thing, I saw a family of four wearing matching
home-made T-shirts. Printed on a camouflage pattern was Superman’s familiar diamond-shaped
chevron (that’s what superhero fans call Superman’s chest shield), but instead of the lone “S”
was the name “JeSus,” with the middle “S” large and conspicuous. The shirts called attention to
Superman’s competition in the business of salvation and served as a subtle reminder that
underneath the festivities lurked a religious dynamic. They functioned as a reminder to the
crowds gathered on the hot June asphalt of who the “true” savior is and as a warning against
slipping too far into pagan idolatry. At the same time, the iconography of Superman and
Christianity blurred and bled into one another in the graphics of those shirts. Here religious and
the secular were not separated by a rigid border, but were superimposed onto each other.
Religion and its Permeable Boundaries
Before entering into a discussion of Superman’s uses in religious work, it may be helpful
to clarify how I conceive of the category of religion. But first, let me present a bit of a
6
disclaimer. The following discussion on the nature of religion is not a definitive answer to the
question of “what is religion?” Indeed, the issue of defining religion is one of the most hotly
contested issues in the field of religious studies. As Jonathan Z. Smith argues in his essay
“Religion, Religions, Religious,” the myriad definitions of the term religion demonstrate not
only an inability of scholars to define religion, but also “that it can be defined, with greater or
lesser success, more than fifty ways.”7 Smith goes on to write, “‘Religion’ is not a native term; it
is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define.”8
Therefore, how I interpret religion is useful for my research on Superman, which examines the
interactions between popular culture and religion in American religious history.
In lieu of a typical definition (be it substantive, functional, or based on familial
resemblance), the following is more of a model or a metaphor: religion as an organism.9 Broken
down to its most basic parts, every living creature is composed of elements, or atoms such as
hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and iron. No single element can be said to be “living.” Any religion is
similarly composed, when broken down to their most basic forms, of elements that cannot be
properly defined as “religious” when viewed as separated from a religious worldview. In other
words, there is nothing that is inherently “religious” and, therefore, nothing that cannot be
incorporated into “religion” or viewed as “religious” when arranged within the correct collection
of elements.
When atomic elements form into chemical molecules, their properties began to alter.
Hydrogen is an explosive gas in its elemental form. Oxygen is a combustible gas. When
combined in the correct proportions, they can form a liquid that is incombustible and can be used
to extinguish certain types of fires. In this arrangement, H2O, the two distinct elements have
merged into a new substance, distinct from either of its composing parts. However, in another
7
arrangement HOOH (hydrogen peroxide), the same elements can be arranged in way that is
toxic, rather than essential, to life as we know it. It is also at the molecular level that atoms, in
certain arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, begin to be described as “organic.”
One can apply this logic to the classification of “religious” (or “sacred”). All organic
molecules require the element of carbon in order to fit the category, just as religious “things”
require a common element as well: the human imagination.10 Any rock, tree, or river existing in
a world without humans, and their imaginative capabilities, would be no more or less “sacred”
than any other rock, tree, or river existing in similar circumstances. The same can be said of any
other elements of religion. Any myth, doctrine, institution, ritual, experience, or ethical principle
can hardly be said to be religious if devoid of interaction with the imaginative potential of the
human mind.11 But, like carbon is not considered to be an “organic compound” in isolation nor in
every arrangement, the human imagination in isolation from other elements could not be said to
be inherently “religious.” For example, as I write this sentence, I am imagining what I will be
having for dinner tonight, which is an activity that could hardly be considered to be religious. 12
Of course, this emphasis on human imagination does not explicitly deny the existence of
the sacred or the divine.13 Imagination often carries the connotation of being opposed, or
contrary, to reality. This is not how I employ the term. My view of imagination is similar to
Sigmund Freud’s caveat about the term illusion, when he writes, “Illusions need not necessarily
be false—that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality.”14 For Freud, illusion is a wish
and some wishes have the possibility of coming true.15 Imagination is the creation of the past,
present, and/or future of a world within the individual’s mind. The term itself bears no judgment
on this imagined world’s correspondence with the external reality. When I imagine what my
dinner will be tonight, I have all the ingredients necessary in my kitchen. I have mastered all the
8
skills required to execute the dish, and would place money on the fact that the inevitable
outcome will match my creative expectations.16
These elements and compounds begin to organize into more and more complex
formations and systems: cells, tissues, organs, organ system, in order to become complete
organisms. As they become more complex, they become increasingly classified as “living” or
“alive.” A similar phenomenon can be seen in the construction of religion and the religious.
Elements and systems from the fields of biology, human psychology, economics, sociology,
history, literature, ethics, and philosophy are combined along with imagination to create more
complex religious behaviors and belief systems. Taken independently, such things as water,
human speech, the story of a man meeting another man in a river two thousand years ago, the
belief that there is something else beyond the world experienced through the senses, human
feelings of inadequacy and imperfection, the fear of pain, the hope for pleasure, etc., are not
inherently “religious” as all of these things exist outside of any religious or sacred “reality”
beyond the human sphere. In other words, whether or not I place any religious significance upon
them, water, words, stories, beliefs, hopes, and fears all exist. But when combined in the
Christian ritual of baptism, they become part of a larger religious ritual and that religious ritual is
born of their interactions and their relationships forged in the imagination of the participants.
Through these interactions within the human imagination, the beliefs of another realm of
existence beyond the material give meaning and contemporary relevance to the story of the men
in the river. The feelings of inadequacy are reevaluated as Original Sin with the water and the
words become a medium in order to achieve the hope of salvation and the avoidance of
damnation. Therefore, that which is not inherently religious takes on religious meaning and
significance only when it interacts with other elements.
9
No organism can exist without interactions with its environment. All organisms need to
ingest elements and compounds, both organic and inorganic, from outside themselves to continue
to function properly. These ingested elements and compounds become integrated into the living
whole, and through this integration, they become something we could study if we look at the
organism. At the same time, the organism releases elements and compounds back into the
environment where it can affect other organisms and non-living things as well. Plants produce
and release oxygen, which is inhaled by animals, who in turn produce carbon dioxide, which is
used by the plants. Bacteria in a petri dish will eventually produce enough nitrogenous waste to
make the environment unlivable and the colony will die off.
When we examine the relationship between religion and popular culture, religious
worldviews do not, and cannot, exist solely and purely as religious.17 They do not exist outside
of or apart from humans. They interact with, affect, and are affected by other systems of human
imagination, whether those systems exist within the same religious tradition, other religious
traditions, or within a secular genre, such as the majority of superhero comics. This is reflected
in the simple categorizations of the interactions between religion and popular culture found in
Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan’s Religion and Popular Culture in America (2005).
Forbes and Mahan divide these interactions into four categories: religion in popular culture,
popular culture in religion, popular culture as religion, and religion and popular culture in
dialogue.18 However, not every aspect of popular culture affects a change in the religious
worldview of an audience member. However, every artifact of popular culture has the potential
to become a part of anyone’s religious worldview in minor or major ways.
Therefore, it is not necessary for a scholar of religion to prove that a piece of popular
culture was intended to convey religious significance or is in and of itself inherently religious in
10
order to declare its religious significance. The scholar does not have to twist themselves into
knots claiming rock and roll is inherently a religious genre due to its historical ties to gospel
music in order to evaluate the impact the genre’s influence has had on some forms of
contemporary American Evangelical worship services. Non-religious elements can influence
religious worldviews and can be used by religious people to perform religious work. With this in
mind, we can now turn our attention to Superman.
A Brief Origin of Superman
Superman’s origin story from the comics is known nearly to the point of cliché or selfparody. Within his first appearance in Action Comics #1 (published on April 18, 1938), his
creators introduce the rough outline that will be altered and expanded throughout the following
decades. The first panel depicts a rocket ship bursting through the roof of a building surrounded
by collapsing skyscrapers and explosions. The accompanying text reads, “As a distant planet was
destroyed by old age, a scientist placed his infant son within a hastily devised space-ship,
launching it toward Earth!”19 The infant inhabiting the rocket was discovered by an unnamed
“passing motorist” and delivered to an orphanage, where, clad only in a diaper, the infant
Superman was lifting armchairs over his head. Upon discovering the extent of his powers, which
did not include flight in these early stories, he “decided he must turn his titanic strength into
channels that would benefit mankind. And so was created Superman! Champion of the
oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in
need!”20
By the summer of 1939 and the publication of Superman #1, elements were already being
added to this story. A rocket holding the infant Superman is still launched from a dying planet,
named for the first time as Krypton.21 A more significant alteration to the story is the
11
identification of the “passing motorist” as the Kents, the couple that later adopts and raises young
Clark.22 Other important elements of the traditional origin narrative were added over the
following decade, such as the names of Superman’s Kryptonian parents Jor-El and Lara.23 By
1945, the origin story had been re-condensed in the form of the introduction to the radio program
The Adventures of Superman: “Up in the sky! Look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! Yes,
it's Superman—strange visitor from the planet Krypton who came to Earth with powers and
abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can leap tall buildings in a single
bound, race a speeding bullet to its target, bend steel in his bare hands, and who, disguised as
Clark Kent, a mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending
battle for truth and justice.” Although revisions were made over the following decades, most
notably by John Byrne in 1986 mini-series The Man of Steel, Superman’s mythos and origin are
so recognizable that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely were able to successfully relate it to the
readers of their All-Star Superman (2005-2008) in eight words and four panels. Over images of
Jor-El, Lara, Jonathan and Martha Kent, and an exploding Krypton, the comic reads, “Doomed
planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.”24
Early Superman Scholarship
The origin of scholarly treatments of the Superman mythos begin with Umberto Eco’s
classic essay “Il mito di Superman e la dissolozione del tempo” (1962), which was translated into
English by Natalie Chilton under the title “The Myth of Superman” in 1972. Eco examines the
comic-book superhero as a paradox that combines the timelessness of the mythic hero with the
plot structure of the modern novel. He writes, “Superman, then, must remain ‘inconsumable’ and
at the same time be ‘consumed’ according to the ways of everyday life. He possesses the
characteristics of a timeless myth, but is accepted only because his activities take place in our
12
human and everyday world of time. The narrative paradox that Superman's script writers must
resolve somehow, even without being aware of it, demands a paradoxical solution with regard to
time.”25 Eco argues that the solution to this paradox is that Superman exists in an “oneiric
climate,” where the chronological order of the individual stories is hard to determine since each
episode begins at a return to the established status quo making the events of past stories
irrelevant to the current narrative.26
Eco’s view on the Superman mythos may apply well to the Golden and Silver Age
Superman stories from 1938 to the early 1970s. However, beginning in the 1970s, the DC
Comics universe began to develop its own continuity that strengthened the importance of
serialized narrative in the Superman stories and their relationship to the larger fictional world.
Richard Reynolds, in his book Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (1992), argues that the ability
of the superhero to function as myth is rooted in the concept of continuity. He writes,
If superheroes are to have any claim at all to be considered the bearers of a
‘modern mythology’ and in some ways comparable to the pantheons of Greek or
Native American or Norse mythology, then this extra-textual continuity is a vital
key to the way in which the mythology of comic books is articulated in the mind
of the reader. The ideal fan is capable of envisaging an ideal DC or Marvel
metatext: a summation of all existing texts plus all the gaps which those texts
have left unspecified.27
While it may appear that Eco’s argument has been rendered moot due to changes in storytelling
styles in superhero comics, his “oneiric climate” may have simply shifted to a much longer time
frame. Since its first company-wide reboot Crisis on Infinite Earths (1986), DC Comics has reset
their continuity every couple decades. After these reboots, the collection of narratives told before
are largely abandoned in favor of a fresh start for the characters.
Superman: Jewish, Christian, or Other?
There is a fairly substantial body of literature attempting to uncover the religious
meaning behind Superman—a subset of a larger enterprise of exploring comics and their
13
religiosity. In recent years, various edited collections have demonstrated the many interesting
directions scholars can take by exploring the interactions between superheroes and religion. The
Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture (2005), edited by theologian B.
J. Oropeza, focuses on theology and ethics, while Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and
Graphic Novels (2010), edited by A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer, explores
superheroes in the context of religious studies. Important books on superheroes and religion
include: Marco Arnaudo’s The Myth of the Superhero (2013), Greg Garrett’s Holy Superheroes!,
Christopher Knowles’ Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes
(2007), Ben Saunders’ Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes
(2011), and Simcha Weinstein’s Up, Up, and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values
Shaped the Comic Book Superhero (2007). What all of these scholarly works have in common is
their focus on the producers of the superhero narratives who incorporate religious symbolism and
religious ethics into their stories. These analyses are limited primarily to a category of the
interaction between popular culture and religion that Bruce David Forbes labels “religion in
popular culture.” Forbes describes this category as popular culture utilizing religion “through
explicit representation, allegorical parallels, and implicit theological themes.”28 This scholarship
that simply notes and analyzes the religious content found in the superhero narrative is limiting
and does not examine how the films and the comic books constructed images of American
religion in specific cultural and historical contexts, or how they are used by the audience to
construct their religious worlds.
For the most part, scholarship concerning Superman and religion is primarily concerned
with locating the character within certain religious traditions. Superman is the creation of Jerry
Siegel and Joe Shuster. 29 Siegel was born on October 17, 1914 in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents,
14
Mitchell and Sarah, were Jewish immigrants from present-day Lithuania. Shuster was born on
July 10, 1914 in Toronto, Canada. His father, Julius, was a Jewish immigrant from the
Netherlands and his mother, Ida who was also Jewish, emigrated from Ukraine. Shuster’s family
immigrated again in 1924 to Cleveland, where he met Siegel at their high school. One prominent
thread of this tactic is focusing on the Jewish heritage of Siegel and Shuster to argue that
Superman is a Jewish character. For example, Weinstein argues Superman is inherently a Jewish
character, noting the common observation of the Hebrew root of Superman’s Kryptonian
surname “El” and his creation during the Holocaust.30 Other methods used to establish Superman
as a part of Judaism include linking Superman to aspects of Jewish mythology and folklore, such
as Moses, Samson, or the golem.
Other scholars argue that Superman is best understood through the lens of Christianity.
Ken Schenck’s essay, “Superman: A Popular Culture Messiah” (2008), argues that Superman’s
resemblance to Jesus is responsible for the character’s popularity and relevance.31 I will discuss
the concept of Superman as a Christ-figure and how American Evangelical Christianity uses the
character in Chapter 4 that deals with the faith-based marketing of the film Man of Steel (2012),
but I want to acknowledge that this line of thought accounts for a significant amount of the
scholarship examining Superman and religion.
A Billion (and Counting) Supermen
There is no Superman. This is not a reaffirmation of the character’s fictional status. Of
course Superman is a work of fiction, but what does that matter? Fiction has as great an impact
in the world we constantly construct around us as any “fact.” Fiction can illustrate truth (maybe
even justice and the American way too). Fiction can influence behavior. Fiction can form the
way we see each other.
15
When I say there is no Superman, I mean there is no single Superman. There is no
Platonic ideal of Superman that exists somewhere in the beyond. Since the character’s first
appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938, there have been 75-plus years of stories and creators
and audiences. And everyone has their own Superman. Comics writer Mark Waid claims to have
consumed every Superman story ever, whether in comics, television, film, radio, etc.32 Others
have never directly experienced a single Superman story, but have absorbed knowledge of him
through a kind of cultural osmosis. And in between these two extremes lie a good number of
people. So whose Superman is more Superman?
More so than any other comic book superhero, with the possible exception of Batman,
Superman is a character that has stubbornly refused to be contained within panels and pages.
Shortly after his 1938 debut, Superman made the transition into a multimedia phenomenon.33 By
early 1939, Siegel and Shuster began creating Superman comic strips for daily newspaper
syndication, a more prestigious medium for comics creators. One year later, Superman was the
star of his own syndicated radio program, The Adventures of Superman, which ran from 1940 to
1951. In 1941, Fleisher Studios began releasing a series of animated cartoon shorts, voiced by
the actors from the radio show.34 The year 1942 saw the release of a Superman novel, The
Adventures of Superman, written by George Lowther, who also wrote for and narrated the radio
show.35 In 1948, the first live-action depiction of the character debuted in the film serial
Superman. From 1952 to 1958, Superman starred in the live-action television program
Adventures of Superman.36 In one of his stranger adaptations, Superman was featured in the
Broadway musical It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman (1966). By 1978, the character had
transitioned to a full-length feature film with Superman: The Movie.
16
Superman is a composite (and I am not referring to the time when his body was merged
with Batman’s). From the character’s earliest days, contributors other than Siegel and Shuster
were shaping it. Superman’s forays into media other than comic books were not merely
adaptations, but helped form the mythos. Jimmy Olsen and kryptonite were introduced for the
radio show.37 Superman’s first flight was depicted in the Fleisher cartoons.38 After Siegel and
Shuster left the comics, hundreds of writers, artists, colorists, inkers, and letterers have
succeeded them. The number of actors who have portrayed Superman in live action or animation
number in the double digits. Screenwriters, animators, directors, producers, etc. have all made
contributions to the development of the character. Some of these contributors, including Siegel
and Shuster, were Jewish. Some were Christian. Some belonged to traditions other than Judaism
or Christianity. Some were non-religious.
This issue is highlighted when we look at the scholarship concerning the religious nature
of the character. Is he a Jewish or a Christian character? Proponents of a Jewish Superman point
to the fact that his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were both second-generation Jewish
immigrants living in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a twentieth-century Moses stowed away in a rocket
ship instead of a reed basket. He is a new variation of the folkloric golem, created in an era of the
worst example of anti-Semitic violence. But where some scholars see Judaism as the primary
religious influence on the character, others see a modern American Christ-figure. In Superman:
The Movie, Jor-El, Superman’s biological Kryptonian father, his heavenly father, tells his son,
“Live as one of them, Kal-El…They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only
lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them
you... my only son.”39 Numerous scholars, theologians, and I are reading too much into this
17
quote when we hear the echoes of John 3:16, which says, “For God so loved the world that he
gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
So, is Superman Jewish or Christian? It is an interesting question which I have no interest
in answering. If pushed, I would answer “yes.” He is both Jewish and Christian. Textually, one
could even expand the question to include secular humanism or shamanism. When looking at
reception, there are undoubtedly examples of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and additional religious
presentations of Supermen occupying the imaginations of his large and diverse audience. Jewish
writers can view the character as Christian and vice versa. Christians can read the character as
Jewish and vice versa.
The questions that interest me more than “what religion is Superman?” are “why is
Superman such a potent site for religious expression?” and “how does the character interact with
and influence religious ideologies and practices among his audience?” My work focuses on what
makes Superman a religious character.
Superman as Religious
Contemporary scholarship on the relationship between Superman and religion is not
limited to the question of which religious tradition influences the character. Ben Saunders, in Do
the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes (2011), argues that Superman is a
reflection of a Platonic notion of the Good. According to Saunders, Superman has undergone
multiple changes throughout his publication history, “from thinly veiled revolutionary socialism
to wartime populism to Eisenhower capitalism to self-canceling escapism to inhibiting selfskepticism,”40 because American concepts about the Good have shifted over time. For Saunders,
the work performed by Superman through reflecting and shaping prevalent notions of the Good
18
is spiritual because it engages with “the gap between the is and the ought” and it attempts to
make sense of the world amid existential crisis.41
Another attempt to locate Superman’s religiosity outside of established religious
traditions is A. David Lewis’ essay “Superman Graveside: Superhero Salvation beyond Jesus”
(2010). Lewis argues that Superman operates in the mode of a savior, but outside Christian
notions of the category. For Lewis, Superman’s salvation takes the form of a memorial, where
dead characters continue to live through their participation in the larger, unending narrative of
Superman. As he concludes, “Without necessitating the trappings of Judaism or Christianity,
Superman is a worldview, ‘a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be
expressed as a story or a set of presuppositions.’ The character offers a cornerstone for an
evolving worldview: Superman is a symbol of life, of hope, of a battle for the never-ending.”42
Both Lewis and Saunders focus primarily on textual analysis in their works. But
Superman exists outside of any text and is a part of his audience’s lived experiences, both secular
and religious. My study, unlike the majority of scholarship focused on the intersection of
Superman and religion, will take both text and lived experience into account when discussing the
religious nature of Superman.
Superman and Liminality
Even if unknown to Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster at the end of the 1930s when they
created the first superhero Superman, humanity in the 20th century stood on the brink of what
could be considered godhood, in its most benevolent and malevolent forms. Robert
Oppenheimer’s often repeated quoting of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death,
destroyer of worlds,” revealed the culturally redefining knowledge that, with the invention of the
atomic bomb, fiery apocalypses were no longer the sole purview of the gods; humanity could
19
now destroy the world on its own. The heavens were no longer closed to us in the 20th century.
Thirty-one years after Superman crashed from the stars, Neil Armstrong was walking on the
moon. Advances in biology and medicine have extended our life expectancy and opened the
doors to the cloning of animals. Warnings against “playing God” take on new urgency when the
tools and technology of this age allow us to emulate the power of the gods, whether for good or
for evil. Some of the imaginings of early science-fiction and pulp fiction have crossed over into
contemporary reality and the culture must now wrestle with what this means for the relationship
between the human and the divine.
Of course, American culture does not offer a single solution to this conundrum. There is
no monolithic response. Religious fundamentalism of all stripes has reacted with a pulling away
from the complexities of the contemporary world by a reassertion of ancient and/or revealed
truth, however that is interpreted. UFO and science-fiction based religions have emerged as a
way of embracing the possibility of the future and technology as a means of achieving it. In the
mainstream religious ideologies, we see more ambivalent feelings. The borders and boundaries
between the realm of the divine and the world of the human, while never fully secure in the
religious imagination, have become more blurred as history marches on. Unsure borders and
liminal spaces are the birth place of monsters.
“Monsters are the borders of humanity,” writes Kelly J. Baker in a blog post explaining
why she studies zombies even though they repulse her.43 Monsters exist in those liminal areas
that produce anxiety in personal and cultural experiences and challenge our notions of what it
means to be human—the space between the human and the animal, the human and the machine,
and the living and the dead. But there is also the space between the human and the gods and
goddesses. Do monsters patrol this liminal space as well?
20
These questions may strike the reader as strange questions to pose at the beginning of an
examination of the religious nature and usage of Superman, but they are significant questions in
the following investigation. What kind of monster could straddle the dangerous territory of the
space between us and the divine? Can the monster be domesticated? What kind of religious work
could such a creature help us perform? Unlike Baker’s zombies, could this type of monster
inspire, instead of repulse?
The monster’s liminality marks it as an inherently religious character. Through boundary
formation and maintenance, the monster is useful in identity construction, which is a religious
concern. Scientifically, we understand that human beings are but one kind of animal amongst the
myriad of species on earth. Biologically, there is very little significant difference between us and
the great apes. But there has to be, right? We “know” we are not simply animals; we are
something more. But humanity, as defined against animality, is not a natural category, but is
culturally created, navigated, and maintained. One need not look too far into American history to
see full, or even partial, humanity denied to people of African descent, or to the Jews in Nazi
Germany, or to the “savages” imagined through the colonial enterprise. Who gets to participate
in humanity is constantly being negotiated in culture. From animal rights activists to prison
reform advocates to issues of immigrants and refugees, we can see these distinctions between
human and animal as constantly contested. In this unsure, liminal space, there be monsters.
Werewolves manifest out of the conscious or, more likely, unconscious understanding of
humans’ biological nature. We eat. We procreate. We die. We become meat that is eaten by the
lowliest of creatures and we rot. The werewolf is neither animal nor human and, at the same
time, it is both. Through werewolf stories, humans create the cultural boundaries between us and
the beast. Through werewolf stories, we become aware of what it is to be human. On the edges
21
of the “civilized” world, live cannibals who are recognizable as human in form and inhuman in
appetite. The cannibalistic monster, like the werewolf, eats the flesh of the human, which
relegates the victim of such an act to the realm of the beast. They lay bare the conceit of us being
anything other than animated meat. Cannibals embody the horror that our humanity can be taken
from us by the whims of the other—a fear that has been substantiated throughout human history.
The liminal space between human and animal is only one such example. Monsters have
arisen out of these numerous borderlands. As Timothy K. Beal writes in his book Religion and
Its Monsters (2002): “These monstrous figures indicate regions of dangerous uncertainty. They
show where the limits of knowing are. They dwell on the threshold between the known and the
unknown, this world and its other-worldly beyond. These monsters are interstitial figures,
markers of inside/outside.”44 These monsters can be said to live in the geographic edges of what
is considered to be civilization, like the Amazons on the edge of the Greek world. Or they can
thrive in the gray space between what are considered to be, in certain cultures, dichotomous
categories, like the Amazons occupying the liminal space between the female and the male.
Other borderlands of what is considered to be human also give rise to monsters. The boundary
between the human and the machine is questioned by such creatures as the Terminator and the
cyborg. As Dr. Manhattan notes in the first chapter of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’
Watchmen (1986), “A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles.
Structurally, there’s no discernible difference.”45 And in that space between the living and the
dead, we see the vampire, the ghost, and the zombie.
This is the religious work the monster performs when it exists within the liminal areas
between binary pairs—through its inbetweeness, it problematizes, while at the same time, it
defines what it is to be human. The superhero genre has no short supply of monsters, whether
22
antagonists like the zombie Solomon Grundy or protagonists like the human/plant hybrid Swamp
Thing. While an argument could be made to include the character of Superman in the category of
the monster, albeit a domesticated one, Superman’s inbetweeness can also be described as
permanently liminal to avoid the negative connotations the term monster invokes. In contrast to
an understanding of liminality as a temporary condition often associated with ritual practices
such as pilgrimage or rites of passage, such as can be found in the works of Victor and Edith
Turner, Superman’s liminality became his permanent state the moment his spaceship landed on
Earth and he was found by the Kents. This is the beginning of his liminal existence. He is an
alien who is raised by humans. Gregory Mobley explores similar characteristics in the biblical
character Samson and concludes that he is an example of a character who exists in a permanently
liminal status.46 Samson is widely considered to have influenced Siegel and Shuster’s creation of
Superman.47
Certain readings of Superman call into question whether he is human. In The Great
Comic Book Heroes (originally published in 1965), cartoonist Jules Feiffer argues that
Superman’s human persona of Clark Kent is an act, not a part of Superman’s true self. He writes,
“Remember, Kent was not Superman’s true identity as Bruce Wayne was the Batman’s or (on
radio) Lamont Cranston the Shadow’s. Just the opposite. Clark Kent was the fiction.”48 He
continues, “But Superman had only to wake up in the morning to be Superman. In his case, Clark
Kent was the put-on. That fellow with the eyeglasses and the acne and the walk girls laughed at
wasn’t real, didn’t exist, and was a sacrificial disguise, an act of discreet martyrdom. Had they
but known!”49 Feiffer argues that this “put-on” served a psychological function for the readers,
allowing them to differentiate how the world perceived them from the hidden power they felt
lurked beneath the surface. He writes, “The truth may be that Kent existed not for the purposes
23
of the story but for the reader. He is Superman’s opinion of the rest of us, a pointed caricature of
what we, the noncriminal element, were really like. His fake identity was our real one. That’s
why we loved him so. For if that wasn’t really us, if there were no Clark Kents, only lots of
glasses and cheap suits which, when removed, revealed all of us in our true identities—what a
hell of an improved world it would have been!”50
Superman is not a Homo sapien. He is Kryptonian and, thus, genetically excluded from
this taxonomic classification. However, Homo sapien and human are not necessarily equal.
Homo sapien is a biological category. Humanity is cultural. Humanity is not a natural condition.
The capacity for language acquisition appears to be an innate, natural ability in most Homo
sapiens, but what language will be acquired, or even whether any language will be is not coded
in the DNA. Language is culture. Humanity is learned and performed. And, in nearly all
contemporary portrayals of Superman, dating back to John Byrne’s updated origin story in the
Man of Steel miniseries (1986), he was raised as a human and Clark Kent is his primary
identity.51 Unlike other alien characters, such as the superhero Martian Manhunter or the
supervillain General Zod (also from Krypton), who came to earth as adults and, therefore, remain
culturally distinct from humanity, Superman is both alien (genetically) and human (culturally).
His powers may be due to his Kryptonian DNA, but the morality and humanity that guides how
he uses them is from Kansas and the Kents.
Similar to the space Superman occupies between the alien and the human, the character
can also be described as transgressing the boundaries between other categories, specifically the
boundary between the human and the divine. While his powers are alien, and therefore biological
in origin, functionally they operate on a level best described as godly. The attributes of the
Abrahamic God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, are hardly universal
24
among the thousands of gods that have engaged with the human imagination. Gods throughout
the history and diversity of the world’s religious traditions have varied dramatically in their
power, morality, knowledge, and mortality. While Superman may not resemble the JudeoChristian God or Islamic Allah, this does not preclude him from exhibiting qualities of the
divine.
Superman’s Liminality and its Religious Use in Boundary Maintenance
The primary religious work accomplished through Superman is the construction,
maintenance, and/or negotiation of boundaries, either between the human and the divine or
between the religious sphere and the secular one. This construction, maintenance, and/or
negotiation of religious worldviews is affected by and uses both religious and non-religious
elements. Superman’s permanent liminal statuses, i.e. alien/human and human/god, allows his
creators and audience to perform this religious work through his character and mythos.
The following chapters examine the ways in which various expressions of Superman’s
permanent liminality are used by creators and readers to perform the religious work of creating,
maintaining, or challenging religious boundaries and identities through specific case studies. The
abundant scholarship concerned with Superman’s “Jewishness” demonstrates one example of
how his liminality can be harnessed. Beyond the Hebrew influences and references found in the
Superman mythos, Superman’s liminal status between the alien and the human is often read as a
metaphor for the Jewish experience in the United States. As the argument is often articulated,
Superman’s alieness is analogous with the religious and cultural otherness of Jewish immigrants
and their descendants, a group to which both Siegel and Shuster belonged, and this argument
tends to focus on the earliest examples of the Superman narrative. Therefore, Superman is a
Jewish character, not only because he was created by Jewish men, but because he directly speaks
25
to the Jewish-American experience.52 Thus, Superman serves as a site for the examination of
Jewish-American identity and for the blurring of the boundary between Jewish and non-Jewish
American culture.
