I write as an agnostic, so this is not a sermon. It is a meditation on Philippians that leads to what I see as three major orientations toward life.
I’ll begin with Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. I’m fascinated by Philippians because it defines the Christian message in a way that goes against human instinct. Throughout history and across cultures, the human default setting has been to prefer power, convenience, comfort, and pleasure over a life committed to a higher cause. But in Philippians, God comes to Earth, denies himself glory and power, and instead lowers himself to love and serve others. His life becomes a model for us, one that demands imitation.
If we study his life, we learn that life is not a plaything, a toy designed to provide pleasure and excitement. Contrary to much of modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-agency, autonomy, and self-individuation, life does not belong entirely to us. It contains a purpose greater than our instincts for pleasure, power, and self-actualization. Philippians teaches us that our purpose is to lower ourselves in order to love and serve others. Christianity at its best is a distillation of that message in all its potency.
Talk is cheap, of course. Many have marveled and wept at the beautiful, albeit challenging, message in Philippians and preached about it, but few have actually lived it. The literature suggests that Saint Francis of Assisi lived such a life. A life of self-renunciation in imitation of Christ, embracing poverty over riches, is rare indeed.
When I first contemplated this humble life, I framed existence as a choice between two orientations: self-renunciation in service to God or self-gratification in service to our baser instincts. But as I’ve watched and enjoyed Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan discussing movies and culture on the Netflix presentation of the podcast The Big Picture, I’ve come to recognize a third orientation, one that may help explain my agnosticism.
These three podcasters, who strike me as secular, seem to genuinely love what they do. No doubt about it, they work hard, slogging through hundreds of mediocre movies a year and occasionally encountering a few good ones. They are extremely smart, talented, and passionate about their work. They don’t strike me as greedy people who worship at the altar of money or lead grotesquely hedonistic lives that would make Gollum blush with shame.
They are cosmopolitan and educated. They believe in smart conversations, the pleasures of nuanced analysis, the wonder of good art, and the power of storytelling. They understand the vitality cinema brings to culture. A successful movie becomes a sort of muse. It informs society. It reflects society. It changes society. It shares a language with society. Fans of Wayne’s World or A Few Good Men frequently quote famous lines, evidence of the permanent stamp these movies have left on them.
A great movie like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything creates a text for endless discussion. Such movies transcend entertainment by disrupting culture, changing the way we see things, and illuminating aspects of the human condition we may never have considered.
To see art, and movies specifically, as a place of transcendence suggests that art, not religion, may be the muscle humanity needs to flex to stay vibrant. This is not a dogmatic transcendence tied to one doctrine or another. Watching The Godfather won’t help you on Judgment Day. But it will make you interrogate the messy relationship between business and family loyalty in new ways.
Great movies won’t give you a religious doctrine, but they can help you distinguish between sacred and profane time, as in Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping. Movies don’t shut down conversations with absolute dogmas. They open new conversations that keep the mind alive. That’s what I see in the work of the talented Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan.
I worry that a life of religious certainty, with its monk-like retreat into poverty and blissful prayer, may cut us off from art in all its contradictory, life-beating spectacle. I worry that religious doctrine can become stagnant and two-dimensional in a way that art remains dynamic and multidimensional.
At the same time, when I contemplate the love described in Philippians, my heart longs for such a life. I wonder if such a life could save me and the lost, self-deceiving souls in Weapons, Eddington, and Bugonia.
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