Currently Watching: Midnight Mass

Discussing the Netflix limited series Midnight Mass and its statements about white Christianity, colonialism, and the American dream. I also propose a concept called "power-first" as a framework for unifying the many attributes of fascist thinking and demonstrate how the show constructs an alternative moral framework. 

Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to Thought Squared. 

You might notice it has been...uh…seven months since my last update. Maybe eight by the time I release this. No, I don't have a good excuse. And I'm going to stop setting goals for update frequency. But I have hit a point where not updating this podcast is actively impeding my ability to focus on anything else. Turns out I need to write a lot just to function normally, and I can't motivate myself to do it without some semblance of an audience. So, here I am. Just going to keep putting one foot in front of the other and maybe, if I'm very lucky, a podcast that updates more than twice a year will pop out. 

Here’s some of what that means. First of all, even though it helps me to think of my segments as bundled together into distinct themed episodes, I’ve finally accepted that I am never going to be able to release consistently if I hold myself to that. So, I’m going to be releasing my segments as individual episodes, though they’ll retain many themes in common with the previous and next episodes. I’m sure you’ll figure it out, especially if you take my recommendation and do not listen to this podcast sober.

Secondly, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I am very far from an expert in anything I want to think deeply about. So, I’d like to partially pivot towards being an interview podcast. Sort of like Ologies by Alie Ward, except instead of experimental and field sciences, I’d like to interview people doing very abstract work — mathematicians, systems and complexity researchers, theoretical cognitive and computer scientists, theoretical physicists, sociological theorists and speculative fiction writers, media and cultural critics, and so on. My first step is trying to release more consistently so that potential interviewees can have a better sense of what they’re getting into. Then I’ll start pinging people on Twitter. Or, ideally, people will start complaining about me so loudly that they’ll end up reaching out to me. If you’re interested in being interviewed, or if you know anyone who you think would be interested, please reach out!

By the way, there are transcripts for these episodes. I don’t know if that comes through on different podcast apps, but you can find transcripts attached to individual episodes on the BuzzSprout website. Or you can read them as a blog on my website, preeya.rocks, in the podcast section. I figure since I'm writing all this out ahead of time anyway, it's a free opportunity to make this content more accessible. I'll also include the link for each episode transcript in the description. 

Also, I noticed in the stats for the last episode that, for whatever reason, many of you listeners are in Frankfurt Am Mainz in Germany. Ich weiss nicht wie Sie diesen Podcast gefunden haben, aber es gefällt mir wirklich Sie zu haben. 

Finally, if you’re listening after I’ve released all the segments I initially intended to be bundled into this episode and you’re interested in chemically augmenting your binging experience, here’s your official heads up to take whatever you want to take so that it kicks in by the time things start getting really weird. Trust me, the stoner segment that’s a couple of listening hours away is going to be a doozy.

And with that, let’s get started! You’re listening to Thought Squared.

[Break music] 

Here in what we call the West, even though we live on a sphere, as I begin to write this, it's the holiday season.  Or at least, it was the holiday season when I began writing this last year. I hope everyone had a good time.

Personally, I don’t celebrate anything, not because I’m an atheist, but because celebration requires planning and I am too busy overthinking the shit out of everything. But I do appreciate the basic idea. So, in the spirit of holidays, I'm going to devote the first half of this episode to the religious nature of our ongoing social crisis. You know, the one that we in the US spend our waking hours either ignoring or obsessing over. 

Religion is something we don't discuss much overtly these days, and for good reason. The dominant religion of the West, Christianity, is notoriously difficult to coexist with. I spent a good chunk of my twenties lurking in the comments of the progressive evangelical blog Slacktivist, so I know that even Christians joke about it. Like this: 

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me."

I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." 

I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." 

I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." 

I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." 

I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." 

I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." 

I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." 

I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

What's always intrigued me is that, even though my parents aren’t Christian, and I wasn't raised Christian beyond being American, and I've never set foot in a church during a service, I immediately understood the core truth of this joke. Because anyone with an ounce of cultural awareness can tell you all about Christianity's seemingly infinite need for conformity. The bit that everyone always attributes to the Old Testament or Paul, but it goes beyond that.

For comparison, my father was raised Hindu and my mother Zoroastrian, part of the group now referred to as Parsees. Both of these religions historically differ strongly from Christianity in their willingness to conceptualize the validity of other religions. For Parsees it's explicitly political, because they were driven out of Persia when the Muslims conquered it and ended up stranded in what's now the Indian state of Gujarat. For Hindus it's theoretically structural, because it's a polytheistic religion formed by the synthesis of the ancient Vedic religion -- essentially, the ancient Iranian version of the Greek slash Roman slash Norse gods -- with overlapping folk religions already extant in Dravidian India.

