Andy Bannister was Simon Ward’s guest on the My Faith at Work Podcast recently, for a wide ranging discussion about the Christian faith – and the evidence for it. You can play the episode with Andy on by pressing on the link above. Alternatively follow this link to the webpage for the programme and listen there, as well as see all the other interesting guests that SImon has interviewed.
Is there room for God in a world explained by science? Andy Bannister shows there are many questions, even simple ones, that science can’t answer. A lunch-time talk at Glasgow University Christian Union in February 2023.
Several years ago, I asked a Chinese friend why only one of her elite post-doctoral group of pure mathematicians were from the UK. The answer I got was shocking. “I have a daughter in primary school in Scotland, and you do not understand education here. Most of what my daughter does in school is play; her academic work is constantly interrupted by parties, games, outings, assemblies; and the school day is so short. In China at that age, I studied maths every day at school and for many hours before and after school too – here it is all play, play, play!”
I was confronted with the question: what price is worth paying for perfection?
Whiplash is a film about individuals being crushed by the relentless drive for greatness in a particular field. It could have been maths, or sport; but the film is set in the world of jazz – in which the key figure Andrew Neiman (played by Miles Teller) is a drummer. The pressure to become “one of the greats” is certainly an internal drive for Neiman; but is taken from obsession to destructive levels by his teacher Terence Fletcher (J. K Simmons), whose drive for perfection destroys students. Perhaps worse still, Fletcher seems convinced that his students must be broken repeatedly to push them beyond ordinary human limitations. “The two most dangerous words in the English language are, “good job”” he notes. As such, Fletcher’s teaching method not only demanded iron discipline and technical excellence, but also involved a form of psychological warfare against his students. Films have occasionally shown army recruits being broken in this way; but rarely with the ferocity which Simmons brings to the part of Terence Fletcher.
The two central performances in Whiplash, are superb. Teller is excellent as the driven, intense, gifted, yet vulnerable young drummer; who learns to confront his demons both inner and external. Simmons is truly horrific as the dangerously out-of-control Fletcher, who values winning and perfection above people. Simmons’ viciously foul-mouthed and blisteringly intense denunciations of errant students is like something from the Maoist cultural revolution; it is gruelling watching – but impossible to turn away from. In Fletcher’s world, if he destroys fifty people, but makes one genius, he’s a happy man. Like all the best movie villains, Terence Fletcher makes compelling viewing. In one scene (spoiler alert!), Fletcher weeps over the death of a student – a great player who he had ‘broken’ and made legendary. “He was a beautiful player”, laments the teacher. We later discover that the young man had killed himself – the parents blaming Fletcher for the psychological torment he endured at his hands. Yet still, even as Fletcher appears to show some normal human warmth, or even vulnerability his words are chilling. “He was a beautiful player”, seems to suggest that Fletcher wept not for the loss of a person, but for the loss of his talent.
The film leaves us with an ambiguous conclusion; on one hand Nieman finally emerges as a great drummer; and gains the respect of his fellow musicians and his sinister teacher. However, we are left with a question mark. Would he have achieved such greatness without Fletcher’s psychological battering, or would he have consigned himself to a more contented mediocrity? Leaving aside the much-debated issue of whether practice-makes-genius or not; the issue here is – what price is it worth paying in pursuit of a goal?
Neiman is shown giving up on most aspects of what it means to have a normal balanced life; he has no friends, has given up on sport, and loses his girl in his thirst for perfection. He ends up as a specialist, but with a malformed life. These questions are pertinent in parenting and education. We may not be as extreme as Fletcher; but when is it right to push our kids; and when is it right to let them just meander along contentedly? Are our schools so fearful of the kind of Fletcher-dynamic depicted in Whiplash that they fail to inculcate any kind of love of excellence in our children at all? “Gold-stars all round – and who cares what mark you actually scored?!”
Central to the almost unbearable dynamic of this film is the way that the master propels the apprentice towards perfection under the constant threat of rejection. Being the ‘core player’ in the music school’s prestige band was an honour entirely at the disposal of Fletcher and expulsion from the band something he could execute on a whim. The film depicts the pursuit of perfection as the ideal of greatness and significance; but it also portrays a self-destructive fear of rejection as the necessary stimulus for its achievement. This seems to leave us in an impossible dilemma in that either greatness doesn’t matter on one hand, or that people don’t on the other.