Superman’s liminal status between the alien and the human can also serve as a site for the
work of American civil religion. Chapter 2 will explore this phenomenon more in-depth through
examining the work done through the comic book Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (1977). While
the narrative does include a struggle between the human protagonists (Superman and Ali) against
an alien empire, it can be viewed as an attempt to mitigate the religious and racial otherness of
Ali’s cultural perception in a white Christian American consciousness in order to include the
boxing champion into to pantheon of American “saints.”
The remaining chapters deal more directly with the religious usefulness of Superman’s
existence between the human and the divine within a Christian context. Through playing with the
perception of Superman’s divine nature, stories dealing with someone believing that Superman is
a god or an angel allow the creators a space to comment on the nature of humanity as defined
against the divine. Among Superman’s real-world audiences, his liminality encompasses and
expresses a religious potentiality in the form of the Christ-figure. When this association with
Jesus intersects with commercialism, it becomes a site for a Christian audience to define
Christianity’s relationship and boundaries with the more secular world of popular culture.
1
Metropolis Superman 37th Celebration Program Book 2015, Metropolis Area Chamber of Commerce, 10.
“Where to Play,” Visit Metropolis, Metropolis Tourism, accessed April 18, 2016,
http://www.metropolistourism.com/play.
3
“Metropolis Unveils Statue of Superman’s Lois Lane,” 6 ABC Action News, June 16, 2010,
http://6abc.com/archive/7498465/.
4
The festival hosts a cosplay contests where festival goers vote on their favorite costumes.
5
The Super Museum – Metropolis, Illinois, accessed April 25, 2016, www.supermuseum.com.
6
Metropolis Superman 37th Celebration Program Book 2015, Metropolis Area Chamber of Commerce, 14-21.
7
Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281.
8
Ibid.
2
26
9
This approach was inspired, in part, by Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block
Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
However, it diverges significantly in regards to her argument that religion is composed, at its most basic level, of
“specialness.” According to the model I present, “specialness,” or “religiousness,” is not inherent to any single
component of religion but arises from the interactions between these non-religious elements.
10
See T. M. Luhrman, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) for a psychological anthropological assessment of the importance of human
imagination in contemporary American Evangelical Christianity.
11
These six elements, along with the material element of rock, tree, river, etc., are Ninian Smart’s Seven
Dimensions of Religion. See Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996).
12
Avocado turkey burgers, to be precise.
13
A point also made in Luhrman.
14
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989),
39.
15
Although, to be fair, Freud is rather pessimistic about the possibility of the particularly religious type of wishfulfillment.
16
In other words, I will be eating avocado turkey burgers tonight.
17
By “purely religious” I mean consuming and consisting solely of religious elements.
18
Bruce David Forbes, “Introduction: Finding Religion in Unexpected Places,” in Religion and Popular Culture in
America, rev. ed., ed. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2005), 10.
19
Jerry Siegel (w) and Joe Shuster (a), “Action Comics No. 1: Superman, Champion of the Oppressed!,” in The
Superman Chronicles Volume One (New York: DC Comics, 2006), 4.
20
Ibid.
21
Jerry Siegel (w) and Joe Shuster (a), “Superman No. 1,” in The Superman Chronicles Volume One (New York:
DC Comics, 2006), 195.
22
Ibid.
23
Superman’s Kryptonian parents are first identified as Jor-L and Lora in the newspaper comic strip by Jerry Siegel
and Joe Shuster and the spellings were altered in the 1942 novel The Adventures of Superman by George Lowther,
who was also a writer for The Adventures of Superman radio program (1940-1951).
24
Grant Morrison (w), et al., All-Star Superman, vol. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 2007), 11.
25
Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” trans. Natalie Chilton, Diacritics 2, no. 1 (1972): 16.
26
Ibid., 17.
27
Richard Reynolds, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 43.
28
Forbes, “Introduction,” 12.
29
For a more in-depth look at the lives of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, see Brad Ricca, Super Boys: The Amazing
Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – The Creators of Superman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
30
Simcha Weinstein, Up, Up, and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book
Superhero (Baltimore: Leviathan Press, 2006), 19-32.
31
Ken Schenck, “Superman: A Popular Culture Messiah,” in The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and
Popular Culture, ed. B. J. Oropeza (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 33-48.
32
Mark Waid, “The Real Truth about Superman: And the Rest of Us, Too,” in Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth,
Justice, and the Socratic Way, ed. Tom Morris and Matt Morris (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 4.
33
For an more in-depth look at Superman’s appearances across twentieth and twenty-first century media, see Bruce
Scivally, Superman on Film, Television, Radio and Broadway (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.,
Publishers, 2008).
34
Bruce Scivally, Superman on Film, Television, Radio and Broadway (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,
Inc., Publishers, 2008), 25-26.
35
Ibid., 19-20.
36
There may not have been the greatest variety of Superman titles in the early decades.
37
Scivally, 19.
38
Ibid., 26.
39
Superman: The Movie, directed by Richard Donner (1978; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2013), DVD.
40
Ben Saunders, Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes (New York: Continuum, 2011),
29-30.
27
41
Ibid., 5.
A. David Lewis, “Superman Graveside: Superhero Salvation beyond Jesus,” in Graven Images: Religion in Comic
Books and Graphic Novels, ed. A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer (New York: Continuum, 2010), 183.
43
Kelly J. Baker, “There Be Monsters: A Warning,” Sacred Matters (blog), accessed September 10, 2015,
http://scholarblogs.emory.edu/sacredmatters/2015/08/28/there-be-monsters-a-warning/.
44
Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002), 194.
45
Alan Moore (w), et al., Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 2005), 21.
46
Gregory Mobley, Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 28.
47
Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain Books, 2006), 117-118.
48
Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003), 11.
49
Ibid., 12.
50
Ibid., 13.
51
Examples include Dean Cain’s portrayal of the character in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
(1993-1997) and Tom Welling in Smallville (2001-2011).
52
For an example of this argument, see Harry Brod, Superman is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to
Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way (New York: Free Press, 2012).
42
28
CHAPTER 2: BOXING SUPERMAN
Truth. Justice. The American way. Alongside “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a
plane! It’s Superman!” and “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able
to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” Superman’s never-ending battle for “truth, justice, and
the American way” endures as a hallmark quotation for the character. In the past decade, this
connection between Superman and the American way has been challenged among the stories of
Superman, in both comics and film. In the movie Superman Returns (2006), Daily Planet editor
Perry White (played by Frank Langella) sidesteps it when he asks, “Does he still stand for truth,
justice, all that stuff?”1 Action Comics #900 (2011) addresses it directly when Superman
renounces his U.S. citizenship saying, “‘Truth, justice, and the American way’—It’s not enough
anymore.”2 Whether as attempts to appeal to an increasingly important international audience (in
terms of revenue), reactions to the political climate and foreign policies of post-9/11 America, or
a combination of both, Superman’s rejection of “the American way” demonstrates a stark
departure from his characterization as an embodiment of American ideals that dates back to at
least the 1940s and was in full bloom by the debut of the television show Adventures of
Superman in 1952, which included the phrase “truth, justice, and the American way” in its
opening narration.
As late as the 1970s, Superman was still an unquestioned exemplar of “the American
way.” This chapter will explore how comics creator Neal Adams (with help from Denny O’Neil
in the early stages of the project) employed Superman’s position within the nebulous
construction of American civil religion as a small part in the larger cultural transformation of
heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, from a controversial figure in the 1960s and
1970s, into a full-fledged American hero by the 1990s. It is due to Superman’s position as both
29
an exemplar of the American way and a (literally) alien other that he is capable of serving as a
conduit for Ali’s religious and racial otherness to become re-conceptualized for inclusion into the
American civil religious pantheon. Superman’s permanently liminal status between American
and foreign allows Adams’ to use the character as a means for Ali’s cultural transformation into
an American hero despite Ali’s adherence to various formations of Islam.
American Civil Religion and Superman
While academics and non-academics alike argue about the degree to which Superman is
influenced by or participates in the religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity, there is one
religious worldview in which there is little doubt Superman has been a participant in since early
1940s—American civil religion. For the purpose of this analysis, American civil religion is the
collection of myths, rituals, observances, beliefs, and pantheon of national heroes and legends
related to the sacrilization of the American nation-state in order to act as a system of religion
where the sacred focus becomes “the people.” Reflecting the diversity of the American
population, there is no single form of American civil religion, but, instead, a plurality of
American civil religions, each with its own set of myths, rituals, beliefs, and legendary figures.
America is far from a monolithic population and American civil religion reflects that.
Superman, since his debut, has reflected American political and cultural sensibilities. The
earliest comics portray the character in light of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.3 After the
United States’ entry into World War II, Superman’s iconography becomes more explicitly
American. The cover of Superman #14 (January 1942) shows Superman standing in front of a
stars and stripes shield with a bald eagle perched upon his left arm. Behind the shield are the
outlines of the American war machinery: tanks, howitzers, and airplanes. Although cover dated
January/February 1942, this issue was released November 7, 1941, one month before the
30
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the country’s entry into the war.4 By the Eisenhower-era of
the 1950s, Superman emerges as a means of promoting an American identity which embraces the
diversity of the American population to define the U.S.A. in opposition to the U.S.S.R. In the
public service announcement “Lend a Friendly Hand!” (1960), Superman instructs the children
in the comic, and by extension the reader, on the importance of accepting refugees and
embracing them as friends.5 In a poster from the 1950s Superman informs a group of school
children, “And remember, boys and girls, your school—like our country—is made up of
Americans of many different races, religions and national origins. So if YOU hear anybody talk
against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin—don’t wait:
tell him THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN.”
Superman’s liminality places him in a unique position among members of the American
civic pantheon. In a state of constant tension between divinity and humanity, Superman
simultaneously exists between notions of the ultimate, Platonic notion of the Truth and the
relative “truths” of the culture and time where and when any particular story is produced and/or
read. He stands in tension between the ideal of America and the reality of America. This is
demonstrated in the last example. In the ideal formulation of America, racism and religious
bigotry are un-American values, but, in the historical reality of America, racism and religious
bigotry are foundational and ever-present. To say racism should not be considered American is
an assertion of the sacred reality of an America that exists outside of its expression within
culture. To say racism is not a part of the American experience is to deny reality.
Superman’s permanently liminal position between America as an ideal and America as a
reality allows for changes in the character’s relationship to the nationalistic civil religion
throughout his 75 year history. It allows the character to change and adapt with the sensibilities
31
of his creators and his readers while remaining paradoxically unchanged. This in-between status
and Superman’s inclusion in the great American pantheon allows his creator an opportunity to
define what is and is not American and, in the case of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, who should
or should not also be allowed entry into the American pantheon.
Muhammad Ali
Like any country invested in its own nationalistic mythology, the United States of
America needs its heroes and its saints. This American pantheon includes presidents and
politicians, outlaws and lawmen, artists and explorers. These cultural heroes and legends reflect
the cultural values of the society and, as our society’s values change, so do our heroes. Some
heroes are forgotten, while others are added. But none exist in the cultural imagination exactly as
they were in historical reality. People are complex, but cultural hagiographies are not. Certain
aspects of the individual’s narrative that correspond to the cultural value system are highlighted,
such as George Washington’s honesty, and other aspects that are downplayed or ignored, like
Washington’s enslavement and ownership of black people.
As American culture came to a general consensus that the black freedom movements of
the 1950s and 1960s had a positive effect on the current political and social American landscape,
new heroes needed to be selected from the movement to reflect this cultural shift.6 The main
problem is that many of the leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, like Martin
Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968) and Malcolm X (1925 – 1965), were controversial and complex
characters and, in order to be “canonized,” would have to be transformed into less politically
dangerous and divisive versions of themselves. African-American leaders of the 1950s and
1960s appealed to segments of the African-American population and to people outside of the
American context before their cultural transformations in the latter part of the 20th century and
32
early 21st century. Their cultural appropriation by the larger American population required
downplaying and/or ignoring some of the very aspects of the political and social thought that
made them appealing to the black population.
Besides King and Malcolm X, another famous (and arguably as famous) example of this
process of cultural appropriation of an African-American icon is that of the transformation of
Muhammad Ali (1942 - 2016), from a draft-dodging black nationalist into a national hero who
would light the torch at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. As Mike
Marqusee puts it in his book Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties
(2005), “Ali has had his political teeth extracted.”7 When comparing the cultural image of
Muhammad Ali in the late 1960s to his image as little as ten years later, the differences are quite
striking. By focusing on the formative years of Muhammad Ali’s public persona, I will
demonstrate that the cultural image of Muhammad Ali, from the earliest days, was the result of a
confluence of historical and ideological factors and influences that met in the individual
personage of Ali, who then used his personal agency to shape the cultural narratives surrounding
him. From his gold medal victory in 1960, Ali played more of a role in the shaping of his public
and cultural image than many scholars allow for and, by extension, Ali’s cultural transformation
during the 1970s can be viewed in a similar fashion.
In his book Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon (2009), Michael Ezra argues that
Ali’s image was primarily due to what group of people had “economic ownership of him.”8 As
Ezra writes, “The most significant way people have made meaning of Muhammad Ali over the
years has been through their understanding of him as a moral force, both positive and
negative…The crucial way many Americans have arrived at their moral understanding of Ali—
his cultural image—has come from their perception of who is making money by associating with
33
him—the commercial manifestations.”9 According to this thesis, Ezra argues that public reaction
to Ali’s opposition to the war in Vietnam and his membership with the Nation of Islam (NOI)
were primarily reactions to economics, rather than politics or race.10
Ezra’s research is important as it introduces a focus on the commercial forces shaping
Ali’s cultural image, thereby adding an interesting dimension to the understanding of Ali in a
larger context. In addition, Ezra’s understanding of Ali’s cultural image as a reflection of his
moral authority and the process of meaning making is also compelling. However, I find it
problematic to reduce all of the factors leading to his cultural appropriation to economic realities.
For example, Ezra points out that the announcement of Ali’s membership with the NOI in
February 1964 negatively affected his box office revenue, but it did not completely devastate it.11
It was not until the formation of Main Bout Inc.—Ali’s management company of which NOI
controlled a majority stake—in January 1966 that his income was greatly affected.12
There are two problems with Ezra’s economic argument. First, Ezra provides no real
evidence that the majority of Americans would have been aware of where the money was going.
Secondly, even within Ezra’s text, Main Bout’s formation is chronologically tied to Ali’s refusal
to be drafted into the United States Army, also in early 1966. It seems more likely that people
were aware of his resistance to the draft, as this was heavily reported, and that this would have
the larger impact on his image.
Although Ezra’s thesis is an incomplete picture of the causes behind Ali’s cultural
transformation, he does provide important insights into Ali’s early career, among other
information. For example, Ezra acknowledges that even at Ali’s lowest point of esteem among a
majority of the white population and portions of the black population, this negative opinion was
by no means universal and that some of the very attributes that led to his negative image among
34
some contributed to his positive image among others. Ezra writes, “Ali’s celebrity, boxing
ability, comfort among common folk, militancy, and affiliation with the Nation of Islam all
contributed to his having widespread credibility among ghetto populations that was unrivaled by
contemporary race leaders other than the late Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and members of
the Black Panther Party.”13 Ezra also notes that this affinity towards Ali extended to college
students across racial lines, probably due to his opposition to the war.14
Marquess’ Redemption Song also emphasizes Ali’s multiple receptions. He argues that
Ali’s meaning is far from uniform throughout the American or global context.15 Marquess
provides a more nuanced approach to Ali’s transformation by paying close attention to Ali in the
context of the black freedom and anti-war movements of the 1960s.16 Comparatively, Jeffrey T.
Sammons, in his book Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1990), argues
that the shift of Muhammad Ali’s cultural image is the result of a change in American culture
itself, primarily American attitudes toward the Vietnam War and that the NOI was no longer the
hot button issue it was in the 1960s.17 And, of course, American culture did change throughout
the 1960s and 1970s. By the time Ali’s conviction for evading the draft was overturned by the
U.S. Supreme Court in June 1971, the majority of America was opposed to the draft and to the
war in general. However, it seems more difficult to argue that the general American population
ever grew to accept the NOI or black nationalism in general. At the most, it seems that the
cultural visibility of the NOI in white America had decreased, but even this needs to be argued
more effectively than Sammons has.
The Racial Politics of Heavyweight Championship Boxing
Before turning attention to Muhammad Ali as an individual reacting to social stimuli, a
brief overview of the racial politics of heavyweight boxing from the beginning of the 20th
35
century may be able to shed some indirect light on the cultural image of Ali. The first black
heavyweight boxing champion was Jack Johnson (1878 – 1946), who held the title from
December 1908 to April 1915. Born during the Jim Crow era in Galveston, Texas, Johnson’s
reign as world champion was marked by severe racial tensions due in part to Johnson’s multiple
marriages to white women. Johnson’s reign also marks the beginning of the racist concept of the
“Great White Hope,” popularized by novelist Jack London, which is the notion of a future white
boxer who would be able to reclaim the championship from minority fighters.
The narrative of the “Great White Hope” would continue to affect the framing of the
narratives surrounding Ali’s bouts throughout his career, even when he fought against other
black fighters. Often, especially after his conversion to the NOI, Ali would take on Johnson’s
role of the “black menace.” However, during the 1960s and 1970s, there were no white fighters
capable of posing a serious challenge to Ali. Therefore, his black opponents like Floyd Patterson
(1935 – 2006) or Joe Frazier (1944 - 2011) would become black surrogates for white fighters.
Sammons writes, “Although the Patterson-Ali rivalry conjured up images of a ‘holy war,’
a battle between the forces of Islam and Christianity, religion was not the real issue; racial
ideology, patriotism, and society’s standards for proper athletic behavior were at the heart of the
dispute.”18 The narratives surrounding Ali’s bouts were not a singular narrative thread.
Christianity versus Islam and patriot versus traitor were woven into a larger narrative, but
underlying everything else was race. As legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson (1919 –
1972) wrote in an article in March 1967,
Muhammad Ali—or Cassius Clay—just might be one of the greatest heavyweight
champions this country has ever produced. One thing is certain. He is the most
hated. He is hated because he is Muslim. He is also hated because he speaks his
mind. Some members of the press don’t like either one of these things. But what
they seem to dislike most is that Clay is a Black Muslim and an outspoken black
man.19
36
Malcolm X also saw Ali’s matches as part of a much larger narrative framework than simply
sports. About the first Liston-Ali bout, he writes,
Cassius Clay, being a Muslim, didn’t need to be told how white Christianity had
dealt with the American black man. “This fight is the truth,” I told Cassius. “It’s
the Cross and the Crescent fighting in a prize ring – for the first time. It’s a modern
Crusades – a Christian and a Muslim facing each other with television to beam it
off Telstar for the whole world to see what happens!” I told Cassius, “Do you
think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as
anything but a champion?” (You may remember that at the weighing-in, Cassius
was yelling such things as “It is prophesied for me to be successful! I cannot be
beaten!”)20
Later, in accordance with the importance Pan-Africanism had in his political worldview,
Malcolm X would globalize the significance of his framing of the fight as a religious narrative of
Islam versus Christianity. He writes,
I was later to learn that apparently every man, woman and child in the Muslim
world had heard how Sonny Liston (who in the Muslim world had the image of a
man-eating ogre) had been beaten in Goliath-David fashion by Cassius Clay, who
then had told the world that his name was Muhammad Ali and his religion was
Islam and Allah had given him his victory. 21
Ali subverted this racially constructed cultural narrative through the framework of Black
Power. In his pre-fight rhetoric, Ali fully embraced the notion that his opponent was the “white
man’s champion.”22 However, by framing blackness as a form of consciousness rather than a
result of pigmentation of the skin, Ali asserted that he was blacker than his opponents, even if
they had darker skin coloration, and that blackness was beautiful and valuable to him as a fighter
and to the culture in general. Marqusee sees Ali’s embrace of Black Power ideas as
transformative for the interaction between sport and race.23 Marqusee also notes that, by FrazierAli I in 1971, blackness had become a virtue in professional sports and Ali attacked Frazier’s
blackness and labeled him an “Uncle Tom.”24 By feeding into and ultimately subverting the
racist narrative the culture was constructing around his fights, Ali was able to put forward a new
Black Power narrative and make that narrative work in his favor.
37
After Jack Johnson, the next black heavy weight champion of the world was Joe Louis
(1914 – 1981) who reigned from 1937 until his retirement in 1949. Louis’ championship made
enough of an impression on a twelve-year-old Malcolm Little that it would be included as a part
of Malcolm X’s life story years later. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex
Haley relate Malcolm’s feelings about Louis’ victory. They write, “And all the Negroes in
Lansing, like Negroes everywhere, went wildly happy with the greatest celebration of race pride
our generation had ever known.”25 Malcolm X relates his early, unsuccessful attempt at boxing
as inspired by Louis and seen as an area of exemption from the racial system of the time. He
writes, “A Negro just can’t be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up to the
neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were
the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a
white man and not be lynched.”26
Approximately one year later, Louis’ hero status would transcend racial boundaries with
his defeat of German fighter Max Schmeling becoming a symbolic victory over Nazism. I
believe Louis’ transformation into a national hero through the defeat of an external enemy
provides a compelling historical precedent from which to view Ali’s cultural transformation.
Louis’ transformation was immediate because the threat he symbolically defeated was an
immediate and recognized one. Ali’s resistance to the war in Vietnam and his views on race were
battles with enemies that American culture would not come to recognize as enemies until later in
Ali’s career. Initially, as we can see in his classification as the black champion, Ali was not
viewed as fighting against an enemy but was viewed as the enemy. But as the war on Vietnam
became viewed as an unpopular, unjustified action and the progress of race relations in the U.S.
reached a point where most Americans considered racism to be a serious problem affecting
38
America’s moral authority, Ali’s struggles against American racism could be seen as noble a
fight as Louis’ was against Nazism. Then, the forces of nationalistic pride that propelled Louis to
national hero could be harnessed to appropriate Muhammad Ali into the pantheon of American
mythology. As Ezra notes, “The notion of Ali as a citizen of the world who stood up in the face
of injustice would one day become the basis of widespread admiration toward him.”27
Ali, the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X
Muhammad Ali’s most significant association with the black freedom movements of the
1960s was with the Nation of Islam, its leader Elijah Muhammad (1897 – 1975), and its
charismatic spokesperson Malcolm X. But Ali’s history with racial politics goes back farther
than his encounters with the NOI in the early 1960s. Ali’s father, Cassius Clay, Sr., was a
follower of black separatist thinker Marcus Garvey, as was Malcolm X’s father.28 Manning
Marable, in his book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, argues that Ali’s individualism and his
Garveyite childhood led to a natural affinity towards NOI.29
A young Cassius Clay had been introduced to the NOI in 1961 by Sam Saxon30 and, in
1962, this interest was solidified when he met Malcolm X for the first time in Detroit, Michigan.
The admiration and friendship between the two seemed to be immediate. As Malcolm X writes,
And if I happened to be speaking anywhere within reasonable distance of
wherever Cassius was, he would be present. I liked him. Some contagious quality
about him made him one of the very few people I ever invited into my home.
Betty liked him. Our children were crazy about him. Cassius was simply a
likeable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster.31
By 1963, Ali seems to have converted to the NOI and was espousing anti-integration rhetoric in
his public speech.32 Both the NOI and Ali’s management seemed to want this association kept
quiet. Elijah Muhammad thought that Ali would lose his title fight to Liston in 1964 and that
failure would reflect poorly on the NOI.33 The Louisville Sponsorship Group (LSG), a group of
rich white Louisville men who formed an investment group for Ali after his gold medal victory
39
at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, wanted to hide the association because they felt it would
negatively affect ticket sales and prevent Ali’s chances at a title shot.34 Regardless, many white
fans were turned off by Ali’s association with NOI, even before a formal declaration was made.35
November 1963 marked the beginning of the end for Malcolm X’s association with the
NOI. Shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Elijah
Muhammad issued a statement prohibiting any member of the NOI to speak about it publically.
On December 1st, Malcolm X told the press that Kennedy’s murder was “the chickens coming
home to roost.” Although this comment would lead to the NOI placing Malcolm X on a 90 day
censure that would end with him formally leaving the group, the split was the result of deeper
differences between Malcolm X and the NOI. Malcolm X had become disenchanted with Elijah
Muhammad due to the former’s sexual improprieties and was chaffing at the limitations that the
NOI policies were placing on his political agenda. Elijah Muhammad was upset with the
direction in which Malcolm X’s political activism was heading and was uncomfortable with the
amount of attention Malcolm X was receiving in the press.
In spite of the impending split between Malcolm X and the NOI, when Muhammad Ali
would eventually be forced to choose a side, Ali invited Malcolm X to stay with him in Miami as
he trained for the Liston fight. Of all the possible NOI representatives that could have served as
his spiritual advisor, Ali’s close relationship with Malcolm X endured even during the censure.
On February 26, 1964, one day after he became the world heavyweight champion, Ali
announced his membership with NOI and told reporters that he was now to be referred to as
Cassius X.36 And, although his ultimate split with the NOI and by extension with Ali was less
than a month away, it was Malcolm X who addressed the press and told them:
Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more
to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was,
because Robinson is the white man’s hero. The white press wanted him to lose.
40
They wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about
the religion of other athletes. But their prejudice against Clay blinded them to his
ability.37
With his comparison of Ali and Robinson as black and white champions, respectively, Malcolm
X provided Ali with the template he effectively used to subvert the “Great White Hope”
narrative the mainstream culture wanted to place on his future fights.
After Malcolm X’s split with the NOI, Ali had to decide whether to stay with Elijah
Muhammad’s organization or to side with Malcolm X and help him form the Organization of
Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Ali choose the NOI. As Malcolm X wrote, “Cassius Clay and I
are not together today.”38 According to many scholars, Ali had become an important component
in the feud between the NOI and Malcolm X. Marable writes, “Clay was the Nation of Islam’s
prized property and had to be retained. Malcolm X was the enemy.”39 Sammons argues that,
after Malcolm X’s falling out with the NOI, Elijah Muhammad used Ali to fill the role of
prominent spokesperson.40 Charles Lemert, in his book Muhammad Ali: Trickster in the Culture
of Irony (2003) argues that Elijah Muhammad used Ali as a cover for the expulsion of Malcolm
X.41 Lemert sees Elijah Muhammad’s giving Ali his new Arabic name on March 6, 1964, only
two weeks after Ali’s public acknowledgement of his membership with the NOI, as a way to
secure Ali against Malcolm X.42
Once Ali split with Malcolm X it appears to have been a complete split. While both men
were touring Africa, they encountered each other at an airport but did not speak. In The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X frames this lack of confrontation as a conscious and
sympathetic decision on his part. He writes:
I thought that if Cassius and I happened to meet, it would likely prove
embarrassing for Cassius, since he had elected to remain with Elijah
Muhammad’s version of Islam. I would not have been embarrassed, but I knew
that Cassius would have been forbidden to associate with me. I knew that Cassius
knew I had been with him, and for him, and believed in him, when those who later
41
embraced him felt that he had no chance. I decided to avoid Cassius so as not to
put him on the spot.43
However, Marable claims Ali snubbed Malcolm X at the airport and it was not Malcolm X
deciding to avoid Ali so as not to embarrass him.44 The closeness between the two could have
led to the possibility of reconciliation at some later date, but any possibility of this was ended
less than a year after Ali chose the NOI over continued association with Malcolm X, with
Malcolm X’s assassination on February 21, 1965. If Marqusee’s suspicion that Ali sided with the
NOI because he felt continued association with Malcolm X “would lead him deeper into political
activism, expose him to greater danger,” it is easy to imagine a reconciliation could have
occurred when Ali made the decision to challenge the war in Vietnam and the draft and placed
himself into deeper political activism with the threat of prison.45
Regardless of the ultimately unattained reunion between Ali and Malcolm X, Malcolm
X’s political and racial ideology that emerged during the last years of his life would be reflected
by Ali throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As Marqusee notes both men eventually arrived at the
same worldview, “a fusion of black pride with universal humanism.”46 Ali’s anti-draft
proclamation “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong” follows Malcolm X’s speaking out
against the war as early as January 1964 and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) doing the same in January 1966.47 Through Ali’s anti-war position, he joined himself
ideologically with Malcolm X by emphasizing a brotherhood with people of color around the
world over a perceived duty towards the white U.S. government.48 Malcolm X also realized
early Ali’s popularity throughout the world. He writes,
Through my chauffer-guide-interpreter I was asked scores of questions about
Cassius. Even children knew of him, and loved him there in the Muslim world.
By popular demand, the cinemas throughout Africa and Asia had shown his fight.
At that moment in young Cassius’ career, he had captured the imagination of the
entire dark world.49
Ali would come to view this connection to Africa as important to his worldview over time.
42
1960s Mainstream Media and Ali’s Image
Marqusee argues that of all the intellectual gifts with which Malcolm X inspired
Muhammad Ali, it was Malcolm’s gift of self-invention, a gift that Manning Marable emphasizes
in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, that had the greatest impact.50 However, Ali was inventing
himself and his public image well before his 1962 meeting with Malcolm X. In Las Vegas,
Nevada during 1961, Ali met “Gorgeous George” Wagner, a professional wrestler who played
the role of the bad guy (or heel in professional wrestling terminology) and bragged incessantly
outside of the ring to increase ticket sales to his matches.51 Ezra notes that this encounter with
Wagner had the largest impact on Ali and the creation of his public image before his meeting
with Malcolm X.52 Although Ali is not solely responsible for the manner in which the media
portrayed him, this example shows that he did exert his personal agency in his presentation from
the earliest days of his boxing career and was not merely at the whim of cultural changes and
shifts.
