At the comics shop, religion goes graphic

Reading the roll
You can track who’s what by diving into a database at ComicBookReligion.com, a project of the exhaustive religion reference site Adherents.com. The database links to closely argued, heavily referenced essays that, for the most part, build compelling cases for its identification of a particular character’s church ways.

Some, like Catholic Girl, are pretty obvious and are noted with a link to a simple character description. But if you’re a big-time superhero, you get the full treatment. The Hulk’s lapsed Catholicism is established in an original essay running more than 3,500 words, with footnotes to scholarly papers on psychiatry and philosophy, supported by copious panels reprinted from the comic book series.

(Superman, for the record, is probably Methodist, while Batman is most likely a lapsed Catholic or Episcopalian.)

That sort of detective work can be fascinating (and a great time-waster), but it doesn’t really capture what’s going on under the surface: the commonplace acceptance in the rebellious world of comic books of faith and the exploration of the divine.

It’s a development that mirrors recent trends in American society, Garrett said.

“In America today, where we’re told that 90-some percent of people believe in God and a certain large percentage of people have an active life of faith — being involved in church or praying or some other practice — then I think it’s going to be unrealistic not to see that depicted in a story,” said Garrett, a professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

“Comics for the last 20 years have [come to] understand that it’s not just teenage boys who are reading about guys in capes,” he said. “There are actually some serious stories that are being told — universal stories.”

The transfiguration of Rev. Stryker
That reflection isn’t always positive. Just as there are preachers on the wrong side of the law in real life, so, too, are there some seriously whacked-out church folk in the graphic universe.

One of the most dangerous enemies of the New X-Men is the Rev. William Stryker, an evangelical minister.

Perhaps the most recognizably true-to-life character is the Rev. William Stryker, an evangelical preacher whose mission is to wipe the mutants of the X-Men universe from the face of the Earth.

Twenty years ago, when Stryker was introduced, “he was someone who represented intolerance,” Garrett said. “There are other ways that we could represent it — you could have picked a white supremacist — but what brings the extra tang to the story is the disconnect between the message of love that’s supposed to be the Christian message and the message of exclusion that is sometimes the message that Christian churches put forth.”

It made perfect sense for the time, said Sharrett, of Seton Hall. Stryker was born during the 1980s, during the liberal backlash against the ascendance of the Religious Right, and that was no accident.

“That kind of device — that explicitly religious idea — you would find this in conservative moments of American history. Rather mainstream superhero comics with religious ideas speak to the conservatism of the time and the popularity of other religious narratives,” he said, naming the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and the television show “Revelations,” in which a scientist and a nun uncover evidence that the world is approaching the End Days.

Interestingly enough, the producers of the 2000 movie “X-Men” turned Stryker into a colonel in charge of a government bureaucracy. In that way, they managed to sidestep complaints that have occasionally been lodged against the character in the comic book series, which some conservative and religious scholars have denounced as a totem of religious hatred.

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