Last week, I went to see a movie, the new Alex Garland film Civil War, starring Kirsten Dunst1. Folks have asked me, “what’s this about?”
Civil War is a dystopian thriller about four journalists traveling from New York to Washington D.C. to interview the President toward the end of an American Civil War.
Here’s the trick: It takes place sometime in America’s near future. What’s called the Western Front of Texas and California have succeeded and with a hand from Florida are at war with the United States. All we know is that the current President in the film is in his third term, he’s disbanded to FBI, and has used the military to violently target civilians.
That’s all Alex Garland is interested in telling you.
We are not told what caused this civil war. We don’t know if there were good reasons for the President’s actions. Lots of people in the movie have weapons. Strike that! Everyone in the movie has weapons, except these four journalists. Some are in plain clothes, others are in military fatigues. But no one has a flag attached to their uniform. So, we don’t know who is real military or who went to the Army surplus store.
We meet people along the way and have no idea which side they are on or who they are fighting for. We don’t know what in the world California and Texas could all agree on.
After screening it, I spent time reading and watching reviews of Civil War. Most of the reviewers I like and pay attention to really liked the movie. A few of them did not. What they didn’t like is that the film never tells you what the civil war is about. And because it didn’t pick sides of the issue — or even name any issue — they didn’t like it.
I won’t spoil it, cause it was just released and most folks haven’t seen it, but there is one scene where the characters are pinned down by a sniper and they come across two guys in uniform who are also pinned down. They asks the soldiers “what’s going on?”
The soldiers reply, “We are shooting at the guys who are shooting at us.”
That’s the most clarity movie goers get.
Later, there’s a scene when a man in uniform (Jesse Plemmons) threatens four journalists. They tell him, “We’re Americans.” He asks, “What kind of American?”
What’s so haunting about that scene is that we don’t know what side he’s on, but the answer to that question is going to determine whether they live or die.
Civil War is about what happens when community and connection and humanity become arbitrary or self-defined or based on the irrational definition of who is in and who is out.
It’s about polarization for polarization sake, when we dislike someone just because we don’t like them or have been taught to dislike them because they are not “our kind of American.”
It’s about what we think about people after being spiritually formed by cable news and talk radio. It is a meditation on who America is becoming.
Dallas Willard said that the gift we are to God is who we are becoming. C.S. Lewis suggested we examine our lives on an eternal timeline, that we should imagine who we become if we maintained our spiritual outlook and practices forever. For example, if you overspend your income or overeat everyday, who would you be in 10, 30, 50, or 1,000 years.
Alex Garland’s film suggests the amorphous, us-versus-them, violence as speech trajectory of our current moment will eventually lead to disintegration — an image burned into my mind during the movie as the Lincoln Memorial is destroyed. The message is simple, a culture must adapt, integrate, and harmonize their lives or ultimately be destroyed.
In my view, though many of the most vocal are the most distanced and distrustful of this truth, only the Christian religion is capable of ushering in this kind of harmony. Why? Because as Dallas Willard said, “Christianity is the only religion which exists for the benefits of its non-adherents.” Christian — if we were all better at following Jesus — exist to bless the world. Again, I get that many of the most public and vocal Christian are effectively anti-Christ, articulating a white, Nationalist Christianity which is divorced from everything we see Jesus and the Christian church doing in the New Testament.
Nevertheless, it requires the rest of us to serve as vessel of faith, hope, and love. And, no, there is no way to be vessels of faith, hope, and love without being used, taken advantage of, and potentially discarded. This is what happened to Jesus. We should expect this to happen to us. A sacrifice-free faith is an American expectation, not a historically Christian one. Autocracy and violence, on the other hand, are the inevitable results of expecting other people to pay the price for our beliefs.
The question is simple: What can you do today, in your workplace, school, church, home, and wherever your feet take you to bring harmony rather than discord?
That’s it. That’s what you need to do today. People of faith have to — and this will be costly — be committed to more than simply shooting at the people who are shooting at us. Someone has to live unarmed…if only to show it’s possible.