Why Angels and Demons Will Shake Up Hollywood's Attitude Toward Religion

Ron Howard's new adaptation of the Dan Brown book Angels and Demons represents a breakthrough in Hollywood's approach toward religion, taking the discussions of faith away from the extremes of proselytizing and rejection to the middle ground. That is where most believers are, and that is where great storytelling takes place. And Angels and Demons is great storytelling.

As a practicing Muslim working inside Hollywood, I have often felt that there is a tangible bias in the entertainment industry, not just against my own religion, but against people of faith in general. Too often, I have seen important film and television projects that look at religious faith in a sophisticated way disappear into a black hole within the system. The excuse used by many traditional Hollywood types, that religion is just too controversial a matter to deal with in cinema, has always rung false.

Indeed, the great moguls who founded Hollywood knew that the majority of their audience consisted of devout believers, and being smart businessmen, they catered to religious ticket buyers with majestic films like The Robe and The Ten Commandments. Indeed, it is the latter film, Cecile B. DeMille's epic on Moses, which has exerted profound personal influence on me both as a believer and as a filmmaker. The Ten Commandments was the first movie I ever saw after I emigrated from Pakistan to the United States at the age of three.

Watching that film on our newly acquired television set in our tiny apartment in Queens, I was taken away to a magical dimension. A world where God spoke to men through a burning bush and a pillar of fire, where a shepherd's staff could transform into a snake and the Nile could turn red with blood, a world where an evil Pharaoh could be humbled by a simple prophet emerging from the desert. I remembered turning to my father as the end credits rolled, my heart pounding with wonder, and asking him a question that would begin my personal journey of faith.

"What is God?"

Over the years, I have heard many answers to that question, but none that has yet to satisfy me more than the one my father gave me that night after we watched the movie.

"God is the light of the universe. What Moses saw was just one ray of that light."

His perspective has stayed with me over the years, and has allowed me to approach both my craft as a filmmaker and novelist, as well as my social interactions as a human being, with a sense of humility. The Ten Commandments taught me that God is everywhere, and His voice can be heard at any time, from any source. Whether it is through a bush burning in the desert, or from the mouth of someone from another culture, even another religion, God's voice is always echoing around us, if we only choose to hear.

Yet faith, as any true believer will admit, is hard. We are imperfect people living in a broken world trying to make sense of it all, and it is often hard to reconcile what our hearts tell us about the spiritual beauty of God and what our senses tell us about the evils and suffering of creation. Faith at its best is our shelter during the storms of life, our sturdy ship to guide us through the turbulent seas of the human experience. But at its worst, it can be used as a tool to control and oppress others, to spread suffering instead of love in this world. Any believer who is sincere must confront daily the contradictions that come with belief and somehow synthesize these opposing realities in a way that makes sense to the heart, even if it cannot be grasped by reason. To trust that there is purpose and meaning in this cosmos, despite the onslaught of evidence to the contrary. Maybe that is why it is called "faith" in the first place.

Angels and Demons is the first Hollywood movie in a long time that really looks at what it means to be a believer, and the extremes that can be found among people who look to faith for guidance. Without revealing the film's secrets, I think it is safe to say that it is a movie that examines whether science and religion are incompatible, and explores the dark actions that people take when they conclude that one of these disciplines threatens the other.

While some conservative Catholics might find the film's portrayal of the secret dealings inside the Vatican offensive, I think most people, Christian or otherwise, will appreciate its very human picture of characters who are motivated by faith and committed to struggling with "demons," both in others and within themselves. It is this presentation of raw, imperfect human beings struggling with faith that I appreciated most, as I face these battles within myself every day as a believer.

Indeed, when I wrote my novel, Mother of the Believers, I found myself naturally examining these conflicts in the context of the birth of Islam. My book, which follows the rise of Islam from the perspective of Aisha, Prophet Muhammad's wife, portrays the early Muslim community as consisting of very complex, passionate and, at times, flawed individuals. People who most overcome their own inner demons to do good, and when they sometimes fail, who repent and return to the "straight path," as sincere faith is called in the Qur'an.

What I hope my novel accomplished, and what I know Angels and Demons did, is to take the discussion of religion out of the hands of extremists with an agenda. That agenda could be the desire to proselytize others and convince them of the truth of a religion, or to go to other extreme, which is to mock believers as simpletons who couple faith in God with a conviction that the earth is flat and that babies come from storks.

