Greek mythology makes it clear that the great god Zeus loved to party.
Such wild things happened when the Norse demigod Thor and a group of superheroes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) entered Omnipotence City in “Thor: Love and Thunder.” The Greek gods are in force, with Zeus serving as king, but so were many other deities from other cultures.
Valkyrie, the queen of New Asgard, noted, while taking roll, the off-screen presence of another deity: the “God of Carpentry”.
Inquiring minds want to know if, to quote WhatCulture.com, the director of the film, Taika Waititi, had “confirmed the real existence of Jesus in the MCU? … Without showing Jesus, Waititi has plausible deniability: Valkyrie could have been talking about the Greek god of carpenters Hephaestus, or even Lu-Ban, the god of carpentry from Chinese mythology.”
The cosmology of Marvel superhero movies has become so complex that it’s hard to know precisely what’s being said, said Thom Parham, a screenwriter who teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University. In the beginning, superheroes were simply aliens instead of gods or demi-gods.
“But now we have sub-deities. They want to have their cake and eat it too,” Parham said, after returning from Comic-Con 2022 in San Diego. “We have gods and we have demigods. We have Greek gods and we have Egyptian gods. We have the Eternals and we have the Celestials.”
When Parham heard the reference to the “God of Carpentry”, he felt that “a dangerous line had been crossed. … What are they saying? I don’t think they know yet.
With “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” set to premiere in November, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will hit 30 movies and a dozen or more sequels are planned. The franchise has grossed $27 billion at the worldwide box office.
In terms of religious messages, the MCU has come a long way since Captain America, after hearing Loki described as a god, said, “There’s only one God…and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” . The New Rockstars YouTube channel featured over 50 gods on “Thor: Love and Thunder” alone.
It’s almost impossible to ignore the role this franchise plays in popular culture around the world, said film critic Steven Greydanus of DecentFilms.com, who is an ordained Catholic deacon. Some religious leaders continue to seek out MCU themes that “connect in some way to the Bible, divine revelation, and Christian thought.” Others have decided that this is a “giant, worthless wasteland” and that believers should enter the megaplexes “with our knives drawn.”
It’s easier to make these kinds of decisions when it comes to works of art, such as “The Lord of the Rings” or “Harry Potter,” based on a single author’s worldview, he said.
But Marvel movies and TV series are created by dozens of artists hired by corporate executives targeting China, Russia, the Middle East and theaters everywhere. Therefore, they have been “scrubbed” until “these characters tend not to believe anything or defend anything,” Greydanus said. But it’s hard to avoid religion when creating mythologies that include creation, miracles, superpowers, healing, eternal life, and clashes between good and evil.
In a Catholic World Report essay titled “Love and thunder, mean nothing? Religion and Nihilism in Recent Marvel Movies,” Greydanus asked this moral question: “What…is the basis for reward and punishment in the various MCU afterlives (or whatever ultimate reality lies behind of diverse cultural perceptions of the afterlife)? We are told that there are conditions to reach Valhalla or the Egyptian Field of Reeds; What is the basis of these conditions?”
In the new “Thor” movie, a character named Eternity, a god above all other gods, grants a wish to the first being to reach it. This desire can be for better or for worse.
“He is a kind of unique God. It’s hard to build a religious worldview around that kind of idea,” Greydanus said. Meanwhile, the Marvel universe continues to grow and get more complicated, and “every movie has to use a bigger canvas, on a bigger scale, with even bigger mysteries to unravel.
“The more you try to tell us about all the mysteries of this universe, the less room there is for us to look for some sign of God or some source of ultimate truth. … It’s hard not to wonder, ‘Who created this cinematic Mount Olympus? Who is in charge?’ ”
(Terry Mattingly directs GetReligion.org and lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is a senior fellow at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi.)