The Gospel Coalition Watched Dune: Part Two, and I Have Thoughts

True and false messiahs, true and false myths

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

I find it quite easy to read Dune as a Christian because I’ve literally never read Dune any other way. Often when I read texts I find myself drawn to themes that resonate as deeply true, which is a criterion that I necessarily think through as a Christian. These don’t have to be themes that were put there deliberately by a Christian. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro is a deeply challenging picture of marital love and guilt, which emerges when a man (who has for years been unfaithful to his wife) comes to find his wife is dying of dementia, does not remember him, and has fallen deeply for another man at her care facility. This story is not a fable or parable, and there is no moral of the story. It’s just a tale that raises deep, difficult questions that are, to me, some of the Big Questions of Christian life. How do we overcome the shame and guilt of the things we have done wrong? How do we live in the face of dying? How  do our relationships make us who we are? What does it mean to love your spouse?

And I feel the same about Dune. Dune is a story about living under extreme oppressive powers – monopolies, governments, and self-interested religious hierarchies. In the midst of this, highly motivated individuals chafe against and ultimately refuse to be controlled by them. Is this futile? Can these systems truly be overcome? Are we doomed to simply reinscribe them and grasp the wheel of power ourselves? Or does nothing replace these systems but chaos?

These are the questions that are at the heart of every character arc in Dune. Jessica defies her religious order and refuses to commit to their breeding program, instead having a son who she hopes can have miraculous powers – both to please herself (to have the Kwisatz Haderach, the man who can endure the prescient knowledge her order restricts to women) and to please the man she is in love with, who wants to have a son. Paul takes the title of Mahdi among the Fremen to destroy the imperial system that destroyed his family and threatens the survival of humanity. These are motivated decisions, but are they good decisions? What other options do they have? To allow the imperial system to continue to oppress the Fremen and drift towards the stagnation of humanity? Don’t we today look out at the world and see the same threat from tyranny? What are our options?

So with that in mind, I looked at the Gospel Coalition’s review of Dune: Part Two, which treats this as a religiously-skeptical, post-Christian text. And I was extremely puzzled. 

Parsing the Review

It’s a little hard to figure out exactly what McCracken’s problem with Dune: Part 2 is, or if he really has one. He calls the movie a post-Christian text, because of what he sees is its simultaneous attraction to, and revulsion of, religious stories. And he also sees the movie as an opportunity for Christians to point to a true messiah who resolves these tensions.

So on one hand, we have this:

I left the theater ready to exit that world—and especially grateful that this messiah story isn’t the messiah story.

Here, McCracken is happy to treat Dune: Part Two as a good movie, but wishing to emphasize that Paul is not Jesus. This is, to be fair, not the substance of the article, though it does sound a little silly. It’s a little too similar to a Jesus Juke (“Shai Hulud says he produces the Water of Life, but you know who’s the real living water? Turn with me in your Bibles to John 4,” etc.). More of a way to prevent conversations about Dune: Part 2 than it is a way to actually engage with the text of the film or book, really. Yes, most people will, in fact, leave the theater distinctly glad they don’t worship Paul; those who worship a different incarnate messiah will feel they have made a superior choice. This is more or less the experience the movie is begging you to have, though it does not deliberately point you to a different messiah. At this level of conversation, though, it is difficult to go further and deeper than singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

But on the other hand Brent McCracken seems to be experiencing Dune: Part Two as a volley in the culture war: 

Chani gives voice to the questions and doubts of a growing number of “nones” who see religious faith as a feel-good smoke screen for nefarious power grabs.

“You want to control people? Tell them a messiah will come,” she says at one point. “They’ll wait for centuries.”..it adopts a decidedly skeptical posture toward the religious enterprise. Is the messiah narrative of Christ—indeed, the entire New Testament—merely propaganda to inflame religious fervor and consolidate power among religious leaders? … It’s the familiar Marxist critique that religion is a means of social control, a narrative apparatus used by the hegemony to entrench its authority and subdue the restless masses (“the opium of the people”). But the critique gets a post-Christian, contemporary spin…whatever interest Villeneuve has in Christianity is clearly conflicted, as the Dune saga leads audiences to question “messiah” mythologies and be wary of religious narrative gatekeepers.

