Logan is a Christian Fable Disguised as a Superhero Story

Logan is a Christian Fable Disguised as a Superhero Story March 6, 2017

Dafne Keen in Logan, photo courtesy 20th Century Fox
Dafne Keen in Logan, photo courtesy 20th Century Fox

 

Unlike Logan, Laura (Dafne Keen) was an experiment from the very beginning. She’s supposed to be part of an army of super-soldiers—killers created from test tubes and training. And like Logan, they gave her a coating of adamantium to make her all the more durable.

“Don’t think of them as children,” a scientist cautions one of the children’s nurse caregivers. “Think of them as things.”

But even though Laura is shaped by the quasi-demonic forces around her, she and her cohorts can’t be turned into things. It’s impossible. And this gets to the flipside of that Genesis story: Sure, we sinned. We are sinners. We are separated from God. But we’re also made in His image. He gives us a soul. And the children, despite their unusual way of coming to be, each have that eternal gift wrapped inside them.

That’s not just me theorizing. The film explicitly states that Laura and her ilk have souls, and those very souls makes them thoroughly unsuitable to the amoral tasks they’re being trained to do. So these scientists decide to scrap the program, eliminate everyone involved in it and start from scratch. Instead of creating babies, they’ll manufacture—clone—their super-soldiers. “Building something without a soul,” we’re told darkly. We see one of these creatures in action, and it is indeed a terrifying sight to behold.

Such soulless creatures are known, in Jewish tradition, as golems. In fact the Talmud suggests that Adam was a golem himself—a “shapeless husk” until God imbued him with the breath and life that made him truly human.

Logan stresses that we are made up of more than just our biology or upbringing. There is something else there, something inherently spiritual that connects us to a higher state of being. And if we were to go without it, we become, truly, monsters.


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