IS BATMAN AN ATHEIST?
Why superheroes can hang around with all those gods and demi-gods but might not believe in … God
DC Comics has just suggested Batman is an atheist.
On the one hand, that seems a bit odd, since Batman — a.k.a .Bruce Wayne — has met a wide array of gods and demigods personally. On the other hand, Batman’s atheism makes sense. When humans have superpowers, what’s the use of gods?
Batman hangs out with Wonder Woman, who hobnobs with Zeus, Ares and other deities. He’s buddies with Deadman, a ghost resurrected by a goddess named Rama Kushna. In one memorable comic that gave me nightmares for years when I was a kid, Batman got turned into a vampire, which seems like it would be hell on one’s skepticism.
If you live in the DC universe, you’ve got to believe 12 improbable things before you eat your Bat toast. Being an atheist in those circumstances seems less a spiritual stance and more like carelessness.
But if everything is possible, there’s not much need to believe in transcendent powers beyond our ken. Mystery and faith are essential to most religious experiences. When gods are as common as bullfrogs or bananas, what makes them divine or special? Superheroes and supervillains aren’t exactly gods. But they don’t leave a lot of room for worship either.
The exact state of Batman’s faith isn’t crystal clear. Batman No. 53, just published, includes a scene with the Dark Knight being asked: “Do you believe in God?” and him replying: “I used to.”
Batman writer Tom King was quiet until this week, when he tweeted something cryptic:
“Lot of people saying Batman 53 (which I wrote) shows Batman is an atheist. That’s not how I read that comic. But I don’t think my reading of it is the most important one. Anyway, I hope you read the whole thing for yourself and decide for yourself.”
Part of the fun of superheroes is that we can identify with them. They’re supposed to be like us. Among other things, that means writers often give them recognizable religious beliefs.
Daredevil is a Catholic, wracked with guilt and struggling with his relationship with the Christian God. Ms. Marvel is a Muslim whose faith inspires her to fight for justice. And Batman is apparently an atheist who lost faith when his parents were murdered in front of him.
Superheroes aren’t just like us, though. They’re an empowered version of us. And that means that beside the regular religious believers in comics, you also get the other stuff. The Christians, Jews, Buddhists and agnostics are always stumbling over other divine beings who do things like raise the dead, manipulate time or usher believers and non-believers alike into literal heavens and hells. Norse gods, Greek gods, Cthulhu and various earth elementals rub shoulders, wings or tentacles with sorcerers, tech geniuses and large green monsters.
Batman doesn’t have to believe in the gods. They’re right next to him, pulling on his cape.
Superheroes are popular because they make the transcendent so easily familiar. People sometimes say superhero tales are modern myths. Like the characters in Greek or Norse myths, Superman, Iron Man and Mary Marvel have amazing abilities and go on amazing adventures. But superhero narratives aren’t really tales about gods who are to be worshipped or feared. Rather, they’re stories about what it would be like if you had godlike powers to perform miracles.
The superhero genre, then, grabs the divine spark, and hands it over to human beings. The name of the first superhero, after all, is Superman — a name cribbed from arch-atheist Nietzsche’s “uber-mensch” by the two unreligious Jewish kids who wrote the comic. The ubermensch in Nietzsche’s view was the man who rose to greatness in a society that no longer was dragged down by Christianity.
Nietzsche was famous for declaring that “God is dead”— by which he meant God wasn’t needed anymore, because human beings, post-Enlightenment, were ready to take his place. “We are (God’s) murderers,” Nietzsche wrote.
For Nietzsche, this is a poetic way of talking about a spiritual and intellectual change. God has gone out of the universe, and human endeavour striving and imagination now must try to fill his place.
But in superhero comics, Nietzsche’s metaphor is a literal, mundane plot point. Superheroes are always killing one god or the other. Batman in one comic kicked the wrath of God in the face and booted him out of Gotham. In Wonder Woman (the movie), the heroine defeats Ares, the god of war. And in Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Starlord, who doesn’t even have any superpowers to speak of, beats his dad, Ego, the Living Planet, who, like the name says, is a planet-sized deity. The divine is transcendent, powerful, beyond human control. But in superhero stories, human-sized folks — the people we identify with — push gods around willy-nilly.
This is the exact inverse of myths, where it’s gods who push us around. Myths are often about how humans are destroyed by divine edict and the blind hand of fate. Job can’t do much about it when Satan kills his family and blights his crops. Orpheus defies death briefly, but he’s ultimately just another weak mortal, and Eurydice is dragged back to Hades. But if a superhero had been around with Job, he or she would have kicked Satan’s butt (Black Panther, for example, has actually defeated Satan in handto-hand combat.)
As for death — superheroes are always coming back from the dead. (Not much of a spoiler here, since the movie came out in November 2017.) Superman was brought back from the grave in the Justice League movie. Half of Marvel’s heroes are going to get resurrected in the next instalment of Infinity War. In superhero stories, dying is not a whole lot more dramatic than travelling to a different city — like, say, Albuquerque. In fact, there are almost certainly more superhero stories in which someone comes back from the dead than there are superhero stories in which someone visits New Mexico.
No wonder, then, that Batman’s an atheist. What’s God for when you can flick a switch and bring your pal back from his not-so-final rest? Spiritual beliefs are superfluous when you are so talented and smart and powerful that you can overcome any obstacle and succeed in any quest. Superheroes live in a world where human beings can do anything. Put on tights and we can all hobnob with Zeus and kick Yahweh’s butt. We control our own destinies, muscle planets about and overcome death itself. Humans are all-powerful.
That’s a myth, of course. But it’s a myth even atheists like Batman can believe in.