It's impressive how much Western and Christian supremacist undertones Supernatural has
I watched Supernatural until season 7 or so when I was younger. I didn't really examine its subtext at the time, and just thought it lost steam after the original plot ended. I've recently started rewatching the show from the beginning, and, wow, like just wow. It's amazing how much Christian and Western supremacist subtext it contains.
Before I get into the details, I should mention that I've only rewatched the first five seasons yet. So I don't know if this still holds true after that. With that out of the way, here are the major reasons (obviously, spoilers).
Pagans are always depicted as bloodthirsty maniacs. Every single time.
Holy aspects of Christianity -such as exorcism rituals, churches, holy water- are the only "real" effective way of fighting demons. The other ways are made up in the show (demon killing guns and blades).
The cosmology is a thing on its own. Christian God has created the universe, yet Earth is at its metaphorical centre. Knowing a few things from the seasons after too, I can say that it's the only place of importance in the entire universe. Following the traditional Christian logic, humans are also the most important beings on Earth.
A special mention goes to the episode "Hammer of the Gods" (S05E19), as a striking example of what I talk about. In the episode, the major "pagan" gods alive gather to talk about the looming apocalypse. This includes Kali, Baldur, Mercury, Baron Samedi, Zao Shen, Odin, Ganesh. It's really telling that they threw in Ganesh and Kali together with old gods. Oh, and of course they all eat people.
The said apocalypse is to be caused by Lucifer coming back and fighting it out with Michael. Apparently it will be so bad that it will kill around half the human population.
The gods gather, conspire, with leads Dean and Sam there being held hostage as bargaining chips. They say they have to conspire, because if not prevented, this Christian apocalypse will kill them too. So this led to them teaming up. You can already see that Christianity is depicted as the big bad boy in the entire world.
During the talks, Kali says this to Loki, who she discovered was actually arcangel Gabriel.
"Westerners, I swear. The sheer arrogance. You think you're the only ones on earth? You pillage and you butcher in your God's name. But you're not the only religion, and he's not the only God. And now you think you can just rip the planet apart? You're wrong. There are billions of us. An we were here first. If anyone gets to end this world, it's me. I'm sorry. [KALI stabs GABRIEL with his own blade. GABRIEL screams, and in a flash of light, dies.]"
Don't worry he doesn't actually get killed by Kali.
Almost just after this scene, Dean gets up and says the following. Emphasis mine.
"All right you primitive screwheads, listen up. I'm outta options. Now on any other given day, I'd be doing my damndest to, uh, kill you. You filthy murdering chimps. But, uh, hey, desperate times. So even though I'd love nothing better than to slit your throats, you dicks, I'm gonna help you. I'm going to help you ice the devil. And then we can all get back to ganking each other, like normal. You want Lucifer, well, dude's not in the Yellow Pages. But me and Sam, we can get him here."
I swear, at this moment, I could almost see a 19th century colonizer white supremacist manifest to say this. I should remind that he says this to a group of gods that includes two major gods from Hinduism: a major religion that still exists. It would have been bad even without that, but this fact makes it much worse.
After this, Lucifer shows up, and kills every god with ease. He's not even the Christian god, and he's not even at his full power, yet he kills multiple major gods from other religions as if they were less than nothing. Oh, and he says that to them too.
"You know, I never understood you pagans, always fighting, always happy to sell out your own kind. No wonder you forfeited this planet to us. You are worse than humans. You're worse than demons. And yet you claim to be gods. [LUCIFER twists his fingers and MERCURY dies as his neck snaps] And they call me prideful."
He then kills Gabriel for real too. Because, as is tradition, gods from other religions are too incompetent to do anything to Christianity.
This episode is probably the epitome of what I mean, but it's just a culmination of what's been there from the start. The trashing of what is deemed as "pagan" (often read: not "Western"), and the supremacy of Christianity has always been there. I still like the show for its other aspects, but its subtext is really Christian and western supremacist.
I can absolutely understand where you're coming from and agree to some degree, but the show absolutely makes of mockery of genuine christian beliefs, too. The character that I think you're saying is the stand-in for the christian god is a whiny douche and
later season spoilers
the brothers literally kill himSupernatural definitely is western-centric, but the basic premise is "what if all of these fake mythologies were real" and that 100% includes christianity. The show doesn't really seem to have any particular regard for any of the belief systems that it mines for content. It's pretty disrespectful in general.
