Faith, Fear and Midnight Mass’ Biggest Question

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Midnight Mass. You’ve been warned.

Say what you want about the Bible, but there are two things most people can agree on: much of it is beautiful, and much of it is terrifying.

I’ve never seen TV like Netflix’s Midnight Mass (read our review), a series unafraid to recognize that there is something inherently horrific in the drama of salvation. The Eucharist practiced in so many Christian churches is a dramatization of the consumption of human flesh and blood. The gravity of that horror is inescapable. The night of Jesus’ arrest as recorded in scripture is a tale of loneliness, torture, betrayal, blood, despair, and violent death. In its most sacred ritual, Christianity commemorates death as well as resurrection, and celebrates it, and that is creepy.

Midnight Mass is satisfying because it commits very quickly to two premises: Vampires are real and God is ambiguous. And thanks to some very skillful writing, acting, and framing, we quickly buy into both premises. They combine to create one hell of a great scare that also manages to be challenging and poignant. But how in the world do they get away with it?

Why is it easier for us to believe in an ancient, deathless, winged vampire lurking beneath the earth than it is to believe there might actually be a God? Midnight Mass knows the answer and is not shy about saying it: God has hurt us. Vampires have not.

He Is Us

Two forces, the overt vampire and the monstrous fear inherent in faith, meet in Monsignor Pruitt. His experience on the road to Damascus is supernatural in every sense of the word. A man in mental distress, lost halfway across the planet from his home, caught in a dust storm, trapped in an unearthed tomb, fed upon and fed by a creature… these events are inexplicable to the mind. He’s bitten and revived by a seemingly supernatural force that looks like a biblical icon, he transforms from old to young in a night. Given the utter otherness of what happened to him, Pruitt’s deductions that he’s met an angel and being asked to testify to that experience are far from ludicrous. He is simply contextualizing his observations, as we often do, through the lens of his background. He sees, as scientific historian James Burke reminds us, what his experience tells us he sees.

He is us.

The word “holy” used in the biblical context really means “other” or “otherly.” It is that which comes from outside understanding, that which is set apart, unique, uncanny. And for Pruitt to see his vampire master as holy is utterly natural. That Pruitt might wish to bring the miracle home, manipulated by his own resurrection, is a secret and benevolent intention. Like so many of us in religion, Pruitt finds himself manipulated by a force professing to represent the sovereign and divine. I’ve seen it again and again in congregations, denominations, bible colleges, conservative political movements; the adroit manipulation of religious ideas by leaders to use their flocks for unholy gains. I’ve experienced it myself. My particular church upbringing, for example, tolerated or encouraged a homophobia that stuck with me throughout my adolescence, a worldview which good friends (and, I believe, God) later led me away from. I’ve come to understand over time that some of the forces that first pointed me toward destructive prejudices like this were more motivated by political power than by any sense of Christian faith.

To apply science at its most pure means is beginning with a guess and testing it, and Pruitt’s hypothesis is an informed guess, deeply flawed, but hardly stupid. His own further scientific observations of the corruption and slaughter in The Crock Pot eventually lead him to see his initial error, late though the hour may be. But until he sees that light, when Pruitt speaks from behind the pulpit, the zeal and cadence of his words is more akin to what one might typically expect from an evangelical or Pentecostal sermon than a Catholic homily. Somebody spent a LOT of time listening to preachers before writing Midnight Mass. Pruitt has seen the Good News and now he will share it, not just through preaching, but through the Eucharist.

The liturgy of communion is understood in many ways across the spectrum of Christianity, but some elements are common to most sects: a symbolic or sacramental appreciation of the meal shared by Jesus and his closest friends the night before his execution, and a teaching that this bread and wine represent Jesus’ body and blood, consumed in remembrance. As the death of Jesus sets into motion his resurrection three days later, there is a certain inherent dichotomy in the observance of communion. It is a feast that observes death and new life.

In the Roman Catholic tradition represented on Midnight Mass, doctrine indicates that after the blessing of the priest, the wafer and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus consumed by the congregation, a mystery known as transubstantiation. In Pruitt’s eyes, that means the blood of the angel (or vampire) is, during the ritual, being blended with the blood of Christ and given to the people. The new covenant is being acted out.

