Bruce Wayne makes his atheistic declaration in the context of a jury trial for Mr. Freeze—a perennial Gotham City villain who Batman beat the chilly tar out of a while ago. Bruce feels bad about the whole thing now, believing that Batman—his own mirror image—went way farther than he should’ve.
King’s Bruce Wayne lost faith in God a long time ago (which contradicts Batman’s 1939 origin story, which is repeated by others, where he actually commits to crimefighting through prayer). But he found faith in Batman—Gotham’s very own savior king. And he came to believe that the hero was infallible.
The Mr. Freeze thing proved to Bruce that Batman’s very fallible indeed. “He’s not God,” he says to the jurors. “God blesses your soul with grace. … Batman punches people in the face.”
Whatever Batman’s relationship is with God these days—and whatever it’ll be at the end of King’s expected 100-issue story arc—is pretty secondary to No. 53’s real crisis of faith: Batman’s doubt in Batman.
I’ve done a lot of radio interviews recently about the conditional nature of heroes. The instigator: Chris Pratt, a funny, down-to-earth actor who’s been saying some awfully great things about Christianity lately. Should we embrace Pratt as a role model? I’m asked.
We Christians are often starved for heroes, it seems, and we look for them wherever we can. And when we find them, we sometimes make the same mistake that everyone else does: We assume that because they’re doing some great things in this area, they’re doing great things in every other area of their lives, too. We want to believe in them, even though we know full well how flawed and fallible we all are. And so when our heroes and role models prove as fallible as anyone else, we rip them from the pillars we’ve placed them on and cast them down.
Pratt himself addressed the fallibility of man in an acceptance speech for the MTV Movie Awards:
Nobody is perfect. People will tell you that you are perfect just the way that you are, you’re not! You’re imperfect. You always will be, but there is a powerful force that designed you that way, and if you are willing to accept that, you will have grace. And grace is a gift. Like the freedom that we enjoy in this country, that grace was paid for with somebody else’s blood. Do not forget it. Don’t take it for granted.
Grace, that word again—the word that Bruce invoked in the jury room, the word that Batman has always had an imperfect understanding of.
How much we all need grace. Even Batman.
We’ve all heroes aplenty fall over the years. Christian heroes, sadly, seem especially susceptible. When I was a kid, religious leaders like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker were all over the news for their moral failings. Now, it’s Bill Hybels. Leaders who claim and aim to point us to a better way find themselves in more obvious need of redemption themselves.
We see it in our own lives, too. We’re painfully aware of how often we screw up. Bruce Wayne has learned something that many of us have learned, and re-learned, again and again. We’re broken.
“I’m lost,” Batman tells Alfred at the end of Batman #53. “I need to remember who I am.”
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