CHAPTER 9
In The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars there is a consistency between the religious and other values expressed. The political outlook which emphasises the individual against the collective is linked with a religious outlook emphasising the importance of the individual in Last Things.
Tolkien's creation is plainly infused with Christian religious values, though it does not make a Christian allegory as such. As it is set in a previous (that is, pre-Christian) age of the world, there is no figure very like Christ -- a Redeemer or only-begotten Son, though there are several who bring salvation to others by self-sacrifice. In The Lord of The Rings there is very little about overt religion, but there hardly needs to be, since the borders between natural and supernatural are indistinct. From Tolkien's other writings it is clear that the Enemy, Sauron, is a fallen Maia (roughly equivalent to an angel), as his predecessor and former master Morgoth was a fallen Vala (roughly equivalent to an archangel or cherub). Gandalf is also a Maia, though given the form of an old man. He is a supernatural being who has been sent to or incarnated on Middle Earth to help and encourage the people of the good side of the great struggle.
There are supernatural powers and principalities physically present, and the existence of the Uttermost West is undoubted. The One (God) is known to have intervened on Middle-Earth last with the Downfall of Numenor (as is set out in considerable detail in The Silmarilion), though by The Third Age, in which most of The Lord of The Rings is set, actual religious observances have dwindled greatly. In a sense religion and politics (that is, service to Sauron or to The West) have come together, a sign of truly dire times.
Since both The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars are set in remote pasts, they need not be contained by Christianity, as are, for example, the Arthurian romances which they in some ways resemble. However, their Christian background is unmistakable. The passage of Frodo through The Lord of The Rings, and even ol Luke in Star Wars, is reminiscent of a Christian view of the passage of "everyman" through life to the penultimate encounter with Death and the final, unexpected, victory over it.
The following summary of The Lord of The Rings could also apply to Star Wars with only changes of names:
Frodo, in The Shire, is troubled sometimes by "visions of mountains he had never seen", and a vague, undirected yearning towards higher things. The revelation is made to him by Gandalf (the embodiment of traditional values and wisdom?) that he is the bearer of a special responsibility, and is a person of greater importance than he had guessed (a spiritual being?). He is driven out of the Shire (childhood?) and learns that the Enemy (Death?) is after him personally.
His guide is lost, or at least removed from the immediate scene (maturity and disillusionment?). In the final test, after many battles, Frodo must confront the Enemy alone. He fails, but is saved by an unexpected intervention. Good and Evil are not equal, and apparently against all the odds good triumphs because it is qualitatively different, in what Tolkien calls a "Eucatastrophe".
This is from the heart of traditional Western Christianity. When, in The Lord of The Rings, Gandalf goes to his death in the battle against the Balrog, he says to the dark figure: "You cannot pass". In the practically identical battle between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader in Star Wars, Obi-Wan says: "You can't win, Darth". In these circumstances, the invocation that "Good will triumph" is meant to inspire not hopeful complacency but a determination to ensure that it will.
The great Enemies, enslaved by their own egos, cling to life, however shrivelled and horrible it has become, because to them Death is the end and they have no communication with anything beyond it. It is quite consistent, indeed inevitable, that these Enemies both fear Death and, symbolically, are Death.
However, these stories do not tackle problems of Christian theology in detail. This is most obvious in the way that The Lord of The Rings virtually brushes over the important and complex problem of redemption. The question does not arise for most of the wicked characters. The orcs and trolls are slain in their sins. The only good character to fall into evil and be saved is Boromir, whose fall is brief and whose motives even at their worst are mixed. Gollum and Saruman have elements left in their characters which desire the good, but this does not save them. Even the orcs here and there seem to have some qualities generally counted good: they would be useless as servants even to a bad cause if they did not have some qualities like courage. The orcs seem to have been bred from Elves ruined by Morgoth, and Gollum, we know, is a hobbit ruined by the Ring.
One may wonder: did no orc ever repent? And if they were incapable of repenting, then what of free-will? Failure to indicate any answers to these questions may be a fault of the story. But on the other hand to ask too much along these lines may be to confuse a theological problem with a literary one. Tolkien was not writing a story about the theological position of orcs but about such things as the heroic response to challenge by the individual. A book about orcs from the inside would have been a different kind of book, perhaps something like The Lord of The Flies (as an explicitly Christian allegory would also have been a different kind of book). Tolkien's letters show that he was at least aware of the problem -- he wrote that if human tyrants could utterly ruin and corrupt their victims, then Sauron could ruin elves and hobbits. But his work and thinking were concentrated in other directions and he did not explore this far.
