Christians can Learn From Anime Too

Usually I avoid discussing my beliefs on JP. However, (the week I write this) I had an encounter with a Bible-bound lady and then read a thoughtful article on Beneath the Tangles about Christians blogging about Yaoi and Yuri. They sat in contrast to each other. The Bible-bound lady pontificated about how Halloween was wrong and how people needed to read their Bibles. I commented about how Halloween allows people to keep folklore alive. As you can guess, she said people only need their Bibles. Bible-bound people are those who live in a box of religious media and see anything outside that box as sinful. I used to be a Bible-bound person too.

Her idea of God is small.  He feels threatened by Halloween and folklore and don’t even mention anime! Ironically, for as much as these Bible-bound people read the Bible, they don’t read it. To understand the Bible properly requires you to understand history and culture, requiring you to study sources outside it. If you don’t know 1st century Roman and Hebrew culture, you will miss the nuances and points the New Testament writers make. After all, that culture provides the framework for their thinking. Paul was Hellenistic. And if you don’t understand the ideas that label includes, you will not be able to trace his thinking as he intended.

Likewise, if you don’t understand the conflict Paul had with Peter and James (which Luke smoothed over), you will fail to read Paul’s letters within their proper context. In order to understand the conflict, you have to read Luke’s writings and extra-Scriptural histories from the same period. To provide another example, with Jesus you have to understand what the Pharisees (a Jewish religious sect) practiced to get why he addresses them as He does. Once you do, you will see that Jesus aligned with the Pharisees more than the other religious groups of the time. He was telling them to watch what they were doing. But again, this requires you to read 1 and 2 Maccabees and even rabbinic texts from the period.

My long-winded point: to understand the Bible properly, we have to read outside it. However, as with everything, these teaching tools have been distorted by sin. We are born with God’s law imprinted on us (Romans 2:13-15), but we can lose touch with it. Christians are not to be instruments of sin because we’ve been freed from the law by God’s grace. The law imprinted on us and that which we learn through study acts as a guide, but we are also not under it. In other words, we should follow it because it is how God wants us to behave, yet we won’t be held liable if we fail in good faith.

Think of this as driving down the road. If we are under the law, we are being watched by police officers waiting to write us a ticket. We act out of coercion. When we are under grace, we don’t have police officers watching, but we still follow the traffic laws because it is the right thing to do. We don’t act out of coercion, but rather out of God’s virtue. The law teaches virtue.

So that brings us to anime. God can use everything to teach us virtue, even sinful things like pornography. He is, after all, all-powerful. In Romans 6, the writer addresses a group of people who misunderstood how grace worked. In fact, the text suggests they purposefully sinned to make more of it to go around. Yet, the writer used that sin to teach them the virtue of grace how it frees from sin and the law. So if orgies (or whatever they were doing–the text suggests something like that was going on) can be used as a teaching tool, anime can be too.

God sees us as children. What do parents do with children? They patiently and persistently correct them, allowing them to grow in virtue and knowledge. In fact, the Japanese Zen master Dogen tells us:

Kind speech arises from kind heart, and kind heart from the seed of compassionate heart… speak to sentient beings as you would to a baby.

This echoes what Jesus admonished: for us to become as children ourselves.

Anime can act as a teaching tool, just as folklore can. Anime can open our minds to ways of thinking that can, in turn, open us to God’s lessons. Beneath the Tangles explained how Kaname Madoka from Puella Shoujo Madoka Magica acts as a Christ figure. Anime may contain strong Shinto and Buddhist elements, but if you study those elements you will see that they echo themes similar to Christianity and Judaism and Islam. Gentiles have the law written on their hearts (Romans 2:12-29) , and this can lend a different view for those who want to drive according to the traffic laws. Of course, no one can follow all of the law. We are fallible. That’s where the idea of grace–of God’s forgiveness–comes in.

If you study different religions, you will see they mostly say the same things. That’s because they all tap into God’s Will in some way or another. They provide valuable insights for Christians who are not Bible-bound. And those insights can provide tools. After all, the New Testament is good at telling you want to do, but not how to do it. Love your neighbor as yourself. But how do you learn to love yourself? Faith is best expressed through practice–caring for widows and orphans for example. But how do you cultivate that practice and mindset? I find Taoism and Zen useful for the tools they provide. Zen teaches you how to cultivate self love and create a mindset that allows you to follow Christ’s virtues.

Anime too can offer you examples of behavior that show you how to act (or not act) in a given situation. Many anime stories focus on the value of friendship and offer characters that may face the same difficulties you do. They can provide tools that apply to your life. Even ecchi and anime’s sexuality can provide some lessons about how to feel comfortable with something God intended for us to enjoy (within marriage, of course). Ecchi can teach how sexuality can be fun within the proper contexts. Which, in turn, can help you develop normal relationships along the lines God intended. Barring, of course, sex outside of marriage. After all, physically attraction is something God intended for us to enjoy within limits.

Bible-bound people cannot read Scripture properly because they ignore the outside lessons needed to understand the Bible’s context or open our minds to its messages. Sometimes those lessons come from anime and Dogen. Other times they come from Josephus and the Didache. But we must study to learn the traffic laws. Fortunately, God’s forgiveness allows us to make mistakes. He understands that mistakes–sin–allows us to grow. We can’t earn salvation. That is a gift. However, we can learn how to live close to God’s plan for us. And those lessons come from all directions. After all, God created the universe. The universe and everything within it, acts as a teacher, including imperfect human-produced stories like anime.