This is a remarkable example of what we might term “un-grace”.
In contrast, relationships which are founded on the concept of grace, (rather than accomplishments) work in exactly the opposite way to the dynamic between Fletcher and Nieman. In grace-founded relationships, (be they human-human, or Divine-human), the pursuit of greatness, is predicated upon the foundation of compete acceptance of the person; which in turn produces a mutual striving towards what is good. The force that propels the student (or disciple) forward, is not the fear of rejection and humiliation from behind (as with Fletcher); but the embrace of the other willing them forward towards a beautiful conclusion. That could be a parent leading a child towards career goals, but we also see it in the Christian story of God embracing us ;ole a Father- and leading us towards holiness, purity, and Christlikeness.
Grace is the very idea that meticulously high standards and goals are not to be lowered, but that people are to be loved and valued even while those high standards are being worked towards. The fear of rejection is not the great stimulus to progress; but the grasping of a magnificent vision is.
Whiplash is a great film which unsurprisingly won prizes at The Sundance Film Festival upon its release in 2014, followed by five academy award nominations. The plot is intriguing, the dialogue alarming, and the acting intense and frightening. Allegedly based on the author’s real experiences at a leading American musical college; it demonstrates the nature of abusive power-relationships, where the people are forgotten in the pursuit of some goal or accomplishment. Simmons’ searing portrayal of Fletcher will remain the most poignant memory of Whiplash, and a sombre reminder of how ugly humanity looks when we use people to serve things, rather than things to serve people.
I am intrigued when I speak to people who imagine that God looks something like Terence Fletcher. After all, God is perfect and demands perfection – and is a judge who offers both rewards and punishments. Mercifully though that is where the comparison ends. The Christian faith says that God will embrace and accept us as we are, to then lead us towards perfection. He doesn’t lower His standards but lifts us towards them. Most remarkably of all, at the cross of Christ we see that the person who gets broken to achieve that is Him and not us. There is a price worth paying for perfection, and the message of grace is that that Christ has paid it for us. The genius of Whiplash is that it shows us what perfection without grace would look like, how destructive that would be and how much we need it in human relationships but ultimately from God.
Whiplash is available on DVD, and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
At Solas we love working with local churches to put on low-key outreach events in their communities, to share the gospel with people who don’t come to church, essentially. We often use neutral venues to do this, sometimes they take place inside church premises too.
Our friends at South Glasgow Church opened their doors, and offered food, a friendly welcome and good hospitality to their neighbours and invited them in. They asked me to speak on a topic they thought would interest people in their community and chose “the pursuit of happiness” for the evening. It’s based on the idea that we look for happiness in all the wrong places.
It’s actually one of my favourite evangelistic topics to speak on because it is so accessible and understandable to people with no background in church, working knowledge of the Bible, or a Christian worldview.
I got the basic framework for this talk from a friend in Canada, and it really is very helpful for people. It’s based on the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who suggested that there are four levels of happiness and that true satisfaction in life only comes when all four levels are addressed.
The first level of happiness is ‘animal happiness’. That’s the happiness that comes when our basic needs for things like food and sex are met. However, only pursuing these things leads people into dissatisfaction and unhappiness because of diminishing returns. If you eat a doughnut, it’s great, but if you eat another and then another eventually you feel ill. And of course, our culture encourages us to treat sex the way we treat food and that has just caused chaos. There’s nothing inherently wrong with food and sex either – just that we are clearly designed for more than just those things so if you try and live at that level you end up simply unhappy.
If level one doesn’t satisfy you have to move up to level two. Level two , is the comparison game in which you gain a degree of satisfaction by doing better than somebody else at something -perhaps by winning in a sport, coming top of your university class, or climbing the career ladder. Again, there is nothing wrong with competition per se, in fact healthy competition can be a fun part of life. If it is the only thing you are living for though, you will have a problem because you won’t be at the top for ever. Eventually someone will join the sports team who is faster than you, or someone else will be promoted over you, or be the boss’s favourite and one day you will flunk an exam. It is also exhausting, if you have to justify your miserable existence by constant performing. If you try and gain happiness through the pursuit of level two happiness, you’ll just end up unhappy.