I admit it is hard to imagine Dune in any context emerging from a world where Christendom is dominant and culturally hegemonic to the point of uniform social control, but I think the fact that it can and has emerged is pretty clearly to everyone’s benefit, Christian or no. Yes, Dune is skeptical of the justice of political, social, and religious structures, presenting no part of its universe – be it commercial (CHOAM), governmental (the imperial/feudal system), or religious (the Bene Gesserits and the Fremen religion) as anything other than flawed at best and oppressive at worst. But frankly,  what media, outside of propaganda, isn’t at least a little critical of these systems? Even family-friendly crowd pleasers like The Sound of Music reserve some space for at least some skepticism of the human-created forces that control our lives. The convent Maria decides to leave isn’t good for literally everyone, even though the nuns in the show are kindly and even heroic at the conclusion (the laugh line of the nuns “sinning” when they sabotage a Nazi car is truly gold). The convent is not able to accommodate clearly-neurodivergent Maria, who struggles with the austerity and rigidity of religious orders and is better suited for the varying, rhythmless days of childcare. Most obviously, the convent is not good for women who want to be mothers and wives, which is why the nuns send Maria aways from it not once but twice. It’s not a universal force for good everyone should be aligned with. And, of course, The Sound of Music is intensely critical of the governing systems of late-1930s Austria. 

So what I’m hearing in this is that McCracken is picking up an anti-Christian note in a movie on the grounds that the movie questions any religious idea whatsoever. Paul and the Fremen are very clearly not Christian at all, and are in no way Christian-coded. The language of “messiah” is actually quite foreign to the Fremen – it is only used by white-coded non-Fremen characters. The Fremen themselves favor words like “Lisan al-Gaib” and “Mahdi.” The word “Mahdi” is a term from Islam, the “guided one,” a figure who will emerge in Islamic eschatology to defeat the forces of evil. The phrase “Lisan al-Gaib,” which in Dune means “voice from the outer world,” is derived from an Arabic expression meaning “hidden tongue” or “unseen tongue.” Even in the movie the Fremen are clearly Islamic-coded, adopting Muslim prayer postures. 

Paul’s coding itself seems to point regularly away from Jesus. McCracken sees some Jesus parallels in Paul’s inclusion of marginalized people, like women, in his time of testing in the wilderness, and in his death and resurrection through the Water of Life ritual. But these seem to read a bit against the text. For one thing, Chani is absolutely not marginalized in her own community. She is the daughter of Liet Kynes, a local leader, and (at least in the books) the niece of Stilgar, the current leader of her sietch. There’s also the general status of Fremen women. The Fremen women are taught to fight and work alongside men in troops. A Fremen woman can be won in battle if another man kills her husband – however, there’s more than one way to read this convention. Because a man who kills another man must provide for his wives and children, this could be read as a way to put limits on interpersonal conflict or at least put it through responsible channels. And, of course, the Fremen have a strong taboo against sexual violence – just because a woman joins one’s household does not mean one can rape her. So Paul doesn’t exactly subvert local gendered expectations by treating Chani like an equal. 

Paul’s background is also decidedly not like Jesus’s. Paul’s no carpenter – he was born into a royal family and lived as a royal heir until his father was deposed. Yes, he goes into the desert, but this is not a liminal stage of Paul’s journey. It’s the place where Paul gets his following. It’s the desert where he rules as Mahdi, then duke, then emperor. And finally, Paul’s death and resurrection when he receives the Water of Life is not a self-sacrifice. It is a trance he enters into to receive transcendent powers. Paul doesn’t triumph over the trance like Christ triumphs over death – he enters it, and then he comes out of it, getting what he wanted out of the experience.

So it’s not really accurate to say that the movie or book specifically go after the Christian messianic concept. The narrative challenges the concept of a messiah – any messiah at all – and displays profound ambivalence towards a person adopting a messianic title or role, particularly for the purpose of achieving personal power and mobilizing an oppressed culture for one’s own ends.

And I am struggling to see why this is a message Christians can’t easily resonate with. 

