Kevin Smith is a filmmaker behind alt-90s cult hits like Clerks, Dogma, Mallrats and Chasing Amy. He’s also a huge comic book aficionado (he’s written Daredevil for Marvel Comics and Green Arrow for DC Comics, among others), keenly interested in religion.
So maybe it’s no surprise that he found a way to synthesize all his interests into a single take, but who could have anticipated this doozy?
Religions have been founded on the Bible, resulting in millions of people deriving inspiration and moral strength from amazing stories about fantastic feats of faith. Hundreds of years from now, our descendants will find divine inspiration from the story of Cap wielding Mjolnir. pic.twitter.com/UUBY1cYcym
— KevinSmith (@ThatKevinSmith) February 19, 2020
So, Smith reasons that in the same way Bible stories have inspired millennia of people towards “moral strength”, Captain America will give future generations “divine inspiration”. Specifically, Smith references a scene near the climax of Avengers: Endgame, in which Captain America finally proves that he is worthy to wield Thor’s mystical hammer. Let’s watch that scene.
Well, not exactly biblical maybe, but definitely a cool scene.
From a certain perspective, Smith’s take makes some sense. If the Bible is no more than a collection of folklore than it’s not so different from modern movies. It’s a little hard to see future generations revering the Marvel movies as divinely inspired per se (although, given Disney’s rapid expansion, you never know) but it’s doubtless true that these movies will live on for the enjoyment of future generations in some form or another.
But most Christians see the Bible as something profoundly grander than a series of old tales. If the Bible is a divine source of truth than movies like Endgame are only inspiring insofar as they’re reflections of the real thing.