To my sorrow, many of my colleagues in Hollywood share the latter agenda. People of faith have complained for years, with real justification, that Hollywood promotes an anti-religion outlook. Bill Maher's recent documentary Religulous went out of its way to find the wackiest, craziest believers in the world and then mock them. And Hollywood studios continue to resist making movies that would appeal to believers. Long before there was any controversy over Mel Gibson's beliefs, his idea about doing a film on the Crucifixion in Aramaic was mocked by studio executives, who could not understand why such a film might appeal to millions of Christians.

While one can certainly take Mr. Gibson to task for some of his words and actions, the movie is a powerful and compelling work of cinema that even a non-Christian like myself can appreciate. At its core, it is a film about the central Christian story of the Messiah's tragic sacrifice for mankind. How could that not be a blockbuster? And yet many people I knew in the industry flew into an outraged frenzy when The Passion of the Christ became a huge global hit. It was as if the demonstrated power of traditional religious audiences was a personal insult to the worldview of many Hollywood players, who, in my experience, usually worship only one god - money.

This prejudice against faith inside Hollywood makes Angels and Demons an even greater accomplishment. Ron Howard's movie is important not only because it treats religious faith with respect, but because it actually explores the central issue that is important to many believers today - how to reconcile ancient religious beliefs with the modern discoveries of science. Contrary to the prejudices of anti-religion writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the majority of faithful people are not living in a delusional world, their eyes and ears closed to science and discovery. In Angels and Demons, one of the most important scientists involved in cutting edge physics research happens to be a Catholic priest. For that character, the quest to understand the fabric of the universe through the lens of quantum science is very much a religious quest to pierce the veil and see at last the Face of God.

As several characters in the film point out, religion and science are methodologies to come to understand the truth of the cosmos. They do not need to be antithetical to each other. In fact, they can and should be complementary human endeavors to understand this remarkable universe in which we find ourselves.

And this is by no means a radical new perspective among believers. As the film points out, Galileo saw himself as a devout man seeking to understand God's creation. Isaac Newton also found no contradiction between faith and science and believed the existence of God was self-evident. It was simply his role as a scientist to better understand the work of the Creator. God was the cosmic clockmaker and scientists were merely examining the delicate inner workings of His design.

And in the modern world, with the strange and inexplicable discoveries of quantum physics, scientific treatises on the nature of reality sound remarkably like ancient mystical writings. The more we learn about the shocking contradictions and improbable mechanics of the subatomic world, the more it appears that the universe is less like Newton's giant clock and more like one giant dream, imagined from within an implicate order that transcends human reason. Such a vision would be familiar to the Sufis of Islam, along with their counterparts among Buddhist masters, Kabbalists and Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart.

And it is not only the scientists that are beginning to realize that something truly magical serves as the foundation of reality. Believers are beginning to see in the wondrous scientific order of the universe the evidence of the Divine in action. In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Francis S. Collins explains why the discoveries of modern science only confirmed his personal faith as a Christian. Mr. Collins is no backwoods preacher - he is a pioneering medical geneticist who once led the Human Genome Project.

A similar effort to unite faith and science has long been under way in my own faith, Islam. In my novel, I discuss how Islam was founded on a hunger for knowledge. Prophet Muhammad said: "Seek knowledge, even if you must go to China." And his words inspired Muslims to become the world's greatest scientists at a time when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. In Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists, Michael Hamilton Morgan demonstrates how Muslim scientists in the Middle Ages made incredible advances in every field of study, from astronomy to medicine to mathematics.

In the modern world, there has been a popular effort among Muslim writers to present Islam's scripture, the Qur'an, as completely compatible with the discoveries of modern science. A bestselling book in the Muslim world, The Bible, The Qur'an, and Science, by a French physician Maurice Bucaille, argues that the Qur'anic verses describing everything from the expansion of the universe to the intricate details of embryonic growth inside the womb are in absolute alignment with modern scientific theories.

Of course, non-believers will be skeptical of such claims, but the point is not whether Mr. Bucaille's reading of the Qur'an is correct. What matters is that his theories are now commonplace among Muslims, so that believers do not find modern scientific discoveries to be in any way threatening to their faith. In fact, because of this widespread interpretation of the Qur'an, many Muslims find confirmation of their faith through the discoveries of modern science. The painful Christian debate over the primacy of faith versus science that is portrayed in Angels and Demons is simply not happening in the Muslim world, as there is already a consensus that there can never be any contradiction between the two.

