STAR WARS AND SCRIPTURE: CANON, CONTINUITY, AND COMMUNITY
Darth Vader grotesque of the Washington National Cathedral. Public domain.
The Mandalorian is back for a second season, which means another few weeks of enjoying a new adventure in a galaxy far, far away — and of course, high-quality baby Yoda memes. As a particularly zealous Star Wars fan, this series has quickly become one of my favorite stories in that fictional universe. I love the Old West aesthetic, the strange monsters, and the themes of family and sacrifice that remain central to the entire mythos.
George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, has always treated his franchise like a sprawling mythology — a collection of many different stories from different sources with shared themes and characters, coming together to create a cohesive universe. And just like any real-world tradition, there is a canon: a ranking of stories that are more reliable, more accurate, or more authoritative than others. The Star Wars canon can be convoluted and confusing. It covers many different forms of media, is tweaked and adjusted as new creatives take the helm, and continues to inculcate a complicated relationship among its fanbase. Especially in that last way, it’s like the canon of an actual religion (and no, I don’t mean Jediism).
Consider some ways that people engage with both the Star Wars canon and the Christian canon. Some people prefer certain stories to others, like a favorite book of the Bible or a particular Star Wars film. Some people question the canon and the authorities who determine it, be it George Lucas, Disney, or the ecumenical councils of the Church. Some people interact with the canon by adding their own stories and interpretations, like Jewish Midrash, literature such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, or fanfiction furiously scribbled in the corners of the internet. Some people insist on only accepting particular sources, be they the original, unedited, theatrical Star Wars films (“Han shot first!”); the King James Bible; or the original languages of scripture. Some people engage in toxic behavior when they disagree about the interpretation of the canon, engaging in violence, harassment, or oppression that we see in both the Star Wars fandom and across church history.
I’m hardly the first to point out these similarities, though I’m not saying that the Star Wars and biblical canons are exactly alike. There are a number of important differences between the two: Star Wars is not the inspired Word of God, its canon is established by a multibillion-dollar corporation instead of the Holy Spirit working through tradition, and new stories are added to its universe regularly. Still, as a Star Wars geek and a Bible nerd, I’ve noticed some similarities in the ways that both communities — the Star Wars fandom and the Church — engage with their respective canons. Star Wars fans and faithful Christians are often asking the same sorts of questions: how do we reconcile disparate or conflicting stories within the canon? How do we handle parts of the canon that we dislike? Ultimately, questions of canon become questions of community — how do these collections of stories shape the relationships between the people who gather around them? The canon plays a crucial role in organizing the common life of its community. There’s an opportunity here for the faithful to learn from the fanbase — to lean into more imaginative, creative ways of engaging with the canon of scripture and our common life together.
Let me give an example. Sometimes, people expect the canon to provide a sense of consistency. By focusing on a particular collection of genuine stories, we assume that the overall universe is reliable, rational, agreeable. Contradictory pieces of information should not coexist within the canon — we expect these wrinkles to be ironed out.
For Star Wars fans, this could mean consistency in minute details: approximate hyperspace travel times, the effects of various Force powers, the minor details of a lightsaber prop between movies. Within such a sprawling universe, inevitably some new stories retcon (retroactively change) older ones. In turn, other stories are told to explain away or smooth out the inconsistencies. This can be frustrating to some Star Wars fans. They want their universe to be seamlessly unified, the stories to make sense together, and the internal logic to work. And it would be easy to poke fun at the kinds of Star Wars fans who complain that Ben Solo could never have flown to Exegol in an Imperial-era TIE Fighter, because obviously that craft doesn’t have hyperspace capabilities; except Christians often approach scripture the same way!
What about the different genealogy accounts we have for Jesus? Was the Last Supper on Passover, or the day before? Does God bless the poor, or the poor in Spirit? These are just a few tensions found in the Gospels — across the entire breadth of scripture, we bump into many instances where the canon doesn’t quite fit together seamlessly. There’s a temptation to become frustrated — to wish that all the dates lined up, that the inspired Word of God would just be rational, agreeable, and systematic.
At the heart of this frustration is an impulse for control. An orderly canon is easier to grasp, to understand, to anticipate. This kind of orderly canon would — in theory — promote unity. This central desire for control aims to foster a unified community, but ultimately leads to major interpretive disagreements as different perceptions of “the real story” clash. Skirmishes like this have divided the Star Wars fandom: consider the venomous arguments about the sequel trilogy, which often shape how people think about the canon and their fellow fans. It makes us wonder what we want from our communities: a tidy gathering of people who agree, or the mess of disparate, diverse perspectives? While a canon does create coherence, that doesn’t mean conformity. Besides, a predictable, controllable canon is one without space for new, exciting, and unexpected things to happen. If the Star Wars canon was always restricted by what starships did in the first film, so many wonderful adventures would never take place. If scripture was always confined to a list of mere facts, the Word of God would become stiff and rigid rather than living and breathing.
