Holy Activism, Unholy Despair
Mary (Amanda Seyfried), one of Toller’s congregants, approaches Toller and asks if he might be able to speak with her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger). He’s a radical environmentalist, a cause that some Christians would say has become a secular sort of faith. He even refers to those who’ve died for the cause as martyrs.
But if Michael would call environmentalism a “religion,” it’s one in which we are, in a way, the gods—temperamental, pagan deities using the planet to satisfy our petty desires and vent our petty rages. And Michael, like a despairing Prometheus whose hope has been picked and pecked too many times, has had enough. The science is apocalyptic; civilization too indifferent. He’s despairing and desperate, and he’s ready to do something unthinkable to make everyone sit up and take notice.
But he’s more than simply a doomed, despairing soul. He’s a crusader, too—and one fighting what the movie considers a righteous cause.
“Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” Michael asks Toller.
The question haunts Toller, who sympathizes with Michael’s motivations. After all, God made us stewards of His creation: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it,” we’re told in Genesis 2:15. It is His land, ultimately. “Everything under heaven belongs to me,” he says in Job 41:11. We know from Jesus’ parables that when we’re given stewardship over something from God (Matthew 25:14-30), we’re entrusted to take good care of it—not squander or waste it, and certainly not use it all up.
God asked us to watch over His creation and, in Toller’s eyes, we didn’t do it. Can we be surprised that there would be consequences?
An interesting thing about names in First Reformed: Many of its characters have biblical names, and that’s no accident. Michael, in Revelations, is God’s angelic general—leading the war against Satan’s unholy scourge. The name is filled with a sense of final, sacred judgment—a purge and annihilation of those who would seek to rebel or circumvent God’s impeccable purpose.
(Interesting, too, that Toller felt that talking with Michael was like Jacob wrestling with an angel.)
Our abuse of the earth comes with its own built-in sense of apocalyptic judgment. The Four Horsemen are heading this way, and humanity can blame only itself.
But Toller, at least at first, isn’t so quick to lose hope. “Courage is the solution to despair,” he tells Michael. “Reason provides no answers. … holding these two ideas [hope and despair] is life itself.”
But after Michael dies by his own hands and Toller’s own sickness, sorrow and sinfulness work on him, he forgets that. This spiritual shepherd needs saving himself.
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