Paul Schrader’s 1979 film Hardcore may be both the most Calvinist and the most anti-Calvinist movie I’ve ever seen.
The movie stars George C. Scott as Jake Van Dorn, a stern, strict, devout Dutch Reformed businessman from Michigan — a man who also seems to think that God is a stern, strict, devout Dutch Reformed businessman from Michigan.
Van Dorn’s daughter disappears somewhere in southern California and Van Dorn sets out to find her, discovering that she has been trapped in a nightmare world of pornography and sex work, possibly voluntarily and possibly against her will.
So on the one hand, Hardcore is a parable about Irresistible grace — about a God who will do anything to seek and to save the lost, bringing them home no matter what. But on the other hand, it is also a parable about Limited atonement — about double-predestination and the idea that some of God’s children, or some of Jake’s children, may be predestined to damnation, fated to be lost forever and never to be freed from enslavement to sin and death.
I’ve capitalized “Irresistible” and “Limited” there because those two concepts are part of TULIP — the famous acronym for the five-point Calvinism embraced by Jake Van Dorn and the kind of Michigan Calvinists he represents in Schrader’s story. One of my favorite scenes in the film has Scott/Van Dorn summarizing TULIP to “Niki,” the sex worker who serves as his guide to the underworld of ’70s Hollywood pornography. The incongruity of that scene is darkly funny, but even there, as throughout the film, Scott shows us how Van Dorn is tormented by his uncertainty over how those doctrines apply to his lost daughter. He does not know if his daughter has been predestined to irresistible grace or if she has been predestined to remain outside the limited atonement that limits his limited God.
The beautiful thing about Scott’s performance in Hardcore — and what elevates it beyond the grimy neo-noir melodrama it might otherwise be — is that he also shows us that Jake Van Dorn is realizing he doesn’t care which of those doctrines applies to his daughter. She is his child and he is going to try to save her even if Almighty God has already decreed since eternity past that she is predestined for damnation. And Scott shows us that Jake realizes what his theology tells him that such a defiant act of rebellion against God means for him. It suggests that he, too, must be outside of divine grace.
Van Dorn is driven (in part), by his unconditional love for his child, but his unforgiving theology taught him that God did not have — and ought not to have — to have such unconditional love for all of God’s children. He is haunted by his belief that he is choosing rebellion and sin by committing the offense of being more loving and merciful than God. But if doing everything he can to save his daughter means choosing his own damnation, he’s willing to do that.
In a sense, then, Jake Van Dorn is George C. Scott as Huckleberry Finn, vowing “All right then, I’ll go to Hell.” And like poor Huck, everything he’s ever learned about what God is like has him convinced that God really will condemn him for loving those God has supposedly rejected.
I’m thinking about this old movie because of a recent news story that sounds so much like another Paul Schrader screenplay. It’s also about a stern, strict, devout Dutch Reformed businessman from Michigan and his desperate attempts to rescue his adult child from bondage to a depraved realm of pornography.
You may have heard of this businessman. His name is Ron DeHaas, and he is the cofounder of “Covenant Eyes” the “anti-porn accountability software which has more than 2 million users” (including the MAGA speaker of the House, Mike Johnson). When Covenant Eyes is installed on a computer, it “tracks internet activity, flags potential adult content, and alerts an accountability partner, called an ‘ally.’”
When Ron DeHaas co-founded Covenant Eyes software 25 years ago, one goal was to safeguard his teenage stepsons from adult content online. According to a bio on the Covenant Eyes website, DeHaas became a stepfather of three when he remarried. …
“When the DeHaas family got the internet at their home, Ron quickly realized the dangers this presented to his new family,” the site notes.
Those stepsons are all grown up now and one of them, Thomas Wideman, 38, “has been charged with four counts of using computers to commit a crime, three counts of child sexually abusive activity, and one count of accosting children for immoral purposes.” The allegations here are very, very bad, involving far more counts than only those with which Wideman has been charged.
Like Jake Van Dorn, Ron DeHaas still seems intent on doing whatever he can to help his child: “Court records show that DeHaas covered some of his stepson’s $300,000 bond and facilitated Wideman’s release” from jail pending his trial.
The parallel with Schrader’s movie is not exact, of course. Jake Van Dorn’s daughter was mostly an innocent victim (even if Jake’s theology taught him that there was never such a thing as an innocent victim), whereas DeHaas’s son is, according to police, a predator, neither an innocent nor a victim (that we know of), but a victimizer of helpless others. That makes DeHaas’s theological crisis different, but also more acute.
What most reminds me of Hard Core here is the way that DeHaas, like Jake Van Dorn, has lived his life fully convinced that God is “a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed.” And so he has approached his faith fearfully, burying that treasure in the hopes of preserving it, pure and unsullied and hidden from the world.
The parable I’m quoting there suggests this is not a good or a wise or even a safe way to go about life.
I was always reminded of that parable when reading stories about “Covenant Eyes.” It reminds me of that fearful, faithless third servant in the Parable of the Talents (or of the “bags of gold” in the NIV linked above) because it seems to share his trembling view that life and faith are a matter of sheltering and burying and avoiding all risk of contamination or loss or impurity.
I tend to think of the poor fool from that parable in relation to another passage, from the book of James, which says that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
I’ve known many Jake Van Dorn types who read that verse as confirmation of their view that God is a stern, strict Father — a kind of cosmic George C. Scott — who is concerned above all with purity and faultlessness and worldly pollution.
What about that bit about looking after orphans and widows in their distress? Too risky. Have you seen those people or the conditions of their distress? Nothing but impurity and pollution and contamination. You try to help those people, you’re gonna get some of that on you. It will make you impure.
Better, safer, not to risk angering the hard man and to just bury our purity in the ground so that we can be sure not to lose any of it. Perhaps that will keep the hard man from being angry with us.
To them, “being polluted by the world” has come to mean mostly things like looking at anything that might flag the accountability software of Covenant Eyes. But that’s not what it meant to James. To James, “the world” refers to the systems and structures and Powers That Be that deny the worth and humanity of those orphans and widows, the aliens and the poor. To be polluted by the world is to accept what “the world” tells us about them — that they don’t matter, that their distress is just how it is or, even worse, that their distress is what they deserve.
The saddest moment in Hardcore, to me, is the scene at the end when Niki disappears into the crowd and Jake seems resigned to his doctrine of Limited Atonement with all of its monstrous implications. His daughter has a father and she can be saved. Niki is an orphan, so there’s no helping her.
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