So, if you are unhappy at level two, what do you do? You have to go up to level three happiness! Level three happiness comes from living for others, pouring your life into somebody else. Parenting and charity work are two great examples of very rewarding things that we do, which can produce this kind of happiness. The problem here is that you can’t totally live for others, not least because if you do your job really well, they will no longer need you. ”The Empty Nest Syndrome” is what we call the sadness some parents feel when their job is done and the kids no longer need them. Worse than that, the great atheist philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche pointed out that if you are serving others in order to pursue happiness – you’re not actually doing it for others but in fact being selfish! It’s a very pointed critique, and all means that if you try this you will ultimately end up being unhappy.
The only answer is to find level four happiness. That means finding something truly bigger than you to stake your identity, meaning and happiness on. For Christians that is all about realising that life should ultimately be about worship. That is discovering happiness in loving, knowing, worshipping and being known by the God of the whole universe who created us and designed us for relationship with Him. The great thing about that is that it is not competitive in that you don’t have to earn it God’s love. Also, you can’t outgrow it, and when you have learnt to locate your satisfaction there it liberates you to enjoy other things. Parenthood, charitable work, competition, food and sex – become things that we do desperately trying to justify ourselves – but become good gifts that we can give thanks to God for because they are in their proper place. In contrast I knew a guy who told me that prior to becoming a Christian he had lived at level three. He had placed his family on such a pedestal and idolised them in ways they could never live up to. He said that he almost destroyed his marriage, and drove his kids away before he became a Christian and started to put things the right way round.
It was good to see that there were some non-Christian people who were there for event in South Glasgow. And I have found that with that talk I very rarely get any push-back. It always seems to open up really thoughtful, positive conversations.
If you would be interested in running an evangelistic event for your community along these lines, them have a look at this article entitled, “Taking the Gospel Outside the Four Walls of the Church” : Café Style Evangelism in Six Easy Steps. If you’d like to invite a Solas speaker to help you on the night, please do get in touch. We work all over the country, with churches large and small. We’d love to hear from you.
Jenny Hamill from the church wrote, ” It was great to welcome friends from the local community to our evening with Andy. As we considered ‘the pursuit of happiness’ there was opportunity to listen, question and even debate a little! The message of hope in Jesus was clear – that we experience true joy, whatever our circumstances, when we know Him as our Saviour and friend.”
Sometimes you just need a bit of enthusiasm to get out there and do it! Today on PEP Talk, Andy chats with a couple engaged in old-fashioned street evangelism and tract distribution. Having seen God work through these in their own lives, Jon and Penny encourage their church family to be actively speaking to others at work, in the community and on the High Street.
Jon & Penny Thorp met through their work driving buses in West London. Penny was saved through an addiction recovery program and Jon came to the Lord in 2019 after knowing Penny for six years. They are now married and active at Feltham Evangelical Church.
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
Pattern Church in Swindon is the church that my family and I have been attending since we moved to the area last year. It’s a fairly new church plant in the Church of England, which was supported by Holy Trinity Brompton. It meets in an old factory dating back to the days when Swindon was a massive railway town built around the headquarters of the Great Western Railway (GWR). Half the town was these enormous engineering facilities, for the railway. That has nearly all gone now, but those enormous buildings remain and Pattern Church have got one of them and built their worship centre in. The name “Pattern Church” comes from the history of their building as the Pattern Factory which held all the engineering templates for the GWR.
It’s a lively church with lots of young families. It’s also got lots of new Christians in it too – people who are very new to faith. Being planted by HTB they have loads of ALPHA related mission going on, something really central to their ethos.
They asked me to preach at Pattern Church with a mandate to really help and encourage Christians to share their faith with their friends and work, home and school. One of the things about ALPHA is that it depends on people in the church bringing their friends along, which in turns depends on them having helpful conversations outside the church!