Before his association with the NOI or his first meeting with Malcolm X, mainstream
media coverage of Ali was markedly different than what it would become later in the 1960s, but
Ali still demonstrated the ability to help shape the narrative. In a September 25, 1961 article in
Sports Illustrated by Houston Horn titled “Who Made Me – Is Me!,” Ali is presented in a
relatively sympathetic light. The article discusses Ali’s patriotism in spite of America’s issues
with racism and segregation. Ali relates a story in which a Soviet reporter is asking him
questions about how he feels about segregation. The Russian reporter is trying to get a critique of
the U.S. from Ali and Ali responds, “Tell your readers we’ve got qualified people working on
that problem, and I’m not worried about the outcome. To me, the U.S.A. is still the best country
in the world, counting yours. It may be hard to get something to eat sometimes, but anyhow I
43
ain’t fighting alligators and living in a mud hut.”53 It is difficult to determine if Ali’s portrayal of
what I assume is Africa is his authentic understanding of the continent in 1961 or if he is being
ironic, but it is clear that within a few years, after his travels to Africa, his Pan-African ideology
would have never been expressed in this manner.
Also of note in his anecdote is an implied support of the Civil Rights Movement and
integration. It may not be surprising that prior to his affiliation with the NOI that a young Cassius
Clay might have been sympathetic to the ideology of Martin Luther King Jr. However,
throughout the 1960s, Ali seems to have continued this support at some level while at the same
time supporting a belief in black separatism.54 In 1964, the FBI recorded a phone conversation
between Ali and King. In this conversation, Ali tells King he is behind him but only in private
because it would be too dangerous to publically declare.55 This is not their only contact. In
March 1967, King and Ali met in Louisville, where they were both supporting the struggle for
integrated housing.56 Ali’s connections with the Civil Rights Movement continued after the
assassination of King on April 4, 1968. In October 1970, Ali received the Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. medal. At the event, Rev. Ralph Abernathy (1926 – 1990) said that Ali was “a living
example of soul power, the March on Washington in two fists.”57 And Coretta Scott King called
Ali “a champion of justice and peace and unity.”58 This association with the Civil Rights
Movement demonstrates that even though Ali was loyal to the NOI, he did not limit his
ideological influences to Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Ali was using his personal agency
to select from various competing factions of the black freedom movement.
Elsewhere in this same article, in support of Ezra’s main argument, Ali acknowledged
certain economic considerations that limited his choices, although these limitations would only
be temporary. Ali said, “I don’t join any groups or nothing because it might embarrass my
44
sponsors [the LSG].”59 But he also asserted his individuality and his self-determinism. When
discussing people in his Louisville neighborhood and even his own father taking credit for who
he had become, Ali said, “Who made me is me.”60 This sentiment was echoed when he
announced his membership with the NOI and proclaimed, “I don’t have to be what you want me
to be.”61
Upon the announcement of Ali’s membership with the NOI, there was backlash from the
mainstream press. In the April 11, 1966 issue of Sports Illustrated, Jack Olsen addressed
Muhammad Ali’s conversion. Olsen wrote about Ali in terms of “reverse racism.” He wrote, “It
takes many exposures to a white man before his name sinks into the consciousness of Cassius
Clay. This is because he has erected a sort of racial curtain that screens whites out of his
emotional life. A white man’s name is of no importance to him, nor are ‘whiteys’ themselves,
except insofar as they can further his career.”62 Although exempting Ali and Saxon, Olsen
stereotypes members of the NOI as humorless.63 This is a stereotype that Olsen felt was
affecting Ali’s personality and his public image. Olsen writes, “[Ali] lost track of the difference
between buffoonery and nastiness, and the public began to sour on him.”64 Although throughout
the article Olsen displays distaste for what he perceives as the NOI and its ideology, he does
admit that Ali is sincere in his belief, a position other writers would not take especially in light of
Ali’s draft resistance. Olsen writes, “Cassius Clay has a blind and total belief in every word of
Message to the Blackman, and thus he becomes a rare individual: a genuine, if misguided,
conscientious objector.”65
M. R. Werner, in his book review of Jack Olsen’s Ali biography Black Is Best (1966) in
the March 13, 1967 Sports Illustrated, expressed an opinion about Ali’s relationship with the
NOI that robbed Ali of personal agency. He writes, “It is the opinion of Cassius’ family and
45
many of his friends that the Black Muslims have captured him in an effort to take themselves out
of the lunatic fringe on his championship coattails.”66 By framing the NOI as a cult that has
brainwashed Ali, whether through ignorance or malice, Werner is reflecting the cultural fears
surrounding the NOI and reducing Ali to a puppet with Elijah Muhammad supplying the words.
This is an untenable position in light of the evidence demonstrating Ali as the recipient of a
diverse background of cultural and political influences and as an individual capable of using and
shaping this background to present his own cultural image.
Muhammad Ali came to age in a period where multiple and diverse perspectives on race
and politics converged into a loosely affiliated black freedom movement. As a black southerner
living in segregated Louisville, he would have been exposed to Black Nationalist thought as well
as integrationist positions. As a heavyweight boxer, he also inherited a long tradition of the racial
politics surrounding the world championship title, with black fighters being forced into the roles
of villains or heroes depending on the historical circumstances. Instead of choosing a single
ideology, Ali created for himself a complex synthesis of ideologies that would eventually take on
a global perspective, like his mentor Malcolm X had.
But Ali was not a passive receptacle for these ideologies. Ali would use them to shape his
image and subvert expectations of black athletes present in the popular culture. Ali was a black
fighter who refused to choose between being the villain or the hero and, by being both and
neither, he transcended the categories the media wanted to place him in. It is this individual
agency that is present from Ali’s earliest days in the public spotlight and will continue
throughout his career.
When Sammons declares that “Muhammad Ali changed very little over time; what did
change was the country’s reaction to him and what he represented,” he is not reflecting a reality
46
where every human being is constantly changing.67 This attitude reflects a hagiographical
attitude that wishes its saints to be consistent, both internal and over time. By showing the
complexities of the interactions between Ali’s cultural environment and his individuality, I hope
to have set forth a groundwork that can help illuminate Ali’s role in his cultural appropriation
beginning in the 1970s. I believe a major difference Marqusee fails to acknowledge between the
political “defanging” of King and Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali is that King’s and Malcolm
X’s cultural images were being shaped by the culture after their murders whereas Ali was still
alive to subvert and shape his own public image, even if his struggles with the symptoms of
Parkinson’s disease had removed him from the public spotlight.
Superman vs. Muhammad Ali
In his collection of articles about boxing, Muhammad Ali & Company (1998), Thomas
Hauser relates a well-known anecdote about Ali. Hauser writes, “During his glory years, ‘The
Greatest’ took a shuttle flight from Washington D.C. to New York. As the plane was readying
for take-off, a stewardess instructed, ‘Mr. Ali, please fasten your seatbelt.’ ‘Superman don’t
need no seatbelt,’ the champ responded. ‘Mr. Ali,’ the stewardess said gently, ‘Superman don’t
need no plane.’”68 In 1978, Ali would get the chance to prove himself against the Man of Steel in
the pages of DC Comics’ Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, written and illustrated by Neal Adams,
and Ali would emerge victorious.69 Here Superman may not need a plane, but he turns out to be
pretty lousy in the boxing ring, and Ali remains “the Greatest.”
Certain aspects of the mythologizing of Muhammad Ali can be seen as the result of
cultural shifts. By the latter half of the 1970s, mainstream American culture had become so
disillusioned with the recent memory of the war in Vietnam that Muhammad Ali’s refusal to
become a soldier on the grounds of being a conscientious objector no longer carried the stigma it
47
held in the late 1960s, when young men were still being drafted and dying. As Jenette Kahn, DC
Comics’ publisher at the time of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali’s release, writes, “By 1976, Ali
was a folk hero of iconic proportions. He’d sacrificed nearly four of his best boxing years in
defiance of the draft and the Vietnam War, and for all his brashness and bravado, he was
considered a man of principle and an outspoken symbol of the struggle of black Americans.”70
Here we see Ali’s “defiance” redefined as a virtue in a culture that had come to question the
Vietnam War.
However, by the 1970s, mainstream American culture had not come to accept black
nationalism or the theology of the Nation of Islam. This aspect of Ali’s past was made to fit into
the new mythology of Ali, not through a change in the culture, but through a change in the man.
Ezra argues that Ali’s acceptance of Sunni Islam after Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975 was
crucial in his transformation into an American cultural hero.71 By moving away from the black
nationalist agenda of the Nation, Ali became less dangerous politically and could be seen more
favorably in the realm of sports. Ali could be viewed as removed from the realm of racial politics
through his conversion to Sunni Islam and his myth, now squarely in the area of sports and
culture, could be viewed as “safe.”
Turning now to Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, the question arises, how does this comic
deal with Ali’s stance on the Vietnam War, the racial politics he espoused in the 1960s, and his
religious affiliations? It deals with these issues by completely ignoring them. The only
indication the text gives that Ali is Muslim is his name. The myth-making strategy of ignoring
and silence is at work within this comic.
This ignoring of Muhammad Ali’s involvement with a controversial religious
organization is not only convenient for authors who may have been uncomfortable depicting an
48
African-American religious worldview, it is also an example of another American civil religion
tenant in action—religious toleration. Religious toleration as it has been practiced since the
Enlightenment is not the idea that the religious beliefs and practices of the Other should be
understood, appreciated, or celebrated. Toleration is the relegation of religious matters to the
private sphere so that interactions within the public sphere can be free from overt religious
tensions. By making no note of religion within the text, Adams has banished Ali’s NOI
membership into the comics version of Ali’s private life and safely away from the view of the
other characters within the narrative and the readers as well.
It should be noted that while this strategy of religious toleration through downplaying or
ignoring religious difference is employed within Superman vs. Muhammad Ali’s depiction of Ali,
Ali’s construction of his own narrative within the same period does not ignore his affiliation with
the NOI. In his auto-biopic The Greatest (1977), adapted from his autobiography of the same
name written with Richard Durham, Ali does not shy away from his religious identity. The film
includes Malcolm X (played by James Earl Jones) as a secondary character and features an
extended argument between Ali and a white fight promoter Bill McDonald (played by Robert
Duvall) where Ali refuses to publically denounce his affiliation with Malcolm X, Elijah
Muhammad, and the NOI before the Liston bout.
At some points within the comic it appears that differences between the races are denied,
or at least minimized. When announcing the match between Superman and Ali, Jimmy Olsen,
Superman’s friend, says, “For those of you wondering why Superman agreed to fight with his
costume on…it’s because many of our alien spectators wouldn’t be able to tell the fighters apart!
Except for subtle changes in hue, all humans look exactly alike to them…”72 At the same time it
is minimizing racial difference through the perspective of an alien other, it is emphasizing the
49
unity of humanity when faced with an alien other. As an extremely battered Superman hits the
canvas head first with a “whup” after losing his match with Ali, two aliens emerge to carry him
off. Visibly angry, Ali yells, “Hands off! Take your slimy hands off that man! We’ll take care
of our own!” 73 Here we see the implicit statement that there is no white Superman and black Ali,
only human beings.
If, for the most part, the issue of race is not present on the level of whites and blacks, it is
implied in the treatment of humans at the hands of the alien Scrubbs. Despite their green skin, it
is easy to see them as substituting for whites and their colonial history with regards to AfricanAmericans. In an early panel, we see a Scrubb ambassador backhanding Muhammad Ali across
the mouth for speaking up for Lois Lane. The Scrubb says, “Silence! You will speak when
spoken to!”74 It is here we see Ali’s unwillingness to silently suffer the abuses of a group that
wants to subjugate him as an inferior. With a single punch to the stomach, Ali sends the alien
flying several feet off of his hover platform.75 Later, we see an even more overt connection
between the Scrubbs and white oppression. The emperor of the Scrubbs, Rat’lar, offers Ali a deal
in the face of the annihilation of earth. He says, “If your governments agree to deed the peoples
of Earth to us as slaves, we will spare them! There is no other alternative!”76 With this Ali’s face
grows visibly angry and he begins to lay into his alien opponent. The narrator announces, “We
can only guess at the thoughts that stir Ali’s soul…But, plainly, he has been touched…Plainly he
is driven to a capacity beyond that of ordinary humanity…”77
What does Superman vs. Muhammad Ali tell us the solution to oppression is? The comic
offers individualism and “fair play.” In post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America the role of
government and institutions was called into question. When the aliens first arrive on earth a man
in the crowd screams, “Someone better call the president!,” to which another man jadedly
50
responds (despite Jimmy Carter’s smiling visage appearing on the front cover), “What’s he
gonna do?”78 It is not the governments of Earth the Scrubb fear, but the potential of individuals.
The ambassador says to Superman, “Imagine that destructive capacity multiplied a billionfold…Imagine a society that thrives on individual initiative and not on group initiative!
Intergalactic chaos!!”79 It is not the military or the politicians that the people look to save them
from the alien threat. As Herbert Muhammad, the third son of Elijah Muhammad and Ali’s
manager, says in the book regarding Ali and Superman, “If the fate of our planet is at stake, I
can’t think of anyone I’d rather put my faith in than those two great men!”80
In the end, the Scrubb champion, Hun’ya, overthrows the emperor due to Ali’s insistence
on the principle of “fair play.” Hun’ya explains his treason against the emperor as follows, “His
greatest mistake was to create this tournament! It was in this that you proved yourselves truly
honorable, fair and self-sacrificing! These things we respect above all else!”81 The concept of
“fair play” is also brought up in the most explicit dialogue in terms of race and equality. After
the victory, Ali explains to Lois Lane, “When you come right down to it, fair play is what it’s all
about! If more people tried to live by the simple rules of fair play, my people…all people, would
get a fair shake!”82 It is difficult not to see this simple, if not in fact naïve, solution to the racial
inequalities in America as Adams and O’Neil’s prescription for the readership. The notion of
“fair play” as presented in the comic requires no massive societal upheavals or economic shifts.
The rules are already in place, we just need to follow them. Here, “fair play” is a conservative
method to preserve the status quo, and it seems unlikely that the Muhammad Ali of 1964 would
give his whole hearted endorsement to this viewpoint.
Since their inception in 1938, superhero comics have had serious issues in regard to racial
issues and the depictions of people of color. Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams’ run on the DC
51
Comics series Green Lantern Co-starring Green Arrow was one of the first mainstream comic
books to address contemporary social issues, including race. According to Jenette Kahn, their
work on this groundbreaking series is the reason they were selected to write and draw Superman
vs. Muhammad Ali.83 The first issue, “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” published in 1970,
highlights the racial tensions of the day and the shortcomings of the superhero genre. The plot
involves a white slumlord being attacked by the tenants he was evicting in order to build a
parking lot. Green Lantern swoops from the sky to save him, but is unaware of the entire
situation. After being confronted by the Green Arrow, depicted as a liberal voice opposed to
Green Lantern’s Nixonian “law and order” position, an elderly black tenant emerges to chastise
Green Lantern. Adilifu Nama, in his book Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black
Superheroes (2011), describes the man as “decrepit and unappealing” and speaking “in an
unconvincing black dialect.”84 The man says, “I been readin’ about you. How you work for the
blue skin and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins and you done
considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with—the black skins! I
want to know, how come?! Answer me that, Mr. Green Lantern!” Green Lantern, hanging his
head in shame answers, “I…can’t…”85 Nama notes, “As well-intentioned as this type of
personally transformative pop psychology may have been, it signaled that a personal pursuit of
individual transformation was the true testament of change rather than the social and institutional
quest for racial justice that proponents of the civil rights and Black Power movements advocated.
As a real-world strategy to eliminate racism, the former approach is debatable.”86
Having established their view of white introspection as valuable in overcoming racial
inequality, in a later landmark issue they address the black side of the equation. In the issue,
“Earthquake Beware My Power,” O’Neil and Adams introduce the African-American backup
52
Green Lantern, John Stewart, initially depicted as a symbol of the Black Power movement. 87
After seeing Stewart confront a racist police officer for harassing two black men playing
dominoes, Green Lantern notes that Stewart is not fit to be a Green Lantern, despite his courage
and integrity, because Stewart “has a chip on his shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibraltar!”88
Nama describes O’Neil and Adams’ initial characterization of Stewart as “a cocky, antiauthoritarian, angry, and race-conscious figure.”89 One may note that this description is also
fairly accurate of Ali’s portrayal in the mainstream American consciousness in the 1960s and
70s. However, by the end of the narrative Stewart has softened his Black Power rhetoric and
moves towards the philosophies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He says, “Style isn’t important,
any more than color!”90 By coming in line with O’Neil and Adams’ white liberal views of
individual responsibility in recognizing equality, Stewart has moved past the Black Power
philosophy that O’Neil and Adams had constructed as a roadblock to true heroism. In order to
determine how the two white creators of this comic were able to validate their authority on civil
rights and equality, let us now turn to stories involving the creation of Superman vs. Muhammad
Ali.
The reformation of Muhammad Ali’s cultural image is not the only mythologizing within
the book. In the introduction to Superman vs. Muhammad Ali: Deluxe Edition published in 2010,
Neal Adams writes, “In order to do the book, because of the politics in those days, Denny
O’Neil, the original writer, and myself, had to be approved by the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad.”91 I will now turn my attention towards demonstrating why this is historically
improbable and what this myth of Elijah Muhammad’s approval might tell us about the author’s
desired status for this book.
53
In the same introduction, Neal Adams states that Jenette Kahn was integral in driving the
book forward.92 Kahn corroborates this aspect of Adams’ story in her afterword to the 2010
edition, but disagrees with him on other important points. While Adams contends that the pairing
of Superman and Muhammad Ali was the brainchild of DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz,
Kahn’s version states that the idea was brought to DC Comics by boxing promoter Don King in
late 1976.93 She writes, “What [Don King] proposed was that Superman take on a new contender
– none other, of course, than Muhammad Ali. Other real-life figures had appeared in Superman
comic books, but none had received equal billing or been an equal partner in the action.”94
Regardless of whether the idea was Schwartz’s or King’s, both Adams’ and Kahn’s
accounts agree that Kahn was involved with the project from the beginning. If this is the case,
although Kahn dates the idea to late 1976, it could be no earlier than February 1976, the month
she began work at DC.95 Although it was not released until 1978 due to delays in securing
permissions from the celebrities and real life persons depicted on the book’s cover attending the
boxing match, the content of the book was also being formed well into 1977.96 In the panel
where Ali first sees the alien spaceship, Superman is carrying Ali in a clear, presumably air tight,
bubble through space. Ali describes the Scrubb spaceship as “a cross between Lost in Space, Star
Wars, and a pregnant blender!”97 Since Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977, the dialogue
for the book must still have been being written or rewritten after this point.
Therefore, if the dialogue was being composed into the latter half of 1977 and the earliest
the work could have begun was February 1976, Adams and O’Neil could not have gained Elijah
Muhammad’s approval to work on the book. Elijah Muhammad passed away on February 25,
1975, a full year before Kahn would be hired at DC Comics. So why is Adams claiming approval
from a man who was clearly dead and could not have given it? If by the time Superman vs.
54
Muhammad Ali was being written Ali had left the Nation of Islam and followed Elijah
Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Mohammad, in adopting Sunni Islam, why does Adams claim
the Nation of Islam was sanctioning him as an artist?
It seems that Ali had given his approval to the publication of the book. Ali and his team
may have been concerned with his own image, both through the comics’ characterization and
physical depiction.98 However, Elijah Muhammad’s, and by extension the Nation of Islam’s,
approval would give authority to O’Neil and Adams’ (Irish Catholic and Jewish respectively)
ability to depict African-Americans and racial politics. By creating the myth of personal approval
by Elijah Muhammad, Adams is claiming authority for his sometimes problematic depiction of
blacks in America (such as Superman donning pseudo blackface to pass as Ali’s ring man
Bundini Brown99), black issues, and his status quo position supporting the conclusion of “fair
play” resulting in racial equality. By securing that authority, Adams is able to make the claim
that he was helping with the mythologizing of Muhammad Ali. Adams writes, “I think this is one
of the best graphic novels/comic books ever done. And I truly believe I helped Muhammad Ali
make his statement for the world by doing this book.”100
The Muhammad Ali of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali is a character divorced from all of
the aspects that defined the cultural construction of Muhammad Ali only a few years earlier. By
presenting Ali advocating the more King-like conception of “fair play” and completely ignoring
any previous connections with the more controversial Nation of Islam, O’Neil and Adams
redefine their presentation of Ali as reflecting a certain vision of “truth, justice, and the
American way” that was more in line with a mainstream understanding of race relations in the
US. In doing so, their presentation of Ali is indistinguishable, philosophically, from the perennial
champion of the status quo Superman. This characterization may have stood out in the late
55
1970s, but by the time of the re-release thirty years later, this politically defanged understanding
of Muhammad Ali is perfectly in line with cultural hagiography of Muhammad Ali.101
Superman vs. Muhammad Ali creates a portrayal of Ali, not as he was as a person, but as
an embodiment of “fair play” and individualism’s challenge to oppressive culture and political
systems. Through association, Ali’s identity subtly merges with Superman’s. No longer is Ali a
danger, but he has been transformed into a champion for “truth, justice, and the American way.”
As Jenette Kahn writes, “Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, with its pairing of black and white, its
challenge to oppression, and its themes of courage, justice, and sacrifice, was a book for the
ages. Freedom for all was the message, and it rang loud and clear long after the story was
told.”102 Or as Ali himself puts it while shaking Superman’s hand, “Superman, we are the
greatest!”103 And Ali comes out the other side as a character now safe for mainstream cultural
consumption and appropriation.
In the grand scheme of the cultural reevaluation of Muhammad Ali, Superman vs.
Muhammad Ali is treated as a minor footnote. However, it demonstrates a use of Superman’s
identification with the American civil religion and its ability to absorb other characters (in this
case the real world Ali) into a greater narrative of an idealized America which remains in tension
with the reality of America. Ali becomes a part of Superman’s story and Superman’s story is a
part of the American mythology. By concluding the text with a statement of equality, not just of
racial equality but the equality between Superman and Ali as exemplary individual examples of
the American hero, Ali is raised, in turn, to the status of a member of the American pantheon.
1
Superman Returns, directed by Bryan Singer (2006; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006), DVD.
David S. Goyer (w), et al. “The Incident,” in Action Comics #900 (New York: DC Comics, 2011), 79.
3
Harry Brod, Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the JewishAmerican Way (New York: Free Press, 2012), 13.
4
Beginning with the cover of Superman #12 (in stores July 2, 1941) which showed Superman walking with a sailor
and a soldier, Superman’s covers began focusing on a wartime patriotism. Undoubtedly, this is a reaction to the
2
56
popularity of the newly released Joe Simon and Jack Kirby creation Captain America, who was depicted punching
Adolf Hitler in the face earlier that year.
5
Jack Schiff and Curt Swan, “Lend a Friendly Hand,” in World Finest Comics #111 (New York: DC Comics, 1960).
6
Michael Ezra, Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 171.
7
Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, sec. ed., (New York: Verso, 2005),
3.
8
Ezra, 2.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 94.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., 131.
14
Ibid.
15
Marqusee, 5.
16
Ibid., 11.
17
Jeffery T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1990), 225-233.
18
Ibid., 197.
19
Jackie Robinson, “In Defense of Cassius Clay,” in The Muhammad Ali Reader, ed. Gerald Early, (Hopewell, NJ:
The Ecco Press, 1998), 72.
20
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 313.
21
Ibid., 335.
22
Marqusee, 259.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Malcolm X, 24.
26
Ibid., 25.
27
Ezra, 95.
28
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 225.
29
Ibid., 226.
30
Marqusee, 60.
31
Malcolm X, 310.
32
Marable, 281.
33
Marqusee, 70.
34
Ezra, 64-65.
35
Marable, 286.
36
Ezra, 87.
37
Malcolm X, quoted in Marable, 287.
38
Malcolm X, 309.
39
Marable, 289.
40
Sammons, 195.
41
Charles Lemert, Muhammad Ali: Trickster in the Culture of Irony, (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003), 95.
42
Marqusee, 84-85.
43
Malcolm X, 365.
44
Marable, 318.
45
Marqusee, 90.
46
Ibid., 131.
47
Ibid., 170-172.
48
Ibid., 215-216.
49
Malcolm X, 349.
50
Marqusee, 93.
51
Ezra, 32.
52
Ibid., 32.
53
Huston Horn, “‘Who Made Me—Is Me!,’” Sports Illustrated, September 25, 1961.
54
Ezra, 65-66.
55
Marqusee, 133.
57
56
Ibid., 213-214.
Ralph Abernathy, quoted in Robert Lipsyte “Ali Says Frazier Will Be Easier,” New York Times, October 27,
1970: 56.
58
Coretta Scott King, quoted in Lipsyte.
59
Horn.
60
Ibid.
61
Marqusee, 162.
62
Jack Olsen, “A Case of Conscience,” Sports Illustrated, April 11, 1966.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
65
Ibid.
66
M. R. Werner, “Cassius-Muhammad Is Portrayed with Penetration, Compassion and Wit,” Sports Illustrated,
March 13, 1967.
67
Sammons, xix.
68
Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali & Company, (Norwalk, CT: Hastings House, 1998), 264.
69
Adams’ longtime partner, Denny O’Neil, who also shares writing credit, began the project as the writer but
relinquished the writing duty to Adams some time before the book’s completion.
70
Jenette Kahn, “Afterword,” in Superman vs. Muhammad Ali: Deluxe Edition, (New York: DC Comics, 2010).
71
Ezra, 158.
72
Denny O’Neil, et al., Superman vs. Muhammad Ali: Deluxe Edition, (New York: DC Comics, 2010),33.
73
Ibid., 37.
74
Ibid., 6.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 55.
77
Ibid., 56.
78
Ibid., 15.
79
Ibid., 12.
80
Ibid., 20.
81
Ibid., 70.
82
Ibid.
83
Kahn.
84
Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 2011), 15.
85
Denny O’Neil (w) and Neal Adams (a), “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” in Green Lantern/Green Arrow (New
York: DC Comics, 2012), 13.
86
Nama, 16.
87
Ibid., 17.
88
Dennis O’Neil (w), et al., “Earthquake Beware My Power,” in Green Lantern/Green Arrow (New York: DC
Comics, 2012), 276.
89
Nama, 19.
90
O’Neil et al., “Earthquake Beware My Power,” 284.
91
Neal Adams, introduction to Superman vs. Muhammad Ali: Deluxe Edition, (New York: DC Comics, 2010).
92
Ibid.
93
Kahn.
94
Ibid.
95
Larry Tye, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, (New York: Random House,
2012), 211.
96
Kahn.
97
O’Neil et al., Superman vs. Muhammad Ali: Deluxe Edition, 24.
98
Kahn relates a story where Herbert Muhammad is concerned with the lack of fullness in the depiction of Ali’s
calves. Ibid.
99
Ibid., 52.
100
Adams.
101
Nama, 23.
102
Kahn.
103
O’Neil, et al., Superman vs. Muhammad Ali: Deluxe Edition, 72.
57
58
CHAPTER 3: A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY
It is a recurring theme within the Superman mythos: an individual or group believes
Superman to be a god and begins to worship him as such. Superman vehemently denies that he is
divine and attempts to persuade them that he is “just a man.” This type of story explicitly uses
the character of Superman as a site for doing religious and theological work. Specifically,
Superman’s permanently liminal status between the human and the divine can be used by comics
creators and comics readers to define, construct, and/or question the porous and shifting
boundary between the divine and human. It is a site to play with these notions, safe from the risk
of heresy and blasphemy.
To explore this kind of religious work, encompassing and expressing the construction and
maintenance of conceptions of the divine and the human, I have selected three stories from
Superman’s history. “The Power Within” (1988-1989), written by Roger Stern and illustrated by
seminal Silver Age Superman artist Curt Swan, is the tale of two conflicting groups with
religious notions in regards to Superman: the Fellowship, a group reminiscent of Christianinfluenced New Age practice who worship Superman as a god and savior, and the Consortium, a
group who views him as the Antichrist of Christian mythology. The Kingdom (1999), written by
Mark Waid and illustrated by various artists, begins with the disillusionment of a disaster
survivor who worshipped Superman as a god until Superman visits him at his church to tell him
the truth. “Angel” (2007), written by Kurt Busiek, is the story of an older woman who believes
that Superman is an angel whom God has given her the ability to summon to combat
neighborhood evils.
This timeframe of publication was selected due to the emphasis on Superman’s humanity
within the comics that followed John Byrne’s reboot of the character in the miniseries Man of
59
Steel (1986). Through an analysis of these three stories, created within a twenty-year span, I will
explore the following questions: Why do the human characters within these comics believe
Superman is divine? Why must Superman reject this classification and emphasize his humanity?
How are the creators playing with the categories of divine and human?
“The Power Within” (1988-1989)
Beginning with issue 601 in 1988 and continuing into March 1989, DC changed Action
Comics’ format from a monthly series that focused on Superman to a weekly anthology series.
This anthology format featured a variety of stories starring the Green Lantern, Deadman, the
Demon, and the Phantom Stranger (all along with many others). Each week, with the exception
of the final issue in this format (#642), each issue contained two pages of a Superman story
written by Roger Stern and illustrated by Curt Swan.1
The majority of these pages (issues 601 to 639) were part of a single narrative. It begins
with Superman flying in to save a man named Bob Galt from a group of gunmen.2 After the
initial confrontation Superman learns that Bob Galt is a member of a group who worship
Superman as a god, called the Fellowship.3 Galt is the intended target of multiple assassination
attempts by a group called the Consortium, who believe Superman to be the anti-Christ and the
Fellowship to be a dangerous cult dedicated to him.
