A MENTAL EXERCISE
by Andrew Trauger
Can a Christian be an actor? If you think not, you have a lot to learn.
If I performed in a movie and part of my role as an Old West gunslinger was to wield a real Colt .45 and cap off a few blank rounds at the rustlers, would you say that I, as a Christian, was sinning? Would it make a difference if the character I played were written up as a non-Christian “good guy”? How about the “bad guy”? Would I be in sin if I played the part of the stagecoach robber who killed a couple of innocent people, stole their bags of money, and ran from the law? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, stop now, for the rest of this will upset you.
Must Christian movie producers or playwrights hire only pagans to portray all those God-haters in Thief in the Night or Left Behind? Was Tim LaHaye in sin when he wrote a piece of fiction about evil people? How about Frank Peretti? Is a Christian guilty of the acts he writes about or portrays in theatrical works? Are God-haters the only ones allowed to fill those roles to avoid defiling the holy? If you’ve now answered “yes,” you had better put this down.
What limits are imposed upon the Christian when it comes to playing the witch in Carman’s music video, Witch’s Invitation? Or, may a Christian woman portray one of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth? What if she does an incredibly good job, making you feel as if you were watching actual witchcraft? If the Christian woman, in her green make-up, fake warts and stringy gray hair begins saying, “Double, double, toil and trouble…,” has she begun conjuring up actual spirits, endangering her soul to the damnation due all mediums? If you think she has, you have probably read too far by now.
What does “double, double, toil and trouble” mean anyway? Nothing. I assure you that I have not been struck by lightning or visited by demons for having written it twice now. (Nor you for having read it.) The reason a devout Christian can play a witch in Macbeth is exactly because those words have no real meaning, because Jesus conquered Satan on the Cross. The Christian actress doesn’t need to pray for God’s Spirit to build a hedge of protection around her (or to draw a magic circle) to ward off any evil spirits who might be waiting on those words to spill off her lips. Even when she is convincing enough to make several folks in the audience shiver, she has not sinned against God. On the contrary, it is precisely when she appears to be a real witch that she is most glorifying to God; she has used the talents God gave her to the best of her ability. Sunday morning she will worship our Lord without shame, and next week she’ll play the part of a nurse or a lawyer, a single mother or a deacon’s wife. Pretending to be someone else is her talent, and she pleases God by using that talent well, even when the character is inherently evil.
Evil must exist in order for good to triumph. A writer must imagine heinous acts so he can accurately describe their heinousness to his readers. An actor must vividly portray the evil man so we can all hate him. Someone has to play the part of Judas Iscariot, betraying Christ and hanging himself. Someone has to be Jesse James. Someone has to be an Imperial Stormtrooper, a German Nazi, or a Union Soldier. Dressing up as the bad guy and making him believable is not a sinful act. Living the part of the bad guy is sin. Dreaming about living the part of the bad guy is sin. Thinking the bad guy is cool is sin. But, pretending to be the bad guy for the sake of a good tale is not sin. If the bad guy consorts with demons, that just makes him all the more badder, but the actor is not any closer to sin.
Having established that, consider something else: if it is not sin to play an evil character, then is it sin for a Christian to play a good character in a pretend world? Much of science fiction and most of fantasy literature, plays and movies are based in other worlds or universes. Is the Christian wrong to participate in this? Was C. S. Lewis wrong for writing The Chronicles of Narnia, where Aslan, not Jehovah, was the god of the world he created? Was Tolkein in sin for penning The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where Gandalf crafts powerful magic to defeat the evil foes? Would it be sin for a Christian to portray Gandalf, a good guy who wields magic? Again, if you answer “yes” to any of this, you’re missing it. Perhaps you should stop now.
What if someone dreamed up an entirely make-believe universe where technology was crude or non-existent, where magical spells were neutral and could be used for good as well as evil, where wars were fought over shifting boundaries and beautiful princesses by men and women decked in armor and shimmering swords? What if this world were flat, and enormous and powerful monsters lived beyond the edge of the world, consuming whatever fell over the horizon? What if there were a pantheon of gods ruling this universe? What if humans also lived in this world, not because the fantasy world is a parallel reality to ours, but merely for the sake of convention, because we don’t know how to relate to anything else? What if many other types of creatures co-existed with these humans—elves and dwarves, goblins and trolls, and even the occasional dragon. What if someone dreamed up a whole story in this setting, wrote it down and published it as a paperback novel? Would a Christian be in sin to read it? If you’re still thinking “yes,” don’t say I didn’t warn you.
What if his novel spawned a movie or a play? Would Christians be in sin for taking on the roles of those characters in the story as professional actors? No.
If some company introduced a line of action figures based on the movie, would Christian children be barred from playing with them? No.
What if there were a “party game” based on this setting, so designed that each person in your living room pretended to be a character in the story for a few hours, hunting down the monsters and saving the damsel in distress? Can a Christian be this kind of informal, living room actor? Yes.
What if this party game were called Dungeons & Dragons™? Could a Christian play it? Yes.
