Angels of Light: Hypocrites, Prophets, and Prodigals at the ‘Midnight Mass’
By Brian Keiper
The Fragility of Faith
“Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” — 2 Corinthians 11:14
When I was in high school, I had a dramatic spiritual awakening. The Christian faith I was raised with came alive to me in a way that I had never experienced before. My whole life’s purpose seemed to change. My career direction shifted toward ministry. I went to college to earn a degree in Music Education but with every intention of going into church music ministry. I felt like every step I took — in my career, in my relationships, in the way I met my wife — was guided by a higher power. I spent ten years in church ministry, which deeply affected my young family in many ways. Eventually, I left that world and found a new direction as a music teacher, which I also saw as a kind of ministry, just without being able to use the same language. I would have to show what I believed in my lifestyle alone. Through all those years the fire faded, but the belief never wavered. There were mountaintops and valleys, times of unshakable assurance, and others of deep doubt, but through it all, faith remained like an immovable rock.
Until a few years ago.
Since leaving church work, my world has grown larger and more diverse. I have gotten to know far more people with many different points of view. Social media has expanded this even further, opening doors to true friendships that I never would have had from inside the little bubble where I had spent so much time. I have always been an intellectually curious person, but for the first time, I have tried to push myself into areas of study that challenge my perceptions more. I have always believed that the truth, whatever it is, will stand up to scrutiny. But along the way, and in the midst of circumstances both personal and in the world at large, the rock of faith has felt more like sand shifting beneath my feet.
These doubts have plagued me with fears and guilt. I have hidden them from many who know and love me because I fear they will judge me. I have hidden my faith from new friends because I know how they have been harmed by the church and by those who call themselves Christians. These acts in themselves have only brought more guilt. On the one hand, I have always been told that doubting is not a sin, but this doesn’t always carry over into the real world. On the other, I fear that I have violated the scripture in which Jesus says, “he who acknowledges me before men, I will acknowledge before my father in heaven. He who denies me before men I will deny before my father in heaven.” I have done worse — I have done neither. But now, I feel that I need to come clean.
The impetus for all of this, as it so often is for me, is a work of art. A piece of film so profound that I am not reluctant to call it a masterpiece: Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. It is such a dense and richly layered experience that I could write a dozen articles on different aspects of it and only barely scratch the surface. It is a film (though it is a series, I tend to think of it as a single, seven-hour work) about forgiveness of others and self, different expressions of belief and unbelief. It is a meditation on the biggest questions of existence, life, death, and the hereafter. It mines the depths of sacrifice, loss, redemption, guilt, and the limitations and hypocrisies we all do our best to hide. It is about conformity and standing against it. It deals in family and community dynamics. All the deepest problems and ponderance of humanity represented and explored to an extent rarely dared in popular entertainment. Because there is simply no way to deal with all its intricacies outside of a book-length treatise, I will focus on the element that fascinates and frightens me above all others: the ways that the wolves so easily pass for the sheep.
Wolves Among Sheep
“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” -Brennan Manning
When I was in seventh grade, my class was assigned to do a project and presentation about the year we were born. We were asked to look at important events that shaped history, movements in popular culture, and other things of that nature. Being a movie fan, naturally I gravitated toward sharing some favorite films of 1978 — Superman, Jaws 2, and of course my favorite film at that time, Halloween. This project is also how I first heard of one of the biggest news stories of my birth year — the tragedy of Jonestown. I was shaken by the idea that one man could convince so many people to take their own lives. That a human could prey upon the spiritual hunger of his followers and twist their minds into blind faith was a gut punch even then and it still haunts me now.
Boiled down to the absolute basics of plot, Midnight Mass is this story, told again and again in human history, of the rise of a destructive cult. We have the charismatic preacher, in this case with good intentions at first, sharing a new “good news,” aka “gospel.” He performs signs and wonders, apparent miracles that draw new followers. Ultimately it culminates, as so many do, in total disaster. Neighbor against neighbor, fathers against sons, friends against friends, and eventually suicide, murder, destruction, and all forms of death and devastation. But it is also the story of the tiny remnant, the disparate group that sees this cult for what it is and stands against the deadly tide.