The first indication of the overtly religious themes of this story appears after Superman
rescues Galt for the first time. Galt falls to his knees and prostrates himself before a confused
Superman. Galt says, “You are the one, true Superman! You are our light and our way! Through
you, we shall find our salvation!”4 Galt’s pose reflects a submissive posture toward the divine
that occurs in many of the world’s religious traditions, while his words reflect a Christian
influenced understanding of Superman as divine. This a can be seen in the phrases “one, true
60
Superman,” “our light and our way,” and “salvation.” The following pages further solidify this
connection between the Fellowship’s understanding of Superman and Christianity. Galt explains
to a policeman who is mocking his belief, “Haven’t you heard his story? His father sent him to
us from beyond the stars…to live among us and show us the way! In the years since his coming,
he has ever used his might to balance the uncaring forces of nature…and battle the evil of
mankind. He has been humanity’s champion, asking nothing in return. He has stood for truth and
justice. With his great powers, so far beyond those of us mere mortals, what else could he be
called but ‘savior?’”5 The final panel of this speech depicts Superman in a cruciform pose
hovering over a crowd of people with their hands raised towards him.6
While other Christian references exist within the Fellowship’s religious worldview, such
as a cross located in their desert sanctuary overlaid with Superman’s chevron,7 Christianity is not
the only form of religion that is an influence on the depiction of the Fellowship’s practice. Most
of the members wear Superman’s chevron on shirts of various shades of blue and necklaces with
the symbol as well. Members of the Fellowship sit around statues and icons of Superman while
chanting his name and sitting in a modified lotus position.8 This practice results in the
practitioners exhibiting a glowing pink aura, levitating approximately six feet off of the ground,
and exhibiting an array of various other superpowers.
The story also draws parallels between the Fellowship and early Christian communities,
as understood in the popular imagination. Mother Tierra, the high priestess of the Fellowship,
explains to Clark Kent why they are hiding in a cave in the desert. She says, “Our religion is not
the first to be driven underground by violent oppressors!”9 This is referencing the Consortium,
the group responsible for the initial attack on Galt and dedicated to eliminating the Fellowship
and Superman. Earlier in the story, Galt, through a psychic projection, shows Kent and Perry
61
White, the editor at the Daily Planet, a massacre of the Fellowship at the hands of the
Consortium that killed half of their members.10 These victims are implicitly linked to the martyr
tradition of the early Christian communities.
Like the early Christian communities in the Mediterranean area and also like new
religious movements in the modern American religious marketplace, the Fellowship is seen
engaging in competition with existing religious worldviews and attempting to spread their
message through evangelizing to others. In one scene, Galt is seen brushing off a member of an
Indian religious practice, presumably a member of a group reminiscent of the Hare Krishnas
(although the robe the missionary is wearing is all white), in an airport in Southern California.11
In the next panel, Galt is seen trying to unsuccessfully missionize to a woman at the rental car
counter.12 Often in American popular culture, groups like the Hare Krishnas are used as a
shorthand for strange religious belief systems that are depicted as foreign and slightly sinister.
Like the Fellowship, the Consortium also understands Superman through a Christian
framework. However, instead of reading Superman as a god and a savior, they read him as an
anti-Christ. A member of the Consortium named Hodges explains, “Before we can bring about a
new golden age for mankind, we must first eliminate the Great Beast of the Apocalypse…the
monster who calls itself Superman!”13 He goes on to say, “When I learned that the Fellowship
cultists were worshipping graven images of Superman—and that some of them were actually
gaining powers—I knew that the so-called Man of Steel could only be the long-prophesied
Antichrist! It was my sacred duty to bring my discovery to like-minded men. Only by working
together could we save humanity from this hidden evil.”14 Throughout the story, members of the
Consortium frequently refer to members of the Fellowship as “devil worshippers.”
62
Eventually, the opposing religious worldviews of the Fellowship and the Consortium
result in a battle when the Consortium attack the Fellowship’s desert hideout and the Fellowship
decides to fight back using the powers they believe are gained through their ritual practices.
Mother Tierra proclaims, “So, our enemies have returned…No doubt to finish slaughtering us for
our belief in the divinity of Superman! The last time, we awaited them meekly! But this time we
shall fight back!”15 As they reach the surface, she yells, “Make war, brothers and sisters for the
glory of Superman!”16
Throughout the story, Superman attempts to dissuade Galt and the other members of the
Fellowship from their belief that Superman is a God. His attempts fail. When attacked by agents
of the Consortium, he decides not to handle the situation as Superman, because, as he thinks to
himself, “If I save the day as Superman, I’ll never convince Bob that I’m not a god!”17 After
stopping the battle between the Fellowship and the Consortium, both sides continue to hold on to
their beliefs about Superman (until the arrival of Darksied), which prompts Superman to think,
“Not again! I’m tired of this misguided hero worship! I’d better see to rounding up those errant
troops before I say something I’ll regret!”18
Superman discovers that the supervillain Darksied is manipulating both sides of the
conflict and supplying both with their power, superpowers for the Fellowship and technological
power for the Consortium. Darksied appears after the battle and pronounces, “Fools! Superman
is no god! Nor is he a devil! I know…for I am both!”19 Darksied supplied both sides of the
conflict with power to study “the way certain human lives could be consumed by fanaticism!”20
Darksied is the most notable creation from comics legend Jack Kirby’s limited work for DC.
Debuting in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #133 (1970), he is an integral part of Kirby’s Fourth
World Saga, serving as the primary villain. Following the destruction of the “old gods” in a
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battle reminiscent of the apocalyptic battle of Ragnarok from Norse mythology, the old gods’
planet was ripped into two distinct planets.21 New Genesis, a paradisiacal planet, is ruled over
benevolently by Highfather, a deity who embodies “good.” Darksied is the god-ruler of New
Genesis’ evil counterpart, Apokolips, and is the embodiment of “evil.”
In the final two pages of the story, Superman delivers his final plea to the Fellowship,
who continue to address him as “Holy One” even after Darksied told them of his experiment,
dismissing the explanation as a test of faith. Superman tells them,
Listen! It was Darksied who granted you superpowers, not me! In return, you
forfeited the greatest power of all—your ability to think for yourselves! You have
a responsibility to use that power. Don’t worship me…For all my abilities, I’m no
god. I’m not all knowing, and I’m not immortal. Someday, I will die, too…Don’t
wait until then to take charge of your lives. You don’t need superpowers to make
a difference in the world! Think about that. 22
Mother Tierra expresses disillusionment when Superman’s words convince her that he is
not divine. She says, “I feel as if he’s ripped away a piece of my soul!” But Galt reframes
Superman’s salvific role when he responds, “You’re wrong, Tierra. He just took our souls from
Darksied and gave them back to us!”23
The Kingdom (1999)
The Kingdom (1999), the sequel to Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and several other
creators (but not Alex Ross who illustrated the original), begins amid a flashback to the nuclear
destruction of Kansas. A young boy has survived the explosion caused by Magog and Captain
Atom’s attack on the Parasite. Wandering among skeletons and ashes, his face is covered with
radiation burns. Out of the dust storm appears Superman. The story then flash-forwards to the
boy, named William, having grown into an adult. He has become a minister devoted to the
worship of Superman. He wears a red yoke over blue robes and a necklace of Superman’s
chevron. As he explains to Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s friend and a reporter from the Daily
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Planet, “I spread his word…throughout his land…This wonderful world in which we live…This
utopia, this golden age…It is his gift. His reward. Surrender your faith unto Superman and unto
you he will deliver.”24 William believes that Superman’s disappearance was a test and a lesson to
the world about following “false prophets.” He goes on to explain his theology. He says,
“Superman is above sin. He is divine. Even now, he moves among us as an example of
perfection, watching over me…We can never hope to equal him, only to be inspired by him. His
word is simple. ‘There is a right and a wrong in the universe, and that distinction is not hard to
make. Do right by all.’ Whether you believe in his divinity or not, it is a good message.”25
After his interview with Olsen, William is praying at an altar in his newly constructed
church “The Ministry of William.” Behind the altar is a giant statue of Superman’s chevron and
a stained glass window depiction of Superman with arms stretched out in a crucifixion pose and
his eyes gazing upward. William prays an amalgamation of Superman’s mythos and
Christianity’s the Lord’s Prayer. He says, “…and he changes the course of mighty rivers…and
bends steel in his bare hands. His kingdom come…his will be done…for he is the truth, and the
justice, and the…”26
His prayer is interrupted by Superman’s arrival. Superman, dressed in his civilian clothes
including his eyeglasses, has come to correct William’s misguided religious devotion.27 The fact
that Superman is wearing his eyeglasses is important as it was established towards the end of
Kingdom Come that the glasses serve as a symbolic connection between Superman and his
humanity.28 Wonder Woman gives them to him and calls them, “A little something to help you
see more clearly.”29 His civilian dress and the glasses serve as visual indication that his
conversation with William arises from the humanity of Clark Kent. Superman tells William the
destruction of Kansas was not part of his plan, but part of his mistake. He says, “My peers and I
65
had placed ourselves above humanity, and humanity let us. As a result, the world was nearly
destroyed by our inability to work together. We will never make that error again. We will
forevermore work with you…within society. That is our vow.”30 He continues to deny his
divinity. He says, “I’m not a god, William. I didn’t single you out because you’re special. You
were lucky. It’s only human to want to find sense in a senseless tragedy, but
sometimes…sometimes it isn’t there.”31
Superman’s denial of divinity throws William into a spiritual and existential crisis.
Unlike Mother Tierra in “The Power Within,” William does not exhibit a period of denial. And
unlike Bob Galt, William does not reframe the spiritual importance of Superman in light of his
new understandings. William sets fire to his church and wanders the streets begging strangers for
purpose and direction. He is approached by the mysterious DC character the Phantom Stranger
and is given power and knowledge from a collection of five semi-deities of the DC universe.32
With this newly found “purpose,” William transforms himself into Gog, who is visually similar
to Magog in Kingdom Come. Like the Consortium, Gog believes that Superman is actually the
Beast of Revelation. After confronting and killing Superman for the first of many times,33 he
talks to the burnt corpse. He says,
You tricked me into believing your lies. Into telling others that you were our
savior. That you wouldn’t let evil befall us…We cannot abide the villainy of false
prophets…for there is no greater evil than theirs. Than yours. I was blind, but now
I see. You are the ultimate evil of legend, a winged creature alien to us, cast out
of paradise like a star falling from the sky. A being persuasive and charismatic of
tremendous power, posing as a godsend so as to sway men’s spirits to his
teachings. A beast identified by one distinctive mark.34
“Angel” (2007)
Another example of Superman’s mistaken divinity can be found in Superman 659. Titled
“Angel,” the story by Kurt Busiek, Fabian Nicieza, and Peter Vale relates a series of encounters
between Superman and Barbara Johnson early in his superhero career. The cover by Al
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Barrionuevo highlights some of the religious themes found within this issue. It depicts a backlit
Superman, the sun peeking out over his left shoulder, hovering above a crowd. His arms are
lowered at a forty-five degree angle with his hands open. His cape has been transformed into a
pair of red angel wings. The crowd reaches up towards him, reminiscent of some of the visual
depictions of the Fellowship in “The Power Within.”
The story begins with a car hurdling towards an older African-American woman with a
cross necklace. As she is about to be hit by the car, she begins to pray, “Dear Lord, keep me and
protect me. Let your hand hold me safe from all…”35 Before Barbara Johnson can finish her
prayer, a less experienced Superman swoops down in front of the car, crushing the front end, but
saving her life. Barbara immediately interprets Superman as an angel sent from God to answer
her prayer. Even after Superman corrects her with a gentle “No, I’m just a friend,” she touches
her cross and whispers “An angel sent straight from heaven…”36 Returning home, to an
apartment with three cats named Luke, Matthew, and Paul, she sees live news footage of a train
derailment in Chicago. She begins to pray and Superman flies in again to save the day. She drops
to her knees and says, “Oh, Holy Father above, thank you for hearin’ my prayer. Thank you,
Thank you…Musta been me—me an’ others, prayin’.”37 It is revealed that she has been keeping
a scrapbook of newspaper articles about superheroes, including the Challengers of the Unknown,
the Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, and Superman. She understands the superheroes as “God’s
miracles.”38 Speaking to herself she says, “They always been here, when we’re needin’ ‘em
most…We just gotta believe. Have faith they’ll be there, have faith they’ll help us…We have
faith, we can call ‘em down, call ‘em to save us…We just gotta believe…”39
Seeing the superheroes as angels and deliverers of God’s will, she eventually begins to
see herself as a part of that divine system. Confronting a group of heavily armed robbers, she
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proclaims to them, “I am the eyes of the Lord, the instrument of your undoing! I bring his wrath
on you!”40 Believing that God has granted her the ability to call down the angel Superman, she
begins to seek out criminals and then call on Superman. She breaks up a shakedown, an armed
robbery, a drive-by shooting, and a drug operation by seeking out crimes and calling down
Superman. Superman, as Clark Kent, discusses the situation with Lois Lane when they are
assigned to cover her story. He explains, “He’s not a spiritual phenomenon, though. He’s got
powers, but he’s a person. Like you or me. So what happens if she prays for him and he can’t
come?”41
Superman’s prediction eventually comes to pass when Barbara tries to confront a local
street gang while Superman is struggling against a space-travelling energy being trapped in
Antarctica. She is shot. Superman comes to visit her in the hospital. Despite his protestation that
he is “just a man,” Barbara insists that, although he may not be a literal angel, he, and everything
else, is part of God’s plan. Her neighborhood rallied behind her shooting and took down the gang
that shot her by cooperating with the police. She says as Superman is flying away, “He sends His
gifts to protect us, but also to inspire us to do better. So maybe you’re ‘just a man,’ Mr.
Superman, but tell me…how are you not an angel?”42 When Superman follows up on her in the
present day, he finds her still active in the community and asserting that “Angels are real.
They’re all around us. Why, you might be one yourself, but you’ll never know, not unless you
try spreadin’ your wings…”43
Superman’s Mistaken Identity as Religious Work
In all three of the preceding stories, individuals and groups believe Superman to be
divine, whether angel, god, or demon. Superman’s permanently liminal status between the
human and divine allows for stories of this type to serve as interesting sites for exploring
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religious ideas about the nature of the divine in contemporary American superhero comics and in
American culture. Through defining the divine against the human, these stories also serve to
perform the religious work of questioning, maintaining, and/or negotiating this boundary.
All three stories operate from a predominately Christian cultural context and, ultimately
reaffirm Christian notions of divinity. In “The Power Within,” Darksied’s manipulation of the
Consortium is expressed as an understanding of Superman as Antichrist, which is directly
influenced by the mythology and doctrines of Christianity. In “Angel,” Barbara Johnson is
visually coded as Christian through her wearing of the cross necklace, so it is safe to assume that
the God she prays to throughout the comic is the Christian God.44 The Fellowship, in “The
Power Within,” and William, in The Kingdom, both refer to Superman as “savior.” Stephen
Prothero notes that salvation is a religious goal particular to Christianity and, therefore, a savior
is a particularly Christian solution.45
In Superman’s final speech to the Fellowship, he reaffirms an Abrahamic notion, if not
explicitly Christian, on the nature of divinity when he says, “For all my abilities, I’m no god. I’m
not all knowing, and I’m not immortal. Someday, I will die, too.”46 Omniscience and immortality
are exhibited by the Abrahamic God, but these features are not universal among religious ideas
about the nature of the divine. A cursory glance at the mythologies of various religions show
gods who can be tricked or deceived by other gods or by humans and gods who can die, i.e.
Ragnarok in Norse mythology where all the gods die. In all three stories, Superman explicitly
denies that he is divine, instead stressing his humanity. Within the DC universe, in addition to
gods and/or god-like characters such as Darksied or Zeus, a strong corollary for the Abrahamic
gods exists. Known as the Presence, it first debuted in More Fun Comics #52 (1940), written by
Superman co-creator Siegel, as a disembodied voice in heaven that commands a recently
69
murdered police detective, Jim Corrigan, to return to earth as an avenging angel, the Spectre. 47
The Presence’s otherness is visually depicted through its word balloons, which are colored pink
and drawn with jagged lines rather than the traditional white, round balloons used by Corrigan.
Superman lives in a fictional world. Why is it necessary to have him reaffirm one of the
religious worldviews of the “real” world? Other comics creators have developed religious
“realities” that exist independent from the religious traditions of their audiences through their
constructions of the divine. Alan Moore concludes his deconstruction of the British superhero
Marvelman48 with the main character assuming the role of a god and reshaping the earth into a
utopia that he maintains.49 Grant Morrison, at the end of his post-modern run on Animal Man,
breaks the fourth wall by writing himself into the story as the writer who shapes and controls
Animal Man’s world.50 It is also not necessarily true that the creators, in reaffirming Christianity
through Superman’s denouncing of divinity, are drawing upon their own religious worldviews.
In other words, although the story may reassert Christian truth claims, the creators are not
necessarily Christians. The writer of “Angel,” Kurt Busiek, is a self-proclaimed agnostic and yet
the comic relies heavily on Christian themes and conclusions.51
One answer is that, regardless of the religious worldviews of the creators, the audience is
assumed to be majority Christian. By having Superman explicitly deny he is a god or in any way
divine, the creators are protecting the character against the appearance of blasphemy. They are
not only reinforcing the boundary between the human and the divine, but also the boundary
between the religious and the secular. However, at the same time, these narratives are redefining
the boundary between the human and the divine. They argue for Superman’s humanity and deny
his divinity. In The Kingdom, Superman explains the ill consequences that occurred when
metahumans transgressed this boundary when he said, “My peers and I had placed ourselves
70
above humanity, and humanity let us. As a result, the world was nearly destroyed by our inability
to work together. We will never make that error again. We will forevermore work with
you…within society. That is our vow.”52 While this can be seen as reaffirmation of the wholly
otherness of the divine realm and the dangers of transgression, another interpretation of these
texts reveals a potential humanistic reading. The assumption of Superman’s divinity is not only
based on his extraordinary physical powers, but also on his inherent goodness and the love he
shows for humanity. Throughout the history of Christianity, prominent theological voices have
categorized the human condition as inherently corrupt, due to the influence of Original Sin on the
soul. Thinkers such as Paul, Augustine, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Christian comics
creator Jack T. Chick all argue that the human condition is one of depravity that lacks the ability
to be “good.” Therefore, all human goodness originates in the divine and must be given by God.
Benjamin Saunders argues that Superman is not solely good, but is the embodiment of the
Platonic ideal of the Good.53 By placing Superman squarely into the realm of the human, the
creators are reclassifying the Good, and the potential to do good, as human attributes rather than
divine.
Consequentially, these stories also redefine salvation in human terms. At the conclusion
of both “The Power Within” and “Angel” Superman’s status as a savior is not completely
rejected—it is simply redefined. Rather than a divine figure who would protect the faithful from
the dangers and evils of this world, Superman is presented as a salvific model, one that humans
are capable of emulating. His parting speech to the Fellowship ends with the line, “You don’t
need superpowers to make a difference in the world! Think about that.54 When Bob Galt
responds to Mother Tierra’s religious disillusionment with “[Superman] just took our souls from
Darksied and gave them back to us,”55 he is stating that their souls are their own. Barbara
71
Johnson’s assertion that “Angels are real. They’re all around us. Why, you might be one
yourself, but you’ll never know, not unless you try spreadin’ your wings…”56 tells the reader that
the salvation Superman offers is in the form of inspiration that humanity is capable of saving
itself, or at the very least improving the human condition itself.
Therefore, when Superman denies that he is divine, this denial is not only reaffirming the
Christian boundary between the human and divine but redefining what it means to be human in a
more humanistic worldview. Superman’s permanently liminal status between the human and the
divine becomes a site for the religious work of defining what it means to be human. The refrain
of “just a man” serves as an ironic counterpoint to the potential of humanity Superman embodies.
1
These weekly two pages would later be collected in Superman: The Power Within (New York: DC Comics, 2015).
Roger Stern (w), et al., Superman: The Power Within (New York: DC Comics, 2015), 6-7.
3
Ibid., 26.
4
Ibid., 15.
5
Ibid., 16-17.
6
Ibid., 17.
7
Ibid., 64.
8
Ibid., 65.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., 26-27.
11
Ibid., 54-55.
12
Ibid., 55.
13
Ibid., 51.
14
Ibid., 50-51.
15
Ibid., 69.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., 58.
18
Ibid., 77.
19
Ibid., 76-77.
20
Ibid., 78.
21
Jack Kirby, et al., “Orion Fights for Earth,” in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus Volume One (New York: DC
Comics, 2007), 106-107. Originally published in The New Gods 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1971).
22
Stern, 81.
23
Ibid., 80-81.
24
Mark Waid (w), et al., “The Road to Hell,” in The Kingdom (New York: DC Comics, 1999), 10.
25
Ibid., 12-13.
26
Ibid., 15.
27
By the end of Kingdom Come, the superheroes, including Superman, have given up their secret identities.
28
Waid, “The Road to Hell,” 200-201.
29
Ibid., 200.
30
Ibid., 17.
31
Ibid.
2
72
32
These five, known as the Quintessence, include the Phantom Stranger, Zeus, Ganthet (of the Guardians of the
Universe), High-Father of New Genesis, and the wizard Shazam. They were previously seen during the events of
Kingdom Come.
33
Gog’s plan is to punish Superman by killing him over and over again while travelling backwards through time.
34
Waid, “The Road to Hell,” 28.
35
In the original dialogue, this prayer is lettered without spaces or punctuation to convey the speed of the speech.
Kurt Busiek (w), et al., “Angel,” Superman 659 (New York: DC Comics, 2007), 2.
36
Ibid., 4.
37
Ibid., 10.
38
Ibid., 11.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 14.
41
Ibid., 21.
42
Ibid., 29.
43
Ibid., 31.
44
Rather than Jewish, Muslim, or any other religious tradition.
45
Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (New York: HarperOne, 2010),
20-22.
46
Stern, 81.
47
Jerry Siegel (w) and Bernard Baily (a), “The Spectre: Introduction,” in The Golden Age Spectre Archives, vol. 1
(New York: DC Comics, 2003), 18-19.
48
Subsequently renamed Miracleman in the current reissues published by Marvel Comics.
49
See Alan Moore (w), et al., “Olympus,” Miracleman 16 (New York: Marvel Comics, 2015).
50
See Grant Morrison (w), et al., “Deus Ex Machina,” in Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina (New York: DC Comics,
1990).
51
Kurt Busiek, “Through the Mail Slot,” Busiek.com, October 30, 2011, accessed June 30, 2016,
http://busiek.com/site/2011/10/30/through-the-mail-slot-20/#more-197.
52
Waid, “The Road to Hell,” 17.
53
Ben Saunders, Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes (New York: Continuum, 2011),
16-35.
54
Stern, 81.
55
Ibid., 80-81.
56
Busiek, “Angel,” 31.
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CHAPTER 4: SUPERMAN ON A SUNDAY MORNING
In 2013, Warner Bros. Pictures released the latest reboot of Superman on the big screen,
director Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, and Craig Detweiler’s sermon notes played a significant
role in the film’s marketing to a Christian audience. In addition to traditional marketing
strategies for summer blockbuster films and newer internet-dependent viral marketing
campaigns, Warner Bros. turned to Grace Hill Media, a marketing company that specializes in
reaching out to church audiences, to help promote their film. And Superman began making
appearances in America’s pulpits.
The term widely applied to this strategy is faith-based marketing. Grace Hill Media does
not use this exact term when describing their mission, but it does refer to “People of Faith,”
“faith community,” and “the faith audience.”1 Taken on the surface, these labels seem to apply to
the vast majority of people in America, who consider themselves to be “religious.” For example,
Grace Hill Media describes its method as “a new strategy to bridge the chasm that existed
between Hollywood and the relatively untapped market of Religious America.”2 However,
discussions of faith-based marketing rarely include outreach to the Jewish population and
outreach to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. seem to be non-existent. In practice, faith-based
marketing is almost exclusively aimed at the American Christian audience, save for the
occasional attempts to address criticism like the claims of anti-Semitism surrounding Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004).When writing about the phenomenon, reporters focus
exclusively on outreach to the Christian community. 3 When interviewed for these articles,
leaders in the faith-based marketing industry, like Jonathan Bock, founder of Grace Hill Media,
and Paul Lauer, the person behind The Passion of the Christ’s targeted marketing campaign,
focus exclusively on Christianity. Furthermore, language such as “bridge the chasm” does not
74
suggest an attempt to reach out to mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics who have historically
comprised a large enough share of the population to be considered the primary consumers of
goods and services. Hidden within the term is the fact that faith-based marketing is aimed
primarily at evangelical and/or fundamentalist American Christians, groups which have
historically had a complicated and contentious relationship with mainstream American culture.
“People of faith are the largest niche in your market,” write Greg Stielstra and Bob
Hutchins in Faith-Based Marketing: The Guide to Reaching 140 Million Christian Consumers
(2009).4 Stielstra and Hutchins’ book is what its subtitle purports it to be: a guide to businesses
on how to tap the potential of the American Christian (primarily evangelical) consumer base
through marketing techniques designed to focus on their religious beliefs. Although the present
discussion is focused on the marketing of a mainstream superhero movie to an American
Christian audience, faith-based marketing is not limited to film. A trip to any local Christian
bookstore reveals attempts to sell a diverse range of products designed for the Christian market,
including apparel, toys, children’s books, music, and more. Not only are such products sold as
ways of increasing an individual’s religious participation and strengthening their commitment to
their religious worldview, these goods are also marketed based on their ability to serve as a tool
for witnessing to the “unsaved” population, therefore hitting on one of the key tenets of an
evangelical worldview as a selling point for the product.5 James Y. Trammel argues in his article
“Who Does God Want Me to Invite to See The Passion of the Christ?: Marketing Movies to
Evangelicals” (2010) that part of the reason Passion was such a box office success was that its
marketing focused not only on the film’s compatibility with evangelical Christian notions of
Christ but also turned its attention towards the evangelical “mission” of reaching out to the nonbeliever by portraying the film as an outreach opportunity.6
75
Therefore, faith-based marketing, in this context, can be defined as an attempt by the
seller of a range of commodities (T-shirts, bumper stickers, music, movie tickets, etc.) to reach
an American evangelical and fundamentalist Christian audience by appealing to its compatibility
with their religious worldview and its potential as a means of conversion, whether the product
itself was designed specifically for this population or for consumption by a wider mainstream
audience.7 This is of course not to say that there is no possibility of marketing consumer goods to
other religious groups, such as Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, etc., both within the United
States and abroad. However, the rhetoric of “faith-based marketing” in the 21st century appears
to be primarily focused on the previously mentioned population.
Faith-based marketing is not without controversy among American Christian groups. The
controversial nature of these techniques may be even more pronounced when it relates to a
secular film like Man of Steel. Several Christian writers and bloggers have voiced concerns with
the marketing of mainstream movies to church audiences, specifically in regard to Man of Steel.
Other criticisms centered around the connection the film and the marketing materials made
between Superman and Jesus and will be discussed later in the chapter. Denny Burk, a professor
of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, took issue with what he sees as manipulative marketing
techniques in his blog post “Brothers, We Are Not Movie-hawkers…” (2013). Burk argues that
the motivation behind the faith-based marketing of the film is monetary and not spreading the
gospel. He writes, “The marketers are not trying to help you to be relevant. On the contrary, their
motive is to sell movie tickets, and these marketers have no problem whatsoever co-opting your
pulpit for their profits.”8 Burk stresses that he is not against the use of popular culture to illustrate
biblical teachings, relating how he had used Forrest Gump in a sermon that week, but that he is
76
“against anything that displaces the centrality of the biblical text in preaching.”9 In the comments
section, Burk further clarifies his position when he writes:
I tried to word things very carefully so as not to indict pastors who may have referred to the
Superman movie yesterday or even have used some of the materials. I’m certain that its [sic] possible
to access the storyline from the movie in a way that serves the text (like I tried to do with Forrest
Gump yesterday). That’s not what I meant to object to. My objection would be to those who allow
a marketing campaign to displace the centrality of the scripture in preaching. The thing that really
got me was the sermon outline. I don’t think that pastors do well to take their sermons from
marketing firms. That’s the part of this story that is astonishing to me. 10
In an email on August 5, 2015, Jonathan Haefs, senior pastor at Shades Valley
Community Church in Homewood, Alabama, expressed similar concerns and similar caveats. He
wrote, “I do have issues with marketing ‘pop culture’ to Christians in order to move a product…I
don’t have any issues with Christians engaging pop culture, discussing it, and even reflecting on
spiritual truths and falsehoods found therein…but the use of pop culture to design
products/studies that are then marketed to churches strikes me as simply being a profiteering
business and not really about the spiritual health and well-being of a congregation.”11
Skye Jethani, a Christian writer and editor for Christianity Today, also challenged the
commercial aspects of this type of marketing in his article “Man of Steel in the Den of Thieves”
(2013). The titular allusion to the gospel narrative of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple by expelling
the money changers (Matthew 21: 12-13; Mark 11: 15-17; Luke 19: 45-46; John 2:13-16) is not
fully discussed in the article itself but would signal to a community fluent in biblical rhetoric the
article’s intention, which indicates he is writing to a specific in-group, not to a general audience.