After all, Jesus warns about false teachers in his eschatological discourse (24:5). False messiahs have risen to the destruction of themselves and others – look at Jim Jones, or David Koresh. Jim Jones sprung to public acclaim by waging war on the stubborn segregation of Indianapolis, Indiana, my hometown. Many of his victims were Black people who joined the People’s Temple looking for a message of Black liberation. This is not dissimilar from the Fremen following a message of Arrakis’s liberation, which is used in the service of others besides themselves. Why on earth can’t Christians resonate with the horrors of charismatic leaders who twist the pain of others for their own benefit? How many of these people have risen and fallen in the church? McCracken himself notices in his article that hypocritical religious leaders fuel religious skepticism.

McCracken’s concerns seem to center around this: Dune is a messiah story that frustrates the viewer by denying them the story. Paul starts off as Jesus (a reading that, as I have already said, is a stretch), but becomes an anti-messiah. This is a deviation from messianic stories that have been popularly loved and craved, and also a deviation from the “true myth,” the story of Jesus that people see reflected in in messianic stories. 

So for me this raises a big question. What exactly is a messiah story? 

Messiah Stories

At the beginning of the article, McCracken lists a number of messianic characters that have won over readers and viewers in popular culture: Harry Potter, Neo, Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, and superheroes, who “rise to prominence in a time of war and oppression – often fulfilling several prophecies along the way – to address injustice and defeat an evil regime.”

So, this list is already very interesting. What does Brett McCracken think a “messiah” is? What do any of these characters have in common?

A literal definition – anointed, royal, priestly – excludes a number of figures on this list. Harry Potter doesn’t rule at the end of his titular book series, Hermione does. Luke Skywalker doesn’t rule either. It’s not at all clear who replaces the Empire – the Disney sequels suggest it’s a diffuse “republic” that Luke himself does not participate in. Of the major trio, it is Leia who comes to be a political leader, not Luke. Some notable superheroes are rulers (Aquaman, Black Panther, Wonder Woman) but other heavy hitters aren’t (Superman, Batman, Spiderman). Neo doesn’t rule at the end of the Matrix. So that’s out.

What about a figure who prophesied or predicted? In that case, Luke is not the messiah, his father is – Luke is the son of the one who is predicted to destroy the Dark Side, which he does in the end when he kills Palpatine (we don’t need to talk about Rise of Skywalker). Harry Potter’s journey with prophecy is actually pretty complicated – Harry was actually not prophesied until Voldemort set out to kill him, and the one who could defeat Voldemort was (until that point) a toss-up between Harry and his friend Neville. The books emphasize that by acting to subvert the prophecy, Voldemort actually put it into motion himself, creating a young man who was so motivated to defeat him that Voldemort all but signed his own death warrant. So Harry is at once prophesied but not prophesied – by believing the prophecy, Voldemort makes it true. Batman is not predicted at all – like Harry, he is created by circumstance, motivated by the violence others take against his family to defeat him.

What about self-sacrificing, or dying and rising? In that case, Aragorn is out, as he doesn’t die and rise. He does go into the mountain but not as a descent into hell or as a lowest moment – he goes with his friends with the authority of the king to summon an army to fulfill their oaths. (The one who dies and rises is Gandalf.) Same with Luke, whose lowest moment is not death but finding out that he is the son of Darth Vader. One movie later he’s more than bounced back.

Or what about McCracken’s own definition – born into a period of depression and conquers an evil regime? In this case, the irony is that this actually excludes Jesus himself. Spiritually, yes, Jesus’s death and resurrection has long been interpreted as a conquering of the powers of death and hell, and yet Jesus’s conquest of the outworking of these regimes – namely, the oppressive kingdoms of the earth – is depicted as a future event in Revelation. And of course, Aragorn is only part of a larger movement to defeat Sauron. Frodo and Sam bring the ring to Mt. Doom, Gollum (accidentally) destroys it, Theoden leads the charge in Pelinnor Fields, Eowyn and Merry kill the Witch King, Gandalf leads the Captains of the West to march on the Black Gate and spring a trap for Sauron, the Shire folk organize their own resistance to defeat Sauruman, etc. In The Lord of the Rings, teamwork really does make the dream work. There is no single messiah figure.

So I don’t think McCracken really has an idea of what a messiah is except for “male character who faces opposition and overcomes it.” You know… a protagonist. 