This is the bloodletting of Midnight Mass, the horror. And this is why the story needs a vampire we can believe in. Because Midnight Mass isn’t just here to ask us questions. It also exists to scare us. And that big, winged, invulnerable, undead lord towering over the congregation, or the obscenity of its blood being secretly fed to us, violating us during a sacred ritual, a tale of contagion told on Netflix in an age of pandemic… that’s scary as hell.

The vampire mythos has long been tied to the bloody symbols of Christian Eucharist. Midnight Mass isn’t subtle in its nods: Its east coastal American island setting is straight out of Stephen King. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the greatest of vampire novels, Salem’s Lot, which is also deeply concerned with an ancient vampire and a priest’s struggles to reconcile faith and horror in the face of strange miracles. “Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take my communion,” says the ancient vampire Barlow in that tale as he pulls Father Callahan to the gaping wound in his own undead flesh to share his curse. The blending of these bloody mysteries permeates vampire fiction from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice. Why do we buy it?

The Horror of Faith

Despite its quiet, almost muted tone and steady pace, Midnight Mass is very angry, as so many of us are, burdened with this knowledge: If God exists, then God at least condones and allows an extraordinary measure of human suffering. In the world we live in, innocent people die in drunk driving accidents, children lose the use of their legs to stray bullets, oil spills destroy communities, and corrupt, wicked people hiding behind a veil of faith take from their neighbors and profit from lies.

That’s the thematic heart of Midnight Mass, where a grotesque vampire flies through the night, spreads its wings in the chancel of a candlelit sanctuary, and barrels over any puny human in its way. The vampire is an overt force. God is much less so. In Midnight Mass, God exists, if at all, as Flannery O’Connor described, in fleeting improbable glimpses: “Jesus move(d) from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark.”

A vampire we can see, we can name. It is ugly, perverse, predatory, threatening. It is contagion. It is corruption. A vampire never promised to love us. We expect only the worst from it. It is an amalgam of our fears poured into a symbol we can comprehend.

But God? From God we expect more. In Christianity, God professes to love us. And that makes believing in God a much more painful pill to swallow.

I grew up in church. My dad was a preacher, and like Monsignor Pruitt, I lived in the parsonage next door to the sanctuary building and rec center and walked between the two for services. I was baptized at five years old, decided to be a minister at 16, and went to college for eight years preparing. I was a parish pastor for five years in two congregations before I left the vocation.

Now I write about video games for a living. But I still believe. I’m a Quaker, an orthodox Christian. I believe what’s laid out in the Nicene Creed in a very literal way. I believe in God and in miracles. And I’m impressed by Midnight Mass because it’s brutally honest about why all of this is so hard, how little sense it all makes, and why some of us choose to believe anyway despite a mountain of ever-present, healthy doubt.

Faith for American Christians is often deeply mundane, even pedestrian. Most of us who profess faith are, at best, folk or pop theologians. The words we use in higher criticism or in theological studies, words like theodicy, exegesis, or transubstantiation, don’t mean all that much in the day-to-day life of a religious practitioner. If we’re thinking about God at all during the week, we’re likely more concerned with what God thinks of our hidden alcoholism or our anger at our partner than we are with investigating any deeper theological scholarship or existentialism. We exercise our faith without always seeking to understand it. Midnight Mass meets most of us where we are, and then scares us to death with a question.

Because that folk simplicity works for us only for a while. Until our child asks us a question about “God” and “why” and suddenly we’re challenged to decide what we believe in again. Until a natural disaster descends from the sky. Until another person takes something precious from us. Until calamity or evil. Then we are terrified.

Like Zach Gilford’s character Riley, my life and faith were changed by a DUI, though unlike him, I was on the victim’s side of the crash. My spouse took the brunt of the head-on collision, and to this day lives with chronic pain and brain damage and is physically disabled. My wounds were different, less visible but still severe: my lifelong chronic clinical depression was exacerbated and multiplied by anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Seven years, hundreds of hours of therapy, thousands of dollars in fees, several prescriptions, a nervous breakdown, and a mental hospitalization later, I’m somewhat better but still pretty broken. That girl on the pavement in Midnight Mass with flashing lights reflected in her blood? That scared the ever-living hell out of me. You see, sometimes, for no reason at all, I’m suddenly on a cold, windy bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, and there’s spilled oil and black blood reflecting the flashing lights and I don’t know how I got there. That still happens.

