So, we always remember the end of Walt Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", with James Mason's manly English lisp sepulchrally intoning "...in God's good time". The end of George Pal's "The War of the Worlds" has Sir Cedric Hardwicke's closing narration:
"After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth."
Many of the Cold War Sci Fi thrillers had references to God and Creation (even scientists!).
"Red Planet Mars" storyline is:
An American scientist contacts Mars by radio and receives information that Mars is a utopia and that Earth's people can be saved if they return to the worship of God.
What is the point? When the idea of Francis Schaeffer's "Christian Consensus" (I prefer "Biblical Consensus") comes up, the knee-jerk reaction is : "America was NEVER a Christian nation!" "The Founders were DEISTS!!!" "We need unlimited rice pudding!!!!"
Like that. Note that I do not make the claim of America being a Christian nation, but that it was founded on Biblical truth, the very thing that has made the West a success, at least until the West abandoned it of late. Lots of people went to church (at least on holidays) and had a working knowledge of what the Bible teaches. Ten Commandments, Golden Rule. Heck, even Ward and June sent Wally and the Beav to Sunday School, clutching their piaculative pence. There is a God, and we in some way are beholden to him, at least to say "Thank You" in November around mouthfuls of turkey and dressing.
What an odd bit of evidence to find that such a consensus existed at least into the late 1950s, when a majority of science fiction movies were made bowing to a need to acknowledge "God" in their writing (perhaps to appease the Joneses of Peoria). The pervasiveness of belief in God in America was enough to tacitly dictate Hollywood scriptwriting.
Just an odd bit of social archaeology I had to dig out.
2 comments:
Awesome. I've been studying gratitude of late, which horrifies people who have seen it. "How can you be grateful? Look what's happened to you. look what you are."
To which I reply:
Look at what has happened to me, look at what I have become! How can I not be grateful?
The difference is they see what has happened to me on the outside, I see what has happened on the inside.
Paul wrote "IN everything give thanks."
He did not say "FOR everything...".
Pollyanna need not apply.
Good last line, BTW.
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