Much has been said about how Amazing Grace has tweaked history to make William Wilberforce more palatable to modern, even liberal, audiences. Some have also pointed out that the film was originally written by Colin Welland, writer of Chariots of Fire (1981), before Steven Knight was brought on board to write a script that focused more on politics and less on religion.
Thinking about these two things together, I was reminded of the following passages from Margaret R. Miles’s Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (Beacon Press, 1997):
Interestingly, no reviewers I found questioned Liddell’s religious commitment. Whether one appreciated it or not, it was apparently fully believable. How did Chariots achieve this authenticity? First, it presents Christian commitment as rooted in religious community rather than in religious individualism. A lengthy part of the film establishes Liddell’s answerability to his family and community in Scotland. He is not shown socializing with other runners at the Olympics; his relationships with them are friendly but distant. Second, voice-over and interior dialogue are used at crucial points throughout the film to reveal the commitments, not only to religious ideas but also to people, that inform Liddell’s convictions. By contrast, Abrahams’ Jewishness, even though it is explicitly pictured as essential — even the key — to his character and motivation, is not articulated. Abrahams is not shown as having family, community, or religious practices. In the scene in which he describes to Ashley Montague what Jewishness means to him, Abrahams shows Montague a picture of his father. But the camera, and therefore the viewer, does not see it. Abrahams talks about his father, but the father never becomes visible to the viewer. The filmic isolation of a character signals his otherness in relation to the perspective assumed by the film, usually that of its protagonist.
Eric Liddell “runs to honor God.” What form of Christianity does the film represent? Not one, I suggest, that can be counted on to be immediately sympathetic to a popular audience in the United States or in Great Britain. Liddell’s Church of Scotland espouses a Calvinistic doctrine that believes in the total depravity of humankind; salvation cannot be earned but is granted to the few who have been predestined to receive it. Scripture is believed to be the literal Word of God and the absolute rule for faith. And, according to Scottish Presbyterians, God has stipulated how God is to be worshipped:
He hath appointed one day in seven for a sabbath, to be kept holy unto him . . . in which [men] observe a holy rest all the day from their own works, words, and thoughts, [and their] worldly employments and recreations. (Westminster Confession xxi)
It is this tenet of 1920s Scottish Presbyterianism that provides Chariot‘s central narrative conflict. I will discuss it shortly.
Scottish Presbyterianism in the early twentieth-century developed what was called a muscular Christianity. Vigorous missionizing was one of the evidences of muscular Christianity. Both in life and in the film, Eric Liddell gave up a career in running to become a missionary to China. Presbyterian missions in China were in their heyday in the 1920s, a time between the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in which thousands of Chinese Christians and many missionaries were killed, and the revolution of 1949 when the Communists came to power and denounced foreign missionaries as agents of Western imperialism.
The dogmatism and aggressive missionizing of Scottish Presbyterianism is glossed over by its setting as a period piece. It is also masked by filmic devices — especially the hymns sung by Scottish Christians and by Anglicans — that imply its fundamental identity with Anglican liberalism. Moreover, Calvinism’s belief in the total depravity of all human beings is never alluded to in the film, helping to make Eric Liddell’s religion sympathetic to popular audiences. . . .
Chariots explicitly exposes the anti-Semitism of Abrahams’ elite Cambridge college and sympathetically represents the pain it causes, but the film nevertheless subverts its own critique in several ways. First, it represents Liddell’s and Abrahams’s personalities as stereotypes: Liddell is friendly, has a sense of humor, is outgoing and usually takes himself lightly; Abrahams is moody, intense, and lacks humor. Liddell is presented as self-assured and likable, Abrahams as difficult, defensive, and monomaniacal. Liddell runs to “give God pleasure,” while Abrahams runs to show a dominantly Christian culture that he can “run them off their feet.” A dominantly Christian audience in Great Britain and North America could be expected to find Liddell’s motivation more heroic, especially when viewers learn, at the end, of his death as a Christian martyr.
Furthermore, spectators are much more likely to identify with the film characters whose subjectivity we have access to than with those we merely see acting in certain ways. Abrahams’ self-talk is heard only after he loses an important race, when obsessive images of losing the race occupy his mind. Viewers are encouraged to identify with Liddell, however; at several crucial points we hear the interior voices that explain his motivation or agonize over the conflict he feels. . . .
For whatever that’s worth; make of all that what you will.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In