Pennywise, Paul and Scary: What IT: Chapter Two Says About Faith, Hope and Love

The Greatest of These

Paul knew that the Christian walk couldn’t be done effectively without community. He writes about how Christians must “bear one another’s burdens” (Galations) and how “a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes) and how Christians are part of “one body in Christ.”

When Bill runs off, his friends come after him—freely, they tell him. They’ll follow him into Pennywise’s metaphorical hell whether he likes it or not, helping him on this unimaginable adventure.

And then the Loser’s Club seems to flip to 1 Corinthians 13—Paul’s famous ode to love that concludes with this:

So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:13)

As they walk into a ruin of a house (under which Pennywise lives), Bev picks up a decorative iron shaft from a long-gone fence. When Eddie, the most fearful of the Loser’s Club, loses his nerve in a truly terrifying scene, Bev gives the iron spear to him. “It kills monsters,” she tells him.

“Does it?” He squeaks.

“It will if you believe it does,” Bev says.

Faith.

When they confront the monstrous Pennywise (now in a much bigger guise), the Losers discover that their plan was based on a false hope—that some ancient ritual would kill IT—only discovering that the Native Americans who tried it before all died in the process. Someone dies in this climactic scene, too—but as he breathes his last, he gives his cohorts a clue to truly defeating Pennywise.

In an earlier confrontation, the dying man had caught one of Pennywise’s guises around the throat. “He was so weak,” he recalls. It’s true of Satan’s whispers, too, when they are drowned out by the song of God and smashed under a determined heel. And so our characters find …

Hope.

As for love, the greatest of these, the Loser’s Club show love for each other throughout—encouraging each other, bearing one another’s burdens, forming one unified body against an adversary determined to separate them.

Love.

“Faith makes it possible to battle monsters,” Stephen King once said. When I interviewed screenwriter Gary Dauberman before the first IT came out, he told me that “even if there’s a demonic presence, I’m always going, … ‘that means that somewhere out there there’s good.’” This latest film has a demonic presence, for sure. But it’s also about something good. Something stronger than evil.

IT: Chapter Two is pretty foul, yes. But like Derry itself, there’s more going on underneath the surface than you’d expect.