Just within my lifetime, I have seen this story over and over in many forms. Some, like the Matamoros human sacrifice cult, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, resulted in mass deaths. Others like the bizarre NXIVM sex cult, Warren Jeffs and his FLDS splinter group, and David Berg’s Children of God are mired in abuse and pedophilia scandals. The list goes on and on to militant factions and hate groups like the detestable Westboro Baptist Church and the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary led by Hyung Jin Moon (son of Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon) who regularly stands before his congregation with an assault rifle while wearing a crown fashioned out of bullets.
But as it turned out, death cults were one thing. Wholesale self-deception by millions who claimed the name of Christ for the sake of a demagogue was still on the horizon. Scriptures warn again and again about deceivers. Jesus warned of wolves coming in sheep’s clothing. The Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 4:3 that there will come a time that Christians will ignore foundational beliefs “to suit their own desires.” Going on he says, “they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” In this sense, Midnight Mass tells a story that has happened before and will surely happen again. But when Jesus warned of the wolves, I never expected them to be quite so obvious about it. What distresses me most is that so many have been deceived anyway, as though they have willfully blinded themselves because they refused to believe they had been duped.
What has shaken my faith more than anything in recent years is the appalling behavior of those who call themselves Christians but seem to want to have nothing to do with Christ. This is not a phenomenon isolated to recent events, but it has never been quite like this in my lifetime. Over the past few years, it has become decidedly more difficult to refer to myself by the term Christian. Many who call themselves by that name have done more to profane the name of Christ than any other by their devotion to demagogues, replacing faith with political identity, and simply living lives that do not reflect the love that Jesus called his followers to display and live out.
In Midnight Mass, the characters of Beverly Keane and those she draws into her web, particularly Wade Scarborough (Michael Trucco) and Sturge (Matt Biedel), thoroughly represent what I fear most about the modern church. People so blindly devoted to an institution and their own self-preservation that they cannot see when deception has entered into the equation. People who claim Christian faith but do not understand the foundations it is built on or live out the edicts it calls its adherents to. This has played itself out to a frightening degree in the world and is captured in microcosm in Midnight Mass.
Bev is a classic illustration of a too-often ignored element in the most famous story Jesus told: the Prodigal Son. In the story, recounted in Luke 15:11–32, there are two sons, the more often focused-upon younger brother who demands his inheritance and squanders it, and the older brother who stays home. The younger brother returns to the father and intends to ask to be made one of his servants. The father instead fully restores him to the family and mounts a massive celebration for his return. This makes the elder brother furious, and the true nature of his heart is revealed. Though he appears to be a faithful child to the father, his heart is cold, filled with jealousy and hatred for the child he sees only as a “sinner.” He cannot see his own faults through his own self-righteousness and is incapable of any kind of repentance.
Beverly is a representation of this older brother. She goes through the motions of faith, can quote Bible verses, knows all the ins and outs of religious ceremony, but is completely dead inside. She is a bigot, a racist, a hypocrite, and a judgmental, hateful human being. She seethes against the prodigals represented by characters like Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), Erin Greene (Kate Siegel), and Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet), people who know they have failed but are now working to better themselves. In a powerful scene, Riley’s mother Annie (Kristin Lehman) confronts Beverly with what everyone else has been afraid to tell her. “You are not a good person,” Annie tells her. She goes on to describe the greatest truth of the Christian faith that is so hard for hard-hearted hypocrites like Beverly to accept. Though Riley is a recovering alcoholic, though he killed a woman while drunk, and though he is an ex-convict on parole, Annie says, “God loves him. Just as much as he loves you, Bev…why does that upset you so much? Just the idea that God loves everyone?” Bev is the kind of person that Jesus described as a whitewashed tomb, “which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matthew 23:27). Just as the religious establishment of Jesus’ day despised this idea, so does the religious establishment today. Beverly is Flanagan’s commentary on the deep corruption of the human heart and the religious establishment.