Its offensiveness towards Christianity is itself based on a sort of religious worldview that is rooted in a specific kind of Protestant Christianity (e.g. mythic literalism, inerrancy of scripture). So they’re basically affirming a specific religion’s idea about what “religion” is and applying it as a definitive conception of religion. Many people’s practices of Christianity themselves don’t follow those assumptions, including Catholic mysticism. and most other religions absolutely don’t.
You’re assuming contradictions are indicative of falsity but a lot of zen koans are constructed to be intentionally contradictory or nonsensical specifically to snap your brain out of the habitual application of conventional logic. Who’s to say that mythological or scriptural references that seem contradictory aren’t doing the same? Or in the case of scriptures that were compiled over a stretch of time, the “contradictions” are usually from different expectations put down at different points in time or for different groups of people. So the proper exegesis is usually to understand the intention underneath the statement to arrive at the broader truth rather than the statement itself.
I think you might be taking my point a little more strongly than I intended it, although I suspect the fault is in my communication of it. I did grow up in an evengelical branch of Christianity, but I'm not currently part of a church that affirms any of those particular doctrines. I also don't think the show was particularly offensive to Christians, and I didn't intend to state that if it came across that way. I just didn't think it was particularly deferential toward Christianity, but I can certainly see how I might have missed that when I originally watched the show.
Supernatural's mythos is definitely very influenced by US Christianity, but I think it's a very bad reflection of the variety of Protestant Christianity that believes in strict Biblical literalism and the inerrancy of Scripture. Supernatural doesn't even attempt to hew closely to the beliefs of those Christians, and the vast majority of its mythos is based on urban legends, occultism, or made up from whole cloth. It has more in common with LaVeyan Satanism in this respect than it does fundamentalist Christianity.
Supernatural is heavily influenced by cultural Christianity as the US hegemony, as are the occult traditions and many of the urban legends draws heavily from. But the Christianity it draws inspiration from is a mishmash from different sources and more resembles what a baptized Catholic who only attends church for Christmas and Easter would portray Christianity as, at least in the seasons I watched (I petered out around season 9 or 10). It also explicitly rejects certain elements of Biblical literalism throughout -- human evolution is canon in Supernatural, for instance.
OP's criticisms of its treatment of other world religions definitely holds water (and I've seen discussion of this particular episode on Tumblr with similar criticisms), but it's just inaccurate to frame Supernatural as based on a specific real-life religious Christianity that it strays SO far from.
Thank you for bringing this up.
I think this is a bit "color-blind" approach to it. Yes, it does satirize the Christian beliefs too. But this doesn't erase the aspects I've mentioned. The show still treats (Western) Christianity as the truest and strongest belief system. Despite how much satirizied it is, (Western) Christian belief is still the biggest, baddest, most effective, strongest.
Context matters too. The show was produced in a western society populated by mostly Christians and whites.
If I offer an analogy, a nationalist (or a "patriot") is often the one who mocks and criticizes his nation very strongly. But this does not mean that he doesn't believe in the supremacy of his nation. Insiders are often the harshest critics, whether they are betrayers or supremacists.
Edit: Also there is no context where a white Christian-ish guy calling the gods of an existing, "brown" religion primitive and chimps can be anything other than supremacist stuff.
Edit 2: Also I'm talking about the original run (first five seasons). The later seasons seem to have lost consistency in themes, so I don't know about the god part in last seasons. Even if god may be an ass in those, I'm not sure what I mentioned would still not exist in some form. But what I said definitely holds true for the original run.
I apologize, I'm really not trying to disagree with your central point or excuse the show's treatment of religions other than christianity. The scene you mentioned is atrocious and really shouldn't have made it into any show.
I just wanted to offer a perspective that the show doesn't feel particularly respectful from a Christian point of view either. I can see how I could be blind to what deference the show does give to american christians, though.
I apologize if I came across as trying to minimize your problems with the show, it wasn't my intent. I watched a good bit of the show and enjoyed the chemistry of the main cast enough to suffer through some pretty bad patches as far as the writing was concerned, but I definitely agree that there were a number of parts of the show that were pretty indefensible and I certainly don't think it was perfect.
Thanks for your kind and understanding response! I do appreciate it. I like the show as well, and after posting this I started the 6th season rewatch too. I think there are very cool and nice aspects to it, and it's a charming story. But the aspects I've mentioned, I think them to be bad. In no way this means people aren't allowed to like the show overall, or that liking it is bad or anything.