Our preoccupation with internal consistency can also change how we read (or watch) the canon. We miss out on the actual stories being told, because we’re too busy treating a film or a Gospel like an encyclopedia. The ambiguity of the canon is in fact part of its charm! As a composite work, a collection of stories told by different people across different media for different purposes at different times, the canon represents many different perspectives. The overarching universe — a galaxy far, far away or a Creation loved by God — is still the same, and the overarching themes — redemption, family, sacrifice, good overcoming evil — are still the same. But the diverse range of voices we find in the canon present us with possibilities, not problems. The ambiguities invite us deeper into the universe, giving us a role as interpreters and participants in the broad picture being painted across the entire canon.
But what happens when we encounter stories that we just don’t like? Consider The Last Jedi, one of the most divisive entries in the Star Wars fandom (nobody agrees with me that its chief sin is the heresy of docetism — if Luke only seemed to be on Crait, was his intervention really meaningful?). To some fans, it’s the best Star Wars film — truly innovative, raising the franchise to new heights. To others, it completely ruined the entire franchise. The ugly underbelly of the fandom was exposed in the toxic response of some critics, where racism and misogyny manifested in the harassment of actors, creators, and even other fans. Contentious parts of the canon can create an identity crisis for the wider community: who are we? How do we disagree? How do we bridge ruptures in our common life?
Christians ought to be asking these questions about parts of the biblical canon, too. There are certainly books of the Bible that many people simply don’t enjoy (Numbers is not the most thrilling read). Other books don’t quite fit with our theological programs — Martin Luther infamously lamented that the book of James was an “epistle of straw”, wishing he could remove it from the canon for undercutting his doctrine of sola fide, by faith alone. Harder still are texts of terror, passages of violence and oppression that have reverberated throughout history. How can we stomach the injustices in the stories of Hagar and Tamar? How can we reply, “The word of the Lord,” when St. Paul appears to tell women to shut up and submit? How can we pray Psalm 137 and find joy in the gruesome death of children?
These verses vex us, especially since our broader faith commitments hold us to accept the entirety of scripture. If the Bible is really God’s revelation to us, the living Word speaking to (and being interpreted by) our communities, we must really find a way to make religious sense of even the most difficult or uninteresting texts. We must come together and share the burden, finding a way to uncomfortably hold the entire canon together. This can be particularly challenging, especially since our disagreements with the canon itself quickly become disagreements with one other. The history of the Church is full of far uglier, far bloodier struggles than the online arguments about the sequel trilogy. Again, how we engage with the canon shapes how we engage with our community.
Why are our disagreements, either with the canon or with each other, so volatile? Because we’ve made the canon a valuable part of our identity. When we are deeply invested in a story — when we allow it to touch us, to create meaning for us, to share an important part of our lives — anything that threatens our interpretation of that story also threatens our self-understanding. This is why a Star Wars fan might feel like Disney ruined their childhood by de-canonizing older stories, or a Christian might experience a crisis of faith when confronted with the complicated manuscript history of the New Testament. We should strive to be gentle in our disagreements, respecting the inherent vulnerability that comes in loving something outside of oneself.
The differences and difficulties of the canon beckon us to be charitable as well, to appreciate different points of view and interact with different ideas. When we begin to do this with the canon, we find that we can also do this with each other. The diverse witnesses of scripture, like the diverse stories of Star Wars, build a big table. There is room for everyone to meet there, and for us to find common ground in the grandest stories which matter most. At this table, we remember the uncomfortable fact that those people with whom we disagree most are still a part of our community. We are responsible for loving, and sometimes admonishing, even our least palatable neighbors. We must remember that these canons do not exist for their creators: they exist for the rest of us.
Ultimately, the appeal of the Star Wars mythos should remind the Church how powerful a deep imagination can be. That galaxy far, far away is not an irrelevant piece of pop culture — as Rowan Williams warns, “A society’s mass fantasies are anything but trivial.” (`) Lucas hoped his universe would serve as a myth for contemporary culture, and to some extent that wish has come true: the stories of Luke Skywalker are as well-known as the stories of Moses, and even Darth Vader is enshrined on the walls of the National Cathedral. But Star Wars, at its best, is more than mere escapism. It helps us imagine life more dramatically, more abundantly — encouraging us to reckon with important themes like family, sacrifice, redemption, and liberation. This is what scripture offers us in even greater abundance: a spark of divine imagination, a story for us to step inside and live with. The canon serves as an invitation to both the fans and the faithful: an opportunity to explore, to interpret, to create, to imagine, and to do all this together. The Bible beckons us to share dramatic dreams and expansive visions, to grow excited about the limitless possibilities unfolding across the cosmic story of God’s relationship with us. Living imaginatively with the Bible and each other — this is the way. (2)
John C. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), xviii.
The way of love, that is.