But even if one is unconvinced that any ancient scripture can remain unchallenged by the discoveries of modern science, it is important to note that the purpose of scripture is not, in fact, to serve as a scientific textbook. The purpose of any holy text that has survived the centuries is to provide moral and ethical guidance to human beings. That is true of the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddhist Sutras. These texts are meant to help us as human beings live in this world and make sense of our lives. They survive because they work.

A Christian friend of mine once asked how I reconciled the story of Adam and Eve in the Qur'an with the scientific consensus on evolution. I smiled and said to him that I didn't bother. It's like comparing apples and musical notes. The scientific theory and the scriptural story serve totally different purposes.

Science is about how. Religion is about why.

Scientists examine the fossil record and come to an understanding of what it means for the history of life on our planet. But the scriptural story of creation is not about history - it is about values. As a believer, the story of Adam and Eve teaches me everything I need to know about what it means to be human. We are all children of Adam, whose name simply means "dust" in Hebrew and Arabic. We are children of this earth. Human beings are brothers and sisters, all part of one family. Like our archetypal father figure, we can make mistakes, we can sin, and we can also repent and find forgiveness. That is the lesson of the story in both the Bible and the Qur'an. Whether it describes a historical event is absolutely pointless and irrelevant.

Science can tell me how I got here as a human being, but it cannot tell me what I am supposed to do now. Indeed science without a spiritual connection can be used to create great evil, as the Nazis proved with their eugenics experiments. The Nazis believed in the methodology of science, but they did not believe in the simple lesson derived from faith - that human life is sacred. The ancient stories and rituals of our religions are meant to help us learn profound spiritual truths that cannot be deduced by examining cells under a microscope. It is that power of wise storytelling that is religion's purpose and gift to humanity.

Cecil B. DeMille understood that. He knew that the power of the Bible lay in its stories, and he turned those stories into incredibly moving, epic films. These ancient tales about good versus evil, the power of love and forgiveness, and the triumph of the weak over the proud, are timeless and have meaning for every generation. It is a kind of storytelling that Hollywood has sadly forgotten.

But perhaps with Angels and Demons, Hollywood can start moving away from the extremes of materialism and cynicism toward the spiritual center where the audience eagerly awaits. And then maybe we filmmakers might be able to play a more profound role as storytellers that help human beings make sense of this truly majestic cosmos.

Kamran Pasha is a Hollywood filmmaker and the author of Mother of the Believers, a novel on the birth of Islam as told by Prophet Muhammad's wife Aisha (Atria Books; April 2009). For more information please visit: http://www.kamranpasha.com

 

 

Follow Kamran Pasha on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kamranpasha

Comments

[HeevenSteven]

Reply to Zanti: Posted 06:40 PM on 05/20/2009

It's all about being hip and trendy? People aren't capable of seeing ancient myth for what it is? Satire and art are often effective in making society view thing differently. Americans seriously need to view things differently, so maybe here's where we start.

I personally reject duality, afterlife, and the Uber-mind. I didn't start out this way; I was raised by believers and indoctrinated by the Catholic juggernaut, but I'm out of the matrix now, and there's no going back.

I think it's time for a new way to view spirituality. In fact "spiritual but not religious" is the fastest growing believer demographic. the author of this blog may be half-way there if not there already, and so are you; you're just afraid to let go of the old stuff.

I understand how important spirituality is to people, and I accept human nature for what it is. I think D.S. Wilson and others are correct that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. I've read his books. I've read Jonathan Hadt, Karen Armstrong (5 of her books) and many others.

I accept that we'll never be rid of spirituality; but hopefully we can have less dogma. You should be fighting that crap, not non-believers.

I

[HeevenSteven]

Regardless of how you think think Hollywood presents belief, non-believers are the most maligned and disrespected group in the world, not moderate believers.

[Zanti]

Name a mainstream TV show, movie, or rock song that ridicules non-believers.

[Zofomofo]

Maybe that ought to tell you something about it?

Besides, I'll trade you 3 mainstream songs for 1 piece of legislation or election anyday.