Jethani does discuss the power this type of marketing technique has when it is deployed from the
pulpit. He writes, “Marketers know that even an indirect endorsement of a movie by a pastor
during a sermon can be one of the most effective means of motivating consumers–it's as close to
God endorsing a film as they can get.”12 Like Burk and Haefs, Jethani stresses that he is not
opposed to the use of popular culture in Christian churches or to the connections that are being
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drawn between Superman and Jesus. However, his writing exudes a stronger sense of disgust
with Grace Hill Ministry and similar attempts to market movies through churches, including the
warning that “They’re looking to hijack pulpits to push their film and boost box office
receipts.”13 Contrasting the acceptance of this technique with political campaigning, he
discusses a poll that shows an overwhelming majority of Protestant ministers feel uncomfortable
endorsing political candidates. He writes, “They would never prostitute the pulpit or sully a
sermon with blatant partisan hackery. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates some ministers don't
feel as strongly about protecting the integrity of the pulpit when $200 million Hollywood
blockbusters are involved.”14 Before calling for his readers to contact the marketers with their
opinions, he writes, “Maybe it's time for pastors to speak up and tell studios and companies like
MinistryResources.org that we don't appreciate attempts to leverage worship gatherings for
product placement and marketing. Maybe we need to be more vocal about the holiness and
separateness of preaching. Maybe the church should be an oasis from the incessant consumerism
of our culture, and perhaps our gatherings should look more like a house of prayer than a den of
thieves.”15 In addition to its biblical allusion, here the phrase “a den of thieves” serves as a call to
action. If the question is what would Jesus do, Jethani seems to point to the gospels for a clear
answer that supports his point of view.
Jonathan Merritt, a Christian writer, discusses this controversy in his article “Superman
Spirituality: Is Hollywood Manipulating Christians?” (2013). Unlike the previous writers,
Merritt’s approach to the relationship between popular culture and religion has a different focus.
While Burk, Haefs, and Jethani are comfortable using pop culture examples as a means of
furthering an understanding of Christianity, Merritt sees the connection between the two as an
opportunity for popular culture to “[express] the good, true, and beautiful.”16 He worries that
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faith-based marketing strategies may be “another step forward in the commodification of
Christianity.”17 He writes that Warner Bros.’ motivation is not the furthering of Christianity, but
financial gain. Ultimately, he worries that the commodification of Christianity will alter the
nature of Christianity by making it “a means to a [sic] end rather than an end in itself.”18
Christian blogger P.J. Wenzel argues that the faith-based marketing of Man of Steel
supplants the Bible with the film as the central text of the sermon. In his blog entry, “Superman –
the Ministry” (2013), he explains, “Pastors are being encouraged to use the movie not simply as
an analogy, but as the text and background against which entire sermon series will be based –
and of course ‘Ministry Resources’ Inc. is ready to provide pastors with trailers, pictures, and all
kinds of cool add-ons to attract maximum attendance!”19 While not totally dismissing a possible
relationship between religion and popular culture (in the comment section, Wenzel notes that pop
culture is useful in reaching the “lost”), he embraces it less than the previous writers. He points
out, “The church is becoming more and more like the world – and the world sees it and
celebrates it! If there ever was a time for a generation of leaders in the church who will fight for
Sola Scriptura, now is that time.”20 Later he adds,
Any pastor who thinks using Man of Steel Ministry Resources is a good Sunday morning strategy
must have no concept of how high the stakes are, or very little confidence in the power of God’s
Word and God’s Spirit. As they entertain their congregants with material pumped out from
Hollywood’s sewers, lives are kept in bondage, and people’s souls are neglected. In short, the gospel
of Jesus Christ is kept hidden despite the fact that life and death are in the balance. Changed lives,
changed hearts, and love for God and others (in short: personal and societal transformation and
salvation) only comes through the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. 21
Wenzel appears to take a harder line against the marketing of Man of Steel to the
Christian audience. Whereas Burk, Haefs, Jethani, and Merritt seem to acknowledge some
potential of popular culture references in church ministry while they reject the marketing and
financial aspects of Man of Steel Ministry Resources, Wenzel questions the efficacy of such
techniques when preaching to the congregation, those already in the fold. This difference points
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to a wider disagreement within American Christianity as to the relationship Christianity should
have with popular culture. James Y. Trammel and Daniel A. Stout, in their essay “Reviewing the
Christian Film Review: Interpretive Critiques of A Serious Man” (2013), establish three
categories of Christian film reviews: fundamentalist, evangelical, and post-evangelical. These
categories can also be helpful when analyzing the various critiques surrounding the Man of
Steel’s faith-based marketing efforts. While the fundamentalist position is highly suspicious of
secular media,22 the evangelical position is much more accepting of mainstream media.23 As the
evangelical leaders write, “To these believers, mainstream culture is not necessarily evil, just
unsanctified. Just about anything can become ‘Christian,’ and anyone can become saved.”24
Wenzel leans more towards a fundamentalist position in regard to this relationship when he
warns of marketers’ attempt to replace the gospel with a superhero movie.25 On the other hand,
Burk, Haefs, Jethani, and, to some degree, Merritt seem to embrace an evangelical approach to
the intersection of religion and popular culture.
In order to fully explore the phenomena of the faith-based marketing of Man of Steel and
the reaction of its critics, this chapter will examine the larger historical context of marketing
Hollywood films specifically to religious audiences, both before and after The Passion of the
Christ, and the background of Superman as a Christ-figure in movies. This chapter will also
analyze the content of Grace Hill Media’s Man of Steel Ministry Resource website and discuss
the numerous examples of Christian pastors and bloggers addressing Man of Steel in their
sermons and writings. Then, by returning to the previously discussed critics and Detweiler’s
response to them, the chapter will explore the various ways both sides of the controversy are
using the film as a means of producing religious work.
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Selling Movie Tickets to the Religious: Historical Context
In examining Man of Steel’s place in the historical context of religious films and faithbased marketing, it becomes obvious that the history of the marketing of films to religious
audiences can be divided into two main eras: before The Passion of the Christ (2004) and after.
Although much contemporary scholarly attention has focused on Passion, both for its content
and the way it was marketed, during the previous one hundred years, films with religious content
and religious marketing strategies existed within the mainstream Hollywood industry. In fact, the
marketing of Hollywood films to faith-based audiences dates back to the days of the silent film
era. Peter A. Maresco, an expert in marketing and consumer behavior, traces the marketing of
movies with religious themes to religious markets in 1927, when children were dismissed from
school early so they could see Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings.26 This strategy continued
throughout the twentieth century, with films like 1933’s The Sign of the Cross in 1933, The
Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965, and The Prince of Egypt in 1998.27 Combined with the
technological and communication advancements of the early twenty-first century, a faith-based
marketing strategy helped to create the phenomenal success of The Passion of the Christ in 2004,
which, according to Box Office Mojo, grossed over $600 million worldwide and still ranks as the
highest grossing R-rated movie of all-time.
In his article “Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: Segmentation, Mass Marketing
and Promotion, and the Internet” (2004), Maresco explores the historical precedents of the
marketing campaign surrounding The Passion of the Christ. With the exception of the use of the
internet, Maresco finds that the specific marketing of Passion to religious audiences and most of
its techniques can be traced back to much earlier biblically-based Hollywood films. Maresco
singles out The King of Kings as one of the earliest examples of marketing segmentation, where
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the promotion of a film was aimed at specific sub-groups within a larger population.28 The Sign
of the Cross continued the appeal to specific audiences by courting three groups: the general
movie-goer, the church-goer, and the school-ager.29 The Greatest Story Ever Told expanded the
faith-based marketing of Hollywood films. Many of these techniques would be used by The
Passion of the Christ forty years later. They included the creation of promotional items and their
distribution to specific segments, the circulation of editorials, the creation of audio-visual
material for religious leaders to use, and offering a free preview to various groups who could
then influence the viewing habits of their followers.30
The intersection of film, religion, and marketing is a system of relationships that dates
back to the early 20th century. Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans note two periods of the
“Hollywood Biblical Epic” before the release of The Passion of the Christ: the first “golden age”
of the 1910s and 20s and the second “golden age” of the 1950s and 60s.31 Furthermore, they
divide the “Hollywood Biblical Epic” into three sub-types: “the Old Testament Epic,” “the Christ
Film,” and “the Roman/Christian Epic.”32 In their book Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the
Hollywood Cinema (1993), Babington and Evans argue that the reemergence of the biblical epic
in the 1950s came about as the result of cultural factors, such as strong anti-communist
sentiment, the rise of television, and the formation of the modern state of Israel in 1948.33 They
note that the genre’s decline in the 1960s was also the result of cultural factors, such as
increasing secularism, the audience for genre staying home from cinemas and watching TV
instead, the “escalating costs” of such epics, and the loosening of censorship. They write, “It can
be plausibly argued that before the explicit violence and sexuality of 1970s and 1980s
Hollywood cinema the Biblical Epic gave release not only to sadistic and masochistic drives
repressed in other films but also displays of sexuality in the orgy and the period-justified semi-
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nakedness of both male and female bodies. With the diminishing of censorship this function
became superfluous.”34 Interestingly, the extremely violent and gory R-rated Passion brought the
audience back to the genre in 2004, but in such an explicit way that some observers have likened
the film to “Christian pornography.”35
Although aspects of the faith-based marketing of Man of Steel can be seen in these
examples of 20th century attempts to appeal to religious (primarily Christian) audiences, the most
pertinent antecedent is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. In a period when multiple films
were being produced with a Christian audience in mind and doing poorly at the box office,
Passion was the exception due in no small part to its faith-based marketing strategy.36
Employing an array of tactics aimed at a Christian audience, such as a promotional DVD, the
marketing team developed a successful strategy for tapping into the religious sentiment of an
evangelical audience in order to sell movie tickets. James Y. Trammel argues that the scale of the
marketing alone was not responsible for the film’s success among evangelical Christians in
America, but that the marketing was designed to appeal to evangelicals’ “faith, taste, and
mission.”37 The marketing material presented the Roman Catholic Gibson’s film as both accurate
and authentic within the context of the evangelical religious worldview and as an important tool
for missionizing to a non-Christian audience.38 In addition, alongside the more traditional
promotion of the film through television and movie trailers, church leadership was tapped as a
means of distributing these marketing materials to members of their congregations.
The marketing company behind Man of Steel Ministry Resources, Grace Hill Media
founded by Jonathan Bock in 200039, benefitted from the movie studios’ increased attention to
the evangelical Christian audience in the wake of The Passion. Within two years of the release of
The Passion, Grace Hill Media helped Walt Disney Pictures market the successful adaptation of
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C. S. Lewis’ Christian allegory Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
and Temple Hill Entertainment’s less successful biblically inspired The Nativity Story. Grace
Hill Media also helped to market less explicitly Christian films, such as Johnny Cash biopic
Walk the Line in 2005 and The Blind Side in 2009. Films like these dealt with Christian
characters and appealed to Christian themes without overt references to Christian doctrine or
theology.40 Grace Hill Media has also been hired to promote films that could potentially offend
some Christians, such as The Da Vinci Code in 2006 and Noah in 2014, as a way of diffusing
possible controversy.
Grace Hill’s post-Passion projects focused on films with direct ties to Christianity, but
also included films that were less overtly Christian in their source material. Whereas The Nativity
Story and The Chronicle of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe drew from the Bible
and the fiction of a Christian apologist respectively, films such as Walk the Line and The Blind
Side can be viewed as Christian films because they are biographies whose main characters are
declared Christians and are known as such outside of the world of the film. However, Man of
Steel is not drawn from any explicitly religious source nor does it feature any characters adapted
from historical persons known for discussing their Christianity. The main element of Man of
Steel that allows for the application of a faith-based marketing campaign appears to be the film’s
interpretation of Superman as a Christ-figure.
Superman: Silver Screen Savior
If the marketing of mainstream Hollywood films is not unique to Man of Steel Ministry
Resources, neither is the framing of Superman as a Christ figure. As previously discussed, there
has been no shortage of creators or audiences attempting to write or read the character as a
Christological metaphor.41 Although I have argued earlier that Superman’s status as a religious
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object exists independently from any major world tradition, including Christianity, or any
connection with religious characters, such as Jesus, this does not preclude the importance of how
people view Superman through the lens of their own religious traditions. When it comes to
Superman’s portrayal on film, Christian interpretations abound and have the tendency to
dominate the conversation about Superman’s connection to religion.
Since Christopher Reeve’s debut as the Man of Steel in Superman: The Movie (1978),
film makers and critics alike have been constructing the Superman-Christ connection.42 Jack
Kroll, in his review of the film for the January 1, 1979 issue of Newsweek notes these messianic
themes. He writes, “Superman as son of God, as the Saviour, as the Resurrection and the Life?
Isn’t that appallingly vulgar, a grisly reflection of the junk culture that has just about buried real
culture almost out of sight? I don’t believe it is. Why shouldn’t these great revelatory myths
come back into the collective consciousness in the most effective and dramatic ways that our
civilization, God help it, has set up?”43 Kroll’s observation is not an isolated example. Film critic
Pauline Kael, in her review of Superman: The Movie titled “The Package” (1979), makes similar
connections when she describes Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Jor-El, Superman’s Kryptonian
biological father, as “a straight forward God the Father performance.”44
It is hard to argue that these critics or any member of the audience who also sees similar
connections are simply projecting a Christian interpretation onto a text where it is unwarranted or
onto an intentionally designed subtext. The four films starring Reeve, Superman Returns (2006)
starring Brandon Routh in a continuation of the Reeve films, and the 2013 reboot Man of Steel
are not subtle in their Superman as Christ metaphor. Jor-El (played by Brando in both Superman:
The Movie and posthumously in Superman Returns) delivers this message to his son via
hologram and says, “Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your
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power are needed. But always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a
great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason
above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you... my only son.”45 Indeed, without having
to stretch the imagination too much, this speech reads like a paraphrasing of John 3:16, “For God
so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not
perish but have eternal life.” The visual motif of Superman in a pose reminiscent of crucifixion
occurs in both Superman Returns and Man of Steel.46 While the often cited translation of El (as
in Kal-El) as “God” may not register with an ordinary viewer not well versed in biblical Hebrew,
the preceding invocations of Christian scripture and iconography would not be lost on an
American audience, even the non-Christian members.
Shortly after the release of Superman II (1980), film studies scholar Sarah R. Kozloff
published “Superman as Saviour: Christian Allegory in the Superman Movies” (1981). Kozloff
argues that the subtext of the first two films starring Reeve can be read as an extended Christian
allegory. She equates characters from the Superman mythos with characters from the Christian
gospels. According to her reading, Kael is correct to view Jor-El as God the Father. Furthermore,
a viewer can see: the Virgin Mary split between Superman’s dual mothers, Kryptonian Lara and
earthling Martha Kent; Jonathan Kent taking on the role of Joseph; Lois Lane’s sexuality tying
her to Mary Magdalene; General Zod’s rebellion on Krypton and his subsequent imprisonment
linking him to Satan; and, of course, Superman as a metaphor for Christ.47 Lex Luthor, for his
part, symbolizes humanity and its false sense of control. Luthor becomes the focus of what
Kozloff labels the “anti-secular humanism” exemplified in several blockbuster pictures released
around the same time as the Superman films, an anti-secular humanism, which she sees as a
reflection of the political and religious landscape of late-1970s and early-1980s American
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culture.48 Kozloff’s one-to-one allegorical map of the Superman films’ characters can of course
be called into question, particularly Lois Lane as Mary Magdalene. However, Superman’s
depiction in these films and their reboots as a Christ-figure appears to be more deliberate on the
part of the filmmakers.49
Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003)
illustrates that, for a larger portion of American history, the characterizations of Jesus in the
American context have been fluid and heterogeneous and can be seen as “a Rorschach test of
ever-changing national sensibilities.”50 While Prothero limits his examination to depictions of
Jesus throughout American history, such as Thomas Jefferson’s “enlightened sage,” Billy
Sunday’s muscular Christ, or the “Black Moses” of African-American Christianity, the religious
work of adapting Jesus to modern sensibilities and particular subcultures to better reflect the
“American experience” need not be limited to the figure of Jesus proper. Indeed, Christ-figures,
such as Superman in the movies, are another potential site for this continuous updating of
religious ideas. Kozloff argues that the subtextual Christ-figure of the first two Superman films
serves as a means to adapt Jesus for a contemporary audience and that “Superman—a sexy,
humanized, and Americanized Jesus—is clearly the hero for our time.”51 She writes, “When we
recognize Superman’s affinities with Jesus, we realize that actually the complete message of
Superman and Superman II is not only that Jesus exists, loves us, and will return, but also that
He is a wholesome farm boy from the heartland of America, and that the American Way
(whatever that is) has been divinely sanctioned.”52
One example of the framing of Superman as a Christ-figure can be seen in Stephen
Skelton’s The Gospel According to the World’s Greatest Superhero (2006). This text is an
extended comparison of Superman and Jesus written from a confessional perspective. Drawing
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mainly from the first two Christopher Reeve films, the television show Smallville, and the Death
of Superman arc in the comics, Skelton argues that Superman is a Christ-figure par excellence.
Skelton goes on to say that Superman can only be a stand-in for Jesus, not any other
religious figures. He writes, “The attraction of Superman to humankind is actually the attraction
of no one else but Christ.”53 Skelton then extends this claim to the entire superhero genre through
the transitive property. If Superman is a Christ-figure and all other superheroes that followed
Superman’s creation are “Superman figures,” then all superheroes are Christ-figures.54
Skelton’s argument for Superman as Christ-figure is, at its core, an argument that every
story we encounter is pointing towards Christ. He argues, “In fact, to say that a story like
Superman can be completely secular or completely nonreligious is to say falsely humans can be
on their own, that they can be in the service of themselves…Though we continue using the word
secular to mean ‘not overtly religious,’ we must acknowledge that all stories are by nature
religious—either positively or negatively so.”55 His body of work seems to point in this direction
as well. In addition to The Gospel According to the World’s Greatest Superhero, Skelton has
published multiple Bible study guides based around popular television shows and movies. The
subjects of these study guides include The Andy Griffith Show, It’s a Wonderful Life, John
Wayne movies, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island, and The Lucy Show.
Furthermore, Skelton takes the premise of “all stories are by nature religious” a step
further by implying that Superman (and popular culture in general) is not only a site of religious
expression for creators and readers but a site of divine revelation. He explains, “Keeping our
focus on the mission of service, the warning should be reiterated that to reject what a pagan says
simply because a pagan is saying it is putting ourselves in danger of rejecting what God is saying
through the pagan.”56 God is speaking to us through Superman. Siegel and Shuster, although
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Jewish, were not just creating a Christ-figure through the cultural osmosis of living in the
predominately Christian city of Cleveland, Ohio, but were also instruments of God to further
demonstrate the eternal truth of Christianity—they were channeling the divine.
Skelton analyzes the Superman mythos in comics, television, and film through this lens,
with variable degrees of success. He repeats the often noted etymological linkage between
Superman’s Kryptonian family name “El” with the Hebrew terms for God “Elohim” and “El.”
Certainly, it is possible that Siegel and Shuster would have been aware of this and they were
responsible for the introduction of this detail by naming Superman’s biological father “Jor-L” in
the Superman newspaper strip. He was subsequently renamed “Jor-el” in a novel The Adventures
of Superman (1942) written by George Lowther, who was also the narrator and a director for the
radio program of the same name (1940-1951), and later solidified, in 1944, as “Jor-El” in More
Fun Comics #101, the first Superboy story, written by Don Cameron and illustrated by Shuster.
While this connection is a common assertion, both in scholarship and in confessional works,
Skelton continues to examine several more names in the Superman canon as revealing hidden
Christian meanings. He argues that the Kents’ first names also tie them to the story of Christ. He
highlights that one of Ma Kent’s names before continuity settled on Martha was Mary and Pa
Kent’s middle name is Joseph, which he obviously uses in connecting both with Jesus’ earthly
parents. The naming of Ma and Pa Kent was not standardized until the early 1950s. First
introduced into the Superman narrative in Superman #1 (1939), Pa Kent addresses Ma as
“Mary,” but he is unnamed.57 In Lowther’s Superman novel, the characters are named Eben and
Sarah Kent.58
Although the Superman films do not seem to be presenting as in-depth a metaphor for
Superman as Christ-figure as Skelton argues, they do appear to make this connection as well.
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The question then becomes: for what purpose? Anton Karl Kozlovic lists four reasons
filmmakers use the Christ-figure in their work beyond the immediate emotional connection it
forges between the character and the audience: (1) evangelism by Christian filmmakers, (2) as a
“joke,” (3) the influence of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and (4) the
cultural saturation of Judeo-Christian religion in the U.S.59 I feel it is necessary to add a fifth
reason; creators may employ a Christ-figure in their narrative in order to critique Christianity or
challenge the theological notions that have emerged around the figure of Jesus Christ. Like film,
comics also offer the reader their fair share of Christ-figures and offer examples of the Christfigure as critique.
One such example is the misotheistic comic book series Preacher, created by writer
Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon. Published in 66 issues between 1995 and 2000 by DC
Comics’ mature imprint Vertigo, Preacher is the story of a disaffected Texas preacher named
Jesse Custer who becomes host to the supernatural offspring of the sexual union of an angel and
a demon named Genesis. Genesis, the synthesis of good and evil by the nature of its conception,
is an entity of immense power, enough to challenge God and send him into hiding. Through his
union with Genesis, Jesse gains the ability of “the Word,” a power where anyone who hears and
understands what Jesse commands is compelled to obey. With his new found power and after
learning that God abandoned heaven to avoid Genesis, Jesse vows, “I’m gonna go lookin’ for
him. I don’t care how long it takes or where I have to go. I’m gonna find him. An’ I’m gonna
make him tell his people what he’s done.”60
Jesse’s role as a Christ-figure is not hidden away in layers of subtext like we see in
Superman: The Movie, where the Superman-Christ connection can be made by those seeking it
or ignored by those who are not, but is highlighted throughout the series. For example, after
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healing a character named Hoover of the psychological trauma resulting from one of Jesse’s
previous commands by commanding Hoover to “just forget it,” Jesse’s girlfriend Tulip O’Hare
begins to quote mock scripture. She says,
And lo, he walked among them, healing the sick and the infirm of mind, and yet
they knew him not. But it came to pass that word of his passing, and of the great
miracles he was performing…And someone said—Whoa, brethren check out his
initials! And someone else said—Fuck me, You’re right! And it came to pass that
they did put two and two together and start a religion around him, and it did spread
far and wide across the land…which of course he secretly kind of dug… 61
This quote reveals a mocking acknowledgment of one of Kozlovic’s twenty-five
structural elements of the cinematic Christ-figure, namely that the Christ-figure often (25) has
the initials J. C. (Jesse Custer) or is referred to by some form of Jesus’ name or title, such as
“Chris,” short for Christopher.62 Jesse satisfies many of Kozlovic’s preceding twenty-four
elements as well, perhaps better than any of the examples Kozlovic uses, which is hardly
surprising given Jesse’s status as an overt Christ-figure rather than a covert one. Jesse is the (1)
“tangible,” (2) central character of the narrative. He is introduced to the audience as a small-town
preacher who has ostracized himself from his congregation and is, therefore, (3) an outsider.
Although (4) the source of his supernatural power comes from heaven, he is clearly an example
of (5) “special normal,” physically a normal human being with all the mortal limitations, whose
supernatural power can be neutralized by a pair of ear plugs. His friend, an Irish vampire named
Cassidy, plays the role of Judas by (9) betraying Jesse once by getting Tulip addicted to drugs in
order to control her after Jesse was presumed dead and a second time by making a deal with God
to help separate Jesse and Genesis so God can return to heaven. Jesse’s girlfriend Tulip is (10) “a
sexually identified woman” playing the role of Mary Magdalene.
Jesse’s (11) “baptism rite” comes when the screaming rainbow comet with a baby’s head
that visually represents Genesis collides with his head and results in a violent explosion that
reduces the church to a pile of ashes and the congregation to skeletons.63 This event has shades
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of the heterodox Christology of adoptionism, where, in some versions, Jesus was “adopted” by
God at the time of his baptism by John the Baptist in the River Jordan and becomes imbued with
the Holy Spirit. Jesse also undergoes (12) “a decisive death and resurrection.” He is shot by a
sniper rifle through the forehead and a full page panel shows him lying on the ground with blood
pooling behind his head, his eye open, and the color of his complexion grayish.64 By the
beginning of the next issue he has returned to life, resurrected by God in fulfillment of Cassidy’s
condition that “[Jesse] lives, no matter what.”65 Jesse’s death is part of his larger plan which
ultimately results in (13) his “triumphal victory” of killing God. Jesse summons the new Angel
of Death, a cowboy known as the Saint of Killers, whose two Walker Colt revolvers were forged
in Hell out of the former Angel of Death’s sword and “would not misfire, nor would their
hammers fall on empty chambers. No shot they fired would miss its mark. No wound they gave
would be anything but fatal.”66 Knowing that God will return to heaven when he and Genesis
have been neutralized, Jesse convinces the Saint of Killers to wait for God there and to shoot him
before he can take his seat on the throne.67 Therefore, Jesse’s death is part of the plan. He (15)
“willing sacrifice[s]” himself in order to eliminate God.
Throughout the series, Jesse is seen helping people out or, as Kozlovic phrases it, in (14)
“service to ‘lesser,’ sometimes ungrateful others.” Though Jesse does not strike (17) “a
cruciform pose” when he is shot—his arms are clearly shown to be at his sides and his body is
angled on a downward sloping 45 degrees denying the reader any semblance of the x-y axis of
the cross68 (interestingly, both Cassidy, when he is committing suicide by sunrise,69 and God, as
he is entering the pearly gates while unaware the Saint of Killers is waiting for him on the other
side,70 do pose in the cruciform). The redeemed betrayer and the primary antagonist,
respectively, greet their deaths, knowingly or unknowingly, with the open armed pose of
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crucifixion, but the Christ-figure Jesse Custer does not. On the other hand, he is (18) visually
associated with the cross in several panels throughout the series. However, usually these visuals
convey an antagonistic relationship with the cross. In one flashback to the time before Jesse
merges with Genesis, we see him drunkenly cursing God and smashing a bottle of whiskey
against the cross in his church.71 In another panel, Jesse is silhouetted by the flames of a burning
cross in front of his evil grandmother’s burning house.72 The images of the cross may
foreshadow Jesse’s eventual sacrificial death, yet, at the same time, they demonstrate Jesse’s
distance from God, a distance that within the world of the narrative drives him to become the
sacrificial hero.
Jesse’s power of the “Word” can simultaneously be viewed as (19) miraculous and as
(22) Jesus’ “spiritual garb,” the title of the Word being applied to Jesus in John 1:14, “The Word
became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and
only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” And although we do not see Jesse
wearing a white robe or sandals, throughout the series he wears the collar of a priest, connecting
him with Jesus through the uniform of the clergy. When Tulip sees the explosion that resulted
from the merging of Jesse and Genesis, she exclaims, “My God…!,”73 an example of (24) a
“holy exclamation.” Kozlovic defines “holy exclamations” as when “Someone, either directly or
indirectly, on-screen or off-screen, refers to the Christ-figure protagonist as God or Jesus by
literally saying: ‘My God!’ or ‘Oh God!’ or ‘Jesus Christ!’ or ‘Jesus!’ or ‘Christ!’ or ‘Gee!’”74
Preacher employs this particular technique multiple times. Another example is when Jesse first
awakens after the explosion at the church with a scream, a startled Tulip says, “Christ!”75
Jesse Custer is an overt Christ-figure. The text does not try to bury this connection in
subtext. Besides Tulip’s aforementioned declaration of his connection to Jesus, early in the series
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we are introduced to a splinter faction of a centuries-old religious order called the Grail, which
has been tasked with preserving the pure bloodline of Christ through the inbreeding of his
children with Mary Magdalene.76 This group, led by the villainous Herr Starr, wishes to promote
Jesse as the returned messiah in place of Jesus’ descendant, who is severely genetically damaged
by being the result of 2,000 years of inbreeding. As Starr explains to Cassidy, who he believes to
be Jesse:
The point is that when civilization falls apart—and it will—the Grail can produce
a mortal man whose ancestor was born of heaven. A religious alternative to failed
politicians. A god-king. It doesn’t matter who we put forward. We’ve got so many
old scrolls and bullshit documentation lying around, we could prove conclusively
that Newt fucking Gingrich is the son of God…The latest product of the bloodline
has turned out less than perfectly. If we are to hold sway after the coming
Armageddon, we must give the masses a savior they can believe in. A savior who
speaks with a voice that must be obeyed would be ideal. It’s you, Reverend Custer.
I want you to be the new messiah. 77
The ultimate goal of Jesse’s willing sacrifice of his own life (he was unaware of
Cassidy’s bargain with God and the divine assurance that he would live “no matter what”)
deviates fundamentally from that of the mainstream Christian conception of Jesus’ death and
resurrection.78 In Preacher, salvation does not come from God to cleanse away sin, but instead is
salvation from God. Jesse does not die to allow humanity to experience God’s love; he dies so
that humanity can be free from God’s need for our love. As he tells the Saint of Killers:
Look at it! Look what he made! All them years filled with sufferin’ an’ slaughter,
just like he knew they would be! ‘Cause he wants us to choose him, to love him,
an’ how much more satisfyin’ that’d be when the hell of this earth makes that
choice so goddamned hard! He wants our love. It feeds him…he gave men free
will so they’d choose to love him. Like he caused a war between his angels, so he
could see which ones’d stick with him. 79
Or as he explains to Tulip in his goodbye letter, “And while they worship a God that suits their
needs, the real God thrives on their stupid, misdirected love, and does bad, bad things to this
world with the power it grants him. So God has got to go, Tulip. He deserves it for the things
he’s done, but more than that the world just plain needs to be rid of him.”80
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Preacher’s Christ-figure exists as a challenge to Christianity and its God. The text’s
climatic deicide emphasizes the need of some form of secular humanism to replace the
traditional religious systems that have dominated. Jesse explains to Tulip when he returns from
the dead why he had to allow himself to be killed and leave her alone. He says, “We don’t gotta
just accept the way things are. Just like we don’t gotta let ourselves be lessened by death or any
other damn thing. Just like we don’t need no God to shape the world for us. We can make our
lives the way we want them or we ain’t worth nothing.”81
Throughout the series various allusions to the mythological American West inform
Preacher’s ultimate version of the ideal human condition: the macho, individualistic legend of
the American cowboy. From the first words of the series being a quote from outlaw country
musician Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” (1975) to Jesse and Cassidy’s deaths in front of
the Alamo, the Western theme is pervasive. Jesse’s last name is shared by the infamous leader of
the U.S. 7th Calvary George Armstrong Custer. His “guardian angel”/spiritual guide is the ghost
of John Wayne.82 The Saint of Killers’ origin is set in the Old West.83 The last we see of Jesse
and Tulip is a two-page splash of them riding off into the sunset on horseback.84 God’s death
results in the ultimate expression of this cowboy-ethos tinged with humanism: a world free from
the ultimate expression of authority.
