Justice League vs. God

The Magazine Editor was visiting the other day and conversation turned, as it often does in my house, to the Justice League.

My son Sam (5) is, to say the least, obsessed with the Justice League, an obsession I’ve done little to discourage.  He sleeps under a shelf full of Justice League dolls action figures (he has 80 or so, not including the inevitable copies, and also not including the various members of the Green Lantern corps, who, although appearing on Justice League, are not actually members of the Justice League), as well as banks, comic books, encyclopedias, posters, and a wall covered with his own drawings of various members.

TA. I don’t know — I think I might have gone too far with the whole Justice League thing.
TME. Could be worse.  You could send him to Sunday school.
(laughter)
TA. I mean, I don’t mind, you know, the intensity of it — and it’s not violent like Batman is violent — but I just worry that he’s watching something that he isn’t really getting.  I mean, there are all these moral and ethical concepts in the show that are just too sophisticated for him —
TME.  That’s what I mean.  It could be worse, you could be sending him to Sunday School.

So be it.  Sam likes Justice League because it’s more interesting to him than Superfriends or Magic School Bus (both of which delight his four-year-old sister) and he’s too old for Maisy or Thomas the Tank Engine.  Its moral lessons are couched in high drama, well-drawn characters (in every sense of the word) and fluid, exciting, colorful action, more so than any Sunday school class I remember (although the Bible is certainly not lacking in colorful, absorbing, morally complex action stories).

Sam confessed to me the other night:

SAM.  Dad?
DAD.  Yeah?
SAM.  I believe in superheroes.
DAD.  Sure.
SAM.  No, I mean I really believe in them.  I think they’re here, I think they’re hiding, so they can be there if we need them.

Well, okay, he’s five, so I’m not too concerned about him having actual paranoid delusions.  If he believes there really is a Superman who is good and strong and (mostly) invulnerable, a vastly powerful being with an unerring sense of right and wrong (or at least a team who will correct him if he’s wrong), if he believes in a collection of smart, quick-witted, eloquent heroes who will help him out when he really needs it and never let him down, well, that’s the message of Justice League, but it’s also the message of Sunday school.  And as far as I’m concerned, as far as belief systems go, I would rather have him believe in the brightly-colored pop-culture fantasy of Justice League than in the blood-encrusted gothic tales of organized religion any day.