But even if we do allow for the possibility that some christological theme unites all these characters, it’s still fine that Paul doesn’t fit with them. It’s not even quite true to say that Paul subverts our expectations by starting out like them and going rotten. Paul was never the hero. He always knew the prophecies about the Lisan al-Gaib were planted for Bene Gesserit ends. He always resented his mother’s machinations to make him the Kwisadtz Haderach. And he still takes the title of Mahdi. Paul is not Aragorn gone rogue, he is a kid in impossible circumstances who eventually takes on the mantle of Aragorn to achieve his own ends. Some of those ends are noble, and some of them are decidedly not. Either way, Paul knows damn well he’s not the Mahdi, and taking the title was a choice he knows is wrong.

It’s even stranger that McCracken reads Paul’s “fleshly ambitions” as a sign of things going haywire – namely, that he takes a lover, Chani. If anything, Chani is the last link to decency that Paul has left – partnering a woman for love who loves him in return. It’s the act of casting off Chani to marry Irulan and secure the throne that makes Paul monstrous, not being with Chani in the first place.

It’s just a misreading of Dune to treat Paul as though he is a prophesied hero who goes astray. In Dune, there is no “true” prophecy – only planted prophecies and the will to take them on for one’s own ends. The irony is, McCracken actually does seem to stumble into a Christian theme in Dune more or less against his will by the end of the article: 

If we go down the Paul Atreides path, falling in line with worldly patterns of power and glory, the Chani-type responses will grow. 

Namely, McCracken notes that Chani’s skepticism is warranted, that Paul is not someone she should follow, and those who are like Paul cannot hope to walk a better path than he did. Now, to be fair, I like McCracken’s point here – worldly aspirations and Christian convictions don’t mix. But McCracken seems to really miss the central motif of Dune at this point and is substituting an element of his own worldview here.

I think what McCracken is doing here is falling into a very particular pattern of how Christians see failed Christians: namely, seeing them as called and anointed for a higher purpose, but allowing the temptations of the flesh to bring them astray from God’s purposes for them. This is a narrative that seems to be invoked whenever a Christian leader, particularly one who was formerly popular, falls into disrepute. God had anointed them for a higher purpose, but their sin corrupted them.

But this is just not what Dune is about. Paul was never the messiah. Not really. The Fremen are a colonized people whose planet has been allowed to become entirely desert because of the need for the spice that the desert produces. What the Fremen want is for their planet to be a biodiverse home again. But their desires cannot be met as long as spice is valuable – it is needed for the imperial system that governs the world. And so, their desires, which the government intends to thwart, are used against them by competing religious systems. The Bene Gesserit manipulate them with the hope that one day, a voice from another world will lead them to this paradise. This is a paradise that the Bene Gesserit never intends to deliver. Paul, with the help of his mother, harnesses this desire for a thing that the world cannot have in order to achieve the Atreides family’s own ends. There is no messiah, and Jim Jones was never going to desegregate Indianapolis, and David Koresh abused children, and Paul Pressler always wanted to use his power to prey on young men. 

To see this story as a messiah who goes astray is to miss the incredibly relevant theme that is staring McCracken in the face. The desires of the people for a better future are legitimate. They are denied by the powers that exist. And there are people who have no intention on bringing those futures who are willing to capitalize on those desires anyway. One of these guys gets thrown out of Acts 29 about once a year. It’s not exactly subtle. 

Where McCracken is right is that this manipulation does breed skepticism. But that is not the central problem. The problem is that the manipulation itself is wrong. Ravi Zaccharias’s actions weren’t wrong because they made people not want to be Christians. They were wrong because it is wrong to traffic and rape people. Paul does not have a PR problem. If Paul was nicer to Chani it would not be okay for him to manipulate the Fremen. He is wrong because manipulating the Fremen is wrong. Not all messiahs are real messiahs, and there are many today who were never sent by God and were never going to do what they said they would. There is a warning in this text that is incredibly relevant and honestly astonishing to miss. 

The True Myth: Dune as a Non-Affirmation of Christianity 

The idea of the “true myth” is an idea that first shows up in Lewis’s correspondence regarding a conversation with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R Tolkien. Lewis had been noting the extent to which he was moved by stories in pre-Christian myths that shared motifs with Christian stories – such as a self-sacrificing god, or a dying god. Dyson and Tolkien suggested that this pleasure was coming specifically from the sense that these stories sounded like the sacrifice of Jesus, though they contended the story of Jesus was true. Lewis later said that this conversation was instrumental to his conversion – his fundamental attraction to the beauty of this story, enacted in the “true myth” of Jesus, which he saw refracted through the minds of poets who were themselves attracted to this same story through the grace of God.