Another example of a Christ-figure that is developed to challenge or question traditional
religious notions of Christ is the scientific god-man Dr. Manhattan, found in Alan Moore and
Dave Gibbons’ classic comic Watchmen (1986-1987). Nuclear physicist Jon Osterman is the
victim of a scientific accident that should have disintegrated him on the atomic level, but instead
gives him nearly omnipotent power and a perception of time where past, present, and future
occur simultaneously, similar to conceptions of eternity. His power is sufficient to single-
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handedly win the war in Vietnam.85 In an excerpt from a fictional book, Dr. Manhattan: SuperPowers and the Superpowers, by fictional author Professor Milton Glass, the true implication of
Dr. Manhattan’s power is revealed when Glass is discussing being misquoted as saying, “The
superman exists and he’s American.” Clarifying what he said he writes, “I presume the remark
was edited or toned down so as not to offend public sensibilities; in any event, I never said ‘The
superman exists and he’s American.’ What I said was ‘God exists and he’s American.’ If that
statement starts to chill you after a couple moments’ consideration, then don’t be alarmed. A
feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still
sane.”86
Like Jesse Custer, Dr. Manhattan meets many of Kolzovic’s elements of the Christfigure. Unlike Preacher, Watchmen does not place the character’s association with Christ into
the forefront, but allows it to exist subtextually, as is more common in the treatment of the
Christ-figure.87 Dr. Manhattan is (1) a “tangible,” (2) “central” character within the text who
becomes progressively more of an (3) “outsider” as his story progresses. Osterman is renamed
Dr. Manhattan by the army, fulfilling the possession of (5) an “alter ego”.88 Osterman is
transformed at (8) the “holy age” of 30.89 He is (9) betrayed by Ozymandias twice, once when
Ozymandias makes it appears that the radiation he exudes causes cancer in people close to him90
and again when Ozymandias attempts to disintegrate him.91 Dr. Manhattan is in a relationship
with Laurie Juspeczyk, (10) “a sexually identified woman.”
Dr. Manhattan’s (12) death and resurrection is his origin story. Osterman becomes locked
in a vault designed to remove “intrinsic fields,” fields that are responsible for holding matter
together, and he is disintegrated on the atomic level.92 Months later, he is able to reassemble
himself, organ system by organ system, until he reemerges as Dr. Manhattan.93 Dr. Manhattan
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works with the US military and his advances in science benefit all of humanity, and due to his
new status all humans are (14) “lesser.” While he does not strike a cruciform pose proper, upon
his “resurrection” he reappears to his co-workers in a pose reminiscent of many depictions of
Christ’s second coming, with arms down in 30 degree angels from his body. 94 Although most of
Dr. Manhattan’s abilities are (19) miraculous (even if grounded in science-fiction), he does pull
one straight from Jesus’ playbook when we see him walking across a swimming pool on top of
the water.95 His “resurrection” sees him surrounded in a radiant light emanating from his body.96
Kozlovic notes that “holy auras and effulgent lights” are an association with (22) Jesus’
“spiritual garb,” and are meant to evoke Jesus’ transfiguration.97 When he is fully human,
Osterman is drawn with (23) blue eyes. Dr. Manhattan goes one better. While his eyes are
transformed into blank white spaces, his skin is changed to light blue. Finally, upon Dr.
Manhattan’s “resurrection,” one of his co-workers offers the (24) “holy exclamation” of “Oh,
holy God, willya look at that…”98
So we see that Dr. Manhattan is not simply presented as a god-like entity created by a
scientific accident, but as a Christ-figure. However, he is not a very comforting examination of
the implications of how a Christ-figure would act in the reality of Watchmen. The Christological
question Dr. Manhattan represents is what the outcome would be of a being trapped between
humanity and godhood. Moore’s answer appears to be that such a figure would eventually drift
away from humanity and become apathetic to the plight of humans, or, at best, ambivalent
towards humanity. Dr. Manhattan’s disappearing humanity is reflected, visually, through his
clothing. The month following his resurrection, he is seen in the privacy of his home, wearing a
black tank top, slacks, and shoes.99 Shortly afterwards, upon his christening as Dr. Manhattan, he
is wearing a full body suit with only his hands and head exposed.100 Five years after the accident,
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his full body suit has transformed into something akin to a wrestling singlet, his arms and legs
fully exposed.101 Six years after this, while in Vietnam, he is seen wearing nothing more than a
pair of underwear.102 Six years after Vietnam, his underwear has morphed into a thong, with his
buttocks fully exposed.103 By the time of the narrative, 26 years after the initial accident, Dr.
Manhattan has forgone wearing clothes altogether, except when the situation requires him to
wear a suit such as Eddie Blake’s, a.k.a. the Comedian, funeral or an appearance on television.
At his reappearance, Dr. Manhattan had already transcended the physical utility of clothing (to
provide warmth), but continued wearing clothes due to their social relevance (to cover the naked
human form from the eyes of others). By the time of the main narrative, these social and cultural
meanings of clothing seem to have lost their hold as he loses his humanity. In the JudeoChristian mythology, Adam and Eve first cover their naked forms as a result of a newly acquired
sense of shame after eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Dr.
Manhattan represents a character for whom this ancient shame has little effect and who has little
desire to maintain this connection with his humanity.
Other parts of the narrative of Watchmen also indicate this inability to remain fully
human while participating in the divine. When the audience is first introduced to Dr. Manhattan,
he is informed of the death of the Comedian. He responds, “A live body and a dead body contain
the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are
unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?”104 Viewing the human as a collection of
particles demonstrates a disconnection from his humanity just as, to a human operating fully
within the human condition, the difference between life and death is crucial.
Other characters in the narrative also take note of Dr. Manhattan’s disappearing
humanity. The Comedian, although a cruel and violent monstrosity of a man, is often portrayed
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throughout the series as being able to see deeper truths through his nihilism. After killing a
Vietnamese woman pregnant with his child as Dr. Manhattan watches, the Comedian replies to
Dr. Manhattan’s recrimination by saying:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Pregnant woman. Gunned her down. Bang. And y’know
what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into
mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to
goddamn Australia…But you didn’t lift a finger! You don’t really give a damn
about human beings. I’ve watched you…You’re driftin’ outta touch, Doc. You’re
turnin’ into a flake. God help us all.105
By the end of the text, Dr. Manhattan solidifies his distance from humanity, his own and
others’, when he tells Ozymandias, “Human affairs cannot be my concern. I’m leaving this
galaxy for one less complicated.” When Ozymandias enquires about what this means for Dr.
Manhattan’s newly reacquired “interest in human life,” Dr. Manhattan replies, “I think perhaps
I’ll create some.”106
How could a human-god hybrid, like Dr. Manhattan or Jesus, negotiate the conflicts of
their dual nature? How could a being navigate being both human and divine? Moore’s answer is
clear; it could not. Human nature would recede in the presence of the divine nature. If a
human/god hybrid walked amongst us, it would not be the loving, personal savior imagined by
some Christians, but the distant watchmaker of Deistic thought.107
Jesse Custer and Dr. Manhattan both serve as examples of the Christ-figure in comics, as
does Superman. But what their representations demonstrate is that the Christ-figure is not
necessarily a Christian literary device. In other words, presenting a Christ-figure does not
necessarily translate into the narrative being a Christian one. Preacher’s writer, Garth Ennis, is a
self-professed “hardcore atheist.”108 Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen, has been an adherent of
ceremonial magic and publically proclaimed this in 1993. It seems unlikely that either writer
used their Christ-figures as pro-Christian apologetics.
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The depiction of Superman in Man of Steel appears to be drawing on the Superman-asChrist metaphor established decades earlier in Superman: The Movie and its sequels. However,
the presence of a textual or subtextual Christ-figure does not necessarily mean that the text is
promoting a Christian worldview. As Preacher and Watchmen demonstrate, the Christ-figure can
serve as an oppositional figure to mainstream Christian conceptions of Jesus. There are multiple
ways to read the connections the filmmakers and marketers are constructing between Superman
and Jesus.
While most of the Christian reactions to Man of Steel’s faith-based marketing dealt
primarily with the unease created by the blending of religion and commerce (as we saw at the
beginning of this chapter), some focused on this issue of the Christ-figure. Josh Larsen, in his
post “Man of Steel and the Tiredness of Christ Figures” (2013) for Think Christian, does not
deny that Superman acts as a Christ-figure within the narratives of the films, declaring him “the
definitive, pop-culture Christ figure.”109 However, Larsen challenges the pastoral usefulness of
any Christ-figure. He argues that the Christ-figure cannot and/or does not inform an
understanding of Jesus, it serves as a means to attach “religiosity and resonance” to the fictional
character presented as a Christ-figure.110 He explains, “As a theological exercise, Christ-figuring
is a one-way street.”111 It informs the audience about the character, but not about Jesus.
Larsen’s position reflects a worldview where Jesus exists as an independent agent who
can be understood through resources available to the believer, such as the New Testament.
Superman as a Christ-figure, or any Christ-figure for that matter, presents a challenge to how
Larsen believes Jesus should be understood. He asks, “At what point does Superman become less
like Jesus and Jesus more like Superman?”112 This is, of course, a prescriptive argument aimed at
a Christian audience to guide their interactions with popular culture. It is not advocating a more
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fundamentalist position of avoiding non-Christian culture and its artifacts, but is warning of the
dangers of allowing pop culture Christ-figures to influence conceptions of Christ. It is advocating
a unilaterally permeable boundary between Christianity and secular culture where Christian
beliefs and attitudes affect the content of popular entertainment but are not allowed to be
influenced by them.
Superman and Man of Steel are, therefore, called out as a prime example of this danger
partly because of the faith-based marketing promoting the identification of Superman with Jesus.
But even before Superman: The Movie’s very strongly implied Superman-as-Christ subtext, the
connections between Superman and Jesus were being made within popular culture. For example,
Victor Garber’s Jesus in Godspell (1973) dons Superman’s chevron while identifying Jesus and
his followers with the Hippie counterculture of the 1960s.113 Here, the inverse of Larsen’s
argument is demonstrated and Superman’s iconography is used to inform the portrayal of Jesus
within a popular musical. Prothero’s American Jesus demonstrates that Larsen’s argument is an
ideological one, not a historical or cultural one. Throughout American religious history, the
American Christian understanding of Christ is not solely influenced by the Christian Bible, but
relies heavily on cultural factors outside of Christian doctrine and institutions. Superman’s
liminal position between humanity and divinity highlights an underlying connection to the
character of Jesus and has, more than likely, influenced some American Christians’ constructions
of Jesus. And it is that very tendency that Larsen is using to construct his boundaries and draw
his borders between Christianity and secular culture.
Bosco Peters, in his post “Jesus Christ Man of Steel” (2013) on Liturgy, illustrates
another argument against the Superman as Christ-figure metaphor promoted by Man of Steel
Ministry Resources. Peters acknowledges the conscious attempt to identify Superman with Jesus
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in Man of Steel, but argues this connection is erroneous due to the fact that Superman does not
act Christ-like within the film. Focusing on the climactic battle between Superman and General
Zod where Superman kills Zod by snapping his neck in order to save the life of a family, Peters
notes that this is not only antithetical to the message of Jesus but also to the established depiction
of Superman.114 Peters writes,
What is ultimately being presented in the movie Man of Steel is the very opposite
saviour message of the Man of Nazareth. Man of Steel is teaching that our
salvation is by force – by us being stronger than them. Might, power, weapons,
fighting – these are what we need to do. If thousands of innocents die as collateral
damage, we do that without second thought. If whole cities are destroyed, we do
that without second thought.115
For Peters, Man of Steel is not only a subversion of the Christ-figure, but also the
character of Superman. He, of course, is not alone in his opinion on the killing of Zod. I have
publically discussed the faith-based marketing of Man of Steel at several academic conferences
and, without fail, during the question and answer period, someone in the audience wanted to
discuss this scene and how it goes against Superman’s “nature.” Oddly, or perhaps not that
oddly, the materials promoting Man of Steel to Christian churches make no reference to this final
scene nor to the killing of Zod. Possible explanations for this omission range from the benign,
such as the “spoiler” averse nature of the 2010s, to the more problematic, such as this particular
plot point is seen as contrary to the claims the marketers want to make to the Christian audience,
as Peters argues, and is therefore omitted.
Man of Steel Ministry Resources
The visitor to the Man of Steel Ministry Resources website is greeted with an image of
Henry Cavill’s Superman flying directly at them, moving at great speed with the sun behind him.
The website itself is divided into three main sections: “About the Film,” “Resources,” and “Free
Pastor Screenings.” In addition to touting the credentials of the film’s cast and director, listing
three Academy Award nominees and one winner (although Russell Crowe who also won an
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Oscar, is strangely not mentioned in this section), the “About the Film” section also establishes
the connection between Man of Steel’s Superman and Jesus that it will draw on more explicitly
in its sermon outline. It reads, “A young boy learns that he has extraordinary powers and is not of
this earth. As a young man, he journeys to discover where he came from and what he was sent
here to do. But the hero in him must emerge if he is to save the world from annihilation and
become the symbol of hope for all mankind.”116 While it draws no explicit religious connections,
this paragraph, sandwiched among the standard cast roll call, acts as a primer for the site’s other
content. The reader is beginning to make the connection between the two narratives themselves
and will be more receptive to the notion later.
These connections are strengthened by the inclusion of the third official trailer for the
film at the end of this section. While this trailer is intended for distribution to a general,
mainstream audience, many of the Christian elements that the sermon outlines will emphasize
are found within these three minutes. In fact, multiple YouTube videos have mashed up audio
from the Man of Steel trailers with visuals from The Bible miniseries with eerie effect. The site
contains two other trailers for pastors to show to their congregations during the Sunday sermon.
As with the marketing for films to religious audiences, the distribution of film clips for use in
religious settings also has a longer history, as we have seen with The Greatest Story Ever Told
including the distribution of filmstrips to churches and early screenings for religious leaders and
others as part of its marketing campaign.117
One of these clips, “Reason,” distributed through Man of Steel Ministry Resources is
another official theatrical trailer, but the third seems to have been developed specifically for a
faith-based audience. “Reason” is a short thirty-second clip of Jonathan Kent’s dialogue with a
young Clark after Clark is told he is not only adopted, but also a super-powered alien.
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“Reason” operates on several levels. It is an advertisement; ideally, it works to entice the
viewer to want to see more of the movie and to spend money to do so. However, it strongly
draws connections between Man of Steel’s Superman and Jesus. Sent by a “heavenly” father, and
loved by an earthly one, Superman’s existence is one marked by a purpose—to save the world.
Beyond the portrayal of Superman as a Christ-figure, the Christian viewer can also apply this
mission-driven focus to their own life as emissary for God.
In addition to film clips, the site has six desktop wallpaper images from Man of Steel.
“Soaring High” visually suggests Christ’s ascension into heaven, with Superman flying vertically
through the clouds. “Wrongfully Accused” shows Superman handcuffed and being escorted by
American soldiers, recalling Jesus’ arrest and trial. This connection is also highlighted in
Detweiler’s sermon outline “Jesus—The Original Superhero.” He writes, “Superman faces grave
choices that may cost him his life for the sake of the planet. After he does turn himself in, he tells
Lois Lane: ‘I’m not surrendering myself to Zod. I’m surrendering myself to mankind.’ Sound
like anyone you’ve read about in Scripture?”118 Other images provided by the website include a
picture of Superman’s chevron, titled “Superman’s Shield,” which is either referencing the shield
of David or Paul’s shield of faith in Ephesians 6:16. Another is titled “The Chosen One,” which
speaks for itself.
The final section under “Resources” is the sermon outlines. Here we find three PDFs
designed to facilitate a religious engagement with the film for varying audiences. “Father’s Day
– A Conversation Guide” was produced by the American Bible Society. Man of Steel was
released on Father’s Day weekend and here we can see the intersection of Christianity and
family values very clearly, which is the topic of the following chapter. Another sermon outline
found on Man of Steel Ministry Resources is titled “Jesus – More Than Our ‘Super Man.’” It is
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intended for younger audiences, probably in a Sunday school setting. Its stated goal is “Kids will
better appreciate Jesus and his sacrifice through looking at scripture and the parallels in the Man
of Steel movie.”119 Again, like the Father’s Day guide, it suggests seeing the film together as a
group.
Professor Craig Detweiler’s “Jesus—The Original Superhero” is the most substantial of
the three sermon outlines. It provides five pages of detailed connections a pastor could draw
between Superman and Jesus. Unlike the other two, there is no explicit suggestion to see the
movie as a group. However, it does contain two prompts for the pastor to play clips from the
movie during the sermon. Divided into five sections, Detweiler explores Superman’s continued
relevance to his audience, the Jewish influence on his creation and his Kryptonian name Kal-El,
his calling to his heroic mission, his sacrifice for the greater good, and, throughout the piece,
how Superman can point the audience to Christ. As Detweiler asks, “How might the story of
Superman awaken our passion for the greatest hero who ever lived and died and rose again?”120
It might be beneficial to pause here and make clear that the creators of Man of Steel
Ministry Resources are not straining to make these connections. Zack Synder, the director, and
David Goyer, the writer, have included these connections within the film’s narrative. The film
begins with a miraculous birth, not only is Superman an alien but he is the first Kryptonian to be
produced through natural methods in generations. He is sent to Earth by a father who proclaims,
“He’ll be a god to them.”121 He begins his heroic mission at the age of 30. He willingly submits
himself to earthly authority. During the final fight scene, he clearly strikes a crucifixion pose
before descending back to the hell that Metropolis has become. And, at one point, he seeks
guidance at a church, where he is framed before a stained glass window depicting Jesus wearing
a red cape. Detweiler and company are not grasping at straws.
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And here, I believe, we can see the religious work Man of Steel Ministry Resources is
attempting to perform. The point is not the conversion of souls to Christianity, but the conversion
of Superman. Like the pagan Christmas tree and the pagan Easter egg before him, Superman is
being assimilated as a symbol of Christianity. Although Detweiler makes explicit Superman’s
Jewish roots, this is not an act of appropriating a Jewish superhero, but a secular one. In a call
out on the introduction page, Detweiler shows this connection. He writes, “Two high school
students, Jerry Siegel and Joel [sic] Shuster, created Superman in the 1930s. As the sons of
Jewish immigrants, they had experienced plenty of hard times and persecution. They knew what
it felt like to be viewed as an outsider, on the margins of society.”122 Here, it is clear that
Detweiler is implying both Jewish people of the early twentieth century and contemporary
evangelical Christians were and are “marginalized” by another dominant culture. By
emphasizing Superman’s connection to Jesus, Ministry Resources is claiming Man of Steel as a
Christian movie.
Detweiler has been a proponent of the “evangelical” approach to popular culture long
before being tapped to write the sermon notes for Man of Steel. In his book A Matrix of
Meaning: Finding God in Pop Culture (2003), co-authored with Barry Taylor, Detweiler argues
for an approach to analyzing popular culture that would highlight its theological and religious
potential. He writes:
In this book, we want to look at theology through the lens of popular culture, to
learn about perceptions of God in general, and to discover the evolving role the
divine may play in our everyday lives. We aim to create a theology out of
popular culture rather than a theology for popular culture. We want to join the
theologizing already occurring within popular culture, outside the reaches of the
traditional academy or religion. 123
For Detweiler, Superman and Man of Steel are another site for spiritual opportunity.
According to his sermon notes, Man of Steel points to the truth of the “original superhero” Jesus.
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By highlighting Superman’s willingness to sacrifice himself during the final battle with Zod,
Detweiler connects it to Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. As he concludes:
We may want to soar like Superman, but most of the time, we feel quite
earthbound. A movie like Man of Steel provides a thrilling picture of what
sacrifice, duty, courage, and honor look like. It is a rousing story. Thankfully, a
genuine superhero, Jesus Christ, intervened on our behalf. This perfect person
made a complete sacrifice to save very imperfect people. Consider this concise
summary of our faith, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). May we come
to know, love, and follow the original superhero, Jesus.124
Drawing the Line, Forming the Boundaries
As we have seen, the faith-based marketing strategy of Grace Hill Media and its Man of
Steel Ministry Resources troubled some members of the Christian community. Detweiler
responded to these critiques in his essay “Superman: Sermon Notes from Exile” (June 18, 2013).
In his response, subtitled “Why I wrote sermon notes for a blockbuster Hollywood film,”125
Detweiler describes his critics as being opposed to the use of popular culture in church services.
He writes, “I appreciate the desire to keep our churches pure, to keep out foreign idols, to resist
the influence of Hollywood.”126 He goes on to label this desire “the Amish method.”127 He
argues that American Christians, as “a marginalized people,” are living a life “in exile,”
“outmatched” by the power and appeal of Hollywood and secular culture, in general.128
However, rather than follow biblical examples of life in captivity that mirror a fundamentalist
reaction, such as Moses leading the Jewish people out of Egypt, Detweiler suggests that he is
playing a role similar to Daniel during the Babylonian exile and interpreting Hollywood’s
“dreams” through the lens of Christianity.129 He concludes that by engaging with the mainstream
media, Christians demonstrate their numbers and influence, which will lead the capitalistic film
industry into producing more of the type of film Christians desire to see.130
Detweiler’s framing of his critics’ arguments is only accurate for a small portion of those
uneasy with the faith-based marketing campaign for Man of Steel. Josh Larsen’s argument
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against the marketing of the film to church audiences as a Christian allegory centers on his view
of Superman as an inaccurate Christ-figure.131 Bosco Peters is arguing against the theological
relevance of the Christ-figure in relation to its inability to help the audience understand Jesus.
However, Detweiler’s presentation of the critics’ issues with Man of Steel Ministry
Resources is inaccurate for a substantial portion of the criticism. The examples he links to,
within his essay, are not arguing for the complete separation of Christianity from secular popular
culture; they are arguing against the use of Christianity to promote the sale of movie tickets. For
the most part, they are not arguing for pastors to avoid the content of Hollywood productions but
to avoid being used in a marketing ploy. While Detweiler avoids their main argument in
“Superman: Sermon Notes in Exile,” he acknowledges it in a post to his personal blog, “Making
Hay in the Man of Steel’s Cornfields” (June 18, 2013). In the post, he writes, “I can appreciate
the desire for churches unsullied by the coin of the realm.”132 And here we can see the religious
work critics of the marketing of films to faith-based audiences are performing through their
criticisms.
Critics, such as Skye Jethani, Denny Burk, and Jonathan Merritt, are not calling for a
separation between Christianity and secular culture and its influence; they are arguing against the
influence of money on Christianity. They are using the controversy surrounding Man of Steel
Ministry Resources to reaffirm an ideal of the sacred by drawing boundaries to keep out the
profanity of marketing and money. Jethani’s article’s title, “Man of Steel in the Den of Thieves,”
points to this, as does Burk’s “Brothers, We Are Not Movie-hawkers…” and Merritt’s
“Superman Spirituality: Is Hollywood Manipulating Christians?” As Merritt writes, “the whole
ordeal makes me a little uncomfortable because it represents another step forward in the
commodification of Christianity.”133
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As Heather Hendershot writes in Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative
Evangelical Culture (2004), “The issue is not that evangelical Christians are tainted by
interaction with secular culture, but rather that the boundary between ‘secular’ and ‘evangelical’
has become ever more permeable as evangelical media has grown over the past twenty years.”134
The debate, for the most part, surrounding the faith-based marketing of Man of Steel is not
whether Christians should separate themselves completely from the influence of secular, popular
culturae. Nor is it about the obliteration of any and all boundaries between the religious and the
secular, such as in Skelton’s The Gospel According to the World’s Greatest Superhero, where his
analysis of Superman exemplifies a religious maximalist position writ large. For Skelton’s part,
there is no conflict with “the world” because an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God is in
complete control of everything. God uses the entire world, explicitly Christian or not, to point to
the truth of Christ.
Rather, supporters of both sides of the issue are using Man of Steel to argue where those
boundaries should be drawn. The film’s ambivalent nature as a popular culture commodity
designed to maximize box office revenues, its reliance on Superman as Christ-figure and other
Christian themes, and its marketing campaign’s willingness to use the latter in service of the
former allows it to become a site for the religious work of drawing boundaries between
Christianity and capitalist influence. The marketing techniques used by Grace Hill Media were a
continuation of marketing techniques established for films that appealed to Christian religious
sensibilities for nearly a century. Moreover, issues regarding the boundaries between religion and
economics have existed for millennia. Jesus could not have chased the money lenders from the
Temple if there were not money lenders in the temple. Martin Luther could not have written 95
theses against the selling of indulgences if the church was not selling indulgences.
109
The larger issue here is Superman’s popularity as a secular superhero. This larger issue
allows for a discussion that distances itself from questions about films created for and sold to
evangelical Christian audiences, such as God Is Not Dead (2014). But at its core, the larger issue
does not seem to be a disagreement about the use of pop culture in churches or Christianity’s
influence on pop culture creation, but whether or not the potential religious benefits of using pop
culture outweigh the potential pitfalls of corporations appealing to religious sensibilities for the
sole purpose of money.
Grace Hill Media, “About Us,” accessed September 3, 2015, http://www.gracehillmedia.com/aboutus/.
Ibid.
3
See Gail Schiller, “How Effective Is Marketing to Faith-Based Audiences?,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 15,
2008, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-effective-is-marketing-faith-111852; Tatiana Siegel, “Cross
Marketing,” Variety, June 21, 2012, http://variety.com/2012/film/news/cross-marketing-1118055632/; Sharon
Waxman, “The Passion of the Marketers,” July 18, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/business/media/thepassion-of-the-marketers.html.
4
Greg Stielstra and Bob Hutchins, Faith-Based Marketing: The Guide to Reaching 140 Million Christian
Consumers (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 6.
5
Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 17.
6
James Y. Trammell, “Who Does God Want Me to Invite to See The Passion of the Christ?: Marketing Movies to
Evangelicals,” Journal of Media and Religion 9, no. 1 (2010): 19-29.
7
See Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1995), 222-269.
8
Denny Burk, “Brothers, We Are Not Movie-hawkers…,” Denny Burk (blog), June 17, 2013, accessed October 20,
2014, http://www.dennyburk.com/brothers-we-are-not-movie-hawkers/.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Jonathan Haefs, email to author, August 5, 2015.
12
Skye Jethani, “Man of Steel in the Den of Thieves,” Christianity Today, June 11, 2013, accessed August 28, 2015,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2013/june-online-only/man-of-steel-in-den-of-thieves.html.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Jonathan Merritt, “Superman Spirituality: Is Hollywood Manipulating Christians?,” Jonathan Merritt on Faith &
Culture, June 20, 2013, accessed October 14, 2014, http://www.jonathanmerritt.com/superman-spirituality-ishollywood-manipulating-christians/.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
P. J. Wenzel, “Superman – the Ministry,” Disciples for Life (blog), May 31, 2013, accessed October 20, 2014,
http://disciplesforlife.org/2013/05/31/superman-the-ministry/.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
James Y. Trammell and Daniel A. Stout, “Reviewing the Christian Film Review: Interpretive Critiques of A
Serious Man,” in Evangelical Christians and Popular Culture: Pop Goes the Gospels, vol. 1, Film, Radio,
Television, and the Internet, ed. Robert H. Woods Jr. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), 91-92.
23
Ibid., 94.
1
2
110
24
Ibid.
This is not to necessarily label Wenzel as a Christian Fundamentalist, however. He may or may not be, but in this
case the label only refers to his position on Man of Steel Ministry Resources, not his larger theological worldview.
26
Peter A. Maresco, “Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: Marketing Segmentation, Mass Marketing and
Promotion, and the Internet,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 8, no. 1 (2004).
27
Maresco; Benjamin Sampson, “Marketing Miracles: The Modern Intersection of Hollywood and Christian Film
Cultures,” Creative Industries Journal 7, no. 1 (2014): 35.
28
Maresco.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 4-6.
32
Ibid., 4.
33
Ibid., 7.
34
Ibid., 7-8.
35
For an example, see Ray Richmond, “‘Passion’ – Pornography for the Whole Family?,” Today, March 2, 2004,
accessed September 8, 2015, http://www.today.com/id/4428753/ns/today-today_entertainment/t/passion---pornography-whole-family/#.Ve8dAhFVhBc.
36
Trammell, “Who Does God,” 21.
37
Ibid., 27.
38
Ibid., 25-26.
39
Grace Hill Media, “About Us.”
40
Sampson, 36
41
Or, as also discussed, an example of a Jewish superhero.
42
Superman’s first feature film was Superman and the Mole Men (1951) starring George Reeves in the role he
would later play on television’s Adventures of Superman (1952-1958).
43
Jack Kroll, “Superman to the Rescue!,” Newsweek, January 1, 1979, 50.
44
Pauline Kael, “The Package,” in When the Lights Go Down (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 527.
45
Superman: The Movie, directed by Richard Donner (1978; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2013), DVD.
46
Although not a movie, the promotional poster for the WB/CW television series Smallville (2001-2011) displays an
image of teenaged Clark Kent (played by Tom Welling) tied to a wooden cross in a cornfield, invoking both the
Crucifixion and a scarecrow.