I just think pointing out the ideological flaws in stories we love is a good practice. We get so much ideology from our cultures and stories, and I think a good degree of critical examination is needed. I'm especially critical toward stories that play into ideologically dominant narratives.
To be fair, the Judaic god is the most supreme one based on the number of believers, if you add up Christianity and Islam, today. Often in these kind of series, the number of believers is proportional to strength.
As an example outside of Western media, in the Japanese series Shin Megami Tensei, the biggest, baddest, strongest god is usually YHWH, although more of a gnostic twist on it typically. That means above the traditional gods of Shinto belief, or the deified Buddhas, and you can't call it cultural bias this time - with a mere 1.5% of the nation Christian, it's likely no one who worked on the series is Christian.
In fact, the gods outside of YHWH are usually put under the umbrella of "demon", whereas YHWH always has a special place as the leader of order.
That being said, you usually end up killing YHWH, so it can hardly be called Christian approved.
Collapsing Christianity, Judaism and Islam is commonly done but really not very accurate from a theological standpoint. The deity they each follow is quite different with different expectations of his followers.
You're not wrong, but neither of these series are very theologically accurate with their very premise (I'm not sure it's very theologically accurate for a teenager to be able to kill Yahweh in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam).
My point was more that it's a common trope for some variant of the Judaic God to be primal in these "world religion battle royals" kind of shows, and it's not necessarily one born of a Western bias towards Christianity.
I was mostly referring to your "most supreme by number of believers" comment.
I don't think the fact that (an) anime uses similar tropes invalidates OPs point though, as the primacy of a Christian worldview is only part of the point. I am aware enough to know that western perceptions of anime tropes are not always accurate, but also not into anime enough to speak to why they might have used that particular one. Either way I think OP's point is fairly accurate in its totality.
I see your point, but in the story, Christian God is the only real god that created the universe. He also created Christian Heaven and Hell too, the only heaven and hell. So I don't think it's mainly about numbers, but the fact that Christian God is the only real god in the story.
“Demon” comes from daimon so that’s not entirely off.
It is unfortunate we don't have working spoiler tags. You could edit your comment to use expandable sections: https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/text-formatting#expandable-sections
Shoot, I've been using Discord a lot and forgot that spoiler formatting doesn't work here. Sorry about that...
All good! It's easy to forget, and I don't personally mind spoilers since my ex was a superwholock lol.
FYI, this is just an Army of Darkness reference.
Yeah that’s kinda what jumped out at me. I never finished supernatural but is not exactly well thought out or researched writing.
I don’t really think they were trying you push some narrative or norm. Just making something that would be easy to write and have mass appeal.
It’s literally what if the x files was a road trip turned fan appeasing low effort slop?
Ideology is most often not something that operates consciously, but it affects a person's worldview immensely. I don't think the writers were consciously trying to summon the spirit of East India Company, but they very much did not critically think about the ideological subtext they were injecting into the story. This is likely because they didn't question the validity of the ideological beliefs they inherited from their culture.
By the way, this is not some obscure take. It's one of the bases of literary theory, and it's introduced in undergrad courses too. Anyone who wants to read about it firsthand can check out "Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction".
I’m well aware of this style of analysis and the concept. I just don’t really agree that anyone came away from something like supernatural thinking that all pagans are trash or anything like that.
I’ll admit I find the whole style of analysis questionable/often reaching, but especially here I don’t think many people got their world views from supernatural, especially when you’re talking a movie reference quote as evidence of your argument.
Sure plenty of people absolutely believe crap like that and some % of them enjoyed supernatural, but western/Christian supremacist vibes wouldn’t even hit my list of things to say about the show.
None of those are the points I argued in the post or comments.
I think you're not really trying to understand what I'm saying. These are perversions and exaggerations of what I'm trying to illustrate, and I don't consider them good faith. Have a nice day.
I didn't know it was a reference, but it's not just a reference. The context where it's uttered is extremely important—a white Christian-ish guy saying that to "POC" and pagan deities of different cultures. Some of these deities are still worshipped by over a billion people too. After this, he also calls them chimps too.
They could have chosen so many different ways to insult these deities, but instead they opted to call them primitives and chimps. It doesn't matter it's a reference or not, it's some wildly racist and supremacist stuff. Not recognizing this or downplaying it supports it.
Fwiw all of those deities/spirits/loa are worshiped/invoked/honored today, even if by smaller numbers of people. Not diminishing the fact that Hinduism is clearly the largest of that group by any means.