This country (America) has always
had a soft spot for rebels, which by definition are law-breakers. As I love
pointing out, this nation started out by telling the Mother Country “You can’t
tell US what to do!!!” Our founding document is the Declaration of Independence. When each of the signers
of the Declaration pledged their “lives, [their] fortunes, and [their] sacred
honor,” they weren’t kidding around. They knew quite well that they were openly
committing high treason against the Crown, and they also knew that if they were
captured they had a date with the hangman’s noose. They called themselves “Patriots,”
but to the British, we were “rebels.”
So when someone is an outlaw on the
run from legal authority, we have an instinctive sympathy towards them. It’s in our
blood. We also have an instinctive distrust of government, which is pretty rare
in other societies and cultures. When a government authority tells someone to
do something, often our first instinct is to side with the “little guy” over
the authority.
There’s certainly precedent for siding against
legal authority in Scripture. The Apostles were specifically ordered by the
religious authorities to stop preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus, and
their response was
“We must obey God rather than human beings!” David, whom I consider to be the
greatest king of the O.T., was a fugitive from King Saul, an egregious example
of authority gone bad. Moses was breaking Egyptian law by confronting Pharaoh
and relaying God’s order to let the Hebrews go. Often the O.T. prophets defied
government authority by publicly proclaiming what the Lord had told them to
proclaim.
But of course in each of these
instances, the rebellious and outlaw hero was disobeying human authority because he was obeying a higher Authority. He wasn’t disobeying the law for his own personal
gain; in fact, often he would’ve been better off if he’d just meekly submitted
(with the obvious exception of David). He was disobeying human law only because God’s
law claimed a higher loyalty.
We can debate whether or not the American
Revolution was biblically justified or not in proclaiming independence from the
British Empire. Romans
13:1-7 on its face seems to be pretty damning, but I’ve heard some
justification for it which I won’t go into right now. The point is that even they claimed, rightly or wrongly, that
they were being loyal to the Highest Authority by being disloyal to the British
government. That’s why the first sentence of the Declaration says “We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and the last sentence proclaims that
they’re doing this “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”
Why am I getting into all this?
Well, believe it or not, I do have a point. I think that the American
instinctual sympathy for lawbreakers has gone off the rails at times, as seen
in our popular culture. People who openly flout the 8th
Commandment are routinely glorified in our popular culture, and they’re
certainly not breaking the law in obedience to any higher law except maybe the principle
of “I really want what that guy has.”
Think about some of our national
icons: Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James, John Dillinger, D.B.
Cooper, and similar figures. What do all these people have in common? They were all outlaws who made
their living stealing stuff that didn’t belong to them, and they were
considered heroes and captured the popular imagination in books, TV shows, and
movies.
For this
next point I really have to give credit to Jonah Goldberg. At a time when the latest
Pirates of the Caribbean movie came
out, he mentioned in passing in one of his columns that he’s not a big fan of
pirate movies. Basically his main criticism is that they tend to whitewash
piracy and pirates. Well, duh: It’s a pirate
movie, so naturally pirates are going to probably be the protagonists.
But his
offhand comment got me thinking about this. What do pirates do? Well, by
definition, they steal stuff that doesn’t belong to them. In real life, they
tend not to be dashing and noble-hearted like Jack Sparrow. They tend to be
murderous thugs. They prey on ships and boats which aren’t well-defended, board
them, and then usually murder all the men outright. Depending on your point of
view, the women on board who survive are either more lucky or less lucky, since
they’re likely to be raped and shipped off to sexual slavery. The pirates steal
the cargo which they want and sink the boat, or they haul the boat somewhere
else to sell it.
That’s what
they do. They don’t contribute to an economy. The Free Market System, remember,
is defined as people voluntarily making exchanges for mutual benefit without
force, fraud, or theft. Pirates make themselves wealthy by contributing nothing but misery and death to the
public at large.
Yes, I’m
aware that historically nations have sometimes used pirates in warfare against
other countries. But that was a special case of warfare conducted by governments, which was either justified or
not. That’s very different from a gang of thugs who’ve taken it upon themselves
to steal and frequently murder innocent people on the oceans. One might (or might not) be justified under certain circumstances because it's a method of warfare agaisnt another nation, while the other is definitely not.
And how
about burglars and car thieves? How many movies are made in which the
protagonist is—when it’s all said and done—a thief? They tend to be professional thieves; in other words, they
make a living by stealing stuff that doesn’t belong to them. Now, I’m well
aware that the biblical viewpoint is that people are infinitely more valuable
than things. Every individual person is made in God’s image, and murder is the
worst crime you can commit against another human being. It’s the only crime for
which there’s a death penalty in each of the five books of the Torah. I don’t
believe that every sin is equally heinous, and murder is much worse than any
kind of theft. However. . . as I
pointed out before, the prohibition against stealing is listed in God’s Top Ten
List, right after adultery, so obviously the Lord considers this pretty
important.
But
according to a lot of TV shows and movies, we’re supposed to be really
impressed by a burglar’s morals if he only steals stuff and never kills anyone.
I remember
watching The
Thomas Crown Affair with Pierce Brosnan. He’s a professional art thief,
supposedly the best he is at what he does. We’re supposed to respect his
cunning, superb planning, and witty banter. And it’s absolutely true that he’s
extremely charming (because, duh, Pierce Brosman). But one thing I distinctly remember from the film is a scene at
the end when the police officer in charge of protecting the targeted painting
and catching Crown gives up in his assigned duty. He expresses that he’d much
rather be catching “real” criminals instead of having to care about catching thieves
who’re stealing expensive artwork from rich guys. The point of the movie is to get you feeling sympathetic for a guy who
makes a living stealing stuff that doesn’t belong to him.
Here are just
a few other examples:
Ocean’s 11 (and
all its sequels)
The Italian Job
Reservoir Dogs
The Usual Suspects
The Bank Job
A Fish Called Wanda
Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels
Inception
and that favorite of a lot of people : Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
And those are just the ones I found after searching on Wikipedia for "heist film."
Look, am I
saying you can’t appreciate the cinematic expertise of a movie that glorifies burglars,
pirates, and other thieves? I guess not. But we need to keep in mind that there is a worldview behind these
productions, and it’s not in line with what the Bible teaches. When it
comes to other types of movies, I can at least recognize when a sympathetic character
is doing something the Bible condemns, like foul language or sex outside of
marriage. But I think the pro-theft message in much of American popular culture
is a lot sneakier. We can debate whether or not it’s appropriate for a
Christian to see movies or TV shows in which sin is glorified, but at the very
very very
least, we can agree that we need to train ourselves to recognize an
anti-biblical worldview when we see it.
And if I’ve
ruined the eighteenth sequel of Pirates
of the Caribbean for you, well I’m really really sorry about that (not
really).
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