Beverly not only harbors hatred in her heart, but she also participates in any number of evil acts to protect an institution over the people that the institution was originally established to protect. She assists in murder and cover-up to protect Father Paul. She helps orchestrate the mass suicide at St. Patrick’s church. She lets the newly turned vampires out onto the town in the name of spreading the new gospel. Yet, she cannot see that her acts are far more evil than anything Riley Flynn ever did. She feels no remorse, no empathy, no need for repentance even when her leader, Father Paul, confronts her with the fact that they are the wolves among the sheep. Beverly’s fatal flaw is that she is completely unable to admit when she is wrong. Even when every sign points to the fact that what is happening is not of God but pure evil, she twists and tortures cherry-picked passages from the Bible to clear her own conscience and condemn others.
Ultimately this leads to her undoing, even as others who walked on the same path turn from the horrors they had participated in. Sturge, who has followed lockstep with Beverly for so long, sees the error of his blind devotion and in the end seeks forgiveness and to forgive. And that is the heart of true gospel — authentic good news. To admit that we have walked down a wrong path is a miracle. To allow ourselves to be forgiven is a miracle. And because of this undeserved miracle, to be able to forgive someone else is indeed a miracle as well. For a moment at the end, it appears that Bev may finally understand this. She falls to her knees on the shore as the sun rises, tears on her face. But then, like a rat or a cockroach scurrying from the light, begins futilely clawing at the ground in an attempt to escape her fate.
One of the criticisms leveled against Midnight Mass was that it is a thinly veiled allegory of the Trump era and COVID-19. This is absurd on its face. Flanagan had been working on the story long before the former president’s announcement of candidacy. The fact is that the Trump era aligns with the familiar and ongoing story about the rise of cults throughout the world. In a unique way, the film is depicting a pattern that has been seen throughout history. Jesus himself warned of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Sinclair Lewis wrote about it in Elmer Gantry. Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, and a thousand other spiritual predators enacted it. Claiming the film is an attack on Trump is more a confession than a criticism — an admission and self-indictment of the evangelical embrace of the far-right and Trumpism over the basic teachings of Jesus. The two are diametrically opposed.
Trump just happened to be in the world of politics rather than religion which has also happened many times before. Political cults are nearly as prevalent as religious ones — I’ll let you fill in the names. In the modern era, politics has become its own religion of sorts and we find ourselves so often engaged in its unholy wars. This began long before Trump and Biden but has reached its boiling point in this era. There is no denying that religion has been leveraged into the world of politics for generations. We have seen the results and they are ugly. Division, hatred, and sometimes even war. Writer, pastor, and activist Tony Campolo put it well: “mixing politics and religion is like mixing ice cream and manure; it doesn’t affect the manure much, but it really messes up the ice cream.”
A symptom of this has been the proliferation of conspiracy theories that many who claim to be Christians have participated in, one of the most disgusting side-effects of the politicization of religious belief. Now, differing beliefs are seen not only as an opposing view but as evil, as are the motives of those who hold them. If Christians claim to be people of the truth, there is no room for believing preposterous lies. There is no room for believing an election was stolen despite a complete lack of evidence. There is absolutely no room for believing in a cabal of cannibalistic progressives. There is no place for flat earth, 5G, chemtrails, or any other nonsense from the tinfoil hat crowd. Truth and conspiracy theorizing is completely at odds with one another. There is also no place for calling for violence against elected officials, police and first responders, medical workers, customer service employees, flight attendants, and teachers just trying to do their jobs. I can’t even believe I have to write those words. I thought that would be obvious.
But as I read over what I have written, I must be humble enough to admit that I am a flawed, fallible human being just like every other flawed, fallible human being that has ever lived. I am forced to ask myself how close I have come at different times of my life to being a Beverly Keane or a blind follower like Sturge. I am compelled to look at the deceivers and those duped by deception, go to my mirror, and say to myself what has so often been said before, “there but by the grace of God go I.” I have allowed myself to be misguided and deceived plenty of times before, how close would I have come now?
The Road to Hell…
“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” — 12 Proverbs 14:12
I knew what I was doing was wrong, that it would eventually cause me and those around me pain, but I did it anyway. For an entire year, I lavished my attention, energy, and even a fair amount of money on a fantasy. I was so fixated on this castle of sand that I neglected my wife, my children, and my students. It was not an affair in the traditional sense, but an obsession of sorts. An expenditure of emotion in a way that was clearly harmful to me and my relationships. Then it all came crashing down and I was left with only the pain that I had caused. I came crawling back deeply wounded to those I had wounded myself. It took some time and work, but the bonds healed and became stronger than before. I became a better husband, father, teacher, and human because I finally saw that I was just as susceptible to these kinds of failings as anyone. I had been the haughty, judgmental older brother looking down my nose, never realizing what it meant to be a prodigal. Now I knew. But I also learned the power of forgiveness.
