What the Hugh Grant movie ‘Heretic’ says about Mormon apologetics

Spoiler alert • While not revealing the ending or key plot points, this column dissects dialogue and other moments in the movie “Heretics.”

“Heretic” is a new horror film about two young women, missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who, while seeking potential converts, are trapped in the labyrinthine home of a man named Mr. Reed (played with mocking creepiness by Hugh Grant).

They believe that Mr. Reed is a good prospect, especially after he tells them he has a strong interest in religion. But it soon becomes clear that he plans to use them – not to do something as cliche as “test their faith”, but rather to explore the nature of faith itself.

The film is well informed about the lives of Latter-day Saint missionaries. Church members might raise an eyebrow at one or two things, perhaps most prominently the odd character of Elder Kennedy, a distinctly middle-aged figure in a suit and black missionary name tag who does not appear to have a companion. Of course, Latter-day Saint missionaries are almost always either full-time young people with name tags and companions or part-time older people without either. That we meet Elder Kennedy cleaning a chapel – a common activity for any church member – is enough on the nose to excuse some of these sins, as is some of the genuine dialogue between female or “sister” missionaries about baptism anxiety . and the correlation between their devotion to their work and the potential attractiveness of their future spouses.

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed the film (you may know their previous film “A Quiet Place”), clearly did their research. It probably helped that Julia Glausi, who runs their production company, is an alum of church-owned Brigham Young University.

But there is a lot going on in the film beyond simple probability. The film points to the assumptions that underlie a lot of discussion in the church about what it means to believe — though I wouldn’t be so bold as to suggest that Beck and Woods keep track of online arguments about Mormon apologetics — and, in doing so, it helps us think through how exactly religion works in the everyday lives of people who go to church today.

Faith and facts

At one point in the beginning of the second act, I sagged a bit in my seat. Mr. Reed gives a hushed lecture to the confused and frankly horrified missionaries who have just learned two things. First, Mr. Reed locked them in his house. Second – equally alarming to the missionaries – he doubts the essential plausibility of Christianity.

Reed argues that Christianity is a repetition of Judaism with better marketing. He points to dozens of ancient deities who, he says, died and were reborn. He explains that the story of Jesus is just a remix of clips from earlier mythologies. Therefore Mr. concludes Reed that Christianity cannot be true.

I agreed because Reed’s sermon is a simplification of the modern Jesus myth theory. This is a fringe academic hypothesis that claims that “Jesus” was not a historical person, but an invention of ancient people who pieced together a story from other myths. The Jesus mythism is rejected by almost all scholars of Christian history and the ancient world, Christian or not. But that hasn’t stopped it from finding a wide range of supporters on the Internet, many of whom seem to favor it not because they are familiar with the historical evidence, but because they dislike the politics of modern white evangelicals.

But most disturbingly, I collapsed because it seemed to me that Mr. Reed — and thus perhaps the filmmakers — seemed to buy into the premise that shapes a lot of online conversations about religion. That premise is that religion is like science. It can either be proven with empirical evidence, or it can’t, and if it can, you should believe it. If I can show you an old street sign that says “Zarahemla,” the Book of Mormon must be true and you should be baptized into the Latter-day Saint faith. If you can prove that there were no horses in ancient America, the Book of Mormon must be false and the church should crumble.

None of these suggestions seem to work in real life, to the chagrin of partisans who are frustrated when the evidence that seems blindingly clear to them doesn’t change other people’s beliefs.

I woke up a bit when one of the missionaries, Sister Barnes, punctured Mr. Reed’s case. She points to what many researchers have. The mythic theory amplifies and simplifies points of comparison between these ancient deities and massages the details of these stories until they stretch and contort into roughly the same form. The theory also simply ignores the many contradictions among these ancient myths.

Sister Barnes is right. But in another sense, she buys into Mr. Reed’s premise that empirical evidence is the key to understanding religion.

This kind of jousting accomplishes little other than making its combatants feel good about themselves. People don’t choose to be religious when some imaginary equation of evidence adds up to the right number. The precise alchemy of faith is far more complex and individualized than that. We do things because of how we feel about evidence, about the people who present evidence, and about how the evidence is used. And we can rarely explain how exactly the math in our hearts works.

Beliefs and feelings

So I was even more happy when the other missionary, Sister Paxton, said that she doesn’t believe in God because of facts, but because of feelings. It’s an argument that sometimes causes Latter-day Saints to scoff at two groups: conservative evangelicals and non-believers.

Steeped in the tradition of Protestant Christian apologetics, many conservative evangelicals are used to arguing that their faith can be proven with evidence from history and science and other empirical data sources. To them, the common denial by believers that the Holy Spirit confirms truth through feeling is insane.

The same is true of many non-believers, who find the idea that one can be religious because of emotion frustratingly non-empirical, non-scientific, and completely hair-brained.

Towards the end of the film, Mr. Reed with the sobering conclusion that religion is simply a way of controlling people, which is of course the conclusion you would come to if you believe that people only choose religion because of empirical evidence. There is a long history of people being confused when friends and family join movements or do things that seem confusing and indefensible, and a long history of those people deciding that their friends and family simply need to be brainwashed or confused or, yes, controlled.

But emotions are the reasons people do most of the things we do, and while they’re not empirical—you can’t measure them—they’re actually evidence. Your love for your family and friends cannot be measured, but it is real. Many Americans shop at Target instead of Walmart or Whole Foods instead of Kroger because of feelings or, as some people say today, vibes — vibes that these companies generate with marketing designed to influence us. It is also a form of control, and it points to the fact that we are all incessantly affected by our emotions in real and powerful ways. Highlighting religion as particularly dark for “controlling” us says more about how one feels about religion than whether we are actually “controlled”.

All this is to say that it is perfectly appropriate, and more so, perfectly human, to believe things because of feelings. Ironically, there is evidence that humans make gut-level decisions first and generate evidence-based reasons to validate those decisions afterwards.

Near the end of the film, Sister Paxton describes a study showing that sick people who were prayed for did not heal at a higher rate than people who were not. Then she prays for other people anyway, because, says the missionary, she feels it is the right and good thing to do.

That moment, more than anything else, is why “Heretics” is smart about religion.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of 2023’s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” ​​and 2012’s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”