So I drew some lessons from a favourite passage of scripture to do this, Paul’s visit to Athens as recorded in Acts 17. In Athens Paul first of all toured the town and learned about the culture by careful observation. He looked at the sorts of things that dominated Athenian life, which were idols and temples and the busy religious life of the city. He then looks for a connecting point with culture and finds it in the ‘idol to an unknown god’ and doesn’t begin by criticising or denouncing it; but he builds off it. He commends them for their religiosity and proceeds to tell them about the unknown God. So I showed how that is a model for today, finding the things that our friends are into (not unknown gods in the literal sense) but things like justice, identity, the environment, or meaning. The task then is to show people the way in which that thing is great – but that these things makes little sense on their own. In fact – they only really make sense when embedded in a Christian worldview. Many people are looking for good things, but looking in all the wrong places.
It’s the approach we have taken here on the Solas website with the Have You Ever Wondered? series, starting with people’s everyday concerns and showing how they work in a biblical framework.
If you are a Fecbook user, you can watch the talk on this link, starting at 44 minutes.
It was good for Solas to renew our friendship with Maddiston Community Church. Maddiston is a village in the Falkirk area of Scotland’s centrla belt – and we’ve known the folks down there for many years. I went down to Maddiston to speak about the appearance of the risen Christ to the disciples on the road to Emmaus for Solas – and to conclude the church’s series on the book of Luke. You can watch the whole message here.
Maddiston Community Church is the same fellowship that used to be known as Maddiston Evangelical Church. I asked them why they changed their name and they explained that while the term ‘evangelical’ accurately describes their theology, the term is widely misunderstood by folks in the community around them. An extreme example is a man who thought that it meant it was some kind of right-wing American import, with some connection to Donald Trump!
Thanksfully I wasn’t invited to Maddiston to talk about politics, but to talk about the transforming message of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what happened to the two disciples on the Emmaus Road as they trudged wearily home from Jerusalem after the crucifixion. Their hopes were dashed, and their understanding of how the Kingdom of God would arrive, lay in pieces. The very last thing they were expecting was to meet with Jesus – in fact they were going the wrong way completely. In addiiton to that they couldn’t see Jesus, they were dissiluioned with religion, confused about God and their efforts to figure it out themselves had failed. At Maddiston, we looked at the way in which the risen Christ overcame all these problems for the disiples – and how he can do the same for us today.
You can watch the talk in the link above, and read the original story in Luke’s gospel here:
How could a virgin give birth to a child? This was asked at a live Q&A at Glasgow University and Andy Bannister shows how we’re faced with a choice of miracle: the birth of a baby without a man involved (but with a God behind the universe); or the miraculous birth of the universe from nothing, caused by nothing. Which is the harder to believe?
Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.
Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.
Andy Bannister was Glen Scrivener’s guest on the latest SpeakLife’s “The Way Back” programme. It’s a fast-paced lively and revealing conversation, as you would expect with Andy and Glen in the same room! The pressing issue of the nature and meaning of our humanity is an especially important part of the programme, all of which you can watch below:
An old friend of mine who I studied alongside at college called Savvas Costi is now the head of the Religious Studies department at Bede’s School, which is a large private school in East Sussex. He invited me and Sharon Dirckx, who often works with us at Solas, to join him for three days in the school.
We did a series of Religious Studies lessons, and lunchtime events – including an especially interesting open Q&A. Sharon did some work on God and Science with the students, as well as helping them to think through the question of God and suffering especially around natural disasters. These, of course, have been the themes of her last three books. Then I did a lunchtime event about human rights and where they are grounded, as well as an evening one entitled, “Does Religion Poison Everything?”. I also had the opportunity to lead a series of comparative religion classes.
As most folks around Solas know, I have been studying and comparing Christianity and Islam for years, especially the Bible and the Qur’an. So we did a session comparing the ways in which the two faiths explain the question of origins – how everything began. Then another one comparing what Christianity and Islam have to say about the problem of evil. We examined the contrasting ways that the faiths explain the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Obviously I can draw extensively on my background in Islamic Studies in those sessions and students are often struck by just how different the two worldviews are when you look in detail at how they apply to specific issues.
I was really impressed with something that one of the students (who wasn’t a Christian) wrote about the human rights session, for the school magazine too. He’d obviously enjoyed the meeting, and had really engaged deeply with the topic and wrote about it really well, so that was great.