Which brings us to the matter of Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). Though he ultimately becomes the Jim Jones of the story it is not because of malice or madness. At every step his intentions are good. But as has been well stated “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is the ultimate tragedy of Monsignor John Pruitt.
It is revealed in the third episode that Father Paul and Monsignor Pruitt are in fact one and the same. While on a pilgrimage to the holy land, the aged Monsignor encounters what he interprets to be an angel that restores his youth. He brings this creature back to his home on Crockett Island to share its gifts with his community. As we learn by the end, however, his motives are wrapped up in personal selfishness as well. In his youth, he had a secret affair with Mildred Gunning (Alex Essoe) who gave birth to his daughter. Mildred has since suffered the ravages of age and Alzheimer’s disease, and John hopes to turn back the clock for a second chance with the love of his life.
Pruitt is an embodiment of the fact that even good people can be corrupted, confused, and deceived. That the institutions that hold sway over peoples’ lives are in constant need of examination, reevaluation, and reformation, and that all begins with self-examination, self-evaluation, and personal reformation. To use the biblical term: repentance. It is a loaded term but put simply it means to stop, turn around, and go the other direction, away from destruction and toward life. That is a worthy act for both those who believe in a higher power and those who do not but seek to be better human beings. It can be a painful path, as it was for me, but one that ultimately leads to greater strength and character.
In the end, he must look upon his own castle of sand that has been washed away by the tide, just as I did. Seeing the devastation he has brought upon the family he kept secret for decades from his neighbors, his friends, and his flock, Pruitt pulls the clerical collar from his neck and tosses it away. Has he abandoned only his position as priest…his religion? Or has he abandoned his faith as well? Perhaps it is all of them. I ask myself if I need to toss everything aside because of the corruptions that have infiltrated the church and muddied the gospel as delivered by Jesus. The longer I walk the road of faith the more I am convinced that faith and religion are very different things. Though I don’t entirely agree with Christopher Hitchens’ idea that “religion poisons everything,” I understand his point. Too much of the history of religion is marred by violence, hatred, and judgment boiled down to one simple word, hypocrisy, and it is time that we own up to that.
The Remnant
“…at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace.” — Romans 11:5
Midnight Mass does make another point very clear, however, that there is always hope. The small group, or remnant, that stands against the horrors being brought against Crockett Island are the embodiment of hope. It begins with the character of Riley Flynn, a prodigal son if there ever was one. Riley is the altar boy who goes to prison for vehicular homicide caused by drunk driving. Because of the pain he sees in the world, because of his own devastating failings, he has completely abandoned faith in a loving God. He refuses to allow himself to be forgiven for the destruction and pain he has caused. Riley would rather hate God than let Him forgive him for killing that girl. Yet, he performs the most purely “Christian” act of the whole story when he chooses to sacrifice himself in order to prove to Erin Greene that an unbelievable evil threatens her friends and neighbors. In Riley’s final moments he finally accepts the hand of forgiveness. Sitting in the boat across from him, he sees his victim, now fully healed, surrounded by light. She reaches her hand out to him and he takes the final step of reconciliation when he accepts it and the two rise together to their unknown destiny. This peaceful vision is a striking contrast to “the angel” that has been released as a plague on the town.
Erin then goes on to convince the island’s doctor Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish) and her mother Mildred, as well as Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli), of what is really happening. Eventually, Riley’s parents Annie and Ed (Henry Thomas), and young Warren Flynn (Igby Rigney) and Leeza Scarborough (Annarah Cymone), also play important roles in fighting the tide. In many ways, this ragtag group who see the truth and seek to save their families, friends, and neighbors, are the true angels of light.
