Questions and answers in the The Wittenburg Door
Bob Gersztyn for the Door asks, “Someone has said that Star Wars is the myth of the 21st Century, for Americans.”
Terry Mattingly responds, “…The Star Wars universe gives you good verses evil, yet then turns right around and puts you in kind of an Eastern religious, yin yang context where there are the two sides of the force, the dark side and the light side. It wants to have Eastern religion and Western religion at the same time… People are constantly telling Anakin Skywalker, later Darth Vader, to trust his feelings. Why? Why are you supposed to believe that both the good guys and the bad guys want him to trust his feelings? They guy’s feelings are all messed up. How is he suppposed to get to truth through is feelings when his feelings are a circus? You can’t have truth any way other than feelings because the culture of the 60’s, and thereafter, is all based on experience, feelings and emotions. Anything else is linear, transcendent, doctrinaire truth, and we can’t have that. That’s old fashioned Judeo-Christian or something. So, however you find truth, it’s got to be entertaining, fun, edgy and visual, and make you feel a certain way. Trusting your feelings is very close to the heart of the ’60’s, as I said earlier”
A bit later Terry Mattingly responds, “Yes, that’s what Roberto [Rivera Arcarlo] means when he says the Star Wars universe wants it both ways. It wants to have good and evil, and moral certainty but yet then again it doesn’t want to have a conceptof truth taht actually gives you that, and that’s America. We want very badly for everything to be true except the parts that kind of bug us.”
Terry Mattingly being interviewed by Bob Gersztyn of the Wittenburg Door. Mattingly writes the column On Religion and works as a journalist for the Scripts Howard News Service in D.C. His new book is entitled, Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture
Pertaining to a question about the potential for TV and the Internet as vehicles for evangelism or church programs, “I’m of the belief, as I say in the book, that media makes lousy evangelism, but media makes tremendous pre-evangelism.”
The Wittenburg Door July/August, 2006, Issue No. 206, pp 8-9.