Two dudes keep meeting in the comments section to tear each other apart.
In real life, they belong to the same church. Before the 2016 election and its fallout, they had a decent real-life acquaintance. But now their outraged avatars have fully hijacked the relationship. Ragebait posts spawn cage-match debates. The men have become caricatures of their respective political stances, increasingly bitter and decreasingly real to each other in any flesh-and-blood way.
“I’d become addicted to his posts,” says Phil Gross, a Christian game designer I’ve known for years and one of the two men in question. “Every few hours I’d go find them, even if they weren’t popping up in my feed. It was like I needed that adrenaline hit.”
We know this story. Indeed, most of us have been this story, if we’re honest, scrolling ‘til we find the outrage our nervous systems crave and then lingering as our adrenaline spikes and our cortisol readies us for battle. Amygdala? Activated. Dopamine? Flooding. It’s fight-or-flight time, all the time, and America seems to be loving it.
Phil wants us to look into that.
Punk and Pacifism
All too aware of his own relationship with self-righteous rage, Phil made The Monolith as a satire of religious nationalism.
Earlier this month, he and his publisher Plaid Hat Games launched their new splatter-punk-inspired tabletop game, The Monolith.
This ain’t no Settlers of Catan. If Settlers is folk, The Monolith is ‘90s punk—specifically The Pixies, which Phil listened to repeatedly as he worked on the game. Think Aliens or Warhammer 40,000. The cover and rule book show angry red splotches against stark black and white. Game mechanisms include boast and slay as players obey a shaman’s command to feed enemy hearts to a looming entity in the middle of the board.
It’s all very grimdark, and you’d never guess the game designer’s faith is influenced by the pacifist Mennonites he used to work with.
Calvinists committed to the doctrine of total depravity, get excited. The Monolith pulls no punches about human wickedness. Horror movies, dystopian novels, and the more violent tabletop games share this acknowledgement of the evil within.
The darker arts often show us our cultural moment’s concerns. Rosemary’s Baby explored female body autonomy in the ‘70s while Aliens II blasted corporate greed in the ‘80s. In the ‘90s, the Scream teens’ parents were strikingly absent, the kids themselves exhaustingly self-aware. In 2014, Jordan Peele’s Get Out indicted wealthy white liberals capitalizing on Black bodies. More recently, The Substance grappled with our obsession with beauty and refusing to age while Sinners examined links between Christianity and colonization.
Want to know what questions haunt our society? Ask horror. And with its shamans, prophets, and sacrifices, gamers will understand immediately that The Monolith has things to say about religion and violence.
If that rings Christian Nationalism bells, that’s no accident. Growing up in conservative spaces, Phil remembers one of his college professors rubber-stamping Putin because he wore a cross necklace and describes watching in disbelief as mentors he admired traded virtue for political power. The vitriol of election-season Facebook and the tactics of theo-bros on Twitter-turned-X have been translated directly into The Monolith’s game mechanics.
All too aware of his own relationship with self-righteous rage, Phil made The Monolith as a satire of religious nationalism.
But will players get the joke?
Space Marines and Satire
Sometimes satire doesn’t take. Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop wargame that influenced The Monolith, features hyper-masculine Space Marines. These dudes are muscle-bound, glowering, towering uber-mensch that the alt-right has become obsessed with.
Just as some people flocked to Stephen Colbert’s fake “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in earnest, Warhammer 40,000 has gotten a little 4-chan-y. But game designer Rick Priestly always intended the Space Marines as a dark joke.
“To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic,” he said in a 2015 interview with Cardboard Sandwich. “The fact that the Space Marines were lauded as heroes… always amused me, because they’re brutal, but they’re also completely self-deceiving.”
For Phil, The Monolith’s play style should serve as a warning, not just of Christian Nationalism’s tactics here in the U.S., but anywhere that religion melds with the ruthless pursuit of power. He critiques aggression with a hyped-up, absurd version of it. Kinda like Caravaggio or Beethoven.
In Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, the artist shoves in our faces a spouting artery from the drunk guy’s neck while carefully recording young Judith’s disgust and determination alongside her servant’s grim bloodlust. It’s a Baroque splatter-fest. The unflinching gore imbues violence with ambiguity, doubt, and distaste.
In Beethoven’s 5th symphony (you know the one: dun dun dun DUN), the composer spends plenty of notes on musical conflict. The bad guys have a fight song and it keeps getting stronger. For a while there, it looks like evil might win.
Today, Christian art tends toward the stubbornly upbeat. I’m thinking of my local Christian radio channel, with its “positive, encouraging!” tagline. With the exception of my buddies at Enclave, not many current Christian publishers would risk Ezekiel’s body-horror bones, Ecclesiastes’ cynicism, Revelation’s monsters, or the sick spiral into humanity’s worst that we see in Judges. Instead, it feels like most art funded and sanctioned by the American church demands a happy ending.
We need art of light and dark for the times we can’t find a silver lining and for the losses we will not see resurrected this side of heaven.