How would one ridicule a non-believer anyway? Turn on any religious channel or go to any corner church and witness the exclusionary teachings of them all, I suppose.

Which teachings do you subscribe to or do you just make up your own version of a religion?

[HeevenSteven]

How 'bout the "Left Behind" series, some of the best selling books in the country; also made into movies. Get born again or die horribly, eh?

[harrync]

Is SouthPark [of Comedy Central] mainstream enough? I think there are at least two episodes that mock atheists.

[ArtsyJane]

I couldn’t read your whole article- too long. But I think I got the point – science is about how, religion is about why, and they can coexist in the middle ground where there are no extremes.

I completely disagree. Comparing science and religion is a specifically American obsession; in no other developed country does this happen.

First off, religious extremism is one of the most dangerous fixations there is right now in the world and you compare it to what exactly… “Atheist” extremism? Scientific extremism? What does that even mean? Putting those two concepts on the same scale is quite unconscionable and fails to recognize the perils of religious extremism as a unique, one of a kind feature.

Science and religion belong to two completely different realms of life, which are not even analogous in nature much less in substance.

Science is objective. The object of science exists regardless of us, humans; we barely study and try and understand it. That’s all we can do. It's exogenous and identical for all things. Universal.

Religion is subjective. Even though it organises itself in institutions and presents itself as objective and universal, it's a human product and a personal choice.

Existential void is part of being human. Finding the spiritual strenght to address it depends on the individual. Faith is one way (there are many others) and it could be interesting to study it in the light of just that – as a human activity, designed to address a specific need.

[Kamran Pasha - Huffpost Blogger]

I believe that you should ask people who have suffered under the repression of atheist Communist political regimes over the past century whether "atheist extremism" was a pleasant experience. Or the Dalai Lama about how China's attitude toward religion has helped the people of Tibet. Or the victims of Nazi experimentation as to where science without spirituality can lead.

As for science being "objective," perhaps you should study quantum physics. Even a basic understanding of ideas such as the "observer effect" on sub-atomic particles, will shake up your faith that science has all the answers. "Objective" Newtonian physics has been proven to be a surface understanding of the cosmos. At the deepest levels of sub-atomic reality, objective reason vanishes in a cloud of contradictions and probability curves.

We are living in a participatory cosmos, where our subjective experiences have a direct impact on "objective" reality -- exactly what the mystics of religions have said for centuries.

[ArtsyJane]

Both your examples are anti-Democratic, totalitarian regimes, where repression and prosecution vastly applied; it makes no sense to single out atheism, secularism or science as their main objects. They weren’t.

Communism was first and foremost a socio-economic and a political doctrine (transfer of means of production, abolishment of private property and market economy, suppression of the 4th power, etc). Relation to religion was variable according to each country and its particular interpretation of Marxism. It wasn’t the main prerogative. I’m from Eastern Europe, I’ve lived it.

Anyway, Communism is bygones. Religious extremism is flourishing. Worse, it has been for millennia.

Nazism was a political and a racial ideology, not a scientific one. It was nationalism, white supremacy and Fascism combined. It used, among tens of other means, science (rather pseudo-science) to establish itself. We do this- use science to achieve goals. Our goals are radical or not, not the science. Science is knowledge. There’s nothing extreme about knowledge.

Science is objective in that it uses an exogenous set of rules, which while open to some subjective interpretation, holds essentially an autonomous object. The object of science is independent from our consciousness. It is the act of science that is within our consciousness. Knowledge has limits, but not its object. These limits are constantly expanded, as is our ability to comprehend and interpret what we discover.

To say that science is “extreme” and put it on par with religious extremism is unconscionable and deluded. There’s no comparison.

[HeevenSteven]

Newtonian Physics is not and was never intended to be a complete description of the cosmos; and the problem with sub-atomic reality is that we don't completely understand it yet. Our models are not complete, so we have patches like the Uncertainty Principle; but even so, there is nothing unscientific about probability; so to say that objective reality vanishes within it is to seriously misunderstand it.

[Zofomofo]

Not only is your argument falaciious, it is delibrately mis-leading.

Does Iran, or the Holy Roman Empire ring a bell? The Atheist component has nothing to do with Russia's problems,.

Also, science does not require faith. Only in science will you find the honesty to correct and update based on new info, like "observer effects." So, don't use sciences' open minded approach against it to support a close mind dogma.