47
Sarah R. Kozloff, “Superman as Saviour: Christian Allegory in the Superman Movies,” Journal of Popular Film
and Television 9, no. 2 (1981): 78-80.
48
Ibid., 80-82.
49
That being said, even if it was solely the audience’s reading of Jesus into the narrative, it would not be any less
significant from the perspective of this work.
50
Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003), 9.
51
Kozloff, 82.
52
Ibid.
53
Stephen Skelton, The Gospel According to the World’s Greatest Superhero (Eugene, OR: Harvest House
Publishers, 2006), 157.
54
Ibid., 39.
55
Ibid., 31.
56
Ibid., 76.
57
Jerry Siegel (w) and Joe Shuster (a), “Superman #1,” in The Superman Chronicles Vol. 1 (New York: DC
Comics, 2006), 195.
58
George Lowther, The Adventures of Superman (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1995), 23.
59
Anton Karl Kozlovic, “The Structural Characteristics of the Cinematic Christ-figure,” Journal of Religion and
Popular Culture 8 (Fall 2004), http://dspace2.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2328/14295/2004054629.pdf.
60
Garth Ennis (w), et al., Preacher: Gone to Texas (New York: DC Comics, 1996), 116.
61
Garth Ennis (w), et al., Preacher: Alamo (New York: DC Comics, 2001), 79-80.
62
Kozlovic.
63
Ennis, Preacher: Gone to Texas, 32-33.
64
Ennis, Preacher: Alamo, 191.
25
111
65
Ibid., 202.
Garth Ennis (w), et al. Preacher: Ancient History (New York: DC Comics, 1998), 83.
67
Ennis, Preacher: Alamo, 40-42.
68
Ibid., 191.
69
Ibid., 183.
70
Ibid., 201.
71
Garth Ennis (w), et al. Preacher: Until the End of the World (New York: DC Comics, 1997), 97.
72
Ibid., 128.
73
Ennis, Preacher: Gone to Texas, 35.
74
Kozlovic.
75
Ennis, Preacher: Gone to Texas, 41; It should also be noted that immediately before Tulip’s exclamation of
“Christ!,” Cassidy screams, “Fuck!,” making the panel read “Fuck! Christ!” Perhaps I’m reading too much into this
“coincidence,” but it seems to be an early indication of the series’ anti-Christian sentiments.
76
Preacher was published before Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), but it is not unreasonable to assume that
both works were influenced, directly or indirectly, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln’s The
Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) when it comes to conspiracies and cover-ups surrounding the descendants of
Jesus and Mary Magdalene; see Massimo Introvigne, “Beyond ‘The Da Vinci Code’: What is the Priory of Sion?,”
CESNUR: Center for Studies on New Religions, accessed December 7, 2015,
http://www.cesnur.org/2004/mi_davinci_en.htm.
77
Ennis, Preacher: Until the End of the World, 237.
78
I say “mainstream” here because, throughout Christian history, there have been various and often conflicting
Christologies presented. Preacher’s idea of a possessive, jealous, and ultimate villainous God would not be
completely at odds with Marcion of Sinope’s conception of the God of the Old Testament being a lesser deity Jesus
was sent to rescue us from.
79
Ennis, Preacher: Alamo, 52-53.
80
Ibid., 195.
81
Ibid., 207.
82
Ennis, Preacher: Gone to Texas, 66.
83
Ennis, Preacher: Ancient History.
84
Ennis, Preacher: Alamo, 216-217.
85
Alan Moore (w), et al., “Chapter IV: Watchmaker,” in Watchmen by Alan Moore (w), et al. (New York: DC
Comics, 2005), 20.
86
Ibid., 31.
87
Kozlovic.
88
Moore, “Chapter IV: Watchmaker,” 12.
89
Ibid., 4.
90
Alan Moore (w), et al., “Chapter XI: Look on My Works, Ye Mighty…,” in Watchmen by Alan Moore (w), et al.
(New York: DC Comics, 2005), 24.
91
Alan Moore (w), et al., “Chapter XII: A Stronger Loving World,” in Watchmen by Alan Moore (w), et al. (New
York: DC Comics, 2005), 14.
92
Moore, “Chapter IV: Watchmaker,” 4-8.
93
Ibid., 9-10.
94
Ibid., 10.
95
Moore, “Chapter XII: A Stronger Loving World,” 25.
96
Moore, “Chapter IV: Watchmaker,” 10.
97
Kozlovic.
98
Moore, “Chapter IV: Watchmaker,” 10.
99
Ibid., 11.
100
Ibid., 12.
101
Ibid., 17.
102
Ibid., 20.
103
Ibid., 22.
104
Alan Moore (w), et al., “Chapter I: At Midnight, All the Agents…,” in Watchmen by Alan Moore (w), et al.
(New York: DC Comics, 2005), 21.
105
Alan Moore (w), et al., “Chapter II: Absent Friends,” in Watchmen by Alan Moore (w), et al. (New York: DC
Comics, 2005), 15.
66
112
Moore, “Chapter XII: A Stronger Loving World,” 27.
Jon Osterman begins life as the son of a watchmaker and wanted to continue in his father’s profession. However,
his father viewed watchmaking to be obsolete in the face of Einsteinian theory and pushed him to become a nuclear
physicist. Ironical, his narrative arc ends with becoming the Watchmaker.
108
Alex Wilson, “Garth Ennis and His Big Reveal,” Bleeding Cool, October 18, 2012,
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/10/18/garth-ennis-big-reveal/.
109
Josh Larsen, “Man of Steel and the Tiredness of Christ Figures,” Think Christian, June 18, 2013,
http://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/man-of-steel-and-the-tiredness-of-christ-figures.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
112
Ibid.
113
Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003), 134.
114
However, the quotation Peters uses to illustrate his point is problematic to his argument. He quotes “Nobody has
the right to kill…not even Superman, especially not Superman” from Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s “Whatever
Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? Part Two” Action Comics #583 (September 1986) as emblematic of the ethos
of the “Superman canon.” One issue with this is that “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” is not a part
of the canon and was intentionally created as outside of continuity. The larger issue is this story is hardly proof that
Superman does not kill. In fact, in the preceding panels, Superman has killed Mr. Mxyzptlk and says “I killed him,
Lois! I intended to kill him!” See Alan Moore (w), Curt Swan (a), et al., “Whatever Happened to the Man of
Tomorrow?,” in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, 164-214 (New York: DC Comics, 2006).
115
Bosco Peters, “Jesus Christ Man of Steel,” Liturgy (July 9, 2013), http://liturgy.co.nz/jesus-christ-man-of-steel.
116
“Man of Steel Ministry Resource Site,” Ministry Resources, accessed October 6, 2014,
http://manofsteelresources.com.
117
Maresco.
118
Detweiler, “Jesus – The Original Superhero,” 6.
119
“Jesus: More than our ‘Super Man,’” Ministry Resources, accessed October 6, 2014,
http://www.manofsteelresources.com.
120
Detweiler, “Jesus – The Original Superhero,” 3.
121
Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder (2013; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 2013), DVD.
122
Detweiler, “Jesus – The Original Superhero,” 3.
123
Craig Detwieler and Barry Taylor, A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic, 2003), 16.
124
Detweiler, “Jesus – The Original Superhero,” 8.
125
Craig Detweiler, “Superman: Sermon Notes from Exile,” PARSE, June 18, 2013,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/parse/2013/june/superman-sermon-notes-from-exile.html.
126
Ibid.
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid.
130
Ibid.
131
Larsen.
132
Craig Detweiler, “Making Hay in the Man of Steel’s Cornfields,” Doc Hollywood: Craig Detweiler on
Entertainment, Media, and Culture (blog), Patheos, June 18, 2013, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dochollywood/
2013/06/making-hay-in-the-man-of-steels-cornfields/.
133
Merritt.
134
Hendershot, 24.
106
107
113
CHAPTER 5: FATHERING THE MAN OF STEEL
One aspect of Man of Steel that received attention from the American Christian
community is the theme of fatherhood. The film’s release date, June 14, 2013, corresponded to
Father’s Day weekend. In the month of Father’s Day Weekend in June 2013 evangelical
Christian men used themes and characters from Man of Steel to present modern religious
interpretations of fatherhood and masculinity to their church audience and to reassert the
importance of patriarchy to the family and society at large. However, their applications and
conclusions are far from uniform. In the following examples from Father’s Day Weekend,
Superman is a polyvalent symbol deployed to support preexistent religious worldviews and
social agendas. He is still being used as a way to point towards Jesus Christ in places, but,
depending on the character the author is identifying as the audience’s point-of-view character, he
is also a stand-in for the Christian father or children.
The Man of Steel Ministry Resource site contains several examples of the focus on
fatherhood in Christian discussions on the film. As a piece of faith-based marketing, Grace Hill
Media takes full advantage of Man of Steel’s opening weekend coinciding with Father’s Day
Weekend 2013. In his sermon notes, Detweiler highlights this important time and even suggests
a possible avenue of how the film can be used by Christians to connect to fatherhood. He writes:
This isn’t part of the three points that reveal Superman as an archetype of Jesus, but we’d be remiss
if we didn’t pause, with Father’s Day coming up, and note the love, sacrifice and guidance of both
Superman’s ‘heavenly’ father—Jor-El—and his ‘earthly’ father, Jonathan Kent. We could do a
whole sermon on the way they support and shape their son as he walks out his calling—and all of
us fortunate enough to be called ‘Dad’ could learn a thing or two from the way the[y] invest in KalEl/Clark.1
By maintaining the distinction between Jor-El as “heavenly” father and Jonathan Kent as
“earthly” father, Detweiler reinforces his examination of Superman as a Jesus archetype while
simultaneously highlighting three key aspects of the evangelical conception of fatherhood: “love,
sacrifice and guidance.”2 Extending the Superman as Christ metaphor to the auxiliary characters
114
of Superman’s two fathers, with Jor-El standing in for God the Father and Jonathan representing
Joseph, Detweiler is able to suggest that a proper human father is a reflection of the heavenly
Father.
The website also highlights the issue of fatherhood with a trailer made specifically for
marketing to a faith-based audience. Titled “Reason,” this short, thirty second video uses pieces
of Jonathan Kent’s dialogue with a young Clark after the latter discovers he is not only adopted
but is an alien.3 The voiceover begins with Jonathan declaring, “You’re the answer, Clark.” To
which, Clark replies, “Can't I just keep pretending I'm your son?” The remainder of the
voiceover is Jonathan’s answer, “You are my son. But somewhere out there, you have another
father and he sent you here for a reason. And even if it takes you the rest of your life, you owe it
to yourself to find out what that reason is.”4 This trailer removes large portions of the dialogue in
this section of the film to make the connection to Christianity stronger. The question that
Superman is the answer to has been edited out because it makes clear that the film is discussing
an extraterrestrial and not a messianic figure. While the dialogue emphasizes the connections to
the Christ mythology in the way it mirrors a hypothetical conversation between a young Jesus
and Joseph, it also stresses notions of fatherhood. Included in the visuals of the trailer is
Jonathan embracing an emotionally distraught young Clark and Jor-El lovingly stroking the head
of the infant Kal-El before sending him to Earth. These images suggest gentle and loving fathers,
which is reinforced by Jonathan Kent’s reassuring words of unconditional love to a deeply
shaken Superman. And on another level, the dialogue and images combine to present a vision of
fatherhood that can be seen as a divine mission. A child is imparted to the earthly father from the
heavenly father and everyone is here to fulfill a divine purpose.
115
The American Bible Society’s “Father’s Day Conversation Guide: Man of Steel”
Also included in Grace Hill Media’s marketing material, and more focused on Father’s
Day, is the “Father’s Day Conversation Guide: Man of Steel” produced by the American Bible
Society. This two page PDF contains color photographs from the film, quotes from Superman’s
two fathers, Jor-El and Jonathan Kent, and suggestions for how the Christian father can use the
content of the film to discuss Jesus with his children. Divided into two main sections, with an
additional “Go Deeper” section at the end, the conversation guide begins with a welcome
statement that outlines the main themes of the film the guide will explore. It reads, “This Father’s
Day, the epic story of Superman is given a new life. It’s a timeless story that can connect us to
the ultimate story of heroism, fatherhood, grace, and redemption.”5 The film’s themes of
“heroism” and “fatherhood” immediately point the reader back to the story of Jesus’ crucifixion
and resurrection.
At the same time, one of the guide’s primary goals is not rooted in helping the reader
achieve a deeper understanding and appreciation for the New Testament; it is, at heart, a
marketing device aimed at getting more people to purchase more movie tickets. Under the
heading “How to Use this Guide,” this is made explicit. The first order of business, according to
the authors of the guide, is to “Round up the kids and take them to see Man of Steel (PG-13).”6
With the average number of children in the American Evangelical Christian household at 2.3, the
brilliance of this particular faith-based marketing strategy is that by focusing on fatherhood and
Father’s Day, it is not trying to sell a ticket to a solitary individual but to a family unit of four or
more consumers.7
At the same time, the guide is also concerned with fatherhood’s place in American
Christianity and how popular culture can be used to uncover and support spiritual truths. As the
116
“How to Use this Guide” section concludes, the conversation the film promotes and the guide
distills will lead the reader to “discover new connections to your own life and God’s Word.”8
Throughout the guide the connections between Superman and Jesus Christ are highlighted and
discussed. The quote selected for the first page of the PDF strengthens this connection.
Accompanied by a photograph of Superman ascending into the clouds as the sun’s light breaks
behind him, Jor-El’s “mission statement” to his infant son is quoted. It reads, “You will give the
people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But
in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”9
The first main section is titled “Love that Is Stronger than Anything” and focuses on the
character of Jor-El, Superman’s Kryptonian biological father. In this section, the author is
drawing connections between Superman’s extraterrestrial father and the heavenly Father. The
guide reads, “Throughout the film, the incredible love of a father is what makes everything good
possible. It’s a powerful, self-giving, unrelenting force that becomes an anchor of Superman’s
identity and purpose. This love drives hope; this hope drives purpose. And when spoken, this
love gives Superman his ultimate challenge: ‘You can save them…you can save all of them.’”10
On one level, this can be read as meaning that the love of the father giving purpose and mission
to the child. However, this passage can also be read, perhaps more convincingly, as referring to
the love of God the Father guiding the soteriological, sacrificial mission of Jesus Christ. If we
replace “father” with “God the Father” and “Superman” with “Jesus Christ” the sentiment
remains the same.
Another way to read this section is that Jor-El becomes a stand-in for the Christian father
and, therefore; the children are identified with Superman. Within this text, it is the father’s love
which will ultimately guide the child’s mission. As the guide states, “Throughout the film, the
117
incredible love of a father is what makes everything good possible. It’s a powerful, self-giving,
unrelenting force that becomes an anchor of Superman’s identity and purpose. This love drives
hope; this hope drives purpose.”11 In Detweiler’s sermon notes, he posits that Jor-El is a stand-in
for God the Father and Superman/Jesus is sent to earth to be humanity’s savior. But another level
of interpretation is possible. Through a different reading of the call-out quote highlighted earlier
(“You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will
stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them
accomplish wonders.”12), Jor-El becomes the Christian father who is sending his children out
into the world as evangelical beacons. Superman is not Jesus in this section. Superman is not
even the intended reader. Superman is the child who will go out into the world and, through his
fathers’ love and faith, spread the light of the gospel to all.
The first segment ends with three questions for fathers to direct towards their children.
All three of these questions focus on the concept of love, both in every day, lived experiences
and in theological terms. The guide asks the children questions about examples of love they have
seen in their lives and ways they can increase the quality of love they share with those close to
them. Finally, it asks, “What makes it hard to love people the way Jesus wants us to?”13
The second segment, “Undaunted in Doing What Is Right,” continues strengthening the
Superman-Jesus connections found throughout Grace Hill’s faith-based marketing of Man of
Steel. Superman is no longer a possible stand-in for the evangelical child; he is Jesus again. Page
two of the American Bible Society’s Father’s Day Conversation Guide begins with a quote from
Superman’s earthly, foster father, Jonathan Kent. It reads, “You’re the answer, son. You’re the
answer to ‘are we alone in the universe?’”14 The primary meaning of this quote within the
context of film refers to extraterrestrial life (i.e., aliens), but a quote about alien life seems sorely
118
out of place in the context of this guide. The guide is drawing a secondary level of meaning from
this quote. Instead of Superman as biological extraterrestrial, as living proof of life on other
planets, this quote is being used to point the reader to the existence of the divine, in the form of
the Christian deity. In other words, humans are not alone in this existence. God is with them and
he loved them so much he sent his son to save them.
The text under the second section also illustrates this attempt to form a connection
between Superman and Jesus Christ. The description of the main conflict of the film offered in
this section can easily be read as an allegorical treatment of Jesus’ battle with Satan. It reads,
“He is undaunted in doing what is right. He alone can save the world. But the cost is total—
taking on the full assault of an enemy who would stop at nothing to destroy every member of the
human race. This enemy is someone Superman alone can stop, and only through extreme
personal sacrifice.”15 This connection is made explicit in the next paragraph of the guide, which
reads, “This is an age-old story, played out powerfully here, but echoing the best of the mission
of Jesus in the New Testament. Think of the mirror reflection: From a place far beyond earth,
sent by the love of a Father, Superman gives up all to come live among a people doomed to
death. Nurtured by adoptive parents, he stands in for justice and truth, but ultimately steps in to
save humanity.”16
Only in the “Go Deeper” section of the guide is there a direct connection made between
Man of Steel, Christianity, and fatherhood or any attempt towards a practical application of the
lessons of the film to modern American Christian fatherhood. Interestingly, the guide does not
focus its attention on the characters of Jor-El or Jonathan Kent to express its lesson on
fatherhood. Instead it does so through Jesus’ superiority over Superman. It reads, “[Jesus is]
more than just a champion against evil, he’s a powerful example of what is good. As a father,
119
you should be striving to live out this example every day. You can be that hero for your son or
daughter by giving them unconditional love and support.”17 Again we see the recurring message
of the Grace Hill Media’s faith-based marketing campaign for Man of Steel: Jesus is like
Superman-only better. The guide does not point to characters who are defined by their
fatherhood, like Jor-El, Jonathan Kent, Joseph, or even God the Father, but to characters who are
classically denied the role of father in their primary depictions, Jesus and Superman.
The reference in this quotation to Jesus as “what is good” and therefore an exemplar for
our own human behaviors is similar to the argument that Ben Saunders’ constructed for the
religious significance of Superman in his book Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy,
and Superheroes (2011). Saunders argues that Superman’s religious significance is not found in
his similarities to or the influences of religious characters, like Jesus or Moses, but in his
connection to the philosophical concept of the Good.18 However, Saunders emphasizes that the
Good is a relative concept which changes throughout cultures and time, therefore Superman
morphs to meet these changes and shifts in the American consciousness. The American Bible
Society guide strongly indicates that Jesus’ example of the Good is a much more permanent,
“timeless,” or eternal concept.
Doug Birdsall, president of the American Bible Society at the time of the release of the
“Father’s Day Conversation Guide: Man of Steel,” published an op-ed piece for The Christian
Post titled “‘Man of Steel’: What We Can Learn About Fathers” on June 15, 2013, the day after
Man of Steel’s release and the day before Father’s Day. Birdsall’s article begins with more of a
focus on the fathers in the film than the conversation guide did. He writes, “Early reviews have
noted the film’s emphasis on the two most important men in Clark/Kal-El’s life; the sacrificial
love of birth father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and the supportive, guiding love of adopted father
120
Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner). They both shape the young Clark (Henry Cavill) into the
principled hero he becomes.”19 He then turns his attention to the negative portrayals of
fatherhood he sees present in mainstream American media, what he terms “the archetypes of the
bumbling dad of sitcoms, the clueless dad of television commercials or the absent dad of film
dramas.”20 Birdsall goes on to lament the “fatherhood crisis” of contemporary American
society.21 Birdsall’s conclusions also correspond closely with the theme of Jesus-as-Superman
but better found in the both the conversation guide and the larger collection of Grace Hill
Media’s faith-based marketing campaign. He writes, “There is a lot about fathering that can been
learned from a film like ‘Man of Steel.’ But the best lessons about Fathering can be found in the
pages of the Bible.”22 However, unlike the conversation guide, Birdsall encourages fathers to
identify with the characters of Jor-El and Jonathan Kent. He writes, “Your child won't likely save
the world, but you may be raising the next superhero of his or her own family, company,
community or country. The world needs you to make your fathering story, well, super.”23
Man of Steel and the Fatherhood Blogosphere
Doug Birdsall’s identification of the Christian father as either Jor-El or Jonathan Kent
positions the Christian child as Superman and echoes the point of view of many Christian
bloggers exploring the theme of fatherhood in Man of Steel. Focus on the Family’s blog Plugged
In featured a conversation between two of its bloggers from its other blog, Dad Matters, about
the issues of fatherhood present in Man of Steel titled “Man of Steel: A Tale of Two Fathers.”
Published on June 13, 2013, the conversation between Paul Asay and Sam Hoover focused on
the lessons that Superman’s fathers impart to him, how those lessons inform Christian
fatherhood, and issues of nature versus nurture. After noting that both of Superman’s fathers
sacrificed their lives to protect him- Jor-El saves him from death on Krypton and Jonathan Kent
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saves him from exposing himself to a world that could hate and fear him- Hoover discusses the
importance of “prioritizing life lessons.”24 Asay agrees with this assessment and with the life
lessons that Jonathan Kent prioritized. He writes, First, [Jonathan Kent] tells Clark that it’s not
the gifts that we’re given that makes us special; it’s what we do with them. And second, those
gifts were given to us for a reason. It behooves us to try to find out what that reason is.”25
In their emphasis on teaching and life lessons, both bloggers agree on the importance of
the nurture element of childhood development. As Hoover writes, “Man of Steel could really be
retitled to My Two Dads. Each dad gives Superman a gift: strength from Jor-El and compassion
from Jonathan Kent.”26 Asay responds, “People always argue what’s more important: The
‘nature’ side of being a parent (what genes your kids get) and the ‘nurture’ side. As we see in
Superman, both are incredibly important…but it’s the ‘nurturing’ side—the character lessons
that Jonathan Kent obviously taught his boy ‘Clark’—that really made the guy a superhero.”27
Picking up on the lessons of the superman in Superman’s pulp antecedents, like Philip Gordon
Wylie’s Gladiator (1930), Asay argues that Superman’s Kryptonian nature, given to him, in part,
by Jor-El’s DNA, is enough to have given him his enormous power “but that could’ve made
Supes more of a monster than a hero had Jonathan not given Clark such a great moral
underpinning.”28 In his concluding paragraph, Asay summarizes the child-rearing lessons he saw
in Man of Steel, through Jonathan Kent’s positive and sometimes negative example. He writes:
Just as we help them to walk and run and ride a bike and drive, we try to help our children make
sense of the world—and how they can make a place for themselves within it. We encourage them
to explore (within reason). We encourage them to take chances (within reason). We should, I think,
tell them to do their best all the time (something Jonathan really didn’t do, and maybe couldn’t do,
with Clark) and reassure them that, if they mess up or make a mistake along the way, we’ll still love
‘em. That they’re always super in our eyes. 29
John Blase, writing for the Christian website The Higher Calling, posted an article on
July 3, 2013 titled “Man of Steel: The Strength of Fathering,” which focuses on the sacrificial
aspects of Jonathan Kent’s role in Superman’s development. Blase writes, “In my opinion,
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Jonathan Kent stole the show, and he did it without blue tights or a cape. He did it by being a
good father.”30 Like Birdsall, Asay, and Hoover, Blase sees the role of the father portrayed
through Jonathan Kent’s character and the children through Superman. He describes the
experience of fatherhood through the film when he writes: “We’re handed this baby that came
from somewhere other than us, and we’re expected to help raise him or her. The child is a
mystery at best, with powers that both amaze and frighten us. We realize this little person is
somewhat like us, but also very different.”31 Blase frames fatherhood itself as a sacred act and
the sacrifice of the father as capable of consecrating a profane world. He writes, “When we
fathers sacrifice for our sons and daughters, we are bringing a sacredness into a world that is far
too often unsacred, if not desecrated.”32 For Blase, Jonathan Kent is the true hero of the film and
a hero that the Christian father is fully capable of emulating in their own lives. And through this
emulation, the children will grow into their role of heroes as well. He writes, “But that kind of
fathering is not for the faint of heart. It requires you not to be tough as nails, but to be a man of
steel—and those are two very different things. Pursue the former, and you’ll probably end up a
nail. Practice the latter, and chances are good you’ll watch your son or daughter take his or
her place in the sun, and fly.”33
Other Christian bloggers also wrote about the connections between Man of Steel and
fatherhood when the film was released. Wade Bearden, who blogs at One Theology, posted an
entry titled “Man of Steel Is the Perfect Father’s Day Film” on June 22, 2013. Like Hoover and
Asay, Bearden touches on the nature vs. nurture debate and comes down squarely on the side of
nurture. He writes, “Clark may be super because of Jor-El, but he is a hero because of
Jonathan.”34 The lessons that Jonathan Kent imparts to Superman that Bearden emphasizes have
a moral flavor that is strong in Christian thought. Bearden notes, “Jonathan helps Clark become a
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good man, teaching him to turn the other cheek when confronted with violence. It’s this same
type of moral character that compels Clark to sacrifice himself for the greater good of others.
Sure, Jonathan might not hold all of the answers, but what he does possess—patience and
virtue—he can pass on to his son. Jonathan is why Clark is the good guy, not the villain.”35
Bearden concludes that Man of Steel “should inspire men of all ages- dads or not- to be a positive
father-figure in someone’s life.”36 Throughout Bearden’s piece it becomes clear that he is
focused on sons as the children who need a father to raise them into heroes. He attempts to cover
this bias by using gender neutral language when describing a person’s offspring, such as
“children” or “individual.” However, by the final paragraph, it becomes clear it is the sons that
are the future “heroes” he is thinking about. Bearden implores the reader to “Give young men
purpose, help them develop character.”37
Jacob Myers, in a blog post for Working Preacher titled “Superdad: A Review of Man of
Steel” posted on July 4, 2013, echoes sentiments found in other blog posts about Man of Steel
and fatherhood, but he also adds another dimension. Instead of using Jor-El and Jonathan Kent as
role models for the viewers, he approaches them as two different ways to think about God as the
Father. He writes, “If nothing else, Man of Steel offers preachers an opportunity for thinking of
the father metaphor on a deeper level. Knowing the dangers the contemporary world presents,
does our Heavenly Father fear for our safety above all? Or perhaps, recognizing these dangers,
God wills for us to risk alienation and persecution for the hope of a better world.”38
On a blog about fatherhood and Christianity, thefatherheart, the author of the film review
of Man of Steel uses the film as a platform for discussing the importance of powerful, present
fathers. The review begins by discussing the ill effects by talking about the effects Jor-El’s
absence had on Superman (although he probably should be let off the hook because of the
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exploding planet and all), but makes no mention of mitigating influence of Jonathan Kent’s role
as adoptive father. Most of the other writers dealing with Man of Steel, Christianity, and
fatherhood acknowledge the strong role Jonathan Kent had upon Superman, but this piece does
not. The author here, instead, focuses on the importance of the “traditional” family on God’s
plan. He writes, “Because Family will save the world and strong families are built on a bedrock
of Godly marriages, God intended it this way and we shouldn’t be surprised that both marriages
and family are being targeted.”39 Unlike some of the other blogs focused on fatherhood where
Superman represents the children, here we see Superman as the father. The author values
authority, power, and effectiveness as markers of successful fatherhood, and therefore identifies
with the superhero. Calling his readers into action, he writes, “Lets [sic] always remember, we
are the protectors of our family, our children and our marriages, we are at war men of steel. Suit
up!”40
Another blog post arguing that Superman represents the father is Joe Carter’s “Superman
Isn’t Jesus, He’s Your Dad” posted on The Gospel Coalition on June 19, 2013. Carter argues that
director Zack Snyder commits the common error of understanding Superman as a Christ-figure.
In Carter’s view, Superman is a stand-in for our fathers, what he labels our “first superhero.”41
He writes, “Reading about Superman in the pages of the comic books was my first experience of
nostalgia, longing for a time that had never really existed, when my dad could do anything.”42
For Carter, Superman is a replacement for an illusion of our fathers that inevitably broke down
over the course of our childhoods. Superman is the perfection of our infantile mythology of the
father. However, Carter does see a Christ-figure in Man of Steel, even if it is not Superman. For
Carter, Jonathan Kent’s sacrifice for his adopted son is a Christ-like action. He writes, “We may
appreciate Superman because he represents what our fathers could never be, but Pa Kent shows
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us what we really need from our father: unconditional, self-sacrificial love. Superman may be the
man of steel, but his earthbound father shows us what it really means to be Christ-figure.”43
On the blog for the website All Pro Dad, there was a post published on June 21, 2013
titled “3 Character Lessons Man of Steel Can Teach Fathers.” The titular characters lessons
found by the author of this post were strength, intentionality, and humility.44 The blog post does
not make any direct references to Christianity or the Bible. For example, the piece concludes,
“According to this version Clark/Kalel [sic] could not have become Superman without his
fathers. Through proper guidance and teaching from them, his power was used for greatness. We
hope this movie helps you recognize the greatness in all your children and that, through your
help and wisdom, you can teach them how to fly.”45 This quote reflects the overall tone of the
piece, which on the surface appears to be secular in nature. However, subtle hints would lead a
curious mind with a passing knowledge of evangelical American Christianity to question its
secular status. Within the text itself there is a strange sentence under the humility section. It
reads, “As dads, we must be humble toward our wives and children by not dominating them with
our authority but instead seek understanding and humility.”46 It assumes an authority that is
given to the husband/father from something inherent in the role, even if it is saying that it must
be tempered with humility. This is reminiscent of the notion of the submissive wife in some
forms of American Christian values in regard to “traditional” marriage.