Tolkien did discuss the possibility of Gollum's repentance in one letter, speculating on what would have happened if he had been regenerated by his love for Frodo to the extent that he could have voluntarily destroyed the Ring (as Darth Vader does voluntarily destroy the Emperor at the climax of Star Wars):
He would have perceived ... the only way to keep it and hurt Sauron was to destroy it and himself together -- and in a flash he would have seen that this would also be the greatest service to Frodo. (66)
Given this development, Tolkien said, "The interest would have shifted to Gollum, I think".
This is what happens in "Return of the Jedi". Darth Vader destroys the Dark Side of the Force, as its centre of power is manifested then, by casting the Emperor into an abyss, at the cost of his own life. When Luke begs the dying Darth Vader, now reborn as Anakin Skywalker, to let him save him, his father replies "You already have". His mutilated but still human face, revealed below Darth Vader's mask, and voice now gentle and peaceful, symbolise a great transfiguration. We suddenly realise that the title "Return of the Jedi" refers not to Luke at all, as we suddenly realise, in a vast shift of perspective, that the story has been about the salvation of this single being all the time.
The salvation of Darth Vader-Anakin Skywalker comes quite contrary to the expectations of the very wisest of the good people -- Obi-Wan and Yoda -- who had, wrongly, seen the dualistic and "Eastern" Force as the highest power in the Universe. Anakin Skywalker's salvation, and what it reveals, must be a "Eucatastrophic" surprise even for them.
So in both tales the seductive source of "power" is cast away, and against all probability (67) the personification of Death is defeated and destroyed. This is very close to traditional Christianity.
In cultural terms there is a very striking and significant thing here: The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars achieved their astonishing successes in, roughly, the generation between 1955 and 1985 (though they are both still going strong today), a time when religion in Western societies seemed quite marginalised and when traditional Christianity seemed to have been replaced by a number of substitute religions, some quite bizarre.
It was also a time when the established churches had done a great deal to liberalise or "water down" their traditional beliefs and, in many cases, substitute a social for a religious conscience.
To give anything like a comprehensive survey of the trends and writings of religious modernism would require a large library of books rather than a study the size of this one. However, a few salient and characteristic examples are easy to point out. Thus, in 1960 a progressive protestant theologian, Professor Hans Hoekendije, gave in a speech at Strasbourg the following coda for religious modernism:
We will not be able to really get alongside man in our modern world unless we begin to "dereligionise" Christianity. Christianity is a secular movement, and this is basic to an understanding of it. We have no business to make it a religion again. (68)
Anglican Bishop John Robertson's book Honest to God was published in 1963. This book questioned, it was claimed, "the entire 'religious frame' in which Christianity has been offered". Though by no means original, it attracted considerable publicity and exhibited to a wider audience the attack on traditionalist Christian notions being made by some modernist theologians. The Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin's occultist version of progressivism (predicting the mystical evolution of a group mind or "Noo-sphere"), also became to some extent fashionable, though arguably only among the less hard-headed.
Paul Johnson wrote in his A History of Christianity, published in 1976, with some foreboding, that:
During the past half-century there has been a rapid and uninterrupted secularisation of the West, which has all but demolished the Augustinian ideal of Christianity as a powerful, physical and institutional presence in the world ... Certainly, mankind without Christianity conjures up a dismal prospect. The record of mankind with Christianity is daunting enough. In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant, view of a de-Christianised world, and it is not encouraging. We know that Christian insistence on man's potential for good is often disappointed, but we are also learning that man's capacity for evil is almost limitless ...
In the same year another commentator on the British religious scene, Bryan Wilson, wrote in Contemporary Transformations of Religion:
All the evidence is towards the decline of belief in the supernatural, and the rejection of the idea that the supernatural has any significance in the everyday life of modern man.
In 1978, seven British Christian theologians following Robinson produced a book, The Myth of God Incarnate, which sought to remove from Christianity its primary supernatural element, and a 1986 report by 53 Anglican bishops on the nature of Anglican belief took some time to agree to a statement of basic doctrines which traditional Christians would have regarded as fundamental. The previous year the Anglican church's report on inner-city social problems in England had claimed: "everything tells against the notion that there is a 'soul' independent of social and economic conditions, to which an entirely personal gospel may be addressed".
By the 1980s church attendance from Stockholm to London had declined to such a small minority of the population that in some theological circles the whole of Western Europe was known as "the north German plain of irreligion". Developments at least as striking took place in several American churches (though there was also a great resurgence of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity which rejected established progressivist assumptions). Combined with this theological liberalism and secularisation, a so-called Liberation Theology had flourished in some Catholic and Protestant churches, which in effect meant the adoption of an agenda of left-wing and collectivist political causes, sometimes including support for violent revolution and terrorism.
