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Last updated on: September 4, 2014 at 9:02 pm by Paul Asay

Welcome! 2014-09-04T21:02:19-06:00 Paul Asay

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When I was about 8 years old, my mom took me to Star Wars. I’ve never been the same since.

It wasn’t the first movie I ever saw. It wasn’t even the first movie I ever loved. But it was the first that transported me to another time (long, long ago) and place (a galaxy far, far away) and sparked my imagination like nothing had before.

I conned my parents into taking me to Star Wars another four times–a mighty feat of persuasion for an 8-year-old. And when I wasn’t watching Star Wars, I was still in its world. Every squeak of our rusty old station wagon became a conversation with R2-D2. Every stick became a laser blaster or light saber. I think my parents were too poor to buy me pricey action figures, so I made my own out of cardboard. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were double-sided–one to depict what they looked like when they were alive, the other as charred skeletons.

Watching Star Wars was one of the seminal points of my childhood. I was pretty bummed when I learned that it was the work of the devil.

See, a few years later, a guy named Norman Geisler came to our conservative church, talking about Star Wars and selling a book called “The Religion of the Force.” He talked about how many of the themes from the Star Wars movies (then merely a trilogy) were plucked right from eastern religion. The force, he said, was predicated on the old ideas of yin and yang–good and evil in eternal balance–far removed from our Christian understanding.

I was fascinated. And horrified. And deeply conflicted. It didn’t feel like Obi Wan was trying to turn me into a Taoist. But Mr. Geisler sure seemed to know his stuff. He was speaking in a time when some people swore that you could hear demonic messages on heavy metal albums if you listened to them backwards, and when some Christian parents wouldn’t even let their kids watch anything. Was my love for Star Wars eclipsing my love for Jesus?

Now, more than 30 years later, I think I can fairly answer that question: No.

Mr. Geisler wasn’t wrong about some of the messages in Star Wars: There were elements of eastern spirituality there. But there were elements from a lot of other sources, too. And when Darth Vader turns his back on the evil Emperor to save Luke in Return of the Jedi, the core of the story feels almost … Christian. In Darth Vader, we find a flawed sinner who deserved death. And yet, when he turned from sin to save another, he found a measure of redemption–and new life, even as he died.

The stories we tell ourselves–the stories we find in movies and television–are complex creatures. None are perfectly pure, but few are wholly evil, either. As an author, freelance writer and reviewer for the Christian website Plugged In, I’ve had a chance to see a lot of stories and parse the good and bad in lots of them.

But sometimes, there’s more that I think could, and maybe should, be said than I can say in a movie review. And that’s what this blog is about: Going deeper. I think we’ll find that God can speak in some very surprising places.

I hope to post several times a week here at Watching God. Sometimes I’ll give my take of a movie, new or old. Sometimes we’ll talk about some interesting and spiritually relevant piece of entertainment news. Sometimes I might point you to a story or clip that I think is really worthwhile.

But I hope that whatever we talk about here, it’ll help us both look at the culture a little differently, and maybe better see God’s fingerprints on the stories we see, hear and fall in love with.

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you again soon.

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