However, the All Pro Dad website does not acknowledge its grounding in Christian belief
on its website; but there are a few clues that point towards this religious orientation. All Pro Dad
is affiliated with the NFL and its most prominent NFL spokesperson, and one of its cofounders is
ex-Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy.47 Dungy has been active in and open about his
affiliation with evangelical Christianity.48 By clicking on links at the bottom of the site, a viewer
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could identify All Pro Dad as a division of Family First, LLC. However, Family First’s main
website contains no overt relationship to evangelical Christianity either. But, if one searches for
Family First’s founder Mark Merrill’s website, its “About Me” section indirectly reveals
Merrill’s religious affiliation. It reads, “I’m not meant to be here forever. I’m just here for a
relatively very short time. I’ll be going to my eternal home soon…I want [this life] to matter for
God, for my wife of 25 years, Susan, and for my five children…”49 Questioned about the
meaning of “eternal home” in the comment section by diver1972, Merrill removes any doubt
about his religious orientation by writing, “My ‘eternal home’ is heaven. I believe that Jesus
Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and there is no way to eternal life except through Him.
Christ took my sins on the cross and restored me to a right relationship with God. And for that, I
am forever grateful.”50
The preceding examples reflect the work of James C. Dobson (1936- ) and the impact of
his organization, Focus on the Family, has had on the contemporary conception of fatherhood
found in large numbers among evangelical American Christians. Beginning in the early 1970s,
with the publication of Dare to Discipline (1970), Dobson has had a profound influence on the
way that family, and in particular, fatherhood is viewed amongst conservative Christians. Unlike
the previous generation of evangelical ministers, like Billy Graham, Dobson represents a shift in
the perceived mission of evangelical men. Rather than focusing on the conversion of souls in the
general population, Dobson calls for the refocusing on saving the souls of one’s immediate
family through proper Christian parenting.51 As Hilde Løvdal explains in her article “Called to
Preach, Called to Parent: American Evangelicals and Their Mission in the World” (2013), “But
for Dobson, a father’s main responsibility was to lead his children to Christ, and in turn to have
his family serve as witnesses to a broken world about the power of the gospel. The family, from
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this point of view, was the most important evangelizing tool.”52 Dobson states this position
clearly and concisely in his book Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives (1980) when he writes,
“Nevertheless, my number one responsibility is to evangelize my own children.”53
Thefatherheart blog is a clear example of Dobson’s influence when it reads, “Because
Family will save the world and strong families are built on a bedrock of Godly marriages, God
intended it this way and we shouldn’t be surprised that both marriages and family are being
targeted.”54 Birdsall, Blase, and Bearden also reflect this in their emphasis that the Christian
father is tasked with raising the heroes of the next generation. This notion echoes the callout
quote from Jor-El that is prominently highlighted on the first page of the American Bible
Society’s Father’s Day Conversation Guide: “You will give the people an ideal to strive towards.
They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the
sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”55 The evangelical mission for these
writers has become directed towards their families and its energy is spent on their children.
Through this effort, the children become a moral “ideal to strive towards” sent out into the
secular world. They, as Birdsall writes, become “the next superhero of his or her own family,
company, community or country.”56
When Asay and Hoover discuss the importance of the “life lessons” Jonathan Kent
imparts to Superman, they also reflect Dobson’s idea that conveying values and faith to children
“is done subtly, through the routine interactions of everyday living.”57 All Pro Dad’s assumption
of paternal authority, although it is an idea that clearly originates from a much earlier time than
Dobson and the 1970s, is still found prominently in Straight Talk. Dobson writes, “It will not be
popular to restate the age-old Biblical concept that God holds men accountable for leadership in
their families. Nevertheless, that’s the way I interpret the Scriptures.”58 And, like All Pro Dad
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insisting that this authority be tempered with humility, Dobson adds the caveat, “This assignment
does not justify iron-fisted oppression of children or the disregard of a woman’s needs and
wishes, of course.”59
A contrarian view of fatherhood in Man of Steel and in contemporary American
Christianity is seen in Jonathan Haefs’ blog post “Dads of Steel.” Haefs is the head pastor of
Shades Valley Community Church located in Birmingham, Alabama and associated with the
Evangelical Free of America. For Haefs, not only does any attempt to equate Superman with
Jesus diminish the importance of Jesus, but so does the idea that fathers are to be considered
heroes. He writes, “We have come to expect dads to be the hero when there is only one
hero…Jesus!”60 Haefs continues to explain his position when he writes, “Most kids naturally
look up to their dads as if they are superhuman and, all too often, the ‘Christian’ version of
fatherhood only feeds this notion. Yet, all fathers are far from perfect and so having ‘superman’
expectations only sets them up for failure.”61 In Haefs’ worldview, the father who is set up as a
hero is living under a weight of unrealistic pressure. For Haefs, the true role of the father is a
simple one. As he writes, “The true calling of fatherhood is not to be a hero, but to point to the
only hero…Jesus.”62
In addition to Christian blogs about the connection between Man of Steel and fatherhood,
several blogs that were not explicitly Christian in nature, dealt with the same topic, and were
posted around the time of the film’s release. Ryan Sanders, writing for the National Fatherhood
Initiative an expressly “non-sectarian, non-partisan, non-profit organization,”63 posted “‘Man of
Steel’ and Fatherhood” on June 17, 2013. Within this post, there are many similarities to the
Christian interpretations of Man of Steel and fatherhood presented earlier. Like many of the
Christian writers, Sanders, due to his position as a father, identifies with Jor-El and Jonathan
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Kent more than with Superman.64 Sanders emphasizes two themes the film can teach its viewers
that are also emphasized by the Christian writers: “great fathers guide their kids” and “great
fathers put their kids first.”65 Sanders’ conclusion would not feel out of place if added to many of
the blog posts examined previously. He writes, “In the end, Man of Steel depicts a man whose
biological father and adoptive father sacrifice themselves to save their son. It’s a film that depicts
sacrificial love and selflessness as the true nature of fatherhood, making it a movie worth
watching...dare I say...a ‘symbol of hope’ for our generation.”66
Also veering away from a strictly Christian perspective is Peter Lawler’s blog post for
Big Think, “Superman Has Two Dads! (More on Plato and the Man of Steel).” Lawler
approaches the themes of fatherhood present in the film through the ancient Greek philosophies
of Plato and Aristotle. Lawler stresses the importance of the theme of fatherhood as it relates to
both heroism and sacrifice found in the film. He writes, “Two of the three heroic ‘role models’ in
the film act mainly as dads, and the third—Superman himself—is who he is largely because of
what he was given by those two dads. We’re reminded that fatherhood is less directly biological
than motherhood, but that makes being a father a freer and arguably more sacrificial choice.”67
Like Asay and Hoover, Lawler also examines the nature versus nurture debate. Unlike Asay and
Hoover, Lawler reflects on the fact that Superman is the first naturally conceived Kryptonian in
generations. In the film, Kryptonians are genetically engineered to fill certain roles within
society and hatched in large vats. However, in an act of defiance, Jor-El and Lara conceive
Superman through “old-fashioned” methods. For Lawler, this is an important detail. The genetic
engineering of Kryptonian embryos severely limits the effects the nurture can play in
development of the child. As Lawler puts it, the Kryptonians “are more oriented to a certain kind
of completion.”68 Lawler points to Aristotle’s theory that, by nature, human beings are not
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complete and require the acquisition of “moral virtue” to achieve completion. And, for Lawler,
this is where Jonathan Kent plays a crucial role. By conceiving Superman naturally, Jor-El and
Lara allowed for a vast numbers of possibilities when it came to his “completion,” but it was
Jonathan who shaped that completion and helped to form the man Superman was to become.
Therefore, since Superman’s “moral virtue” is human in origin, not Kryptonian, he is free to
become an earthly hero. As Lawler writes, “It’s because Superman is really from Kansas that we
can trust he’s not our enemy.”69
Writing for the Speakeasy blog for The Wall Street Journal, Jeff Yang also wrote about
the fatherhood aspect of Man of Steel in his post “Dads of Steel” on June 16, 2013. Having found
an interest in Superman through the casting of Asian-American actor Dean Cain in the 1990s
television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Yang does not read
Superman in light of the Christian experience but through the Asian-American experience. He
writes, “Stripped of its branding, Superman is the story of a ‘mild-mannered’ guy with black hair
and thick glasses; a refugee from a far-off place with an entirely alien culture, growing up in the
whitebread center of America. It’s about a guy who’s afraid that his exotic heritage will cause his
peers to reject him and treat him as a freak, and who finally comes to terms with his difference in
[sic] by realizing that his unique identity doesn’t make him weird, it makes him special.”70 In
Yang’s article, we see a new application of an old interpretation of Superman – the ultimate
immigrant. Yang also sees the paternal relationships in Man of Steel as emblematic of AsianAmerican fatherhood. He writes, “The plain-spoken disciplinarian [Jonathan Kent] and the High
Expectations Alien Father [Jor-El]: They’re really two complimentary aspects of the same
parental archetype, which is to say, every Asian immigrant patriarch ever. Hard-working, hardassed, but never hard-hearted, they’re the original Men of Steel, and even if we’ll never quite
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live up to their example or their hopes, we know they’ll be there for us when the Zod goes
down.”71
The Father and Christian Male as Superman
While not a blog post or a sermon, we see more evidence of the intersection of Superman,
fatherhood, African-American Christianity, and marketing in a music video found on T. D.
Jakes’ YouTube page. Titled “Man of Steel – Father’s Day 2013,” it features a black female
gospel singer DaniRob on vocals. The song is sung from the perspective of an African-American
daughter addressing her father. Throughout the song, the African-American father is identified
with Superman. A reoccurring image shown between breaks in the lyrics shows a presumably
African-American man standing in a silhouetted superhero pose—hands on hips with elbows out,
cape waving in the wind—with a yellow chevron on his chest reading “DAD.” The chorus calls
attention to this identification as well, “Dad, I want to say that you’re my superman. How you
held me together made life better, you’re my superman. And I hope and I pray to be like you—
invincible. Now I know a father’s love should be like yours incredible. Is it a bird, a plane, a
train, it’s none of the above, it’s just my dad. Is it a bird, a plane, a train, it’s none of the above,
superman.”72
In contrast to the majority of the previous examples, Superman is not identified as the
child and there is no specific details from the film that are brought into this piece. This
presentation also stands in direct contrast with the another presentation that does posit a
Superman-as-the-father metaphor, Carter’s “Superman Isn’t Jesus, He’s Your Dad.” For Carter,
Superman is the replacement for the childhood illusion of the invincible father. Within “Man of
Steel – Father’s Day 2013,” the invincibility of the father is not an illusion, it is the reality of the
singer. She sings, “And I hope and I pray to be like you—invincible.”73 And not only is the
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father’s superhuman strength an internal one, it is also physical. The singer has “Never seen you
complain when things didn’t go your way. Never seen you strain to move heavy things out the
way with your hands of steel that provided every meal.”74 The father possess inner strength,
outer strength, and is the provider for his family. The father, the ideal man, is stoic, physically
strong, an economic provider, and present in the life of his children.
It is safe to assume that Jakes, himself, had little to no direct input in the creation of this
music video. He is not listed in the credits. Jerod Jerry is listed as producer, with Quinton
Robinson, Bill Barlow, Demonterious “DeToxXx” Lawrence, and Brandon Thomas listed as coproducers. Jakes is also one of the most well-known African-American preachers and can no
doubt delegate such content creation to others within T. D. Jakes Ministries based in Dallas,
Texas. However, as indicated by the Manpower and MegaFest logos located on the bottom of the
video, the portrayal of black masculinity and fatherhood presented through “Man of Steel –
Father’s Day 2013” is fully in line with Jake’s larger worldview of African-American
Christianity in the South.
Another example comes from a sermon delivered by Jason Janich, pastor at the New Life
Church in Escanaba, Michigan, posted to YouTube on June 18, 2014. Being a year after the
release of Man of Steel, Janich’s sermon does not directly reference the film, but instead relies on
the prevalence of Superman in American popular culture to make a connection between the
character of Superman and fatherhood. Like in Jakes’ music video, Janich focuses on the fatheras-Superman metaphor in a positive comparison. Beginning the sermon in a tie and white buttonup shirt, Janich discusses how deep down every man thinks that he is Superman, before ripping
open his shirt to reveal a Superman t-shirt.75 He argues that this connection with Superman is a
good thing, because when it comes to being Superman for their families, every man is “made for
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it, wired for it, created for it.”76 For Janich, this is a good thing because he sees the role of the
father as a shield and as a guide. Children are in the middle of a constant war and the father is
necessary to shield them from the influence of popular culture and their peers and to guide them
through the rough patches.
Tim Hatch, lead pastor at Waters Church in North Attleborough, Massachusetts,
delivered a Father’s Day sermon in 2013 that highlights some of the darker aspects of muscular
Christianity. Where the music video presents a focus on the “invincible” manliness of the father
through the eyes of a daughter who may be described as naïve or childlike in her veneration of
her father, there is little meaning directly expressed in the lyrics. The same cannot be said of
Hatch’s sermon. Only tangentially focused on Superman with no references to the film’s content,
Hatch’s sermon “Man of Steel (Father’s Day 2013)” uses Superman as an exemplar of strength,
power, and masculinity—three attributes Hatch sees as deeply connected. Hatch proclaims the
sermon is to “celebrate manhood…because men matter.”77 And, throughout the sermon, “Man of
Steel” is used interchangeably with “manly man” and Superman is singled out for his strength.
The status Hatch is bemoaning is what he deems the “girlification” of American Christianity, at
the cost of the original message of Jesus’ “strength, courage, and power.”78 On one level, this is
similar to notions found in American Christianity since the nineteenth century. Hatch bemoans
the fact that women are more engaged in the church and in spiritual life than men in American
Christianity. Following in the shadows of men like Billy Sunday and Bruce Barton, Hatch
reflects an anxiety found within certain segments of the American Christian population that has
waxed and waned through the past 150 years. As described by Stephen Prothero in his book
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003), the desire to present Jesus
as “manly” seems to occur when social changes centered around gender emerge. For example,
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Prothero notes an occurrence of this resurgence of an emphasis of masculine Christianity,
particularly among Roman Catholics, after World War II when a large number of women had
entered the workforce.79 Interestingly, some of the same images attacked by proponents of a
muscular Christianity in the middle of the twentieth century were the same images Hatch used as
examples of “girlification” in his sermon. One such type of image common to both are depictions
of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In 1959, Catholic art professor E. M. Catich spoke out against such
depictions, writing “What emerges is a young man in flowing gown, with soft face, large eyes,
small delicate mouth, slightly parted lips, small thin nose, downy beard, long curly hair parted in
the middle and falling gracefully to the shoulders, slender dainty hands, narrow shoulders, long
neck, a slight tilt of the head and neck as if beseeching the viewer.”80 In 1960, artist Richard
Muelhlberger described such depictions as “a bearded woman with as much dignity as a moviehouse billboard.”81 Some fifty years later, Hatch claims to have simply done a Google image
search and is presenting to his congregation the first three images that appear after searching
“Jesus.” After showing the images, he openly mocks them. For instance, after showing one
example of a Sacred Heart painting, Hatch declares, “This is not the savior of the world. No one
is laying their lives down for that dude.”82 He goes on to describe one image of Jesus as “like
half a woman” and another as having a “dainty little hand.”83 Bruce Barton wrote in his text
Jesus of Nazareth (1903),“‘The masculine,’ so the painters [of Jesus] have seemed to say, ‘is the
gross, the sensual, the aggressive, the belligerent. We will make our Christ with a woman’s face,
and add a beard.’”84 This notion of the bearded lady Jesus is reflected by Hatch when he
describes one image of Christ as “almost Angelina Jolie” with a beard and another as a bearded
“Avon lady.”
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Whereas the earlier examples of muscular Christianity that Hatch is emulating seem to
have emerged during societal advancements for women, such as suffrage and women’s
liberation, and are therefore, in part, misogynistic reactions, Hatch reveals a different
homophobic bigotry when he begins to describe, again through images, what he sees as “manly
men.” Displaying a picture of the American actor Robert De Niro, known primarily for his tough
guy roles, Hatch declares, referencing the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, “No way this guy’s
playing a gay cowboy.”85 Hatch’s emphasis of a muscular Christianity as a means of combatting
the “girlification” of American Christianity is not primarily addressed at the strong role women
play in the church or any perceived feminist agenda in the 2010s. Hatch’s muscular Christianity
is a reaction to homosexuality and the strides made by the gay rights movement; it is fueled by
homophobia. Proper Christian men are equated to “men of steel” which is equivalent to “a manly
man” to which heterosexuality is an essential component, a status that has been achieved by
Hatch himself, Superman, and Jesus Christ – “the ultimate strongman.”86 Hatch goes on to list
three characteristics of “men of steel:” they “know their purpose,” “are faithful fathers,” and “are
full of strength and victory through the word of God.”87 Hatch seems to be unaware that his
criteria for “men of steel” precludes both Superman and Jesus since neither, in mainstream
doctrine or continuity, are fathers.
The Superman Mythos as a Site for Fatherhood and Masculinity
The preceding examples demonstrate that a wide variety of authors, including the
American Bible Society, male Christian bloggers, male Christian clergy, and secular bloggers,
have all used the fact that Man of Steel was released on Father’s Day weekend and contained two
examples of fatherhood to present their messages of what fatherhood should be to an audience
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primarily composed of fathers, presumably Christian fathers. In addition, Superman is used to
establish an ideal type of Christian masculinity in some of these sites.
A common theme among these commentators is the question of nature versus nurture. Is
Superman a hero because of the Kryptonian DNA he inherited from Jor-El or because of the
moral guidance and human love of Jonathan Kent?88 This question is translated into the
experiences of the everyday Christian father. Nearly all of the writers examined above argue that
Kent is the model of fatherhood that a Christian father should be pursuing. Interestingly, most of
these pieces completely ignore the role that Martha Kent played in Clark’s early development,
such as learning to control his powers, and Superman’s biological mother, Lara, is universally
ignored.89 Challenging the “traditional” domestic roles of the genders, these writers are using
Man of Steel to decentralize the mother’s role in Christian moral and religious education and
emphasize the role of the father.
For the most part, the writers do not see themselves in the role of Superman. They
emphasize the fallibility of the father as an individual, speaking to the lived reality of the readers
where only a man suffering from delusions would describe himself as a perfect father. When the
above writers are identifying the father with Superman, as in DaniRob’s music video, they
emphasize the “traditional” gender roles of the father as stoic protector against physical and
moral threats.
Through all of these examples, the writers are attempting to define the proper role and
boundaries of the modern Christian father. In doing so, they are constructing a concept of
modern Christian white heteronormative masculinity and using Man of Steel to do so. Some are
calling for a reorientation of the aspects of masculinity which ought to be emphasized. Others are
reacting against such liberal reorientations of white masculinity and calling for a return to older
137
notions of white masculinity in the United States. Some use the character and the film to define
these categories through a secular perspective and some view it through the lens of various forms
of American Christianity.
Craig Detweiler, “Jesus – The Original Superhero,” accessed October 6, 2014,
http://www.manofsteelresources.com, 7.
2
Ibid.
3
This video can be accessed from either Man of Steel Ministry Resources (manofsteelresources.com) or from
YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_hrldo2Y7Q).
4
“Reason,” Man of Steel Ministry Resources, 0:30, accessed November 17, 2014, http://manofsteelresources.com/.
5
American Bible Society, “Father’s Day Conversation Guide: Man of Steel,” accessed November 14, 2014,
http://www.americanbible.org/uploads/content/MAN_OF_STEEL_-_Conversation_Guide_-_June6.pdf, 1.
6
Ibid.
7
Pew Research Center, America’s Changing Religious Landscape, May 12, 2015, accessed July 12, 2015,
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-3-demographic-profiles-of-religious-groups.
8
American Bible Society, 1.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 2.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ben Saunders, Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes (New York: Continuum, 2011),
17-18.
19
Doug Birdsall, “‘Man of Steel’: What We Can Learn About Fathers,” The Christian Post, June 15, 2013, accessed
March 3, 2015, http://www.christianpost.com/news/man-of-steel-what-we-can-learn-about-fathers-97967/.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Paul Asay, “Man of Steel: A Tale of Two Fathers,” Focus on the Family’s Plugged In, June 13, 2013,
https://community.focusonthefamily.com/b/pluggedin/archive/2013/06/13/man-of-steel-a-tale-of-two-fathers.aspx.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
John Blase, “Man of Steel: The Strength of Fathering,” The Higher Calling, July 3, 2013, accessed March 3,
2015, http://www.thehighcalling.org/family/man-steel-strength-fathering.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Wade Bearden, “Man of Steel Is the Perfect Father’s Day Film,” One Theology (blog), June 22, 2013, accessed
March 3, 2015, http://onetheology.com/2013/06/22/man-of-steel-is-the-perfect-fathers-day-film/.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
1
138
Jacob Myers, “Superdad: A Review of Man of Steel,” Working Preacher, July 4, 2013, accessed March 3, 2015,
https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=2666.
39
“Man of Steel,” The Father Heart (blog), July 5, 2013, accessed March 3, 2015,
http://thefatherheart.org/2013/07/05/man-of-steel/.
40
Ibid.
41
Joe Carter, “Superman Isn’t Jesus, He’s Your Dad,” The Gospel Coalition, June 19, 2013, accessed March 3,
2015, http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/superman-isnt-jesus-hes-your-dad.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
“3 Character Lessons Man of Steel Can Teach Fathers,” All Pro Dad Blog (blog), June 21, 2013, accessed March
3, 2015, http://www.allprodad.com/blog/2013/06/21/3-character-lessons-man-of-steel-can-teach-fathers/.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
47
Shawn Brown, “Tony Dungy: The All Pro Dad,” The 700 Club, accessed July 25, 2015,
http://www.cbn.com/700club/features/TonyDungy_AllProDad_0610.aspx.
48
Chuck Finder, “Colts’ Coach Dungy Preaches What He Practices,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 13, 2006,
accessed July 25, 2015, http://www.post-gazette.com/steelers/2006/01/13/Colts-coach-Dungy-preaches-what-hepractices/stories/200601130202.
49
Mark Merrill, “About Me,” Mark Merrill, accessed July 25, 2015, http://www.markmerrill.com/about/.
50
Mark Merrill, “About Me,” Mark Merrill, accessed July 25, 2015, http://www.markmerrill.com/about/.
51
Hilde Løvdal, “Called to Preach, Called to Parent: American Evangelicals and Their Mission in the World,” Fides
et Historia 45, no. 2 (2013): 62.
52
Ibid.
53
James C. Dobson, Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives (New York: Key-Word Books, 1980), 52.
54
“Man of Steel,” The Father Heart (blog), July 5, 2013, accessed March 3, 2015,
http://thefatherheart.org/2013/07/05/man-of-steel/.
55
American Bible Society, 1.
56
Birdsall.
57
Dobson, 37.
58
Ibid., 64.
59
Ibid., 64.
60
Jonathan Haefs, “Dads of Steel,” Pastor’s Blog (blog), Shades Valley Community Church, May 30, 2013,
accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.shadesvalley.org/dads-of-steel/.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
63
“FAQ’s,” National Fatherhood Initiative, accessed July 25, 2015, www.fatherhood.org/faqs.
64
Ryan Sanders, “‘Man of Steel’ and Fatherhood,” The Father Factor (blog), National Fatherhood Initiative, June
17, 2013, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.fatherhood.org/bid/181679/Man-of-Steel-and-Fatherhood.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.
67
Peter Lawler, “Superman Has Two Dads! (More on Plato and the Man of Steel),” Big Think, accessed March 3,
2015, http://bigthink.com/rightly-understood/superman-has-two-dads-more-on-plato-and-the-man-of-steel.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
Jeff Yang, “Dads of Steel,” Speakeasy (blog), The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2013, accessed March 3, 2015,
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/06/16/dads-of-steel/.
71
Ibid.
72
Jerod Jerry, “Man of Steel – Father’s Day 2013,” YouTube video, 3:40, posted by “T.D. Jakes,” June 13, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjGDXklNHpw.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid.
75
Jason Janich, “Pastor Jason Janich – Man of Steel (Father’s Day),” YouTube video, 33:49, posted by “New Life
Escanaba,” June 18, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=202WTOqgrsg.
76
Ibid.
77
Tim Hatch, “Tim Hatch: Man of Steel (Fathers Day 2013),” YouTube video, 42:30, posted “Waters Church,” June
19, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAcqvqJJMuw.
38
139
78
Ibid.
Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003), 120.
80
E. M. Catich, “Sentimentality in Christian Art,” The Furrow 10, no. 8 (1959): 513.
81
Richard Charles Muehlberger, “Sacred Art: A Critique on the Contemporary Situation,” Liturgical Arts 28, no. 1
(1960): 70, quoted in Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 120.
82
Hatch.
83
Ibid.
84
William E. Barton, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life and the Scenes of His Ministry (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1903),
504.
85
Hatch.
86
Ibid.
87
Ibid.
88
However, Kent’s morality has been called into question by a number of critics of Man of Steel, who often point to
his preference that a bus load of teenagers die rather than Clark being exposed as an alien.
89
Lara getting short shrift is not unusual within the general Superman mythos.
79
140
CONCLUSION
In the conclusion, I am returning to an analysis of the family at Superman Days in
Metropolis, IL in 2015. How does their blending of Superman and Christianity help our
understanding of Superman as lived religion in contemporary American culture? Their “JeSus”
T-shirts serve as an example of the various ways that Superman’s permanently liminal status can
be harnessed by religious people in order to accomplish the religious work of drawing and
maintaining boundaries. The family at a festival devoted to one of the most significant characters
in American popular culture wore shirts that served as a way to mark them out as fans of
Superman and as Christians. This blurring of the boundary between popular culture and religion
through the combination of Jesus and Superman’s chevron was not an act of transgression. It
served instead as a reaffirmation to the wearers of the shirts that there is indeed a separation
between Jesus and Superman, and that the religious worldviews of Christianity must always take
precedence over the artifacts of popular culture.
At the same time, the shirt was also aimed outwards at the festival goers. On one level, it
could be seen as fulfilling the missionary requirements of Christianity. On another level, it
served as a warning to the crowds concerning false gods and implied a notion of the strict
separation of the religious and the secular. This is similar to the way that critics of the faith-based
marketing campaign behind Man of Steel used the debate about Superman and Christianity as an
attempt to reaffirm a perceived division between the religious and the commercial. However, this
boundary between the religious and secular is a construction of their worldviews; and the
evidence suggests that if such a boundary exists, it is highly permeable.
It is here in these intellectual borderlands that the religious imagination best harnesses
Superman to perform religious work. I am also drawn to the boundaries between religion and
141
popular culture when performing my academic work. Superman is used by religious people to
construct and maintain the boundaries of their religious worlds. Furthermore, because of his
liminal status between the religious and the secular, I find an examination of Superman to be
well suited for exploring the religious imagination in contemporary American culture, as well as
how these religious worldviews are expressed in the lives of Americans. Superman’s
permanently liminal status make the character ideally suited for performing the religious work of
boundary formation, defense, and/or negotiation. He has been used to include Muhammad Ali in
the American civil religious pantheon. He has been used to solidify the divide between the divine
and the human, while simultaneously redefining what is included in the human sphere. He has
been used by theologians to argue that Christian themes and messages can be found throughout
popular culture. Other theologians use him to argue for a firmer separation between religion and
commerce. He has been used to define the role of the father and white heteronormative
masculinity in a contemporary American Christian worldview.
None of these religious functions are necessarily inherent in the character or essential to
it. It is the resourcefulness and imaginativeness of the religious mind that allows Superman to be
a religious multi-tasker in contemporary American culture. Therefore, analysis and study of the
ways that popular culture is influenced by, and in turn influences, American religiosity is
essential to understanding the dynamic and diverse ways in which Americans construct their
religious worldviews. The secular can be transformed into the religious through integration with
religious worldviews. Religious worldviews can absorb the secular and in turn be transformed by
it.
I believe that this preliminary study points to many interesting possibilities for further
research. An in-depth ethnographic study of the religiosity of Superman’s fandom could yield
142
important information on how an audience integrates and adapts artifacts of popular culture into
their religious worldviews. The examination could also be expanded beyond Superman to other
comic book superheroes, such as Wonder Woman or the Mighty Thor, in order to determine
whether or not Superman is unique in regards to his potential for religious adaptation. Another
potential avenue for further research is an analysis of the reception of Superman across the globe
to determine whether or not this phenomenon has universal aspects outside of the American
cultural context.
Superman’s high level of cultural saturation makes him an excellent candidate for the
type of study I have presented. Few figures, fictional or historical, have attained his level of
recognition. Superman, as a multimedia phenomenon, requires an interdisciplinary analysis to
understand his interactions with the religious imagination and his role in the religious work of
constructing and maintaining religious worlds. Superman is an exemplar of the necessity of
scholarship in understanding the complex and dynamic processes of American religiosity.
Religion is not separate from the secular and the secular sphere is not unaffected by the religious
worlds of those who operate within it. If the scholar of religion wishes to understand the
religious lives of human beings, then popular culture’s role in the expression and the evolution of
individuals’ religious worlds cannot be ignored in favor of scripture or religious tradition.
Superman demonstrates the expression of scripture and tradition through the advantages and the
limitations of comics, film, and the superhero genre. At the same time, Superman and his mythos
are an imaginative playground where the religious ideas of the audience are allowed a degree of
freedom not usually associated with the prescriptive nature of theology. This is the religious
potential of Superman, comics, and popular culture in general. They are sites that are shaped, in
143
part, by religious influences and, in turn, influence the religious perspectives of their audiences
in subtle or potentially profound ways.
144
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