David Crumm: The Greg Garrett Interview on our love of angels and demons
We love our angels and demons!
Pew's massive study of American religious life shows nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe that angels and demons are active in our world. We're also certain about cosmic realms from which these creatures emerge. More than 7 in 10 Americans believe in Heaven with our collective belief in Hell lagging a bit behind that.
Now, an intrepid explorer of the connections between popular culture and the spiritual realms invites us to travel with him as Dante did with his guide Virgil 700 years ago into Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso-a classic tale that we know as [The Divine Comedy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivineComedy). Our new guide already is familiar to thousands of readers nationwide: Greg Garrett, a noted scholar at Baylor University and author of 20 previous books. He calls his book, Entertaining Judgment : The Afterlife in Popular Imagination. 
Greg is well equipped to serve as our guide after decades of exploring religious themes in comic books, movies, music and American literature. As we set off with him on this great cosmic journey, he says: "This book really is the culmination of years of research. I hope readers will have fun with it."
Note that this book is published by Oxford University Press so the standard of research is high and Greg lays out an extensive series of notes at the end of his book if readers dare to dive deeper into some of the strange corners they will discover in this adventure.
We can highly recommend the book both for individual reading, for any teachers or preachers who like to touch upon these issues and especially for small-group discussion in religious or secular settings. You'll have lots of fun in your small group, bringing in video and audio clips to touch off discussion on the chapters in Greg's book.
_ ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm interviewed the author. Here are ... _
HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH GREG GARRETT ON
'ENTERTAINING JUDGMENT'
DAVID: Wow! Talk about a whirlwind tour! The entire cosmos from Heaven to Hell-including visits with angels and demons, comic book super heroes, TV stars, great authors and even strange characters in video games-all in 200 pages!
_ Greg Garrett, the 2013 Centennial Professor at Baylor University. _
GREG: Well, for many years as a journalist, you've been covering the same kinds of connections I've been covering-and this book really does bring a lot of things together in one place.
DAVID: How did you cast the net for this book? Every page drops another intriguing character into the mix. How did you amass this cast of characters?
GREG: I had all of my own research over the years, then I asked people to recommend stories about the afterlife-stories of the undead, angels and demons-and I got a ton of recommendations! A lot of my clergy friends had powerful stories they had used in their preaching. My literary and cultural friends told me about a lot of things they were researching. And I also crowdsourced this. I asked people questions like: What's your favorite angel story? Then, I've consumed so much popular culture throughout my lifetime that I had tons of things to draw on-perhaps with the exception of video games but I even played my way through Diablo for this book.
DAVID: Many of our readers love to make these kinds of connections. Our online magazine hosts Ken Chitwood's FaithGoesPop series and, every week, we're exploring similar links between faith and popular culture.
In fact, I'm going to do a shout-out to our readers: What's your favorite angel story? Go into Facebook or Twitter and tell us. Add the hashtag #FaithGoesPop so that we spot it easily.
GREG: If they want to add another hashtag that I'm starting to use for the book, they can mark their ideas #EntertainingJudgment and I'll take a look, too.
IS 'LOST' REALLY PURGATORY?
DAVID: Let's use this interview to showcase some of the very intriguing connections you make in this book. There are far too many to list them all in our conversation, but we can hit some highlights. So, let's start with that mysterious middle-realm: Purgatory. You point out in the book that the word "Purgatory" never appears in the Bible and the vast majority of American Protestants think of Purgatory as a Catholic belief.
However, Greg, you argue that-in effect-millions of Americans are attracted to the idea of Purgatory through books, songs, movies and TV shows like Lost.
GREG: That's a good place to start because Purgatory really was the starting point for this book. For a number of years, I had been talking about doing a book with my editor at Oxford, Cynthia Read, and then one day she asked me: "Why is it that most American Protestants think that Purgatory is ridiculous theologically but they believe that people do undergo hardship and transform their lives?"
And I told her: "You're right. We have an operational belief in Purgatory even if Protestants think it doesn't make sense theologically."
That question opened up the whole book for me. One of the most primal stories we share is that people can go through Hell and emerge with a transformed life at the end of it.
DAVID: When I was reading that section of your book, I immediately thought of Dr. Wayne Baker's research in United America. When you talk about this "operational belief in Purgatory" that rings the bells of several core American values that Dr. Baker has documented.
GREG: A perfect example of this is 12 Years a Slave-it's a story of Purgatory, which in this case essentially means going through Hell with an expiration date when our hero emerges with a transformed life. In fact, it's hard to watch some of the things you see in the film, unless you can keep reminding yourself: Hey, it's only 12 years. He will emerge from this.
Or for a Purgatory comedy, think about Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Over and over again, he is tried and tested with the hope of emerging as a new and improved being.
Purgatory was built into the DNA of Lost. From the very first season, there was this whole debate among fans about whether the island itself was Purgatory. And the creators of Lost said no it wasn't. But this led to the idea of creating, later in the series, a "sideways" world-a world in which the Lostees never crash landed on the island and are presented with challenges they failed in their first time around. Even Dr. Linus, the show's biggest villain, gets an opportunity to redo an awful choice he made and get it right.