This leaves us without artistic language for our fear, rage, and doubt. Glib theodicy betrays those hurt by a sabotaged world. “Victims of evil cannot be silenced with either rational explanation (theodicy) or irrational submission (mysticism),” said Paul Ricoeur, writing about the problem of suffering. “Their stories cry out for other responses.”
Art is one of those responses. Every person I interviewed about horror mentioned trauma as well. We need art of light and dark for the times we can’t find a silver lining and for the losses we will not see resurrected this side of heaven. We need games, movies, music, and books that uncover wounds. Otherwise the wounds never heal.
Evil must be spoken of.
Know Thyself
We also need to ask what a particular piece of art says about evil. Does it expose and condemn evil, or does it glorify and empower evil? Does it want evil to lose, or win? One piece might condemn witchcraft while another teaches how to practice it. Those are two very different conclusions about evil.
We also need to be honest with ourselves about how dark art affects us. Does this movie, book, game, etc., strengthen my love for God and his world? Or does it fester the worst in me, strengthening my pride, lust, anxiety, selfishness, or greed? With the help of the Holy Spirit and other believers for a sanity check, we can navigate these questions in a holy way. God loves giving us wisdom when we ask.
Inevitably, different Christians will reach different conclusions. My friend, novelist and horror enthusiast Noah Thomas Vance, watches a horror movie just about every day, relishing that his God triumphs gloriously over evil. Me, not so much. That face-melting-bug-robot moment in Hoppers is my limit. I can’t even read the synopsis of The Exorcist without getting nightmares.
Know thyself and how much scary thou canst handle.
Horror, Southern-Baptist Style
Speaking with me earlier this year, Noah points out that Christians were always involved in making horror, both in film and literature. “Up until the late ‘70s, Christians were active in all art forms, including horror,” Noah says. He mentions filmmakers Terrence Fisher and Christopher Lee, and writer M. R. James, a devout Anglican and scholar of early Christianity who became the Father of Folk Horror.
Things changed with the rise of the Religious Right, Noah says. Many Christians fled mainstream arts for the burgeoning faith-based industry. “The moral majority politics of the ‘80s and the conservative resurgence now in the SBC positioned a lot of art as ‘they’re attacking you, the culture is attacking you, and it’s demonic!’”
In Noah’s eyes, that’s a missed opportunity. “Look at William Peter Blatty,” he says, invoking the author and screenwriter of The Exorcist. “Blatty’s intent was to scare people… into believing there is a higher power. These movies have a conservative moral message: evil is evil and we need to stay away. These are warnings.”
Noah’s own horror novel, his debut, will be released next year. Set in a Southern Baptist-esque church, the novel pushes abuse out of the shadows. “I went through a negative series of church experiences,” Noah said, “and I wanted to write cathartically about it.” He sought the release Jordan Peele got in making Get Out. Writers Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, and Stephen King also influenced his style.
Writing his story as a horror novel worked better for Noah than memoir, distancing him just enough to access his memories. “Genre fiction is the cheese you wrap the dog’s pill in. We gotta talk about something real. If we talk about it in this genre, it makes it just palatable enough.” Wrapping his story into horror, said Noah, “helped my story become palatable to me.”
Scare as Therapy
Research backs up Noah’s sense of healing through horror. Not all horror fans have trauma, but many trauma victims are drawn to horror. Scary media serves as exposure therapy, a way to face fear without being harmed. For PTSD victims and other trauma survivors, tense fiction can bring closure for the helplessness felt in earlier experiences because it grants them agency. The survivor can shut Misery or pause Mother Mary, stand up to stretch, and get back into it when they’re ready. The worst can happen on screen or on the board, but in real life, they will still be alive.
Catharsis can come in choosing, then releasing, fear.
Colby Dauch, founder of Plaid Hat Games, believes spooky art hones our survival instincts. Horror “lights up a primal part of our brains concerned with risk analysis, as part of the survival instinct. These things play with that part of our brains that makes us feel like: ‘I’m learning how to assess risk, I’m having my worst fears played out, and I am getting the chance to process them and deal with them.’”
Unchanneled Testosterone and Positive Masculinity
I wonder if the draw to scary movies or violent games isn’t just about trauma, though. It’s no accident that everyone I interviewed for this piece was male. Are they seeking more than catharsis?
We’re in this modern American moment that divides men into two categories: toxic male or gentle feminist. That’s a lot of testosterone floating around with nowhere legitimate to go. The all-powerful posturing of a Space Marine or the swaggering poison of an Andrew Tate might grow appealing if your fight-or-flight instincts have no sanctioned outlet.
I think of my ten-year-old son, who got in big trouble at school because he found a stick in the field and, without jabbing it at anybody or threatening to, pretended it was a dagger. Of course, with our heartbreaking American norm of school violence, I understand our school’s policy. But I also understand that boys will turn just about anything into a pretend weapon, and have for millennia.