There was, however, also impressive evidence that the small number of active church-goers was actually only a fraction of the number of people who professed some religious belief, and who had in fact probably not so much drifted away from the churches as been driven out of them by the churches' own increasing secularisation. (69)
Setting aside questions of the objective truth or falsity of any particular beliefs, it is notable that liberalistic and modernistic religious notions as expressed by the established churches gave little if any attention to propagating such traditional virtues as honour, nobility, bravery, sacrifice, chivalry, valour -- the ideas that the tremendously successful The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars turned upon.
It should not be thought that I am claiming more in this context for The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars than in fact I am: they are not anything like substitutes for religion, they do not teach religious values except here and there almost incidentally; but they are evidence that the religious or spiritual appetite is still very much alive -- indeed not merely the religious appetite, but an appetite for distinctly "Western" spiritual values.
ENDNOTES
66. Letters, page 330.
67. Of course we, the readers and viewers, know that there will probably be a happy ending to The Lord of The Rings and Star Wars, but we are outside the character's point of view.
68. Quoted in The Honest To God Debate (SCM Press, 1963), page 272, footnote.
69. In this context the results of a 1981 Gallup survey are fascinating. The following are the percentages of affirmative answers given in various countries to two questions asked in that survey.
| Do you attend regular religious services once a week or more? | Do you believe in God? | |
| USA | 43% | 95% |
| UK | 14% | 76% |
| Spain | 41% | 87% |
| Italy | 36% | 84% |
| Netherlands | 27% | 65% |
| West Germany | 21% | 72% |
| Norway | 7% | 72% |
| Sweden | 5% | 52% |
| Denmark | 3% | 58% |
This seems closely in line with a survey conducted by the Australian National University in 1987, according to which 82 per cent of Australians believed in a God or some higher power, though the number of church attendances was a small fraction of this figure.
A comparison of the data from the 1954 Australian census and the 1986 census shows at least a close correlation between the extent to which the churches have taken to theologically "modernistic" and/or politically left-wing policies and public pronouncements and the extent to which they have lost supporters, as it also shows a resurgence or at least maintenance of strength for the evangelical and fundamentalist -- the theologically and politically conservative -- churches. The findings can be seen as indicating a vote of "no confidence" by former members of the Anglican and particularly the Uniting churches.
The Anglican Church in 1954 claimed the allegiance of 3,408,850 people or 37.9 per cent of the population. In 1986 it claimed 3,723,419 people or 23.9 per cent of the population (this was before the damaging controversy over the ordination of women reached its full intensity). The Roman Catholic Church had gone from 2,060,986 people or 22.9 per cent of the population in 1954 to 4,064,413 people or 26.1 per cent of the population in 1986, making it easily the largest church in Australia, and displacing the Anglican Church from the position of superiority it had enjoyed since the first settlement. This was in part due to immigration, but it is also notable that it took place at least in part during the Pontificate of the determinedly traditionalist Pope John Paul II -- whose visit to Australia in 1987 attracted enormous crowds of all denominations.
The Uniting Church, the most politically radicalised and "modernistic" of the major established churches, showed by far the largest decline. It had gone from 1,917,627 or 21 per cent of the population in 1954 to 1,182,310 or about 7 per cent of the population in 1986. By contrast, the continuing Presbyterian Church, made up of those generally theologically conservative Presbyterians who had rejected the merger of generally progressive Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Methodists which created the Uniting Church, numbered 560,025. Far from being a discredited and dwindling Conservative rump of one denomination, as they had at first appeared after the merger, they now numbered nearly half as many as did the Uniting Church itself.
Meanwhile, the group marked on census as "other Christian" -- largely the evangelicals and fundamentalists -- had gone from 1.8 per cent of the population to 765,168 or 4.9 per cent. There had also been a spectacular increase in "Orthodox" (presumably owing to immigration) from 0.8 per cent to 2.7 per cent. The Lutherans and the Salvation Army had maintained their percentages of the population, perhaps contrary to what might be perceived as the encroaching secular spirit of the age.
The group marked as "no religion", which in 1954 had been a negligible 23,684 or 1.8 per cent of the population, had gone to 1,197,464 or 12.7 per cent. It is important to note that this question did not necessarily differentiate between those who had no religious beliefs and those who did not consider themselves active members of any particular church. The portion of the population who did not state their religion went from 9.7 per cent to 12.3 per cent, which again may suggest growing disillusionment with the major churches, or with the census.
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