Maybe there are no such things as "Bad Guys"

I'm adding to my other rants about how being bad has come to be acceptable (here and here). I actually get to go on a date with my wife tomorrow night (thanks Mom!), so I began searching the movie listings. One of the current movies out right now is Twilight. It's about a romance between two high school teens - one a normal, pretty girl and the other a very good looking ninety year old vampire. It is based on a series of books that starts with a novel by the same title. I know nothing about the books or the movie beyond what I've already stated. Nothing except this - all the girls in my classes LOVE this story. Several of my students have read every book in the series (three or four?) twice already this school year.

Vampires as a whole are finding a resurgence in popular literature, even without Anne Rice. I've seen what are probably some more traditional fare about vampires in the hands of my male students. But this post is about taking something that is bad and pretending it is good.

I suppose we can begin to place the blame on Anne Rice and her novels The Vampire Chronicles, particularly how she made Lestat a sympathetic character in spite of his evil tendencies that were no fault of his own. When Rice became a Christian, she went into seclusion to figure it all out. She stopped writing the Vampire novels and instead published a fictional account on the life of Jesus as a child. Don't quote me on this, but I seem to recall having heard that Rice has returned to the Vampire stories, this time with a Christian flair and vampire in them.

Permit me to sound ludicrous here, but we also see this move of making vampires "good people" in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy of course began her career slaying these demon killers of the night. As the storyline progressed, one of the characters that assisted Buffy in her daily business of fighting off and killing whatever evil creature threatened the world was in fact a vampire. There was another tv series on last fall whose main character was a "good" vampire in a committed normal relationship.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe vampires aren't really bad people. Maybe they have been given a bad rap by all the fantastic and imaginative gore written about them over the last several hundred years. Maybe contemporary fiction (and by extension contemporary ideology) has taken a necessary corrective action is showing us who vampires really are.

For argument's sake, let's say that vampires are inherently evil creatures. Why are we cleaning them up? Why are we making them acceptable? Why are we mooning over romances and relationships that conquer all the odds when it includes one? I would hope that the reason is because these creatures of evil have been redeemed. I hope it's because in each case we see a change in character and action that turns abruptly from the evil ways of a vampire and turns toward that which is more human, perhaps even more Godly.

Just to play fair, let's say that vampires are not inherently evil any more than your average regular human is inherently evil. Vampires are affected by the fall in the garden of Eden in the same way that humans were. We are told in Scripture that all creation was affected and that creation itself groans in anticipation of its eventual completed salvation when Jesus returns. Does that justify the willful murder and consumption of human blood? Can a vampire really invoke the "I can't help it, it's not my fault" clause? At least the vampire family in Twilight strives to live a human blood free life.

As silly as all this sounds, I think this whole thing comes down to the question of what does it mean to be Godly. In some family devotional material we have been using with the boys, the first week focuses on the issue of Godliness. It defines Godliness as wanting to please God in everything you think, say, and do. That's a pretty good definition. It gets us away from legalism, though it could lead to liberalism if argued "correctly". When I begin to apply that definition to whether or not I'm going to root for the bad guy, imitate the habits of the bad guy, or try to make the bad guy out to be something else entirely, I think I'll discover that I really can't do any of those in good conscience.

Yes Virginia, there really are such things as bad guys. We're all one of them at birth. The good news is there really is such a thing as a really good guy, a perfect guy even. He died for us so we could become one too.