BATMAN, BURNE-JONES AND STAINED GLASS
DAVID: There are dozens of other movie and TV references in this book from It's a Wonderful Life to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. But let's jump to very different forms of media: comic books, paintings and stained glass. You connect all those dots, too!
And that starts with Batman, who makes appearances throughout your book. The story of the "dark knight" is back on prime-time TV in the hit series [Gotham](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham%28TVseries%29). This new series takes us back to Batman's boyhood as Bruce Wayne, which starts with this little boy's absolutely terrifying experience of witnessing the cold-blooded murders of his parents. From that kind of trauma, other characters in Gotham become blood-thirsty criminals, but Bruce Wayne emerges as a heroic figure who wants to use his powers to do good.
While Superman may be America's oldest super hero, Batman has far more fans keeping his legend alive and his fans continually morph Batman into new forms of this angel-demon figure. I think he'll be a connection point in your book for lots of readers and, of course, there are a lot lessons that can be drawn from comics. ReadTheSpirit has even established our own comic section called Bullying Is No Laughing Matter. So, I was very pleased to find Batman, in particular, showing up as a recurring character in your new book.
GREG: Batman is one of our most pervasive cultural stories. When I wrote about Batman and Superman back in my book Holy Superheroes, I did not realize that those two archetypal stories would continue to follow me around.
In the story of Batman, we think of Gotham as this Hell on Earth and we can think of Batman as a demon-a fierce creature of the night who, instead of using his powers for evil, chooses to use them for good. So, we're tracing a character who was born in Hell and chose to rise above it. He casts aside everything he ought to be after those early experiences-and instead chooses to devote his life to doing good or others.
That's the central element of the Batman story: A person can rise above a tragic setting and prove to be a hero for the ages. The question about Batman is: Demon or angel? And we could say he's both-a devil who chooses to be an angel.
DAVID: Well, I was also pleasantly surprised to find in your book a lot about Edward Burne-Jones, the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter and designer whose images are still splashed across Christmas cards, church windows and lots of other decorative arts. You point out that Burne-Jones was influential in rescuing the idea of an "angel" from the Italian artists who wanted to turn them into cute little babies with wings. Burne-Jones gave us angels with real super-hero size and shape.
In fact, I was just comparing some of the popular images of Batman--the dark knight overlooking a sleeping city--to Burne Jones's famous painting The Briar Wood, part of a cycle of paintings that he did in collaboration with his friend William Morris. Basically, a dark enchantment has made nearly everyone fall down in a deep sleep. And in The Briar Wood, which was painted in 1890, we see a very Batman-like dark knight overlooking this sleeping town.
GREG: Burne-Jones is really interesting because he did help to restore some gravity to these narratives about angels. As angel imagery had evolved, it looked as though the basic story was going to run off the rails into sentimentality. Throughout scriptures-whether we're talking about the Hebrew or Christian testaments or the Muslim holy scriptures-angels are described as imposing, frightening, powerful. But, by the time of Burne-Jones, artists had turned angels into these cutesy little babies with wings. In paintings and stained glass and in other images, Burne-Jones restored the powerful nature of angels.
DAVID: And this is not just a matter of aesthetics or interior design. This transformation of angels into super heroes speaks to the terrible nature of the global challenges we faced in the 20th century and face again today. If our spiritual imagination is going to keep up with the world's terrors, then we need super heroes, right?
GREG: Flying babies don't do the job for us when we need a really serious pipeline to the Divine. I think that whenever our culture threatens to turn angels into cute little domesticated figures, then we've lost the main story about angels.
DAVID: We could go on and on-but I want to urge readers to actually order your book to continue the adventure. Let me close by asking you to sum up how you hope readers will respond to your book.
GREG: There were two things at the heart of my desire to write this book.
First, I wanted to spotlight how important stories of the afterlife continue to be in our lives. A vast majority of Americans continue to believe in Heaven and Hell and in manifestations of angels and demons. And that's more than just a casual belief. My colleagues in research at Baylor report that a majority of Americans believe they've been helped by a guardian angel. So, the first thing I wanted to say is: These are very important beliefs in our lives today.
Then, second, I wanted readers to think about this: We're consuming so many of these stories very uncritically. I want to invite people into a thoughtful consideration about this. What do we believe about the afterlife? What do we believe about the way the afterlife shapes our everyday life in pursuing faith and justice?
CARE TO READ MORE GREG GARRETT?
- _ GET THE BOOK- Entertaining Judgment : The Afterlife in Popular Imagination_ is available now on Amazon.
- _ AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE- _Greg has his author page organized to show you his many other books as well as recent posts he's publishing online.
- _ FOLLOW GREG ON SOCIAL MEDIA _-The easiest way to keep track of his travels, public appearances and new media projects is to follow Greg's Twitter feed. He's also on Facebook, where he has 2,000 friends-and room for a few more, especially if you're involved in ongoing discussion of Greg's books.
- See more at: http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/greg-garrett-interview-love-angels-demons/#sthash.DszxvGWI.dpuf