Erin, another prodigal whose story is the mirror image of Riley’s, spent much of her life away from faith but has returned to it, finding something in its heartbeat that speaks to hers. Seeing that their home is beyond salvation, the small group intends to leave the island before she realizes that they must stay behind to fight and stop the evil that has taken over. “It isn’t about us anymore,” she says, “it’s about everyone else in the world. Dying for people we haven’t even met yet. No greater love than that. What the good book says, isn’t it.” Erin ultimately gives of herself to protect these strangers. As “the angel” drinks her blood, she uses a knife to clip its wings in hopes of stopping it from escaping the island. It is an act of selfless love that goes beyond laying down her life for her friends, but also for thousands, perhaps millions that will never know what she has done for them.
It is unlikely that any of us will have to go so far as to protect our family, friends, neighbors, or fellow humans, but those who take the name of Christ are called to lay aside our own rights and comforts for the sake of others. In the age of COVID-19, this has been put to the test. Simple acts of compassion and neighborly love like wearing a mask, an act that does little to protect ourselves but much to protect others from the virus, have been loudly decried from “Christian” television, radio, and pulpits as rights violations. The vaccine has been called by many of these same voices “The Mark of the Beast,” which betrays a basic lack of understanding about the book of Revelation and prophetic language and has contributed to prolonging a pandemic that has already killed millions. These irresponsible preachers and pastors clearly do not understand, or refuse to adhere to, the basic Biblical principle to think of others as greater than ourselves and lay down our rights for the sake of loving our neighbor.
Movingly, Annie also gives her life so others may escape, knowing that the newly turned become hyper-focused on drinking blood. When she awakens to the new version of herself, she wanders until she finds her husband who has also been turned. In an incredible scene, the two discuss how hungry they are, but do not desire to join in on the bloodbath that their neighbors have given themselves over to. “When I saw them at the church, I thought it was something they really couldn’t help. Like something impossible not to do. But it isn’t, Annie,” Ed says, “I feel it too, I’m starving too, but I didn’t. I didn’t. Whatever this is, don’t change who you are.” And so I see that even if the hordes are raging around me, I will not change who I am. And maybe, just maybe, the fears and disgust I feel toward the behavior of so much of the evangelical church today is God calling me to be part of the remnant.
Recently, as my faith has been hanging on by a fraying thread, I am particularly drawn to filmmakers like Flanagan and Wes Craven because they handle matters of faith and doubt with a complexity that is missing from most explorations of these issues. Have I abandoned my faith? No. But it is safe to say that it has evolved. The older I get, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. I find that I am completely certain about even less. But I have begun to find that oddly comforting. To paraphrase Father Paul from one of his early sermons in Midnight Mass, God does not give us certainties, He gives us mysteries. These mysteries are more complex, more profound, more puzzling than any Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, or Benoit Blanc could ever unravel. But that is why I persist. I want to know.
Somehow, the more complicated the mysteries become the more I feel drawn back to the basics. The simple word “love” is filled with so many facets, complexities, and nuances. Our cynical modern selves so often scoff at the triteness of that single word, love. We hate the idea that our most desperate questions and longings could be boiled down to something with only four letters.
For all its length and ponderance, Midnight Mass comes down to that. The final scenes are various expressions of love. Ed and Annie clinging to each other as they sing “Nearer My God to Thee.” Erin drifting into eternity knowing that she gave her life to save others. Sheriff Hassan and his son Ali sharing their final moments together praying, worshipping, connecting with Allah and each other. John and Millie mourning over their daughter but reunited by love and repentance. Sturge and Ooker comforting one another, knowing how badly they have failed, but finding forgiveness. Leeza and Warren in the boat, the last hope for the future, the final witnesses to the fall and redemption of Crockett Island. If this is what love is, then maybe we can believe that love, as simple and even silly as it may sound, is enough. 🩸
Author’s Note
Scripture references are from the New International Version of the Bible.
Editor’s Note
Brian spoke at length about Midnight Mass on an episode of the podcast he co-hosts with Michele Eggen called Movies For Life. Listen to the episode.
Follow Movies For Life on Twitter @MovieLifePod for more info about the podcast.
About
Brian Keiper is a featured writer for Manor Vellum. Brian’s also written for Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, F This Movie!, Ghastly Grinning, and others. Follow him on Twitter @Brianwaves42.
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