Tag Archives: mcu

cultural, from the Internet

Religion in the MCU Diegesis

In a fun but intriguing bit of a mental exercise, Fandom’s Lon Harris asks, if the events of Marvel Cinetmatic Universe films happened in real life, how might they affect faith and religion? It’s a question we at Sacred and Sequential have asked many times of the comics’ diegeses and storyworlds, so it’s a worthwhile scenario to consider for the film characters.

Harris speaks with Marvel Editor Tom Breevort “specifically, in a 2005 interview with the “:

Breevort explained that, in his mind, characters in the Marvel universe have a separate mental category for superheroes, independent from regular mortals or gods.

“For the average person in the Marvel universe,” Breevort explained, “they look at Thor and they say he is a superhero. He is no different than a Mr. Fantastic or Spider-Man or Cyclops; his get-up, his shtick, his whatever, is based on the mythological god of thunder. But I do not believe that most people in the Marvel universe actually believe he is the bona fide article.”

So denial — or, at least, lack of awareness — keep influence of religious institutions at bay. Eventually, though, “[e]very expert I spoke with — Christian or otherwise — felt that American evangelical Christianity would face the toughest challenges from the events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

from the Internet

Next Up for Superheroes: Religion?

Photo by RedZero44 on DeviantArt
Outside the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con

South Asia’s Madras Courier offered a novel op-ed this January from multi-hyphenate Tejaswy Nandury, which argues that the next evolution of comic book superheroes is into religion.

This thought may seem absurd to short term thinkers. If you, like me, are a long term strategist, you will instantly grasp this notion. Marvel already has the mythology, and the mass following, required to scale it up as a global religious operation. It just needs to add some necessary elements to give the MCU a religious gravitas.

Nandury seems to be thinking of the global and multicultural reach of Marvel Entertainment’s films, but he does acknowledge that the leap from page to screen was already the first step in this trajectory. More specifically, he feels that this “source material” that prizes science and liberal philosophy, not to mention capitalism, in its main ethos. This “scientific religion” can base its home and rituals in San Diego’s Comic-Con International, “just as Christmas evolved out of a pagan Roman festival.”

As quirky as Nandury’s idea might be, the only part of it that is actually erroneous is his thinking on its soteriology: Marvel’s comics and films already has a mess of options concerning “salvation” (some of which were explored in this episode of the Vox Populorum podcast, incidentally). However outlandish Nandury’s proposal might be, it’s only this element of it that would need of revision, serious or otherwise.