Taking religion seriously

Few films treat religion at all, and most that do treat it with disdain or humor, while some use it to promote a certain religious belief. Stephen Frears’ new film, Philomena, is one of the rare films that takes religion seriously and walks a fine line between between criticizing it and acknowledging its goodness.

 

The film is based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith, which tells the true story of Philomena Lee's 50-year-long search for her son. Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays Sixsmith, a journalist who has just lost his job as a Labour government adviser and is at sea about what to do next. Then a woman approaches him to talk about her mother, who gave birth to her son Anthony at the convent in Roscrea, in Ireland, was forced to sign away parental rights to her son—but still cared for him until he was adopted at age three—and worked as an indentured laundry lady.

Eventually, Martin agrees to write a human-interest story, and he and Philomena (Judi Dench) begin their search for her son. In flashbacks, the film shows young Philomena giving birth, then working in the convent and being allowed to see her son one hour each day. Her anguish when the boy is adopted has stayed within her, held at bay, for 50 years. She approaches this search timidly, not wanting to offend the Catholic Church, which she remains devoted to.

Martin, on the other hand, grew up Catholic and has long since left the church and converted to atheism. He is vocal about his criticisms of the church and the Christian faith, though he lets up when he sees that Philomena is not in agreement with him.

They visit the convent, where the nuns tell them the adoption records were lost in a fire. Later, Martin hears that the convent deliberately destroyed the records in a bonfire and had sold the children to adoptive parents, mostly in the United States.

Through his previous work, Martin has contacts in the United States. He learns that Philomena’s son had been adopted by Doc and Marge Hess, who renamed him Michael Hess. He grew up to be a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration. He was also gay, and closeted because the Republican Party was “rabidly homophobic,” according to one character. He had died nine years earlier of AIDS.

Philomena had longed to know if her son ever thought of her, and it looks like she’ll never know. They eventually locate Michael's most serious boyfriend, however, and he tells them Michael is buried in the convent’s cemetery back in Ireland.

Throughout their search, Martin’s knowing, secular, unsociable self contrasts with Philomena’s naïve, Catholic, gregarious sensibility. On several occasions they have discussions about religion, and Philomena, the one most hurt by the church, is more at peace than Martin. This comes to a head in a climactic scene.

The screenplay, Dench’s typically fine acting and Frears’ direction make this a fine film that avoids sentimentality and steers clear of preaching a certain message. And its handling of religion is remarkably evenhanded.

Experiencing God is hard work

Surveys show that Americans are into the supernatural. Some would say obsessed. According to a 2011 Associated Press poll, 80 percent of Americans believed in angels—even 40 percent of those who never went to church. A 2009 poll from the Pew Research Center reported that 20 percent of Americans experienced ghosts, and 1 in 7 had consulted a psychic. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans believed in something paranormal and that 40 percent said that houses could be haunted.

In an article published on Oct.14, 2013, in the New York Times, T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, surveys some studies of this phenomenon.

Some scholars, she writes, believe these date show that belief in the supernatural is hard-wired. She refers to anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought, and psychologist Justin L. Barrett, author of Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, who argue that the fear that one would be eaten by a lion or killed by a man who wanted your stuff shaped the way our minds evolved. 

“Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were more likely to survive if they interpreted ambiguous noise as the sound of a predator,” Luhrmann writes. “Most of the time it was the wind, of course, but if there really was danger, the people who worried about it were more likely to live.”

The thinking here is that the search for an agent evolved into an intuition that an invisible agent, or god, may be there. Luhrmann notes that this theory can be argued from different theological positions. Boyer is an atheist and treats religion as a mistake. Barrett is an evangelical Christian who thinks God’s hand steered evolution.

Luhrmann argues, however, that intuition and sober faith are two different things. She asks us to consider how some people attempt to make what can only be imagined feel real. “They do this by trying to create thought-forms, or imagined creatures, called tulpas,” she writes. “Their human creators are trying to imagine so vividly that the tulpas start to seem as if they can speak and act on their own.”

That term, she explains, comes from the explorer Alexandra David-Néel, who wrote that Tibetan monks created tulpas as a spiritual discipline during intense meditation. Tulpa practice has now become popular, with dozens of sites on the Internet with instructions on creating one.

Luhrmann describes how these work. She interviewed a young man who set aside an hour and a half each day for this. “He’d spend the first 40 minutes or so relaxing and clearing his mind. Then he visualized a fox (he liked foxes). After four weeks, he started to feel the fox’s presence and to have feelings he thought were the fox’s.”

Later, he stopped spending all that time meditating, and the fox went away. Luhrmann concludes that “experiencing an invisible companion as truly present—especially as an adult—takes work: constant concentration, a state that resembles prayer.”

“This very difficulty may be why evangelical churches emphasize a personal, intimate God,” she writes, and why “churches that rely on a relatively impersonal God (like mainstream Protestant denominations) have seen their congregations dwindle over the last 50 years.”

This will not surprise those familiar the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism, which delves into the work of contemplation, paradoxical as that sounds.

Luhrmann ends her essay thus: “Secular liberals sometimes take evolutionary psychology to mean that believing in God is the lazy option. But many churchgoers will tell you that keeping God real is what’s hard.”