I don’t believe God hit me in the face with a car… a driver high on drugs did that, and like Riley, pretty much walked away. But how much better is it, if at all, that God let it happen?

Vampires, drunk drivers, these are terrors we can comprehend, we can see. But the threat that God might not love us? Does not intervene? Can we even stand to look? It might be easier, or perhaps even wiser, to say God is not even there.

That’s why, on Crockett Island, it’s harder to believe in God than to believe in vampires. God confounds scrutiny. People believe in God for a variety of reasons: family tradition, a need to feel safety a nd purpose, a justification for bullying, an experience of love and fellowship. Science neither proves nor disproves God conclusively; philosophy, as the prophet Indiana Jones reminds us, is the search for truth, not fact.

What Can We Believe?

Storytellers employ a quality called “the suspension of disbelief” in their craft. This means “just what leaps of logic and fantasy are the audience willing to accept and still be able to enjoy this story?” People want to be entertained, and they’re willing to temporarily believe in a lot of things they otherwise wouldn’t for the sake of a good tale. Midnight Mass knows we know there are no such things as vampires, but it also knows we logged onto Netflix to get scared, so for a while, we are willing to believe just a little bit.

And once we let in the scares, we let in the feels. We all know there’s no such person as Rahul Kohli’s Sheriff Hassan and we all know his son Ali (Rahul Abburi) is a fictional character, a made-up human serving a television drama, but we cry anyway when we see them facing east on the beach and bowing as the sun rises. We have laid aside some semblance of reality for the sake of the message of the story.

And because we let in the fear and the feels, we also let in the terrifying questions.

Midnight Mass dares to look us in the face and ask us something few people ever do: What do you really believe?

The oldest book in the Bible, Job, is primarily concerned with the nature of suffering, the unfairness of life, and the role of God in that quandary. I find its conclusions unsatisfying.

If pain is so bitter, if belief is so difficult, then why do people still believe? I expect, in the end, it comes down to three things: the stories, the family, and the experience.

There’s something to the stories. For all the horror that exists in scripture and theology, there are also messages of beauty and hope, stories of selflessness, redemption, healing, reconciliation, grace, and forgiveness. These stories are very much like the stained-glass windows so often imbued with narrative iconography: They shine through even the hypocrisy of religion to remind us that better things are possible.

The second reason people believe is family. Loving families are precious. Even abusive and dysfunctional families are difficult to separate ourselves from. And in both the best and worst way, the church is like a family, with secrets, traditions, inside jokes, and dark corners. And families are hard to escape from.

Third, there’s the experience. I think of myself as a pretty rational person. I think that the universe is billions of years old, that vaccines help prevent diseases, that theocracy is destructive because informed observation has proven these things. But I’ve also experienced things in the realm of faith that I can’t explain. And those moments stick with me, just as the overt “miracles” taking place in Pruitt’s congregation stuck with him.

And beyond all the ethereal there’s this. I’m an angry person. My faith has helped me to be a more loving person. Maybe that’s enough.

I suspect anybody who has ever gone to church knows a Bev Keane, the Samantha Sloyan character from Midnight Mass. I’ve met several, and they are all terrifying. They’re a product of every age, those unwilling to consider that God might love others as much as God loves them. They’re the nightmare brood of religious tyranny: the witch hunter, the Crusader, the theocratic zealot. They are small people grown big on whatever island they inhabit, whatever small congregation they might bully and shame into submission. They have a verse ready for every moment, malleable and ready to twist to any meaning that grants them momentary authority or self-righteousness.

I wonder if Bev really believed in anything but herself, which is the core of evil in the Christian sense. Selfishness is oft-regarded in Christianity as the core of most sinful infractions… valuing the self over others, valuing self-righteousness over goodness, is the ultimate illustration of wickedness.

And the reason I understand that and try to be something different is because of my belief in a God that frustrates me, infuriates me, but maybe, just maybe, is real and loves me, and wants me to love other people so much. That’s a doubt and a faith I can live with.

Jared Petty is an IGN alumnus. He writes about video games and hosts The Top 100 Games Podcast, which you should totally subscribe to. He likes spooky stuff. Follow him on Twitter @pettycommajared and on Instagram @pettycommajared.