Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve been think­ing about reli­gion in the super­hero genre, par­tic­u­larly as it per­tains to Christianity.

One of my per­sonal rea­sons for reject­ing the reli­gion is that I do not believe in the super­nat­ural.  I do not believe that a man rose from the dead, walked on water, turned water to wine, and so forth.  I believe that mod­ern evi­dence indi­cates such things to be utterly impos­si­ble.   But my rea­son for dis­be­lief here is not the subject–imagine if you lived in a world where such things hap­pened on a daily basis?

How would Jesus be viewed in a world where super­heroes soar through the skies, com­mu­ni­cate with thought, and are inde­struc­tible?  I have two trains of thought on this matter.

The first is that a lot more peo­ple would believe the basics of the story.  You’d have no rea­son to dis­be­lieve that a man once lived who did all those things.  The super­nat­ural is appar­ent in your day-​​to-​​day life.  Mutants have pow­ers, so it’s no stretch to believe that Jesus did as well.

But would peo­ple still make the leap of faith from these pow­ers and acts to believ­ing he was the son of god?  Would they more likely to believe that any­one mak­ing such claims were a delu­sional super­hero? Let me put it this way–in your favorite comic book uni­verse, if some­one showed up with sim­i­lar pow­ers to the sto­ries of Christ in the New Testament, would you believe that they were Jesus reborn, or would you sus­pect that they were some nefar­i­ous vil­lain pos­ing as Jesus for his own sin­is­ter purpose?

A world full of super pow­ers would have pro­found the­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions, and I don’t think I’ve read any­thing that deals with that exactly.  Most comic books I have read seem to have the same basic reli­gions we have.  BUt would they remain unchanged by 100 years of his­tory of super­men on the world stage?  How would the Catholic Church respond to the exis­tence of such things?

Feel free to point me out sto­ries that have dealt with this idea before.  This morn­ing in the shower, I started think­ing about writ­ing a take-​​off on Superman, much like Cory Doctorow did, but instead of depict­ing his par­ents as a jew­ish cou­ple in Toronto, I want to take him back to Kansas, but my Kansas, not the idea of Kansas of a New York comics writer.  Superman as raised by deeply reli­gious, fun­da­men­tal­ist, anti-​​choice Baptists.

How do you think he would have turned out in that kind of family?