Besides, most atheists ARE tolerant of religion and do not propose limiting religious freedoms. Sure, no particular world view is free from it's extremists and other corrupt humans, but that is a distraction from the topic frankly.

[bugsbonzai]

The problem that I have with your analysis of Angels and Demons is simple. You seem to have completely missed how the movie does not treat science with the same respect you claim it treats religion. The anti-matter mumbo jumbo is utter nonsense from start to finish. It doesn’t explicate even a cursory understanding of the concepts and only manipulates the audience's own lack of scientific understanding for the purpose of creating a ticking time bomb for the plot. Science is much maligned in movies In fact, Hollywood has a deep, ingrained disdain for scientific explanation of anything. Movies are riddled with ghosts and goblins, supernatural activities, fantasy worlds, etc. The bad guys are often scientists drunk on power and the characters who suffer in the end are usually the ones who just didn’t “believe” in whatever nonsense required "faith". Even the popular science fiction that comes out doesn’t respect even the most fundamental understandings of the physical world as described by science. See the recent Star Trek treatment of black holes as an example of that. Utter nonsense; Stephen Hawking is swearing in his robotic voice. Science is often an excuse for the macguffin, but rarely given any real thought whatsoever. So please spare me the myopic meanderings on faith and reason. You obviously haven’t done your homework.

[Zanti]

"As a practicing Muslim working inside Hollywood, I have often felt that there is a tangible bias in the entertainment industry, not just against my own religion, but against people of faith in general."

"Tangible bias" is putting it very mildly! And, tragically, too many people derive (well, copy) their view of religion and the religious from entertainment. The left is very guilty of placing way too much importance and faith in that industry--one of our main failings.

Secular worship centers on entertainment (esp. movies), data (polls are God), and drinking. Criticize any of those three sacred institutions, and watch the mouths foam!

Thanks for the thoughtful piece. How did you manage to post it here at Sam Harris/Bill Maher Central?

[bubbesattva]

Too bad more people don't understand the point you make about religion & science being complementary, in that one explains how and the other explains why. I completely agree with you on the need for both to expand our knowledge of the universe. I know the Hindu outlook does well in this reconciliation, being logical enough to know how to separate the two viewpoints on the world but accept both as necessary and valid.

The one thing that bothers me is when people go to far in their attempt to reconcile science & religion & end up twisting both science & religion in order to promote the idea that Biblical stories are perfectly historically accurate i.e. The Creation Museum, in which the curators depict humans frolicking happily with dinosaurs, Flinstones-style. The cognitive dissonance does no justice to either discipline and just serves to make those people look foolish to both sides of the argument, save for a few fervent literalists.

Humans need both the tangible & the spiritual methods of examining existence, and there's no benefit to ignoring them.

[nivram9]

Brilliantly written! Kamran Pasha describes very eloquently a landscape which embraces and makes sense of the major religions and their juxtaposition with modern science.
And the wise words of his father, that God is the light of the universe and that what Moses saw was just one ray of that light, immediately resonate within as the most logical answer to the age-old question.

[ScienceLady]

I don't like how religion uses dogma and miracles and other supernatural thinking. I don't know why we are here, but to believe something just to fill in the empty space is desparate and false. And to have your God, or anyone elses, tell me how to act is absurd. You have no evidence for your God's existence or that the bible or koran is the word of God. The ancient scripts may have some good parables to live by, but they have some bad ones too. And who's authority is it to determine which parts of the bible or koran is relevent? Anyone (think George Bush) can say, "God told me...", and justify almost anything. Including killing a non-believer.

Religionists don't have the humility of admitting that they don't know.

[Gregorio]

Wonderful commentary. It seems to me that A & D does a great job with the idea that both faith and science are belief systems--in this plot of course made manifest in their more extreme forms--both capable of motivating "true believers" to act in extreme ways to defend those beliefs. Literalism and concrete thinking are the hallmarks of these extremes, as the bumper sticker would say, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." Or perhaps from the other side, "The data is solid. Its been heavily replicated. If its not measurable its non-sense.­" My belief system is that ALL human belief systems should be held in tension with one simple truth of our day, that we inhabit a tiny piece of real estate in a universe beyond our comprehension, thinking we "know" this or that, when we should have deep humility and an open mind to the vast unknown that is our Cosmos. THANK YOU for your thoughtfulness.