Now, Lewis carves out a great deal of space for natural revelation, which I am admittedly skeptical of for reasons I’ve discussed at length. Nonetheless, Lewis is picking up on something that I think is true in literature – the reader’s attraction to certain arcs and themes. Of course, these stories were at work in the way in which the early Christians made sense of the Jesus story, and the Jesus story went to work on imaginations since. The final book of Harry Potter explicitly draws on a number of Christian themes, even quoting St. Paul’s “The last enemy to be defeated is death” and depicting Harry’s struggle over both an alien corrupting force at work in his flesh and over the forces of death. This is not an accidental product of cultural osmosis, this is deliberate engagement with Christian theological ideas, as the New Testament quotes in the book clearly indicate. 

But here is what I want to push on. Does this mean this is the only story? Is it somehow post-Christian to not tell this story?

Because this story – self-sacrifice, nobility, the defeat of evil – is simply not the only story worth telling. If the themes of self-sacrifice and the defeat of evil are the stories that define Christian stories, I’m at a loss for what this means for Christian storytelling or media engagement. For one thing, if we want to center these themes as central to Christian storytelling, it’s hard to see how to tell stories that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy. Most real-world events don’t end with the fall of cosmic evil. It goes without saying that they don’t end with resurrections. People in present-day North Korea don’t die and come back to life, but that doesn’t mean we can’t engage with The Orphan Master’s Son as a text with theological themes. 

It’s even harder on the composing side. Not all stories end with the defeat of evil. Most don’t. Bleak endings can still be rich and suggestive, and inspire thought. Seven is one of the most famously dark endings in film history, but still ends with a reserved note that the world is worth fighting for even if terrible things happen in it. Even Christian fiction heavy-hitters chafe against strict theological accuracy. Tolkien famously hated allegory, wasn’t a great fan of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and drew freely from Norse mythology to construct The Lord of the Rings. Iluvatar, the creator god of Lord of the Rings, rules with a pantheon of divine beings. It’s clear how Tolkien’s Catholic theology informs the series, but Tolkien’s creativity still inspires him to draw on all kinds of non-Christian sources to construct his mythology. 

So I think it’s worth being cautious of how we think of texts as Christian or post-Christian. There is really no contradiction between Christian orthodoxy and telling a story that expresses anxieties about various social forces, or rises to power. In fact, I’d argue it’s generally essential for Christian public theology to engage with these issues – including the fact that sometimes the powers win in the world that we live in now. Even more so, it’s essential to creativity to engage with non-Christian ideas, flawed characters, and unhappy endings. Not every story should be Narnia. That doesn’t make them heterodox. 

Concluding Thoughts

I want to be fair to McCracken in that, even though I think his reading of Dune is a little flat, I don’t think the conclusions he comes to are necessarily bad. I just don’t think these are post-Christian themes. I think there is no contradiction between being a Christian and taking Dune on board as theological storytelling. Dune has a lot to say to Christians. It is thematically dense, revealing much more than a God-shaped hole in the heart of the viewers. It raises intense questions about the future of humanity, how colonialism dehumanizes us, what it means to follow human leaders, whether the struggle for liberation can ever bring us imminent healing, and how our beliefs interact with the world around us. These are not post-Christian themes. These are questions that Christians absolutely should be asking ourselves, and are asking themselves in non-white-western contexts.

Feeling ambivalent around dominant religious institutions is, after all, a great Christian tradition. Christianity includes institutional skepticism – Jan Hus, Martin Luther, and William Penn, of course, were more than happy to ask these questions about the religious powers that ruled their world. We don’t need to see these as volleys on Christian history, we can see them as part of a conversation that we are included in. A question that would threaten the Bene Gesserit is by no means a question that should threaten the Christian believer, unless their belief and practice looks more like the Bene Gesserit than Christianity. Theology is a process of asking questions, revisiting them, revising them, being attentive to the leading of the Spirit, looking deeply at the world around us, and asking, “Who says?” This is not post-Christian, this is reformation. It is always occurring. And there is no reason to resist these questions when they are raised – on Arrakis or anywhere else.