Working in a school context is obviously very different from working in a church or a university Christian Union, in terms of what you can and can’t say – and the appropriate ways of presenting things. For example, in a school context you say, “As a Christian I believe that….. “ and there is a reasonable amount of freedom to explain the Christian perspective. What you can’t do is to simply state that something is true. So for example in the talk I gave on human rights, my big idea is that the concept of human rights doesn’t make much sense without God. In a church event, I might push that idea a bit further, but in a a school I might conclude by saying “what you believe about God is crucial because it affects things like human rights – because if you believe in God it is much easier to understand what we mean by ‘human rights’ and ‘human dignity’ than if you believe that we are just a random collocation of atoms”. And then let the students decide what they think. We also use a lot more interaction when working in schools than we would perhaps in a sermon.
The Bede’s students were really great when it came to interaction, discussion times and Q&A. In the classroom setting we’d speak for a few minutes and then ask the students to discuss and debate the ideas – and they were really interested and articulate. In the Q&A event, there were loads of really good questions from the 15-18 year olds who came along. Suffering, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and ‘why do you believe in God?”, all came up.
It was also interesting to observe what happens to a society which is losing its Christian worldview though. I asked one class, “Who here thinks that what Putin has done to Ukraine is wrong?” Every hand went up, So I asked them “why is it wrong?” And no one really knew. So I asked if some things are definitely right and other things definitely wrong – or are these things really just preferences? All but two students said that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are just personal preferences! Two lads had the courage to disagree and say that they thought that there might be more to it than that. The problem was that they all wanted to condemn Putin, but almost all of them had no basis other than preference for that stance.
It reminded me of a famous article by a secular philosopher in the magazine of the Ontario Teachers Association. He had done similar conversations about the basis of morality with High School students and wrote: “I fear we are raising a generation of moral paralytics, they know what they should believe but have absolutely no idea why they should believe it.” “What is going to happen when this lot grow up and have to face difficult decisions?” he asked.
Sharon Dirckx also really enjoyed the week at Bede’s School, and said,
“We had a really blessed time at St Bede’s school. I had the opportunity to take lessons on Am I Just My Brain? with sixth formers. In one lesson, a student began to see during the lesson that there was a lot more to human identity that he’d initially realized. This student then proceeded to come to many of the lunchtime/evening talks. St Bede’s is quite a secular environment but also one where several students were asking the big questions of life. It was a privilege and joy to be there.”
Kristi and Andy chat with pastor and author Sam Allberry about the primacy of Jesus in our gospel conversations. Sam offers his thoughts on evangelism with LGBT friends, the balance of truth and narrative, and the importance of deep Christian community.
Sam Allberry is a pastor based at Immanuel Nashville and Fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He is the author of a number of books, including Is God Anti-Gay? and 7 Myths about Singleness. Find out more at samallberry.com
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
It was great to travel down to Selkirk Baptist Church in the Scottish Borders to speak at their morning service about Jesus and the Questions of our Age. We looked at the way the questions Christians are asked, and the objections we face are changing fast today. Hard evidential ‘truth-questions’ are asked less often than they once were; but questions such as Who am I? (identity), What am I for? (purpose) What am I worth? (value) and Can I make a difference? (Agency?) are increasingly common. The prologue to John’s gospel contains a lot of helpful material for answering these vital questions. The whole service is available in the video clip above – but the talk starts at 37 minutes in.
The saying, ‘he’s all things to all men’ has come to mean someone who tries to please everyone, because they have no principles. Originally though, when the apostle Paul coined the phrase it meant something quite different. In 1 Corinthians 9, he wrote:
In these famous words, Paul sets out key principles for us as we seek to share the gospel of Jesus. Solas sent Gavin Matthews speak on this whole chapter, for Hillbank Church in Dundee recently. You can watch the message below:
We can often assume science has completely mapped out the evolutionary history of the development of life on earth, from atoms to complex organisms, erasing the need for a Creator. Yet, much of the scientific data point to molecules and systems that don’t seem to fit into this theory of beginnings. As part of a talk on “God and Science” at Glasgow University Christian Union, Steve Osmond was asked to explain the concept of “irreducible complexity”.
Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.
Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.
In 1985, Clint Eastwood re-entered the world of ‘Westerns’, producing, directing and starring in Pale Rider – an apocalyptic re-telling of the classic story of underdogs, oppressors and the outsider who rides into town to bring justice. Warning: This article contains plot spoilers!
The setting is Carbon Canyon in California during the Gold Rush of the 1880s. All the rest of the gold-seams in the area are owned by the LaHood mining empire, but one plucky village of settlers are holding out on the legality of their claim, while panning for nuggets. Carbon Canyon is a community of decent people, small families working hard to make a home in the wilderness, living in small dark cabins and working the creeks. LaHood’s land is mined by massive hydraulic schemes, washing vast amounts of soil down the valley to expose the gold beneath. These schemes are inhabited by gun-slinging thugs who enforce company law and turn the land into “hell”.
The opening scene is almost a pastiche of the vintage western. The camera cuts between scenes of the peaceful villagers working the land, with the horses of their attackers rushing across the plains towards them – framed by a backdrop of stunning snow-capped mountains. It soon becomes clear that the raiding party are not there to kill much beyond cattle and pets, but to harass the people off their land, to let the corporation in to blast the canyons for gold.
Some good actors are deployed to put all this together by Eastwood. Corporate bad-guy Coy LaHood is played by a suitably grasping Richard Dysart, and his noxious son Josh by Chris Penn. The central family in the village are key to the story-line and are engagingly portrayed by Michael Moriarty, Carrie Snodgrass and Sydney Penny. And it’s Penny’s character, the fourteen-year old Megan Wheeler who is responsible for turning the tide of the narrative.
When the mob run into the canyon, Megan is reading aloud from the one book kept in their cabin, the New Testament. As hoof-beats approach outside, she solemnly intones the words of Revelation 6; John’s vision of the apocalypse and it’s four horsemen. These are powerful words which have gripped imaginations and divided interpreters for millennia. After the attack, as pressure builds on the villagers to flee, young Megan prays to God – asking for a deliverer, to rescue them from cruelty and injustice.
And here’s the real bite of the story. Will God answer, or is he indifferent to our suffering? Is God an absentee-landlord in his creation, the first-mover who set things in motion and has left the stage; or is he an active judge over the affairs of people? Clint Eastwood seems clear about God in this respect. A rider on a Pale Horse appears, an other-worldy figure, who wears a clerical collar. Yet this man is not a messiah who through miraculous powers turns the hearts of all the wicked to goodness. LaHood doesn’t become a figure like Zacchaeus in the gospels who’s encounter with the divine turned him from corruption to benevolence. This man, known as “the preacher” comes with superhuman power, not to raise the dead, heal the sick and feed the hungry – but to wreak havoc and death wherever he goes. He is in fact, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse: death.
In the biblical text that Megan intones, the heavenly vision is one in which mysterious seals are opened by Christ and as a result God’s justice is unleashed upon the sins of mankind. The rider on the pale horse doesn’t come to redeem but to destroy. In Eastwood’s movie this leads to a story of deliverance where the Pale Rider intervenes to release Megan from attempted gang rape led by LaHood’s son. The rider refuses to be bought off by LaHood, leading inevitably towards a great final showdown, a classic Western shoot-out in the dusty streets of a frontier town. LaHood’s hired lawmakers, hardened killers all, face-down against the Pale Rider. It’s the O.K. Corral meets the battle of Armageddon where good versus evil is a battle fought in lead.
Pale Rider received very positive reviews on release and has gained cult status subsequently. But what’s the attraction of this simple plot in a well-worn genre?
The first is that we identify with the vulnerable, honest people trying to work out a living in the face of power structures which do not operate fairly. We instinctively understand that the poor suffer the world-over from lack of resources and access to justice, which all too often is traded like a commodity. The film taps into a very profound sense of outrage at the way the world so often is, that we all share.
The second is that it presents a narrative in which deliverance comes to us from outside ourselves, and arrives in town like a stranger to set things right. Presented with the circumstances of our own lives, the vulnerabilities of those around us, the cruelty and unfairness of life, we also face the reality that the kind of change the world needs is not incremental but apocalyptic. And quite beyond the capacity of ordinary people like us, working in offices or fields – or panning for gold can ever accomplish. Perhaps we instinctively know that the justice we crave cannot be built, but must be brought to us by a deliverer.