Isn’t there some righteous form of this instinct? God made men with more fighter hormones on purpose, right? As Men of Virtue author Zachary Wagner points out, “When God created the male body—testosterone and all—he said it was very good. Whatever we say about the challenges or sins or misbehaviors of boys and men, we as Christians should be able to confidently say that maleness is a very good thing.”
Christ was meek, yes. But he was also fierce. He defied a violent mob to defend the woman they wanted to stone. He vehemently condemned religious hypocrisy. And he famously turned tables rather than let anyone bar the way to God. He poured out his strength to save us. Outside of the military or the occasional heroic response to a mountain lion attack, where are our men and boys asked to be warriors?
Sports. Games. Play.
Virtue in the Magic Circle
Playing competitive board games together makes us better people.
In any game, players enter a magic circle where the game, rather than society, defines acceptable behavior. In competitive games, the aggression you mustn’t embody outside the circle is welcome here on the board. Allies betray each other in Diplomacy. Magic the Gathering is a fight to the death. Even party games like Chameleon or kids’ games like Sorry ask players to lie and sabotage.
The Monolith offers only villain roles. I ask both Phil and Colby what happens when players take on “bad guy” roles. Phil points out, “Well, I avoided anything in the game that was a realistic representation of a war crime. You can’t bomb a school, for example, as the US bombed the school in Iran,” referencing the Minab school attack. “You can’t kill civilians at all.” The planet in Monolith has no civilians and no innocent victims.
“But what I’m trying to evoke,” says Phil, “and what I want people to think about, is that the spirit of violence is self-perpetuating. It feeds on itself. It is beholden to idols.”
Colby says, “Monolith plays with the idea of violence in authoritarianism and religion, exclusion and otherizing. If players see these negative traits, it can help them reflect on the idea that that kind of religion may create a power structure that can be abused. And this play will help them recognize abuse.”
Simply gathering to play The Monolith or other games may, ironically, engender virtue.
Playing competitive board games together makes us better people. One study found that nice things like sharing, complimenting, and building partnerships in the real world increased when kids and elders played together. Another saw board games improve memory retention, spatial awareness, and good decision-making. Still another found that having several people with positive attitudes improved the whole group’s likelihood of pro-social behavior.
Game groups subtly correct players’ bad behavior. “Conflict-based games can actually teach you how to deal with your feelings,” says Colby. When you clash with another player, or when things aren’t going your way, “you have to handle conflict in a variety of ways. You might even be gently reprimanded by the group.”
If a player overreacts or lashes out, Colby says, “maybe everybody at the table gets kinda quiet, and the person has to realize they affected the vibe.” Play holds a self-corrective mechanism wherein no matter what’s happening on the board, we’re motivated to bring our best selves to the group. We are more shaped by the act of physically gathering with other people to play a game than by the game we choose to play.
“Playing games with other people is a microcosm of society,” says Colby. “And it can really be a chance for a little healthy compartmentalization—this person I am diametrically opposed to in the game, with totally opposite goals, is also my friend that I am going to be bonded to after this game is over.”
Ultimately, it’s the people we play with who define our experience. The Monolith demands brutality on the board. Yet the actual play-test sessions were filled with joke-cracking, snacks, and a glad camaraderie.
Back to the Body
Despite Christian concerns over darkness in our media (we see you, Dungeon Masters, Huntrix fans, and Gryffindors), gathering with others for a common goal offers great scope for sanctification. If we invite the Spirit to shape our interactions, then playing games, watching movies, and reading books communally can be a powerful way to receive God’s healing, offer his love to our neighbors, and develop within us his patience, generosity, and joy. Transformation happens in an embodied relationship.
That’s why Phil Gross finally decided to meet with his online enemy face-to-face. The two men met up over Phil’s lunch break, on a park bench in downtown Syracuse.
“It was a bright, sunny day,” Phil remembers. “In person, it was immediately a different conversation.”
As they talked, something changed in Phil. He remembered the other man’s childhood, which he knew a bit about. He could picture him as a skinny young guy before life got hold of him. In the embodied world of sunshine and skin, the two were able to meet on the shared ground of Christ. “I wasn’t trying to argue with him. I had real questions. There was so much understanding.”
The conversation didn’t change either man’s political opinions. Phil acknowledges that the rift between them goes deeper than one chat in a park could address. And he knows it will take more than a game to heal what plagues modern America.
“Violent people carry heavy burdens—real, unaddressed baggage which they feel must be unloaded into revenge,” he says. “Idols then identify enemies and promise justice for their hurts. And underneath, the real hurt is slowly growing and hardening.”
Unaddressed, hurt begets more hurt. Yet forgiveness can break the cycle.
“How can I frame those hurts in a way that isn’t vengeful?” Phil asks. “God does have harsh words for false teachers. Yet there must be room for forgiveness, too.”
Since that day in the sunshine, Phil has designed plenty of games, both silly and sincere. But of them all, The Monolith is the one Phil keeps coming back to. “There’s a spiritual depth there I don’t think I’m done exploring yet,” he says. He laughs a little and admits, “I’m not gentled yet.”
Source: Christ and Pop Culture – christandpopculture.com