Then, there is an almost spiritual satisfaction in the thought that God will one day unleash justice upon the earth. He does it here in Carbon Canyon, in response to the prayer of a young girl, who is poor, powerless and vulnerable. If God doesn’t only do things like feed the five thousand, but also brings judgement, then perhaps Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-next and the rest will face a divine judiciary, and justice will be served. We’re provoked with the thought that if one girl’s prayer from a log cabin can bring forth death riding on a Pale apocalyptic horse to unleash divine wrath like an avenging angel; then God will one day answer the prayers of millions and usher in His kingdom where perfect justice will prevail.
It’s always interesting to see who people identify with most in a movie. I suspect my teenage daughter might see the plot through the eyes of young Megan. I’d worry about anyone who identified most with “preacher” – death on horseback! Many of us might most want to align ourselves with Hull Barrett, the plucky gold panner who is inspired by ‘the preacher’ to stand and fight, defend his family and crusade for justice, dignity and rights against the odds. We do like to think well of ourselves generally, don’t we?!
But what if in fact our lives look more like the majority of the cast of Pale Rider, the workers on LaHood’s mines? They don’t direct the malevolence, they are perhaps not deeply committed to the system, nor enjoying much of its benefits – but are nevertheless fully implicated in it. What if we have contributed to making the earth into a suburb of “hell”, bought cheap goods made in sweatshops, cheated our neighbour, or treated others with varying degrees of cruelty? The sobering reality is that the Pale Rider – who in the biblical account is death – will arrive with an appointment for us all. According to the frame of reference of Pale Rider, the man on the horse will not come to deliver us and help us find gold; but gun us down in the street. The ‘I was only following orders’ defence seems to fall on deaf ears when the Pale Rider dynamites the house the mineworkers occupy, as much as it did at Nuremburg.
The question is, are we righteous, and when God does execute justice which side will we be found on? Ultimately, are we the noble gold-panners of Carbon Canyon, or implicated in the crimes of the machine? Profoundly, we’re aware that while we aspire to the former, our lives are deeply tinged by the latter and that in our state of darkness we should perhaps fear the reaper after all.
Clint Eastwood’s film is a riveting re-telling of the apocalyptic tale of the judgement of God upon the wicked, sent via a ghostly avenging angel. That is of course, one major thread of the biblical story. In Eastwood’s world the righteous are saved and the sinners are damned. With one exception. Step forward a man called “Club”, played by all 7 feet and 2 inches of Richard Kiel (who most readers will recognise as Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). Club enters the story as a company man, a hired thug there to beat up the preacher and enforce LaHood’s brutal despotism. Yet – he changes sides, and aligns his sympathies with the innocent victims of Carbon Canyon. He is the one character in the whole story who is redeemed and forgiven.
As such, “Club” is the one the character who we can perhaps truly identify with in Pale Rider. We are not completely pure and virtuous like Hull Barrett. We are tainted by our own faults and our complicity in the system which is so often cruel and unjust. We are not completely innocent like young Megan either, in that while we are often victims, in truth we are as much sinners as we are the sinned-against.
Perhaps few of us are like Coy Lahood, so deeply committed to greed that we will do any evil in order to gain the next piece of gold. Yet we are a bit like “Club”. He finds himself in the midst of a wicked system, he finds himself complicit in things he finds unethical, he looks within himself and around himself and comes to an awakening that things are not right. He alone in this movie shows a sign of what a genuine ‘preacher’ might call ‘repentance’. Thankfully he does so before the credits roll, and the end is called and the final shots are fired.
It means that Club is the character in Pale Rider’s Californian apocalypse we need to emulate before our narrative ends and our credits roll. To some people that might sound rather apocalyptic. But in Pale Rider, Clint Eastwood is consciously bringing an apolcalyptic tale to a specific time and place, and asking us to imagine what it might look like in ours. He pictures divine justice arriving to both liberate and destroy – and we cannot help but ask where we stand before it.