Now, polytheistic religions are supposedly more peaceful than monotheistic religions because they prime people to accept many different ideas of truth, though I would argue that glancing at Greek, Roman, Norse, or Indian history tells a different story. But Hinduism has been historically willing to tolerate religious minorities, like Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsees, and yes, Jews and Christians. I say historically because, of course, the biggest problem in India right now is the rise of the far-right-wing Hindu fundamentalist movement known as Hindutva, expressed through political movements like the BJP, RSS, and so on. Hindutva leaders like Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, say that they are defending Hinduism from encroachers…by oppressing slash genociding Muslims and Dalit Hindus, and generally hating anyone without immediate access to power. It’s no different than the rest of the global tide of fascism. You know, the social crisis.

But the current Hindu-Muslim conflict is not the only political crisis in history masquerading as a religious one. In fact, at this point I think it’s probably common knowledge that all so-called purely religious matters were born out of some political or economic calculus, from the Crusades to religious schisms to even the peculiar religion of conservative American nationalism that we’re all subjected to today. Looking at it that way immediately reveals why a certain kind of ideology works so hard not to look at itself that way. And I don't just mean Christianity, I mean any colonial ideology, whether religious or social. For example, white supremacy would be an example of a colonial social ideology. 

Of course, Christianity likes to see itself as an anti-colonialist ideology,  since it was founded by OG Palestinian social justice antifa. Who were also extremely stoned, if the translation of Christos as cannabis oil is to be believed. Which, by the way, did you know there were Indian Buddhist monks wandering around the Roman empire at this time teaching everyone about Buddhism? And that cannabis is native to northern India? Cause Jesus sounds a lot like a Buddhist sometimes. I'm just saying.

But a few hundred years after Jesus died, his message became the official theme song of the Roman Empire. You know, the same Roman Empire that crucified him for opposing them. And it happened because Emperor Constantine attributed a major political and military victory, the Battle of Milvian Bridge, to Christ. Maybe because of sun dogs or the Chi-Ro vision or whatever, but the point is, he decided to be Christian, a faith theoretically built around love and forgiveness, specifically because it furthered his imperial ambitions. And ever since then, I think that message, of complete self-contradiction in the name of power, has been the real message of Christianity. It's why so many Europeans had no problem murdering entire cultures in the name of the guy who told people to love their enemies. 

What's really interesting is, that self-contradiction didn't have to happen. After all, Buddhism, which as I mentioned is a suspiciously similar religion, got a boost in India a thousand years prior because Emperor Ashoka the Great, whose wheel is on the Indian flag, also converted after a major imperial victory. But he converted because he looked at the carnage of the battlefield and felt shame. Like, he gave up war afterwards, even though he was winning. And, OK, he did spend his newfound free time having people chisel his edicts into giant cliff faces. The point is, Buddhism and Christianity now have pretty different vibes, although as Buddhism has accessed more power, it’s also trending towards the colonizer approach, such as with the recent genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Buddhist Myanmar. In other words, the compounded moral failings of the global system, and the refusal of powerful adherents across the globe to see it that way, means that philosophies as disparate as Hinduism, Buddhism, and the officially atheist Chinese state are all converging on the colonialist approach pioneered by white Christianity.

At this point, I think we can safely say that both religion and politics are first, a reaction to, and then later an expression of, a deeper human moral pattern, which I'm going to call power-first. Power-first is what it sounds like: the attitude that might makes right, or that power is its own moral good. It's in stark contrast to the well-attested egalitarianism of nomadic hunter-gatherers, who, as many Western anthropologists have noted, often seem pathologically opposed to the idea of one person directing another in any significant way. This egalitarianism persisted among settled agricultural North American Natives who constructed cultures based on the idea that the land, plants, and animals around them needed to be cared for as equals with human beings. In fact, the early American decision to pursue a democracy rather than establishing a European-like aristocracy was strongly influenced by the American colonists' exposure to Native peoples, especially the Haudenosaunee, who were far more equitable than European societies fresh out of the Middle Ages. 

The thing about power-first is that it can be expressed in a nearly infinite amount of ways. For example, the first-come, first-served philosophy can be a power-first statement, if there’s good reason to believe that certain groups have an unfair structural advantage in getting to the thing first. In my opinion, the purest possible example of power-first is simply the statement “Because I said so.” As countless children have noted over, I assume, all of human history, “Because I said so” isn’t a reason, it’s a statement that you’re in a position of enough power that you can avoid the work of having to explain the reason. Even if the reason is “Because I’m too tired and overwhelmed right now,” there’s a vulnerability in admitting to that and dealing with the implications around it that takes work. Which, I want to be clear, doesn’t mean that all parents are automatically evil for saying “Because I said so.” Sometimes it is better for everyone to take that shortcut. And that is exactly the problem — the fact that it’s sometimes better, and always easier, creates the incentive to always do it while pretending that it’s just too hard to tell the difference between when it should and shouldn’t be used. Which is, at scale, a huge part of the phenomenon underlying the social crisis.

Power-first ideology is woven into the fabric of American culture, since it was birthed from the fantasy of dominating a frontier and bending it to your will, which I think is inextricable from the idea that having the power to kill and enslave people en masse equates to having the moral right to do so. We usually call this racism mixed with capitalism, but both grew out of European feudalism and general aristocratic dynamics seen in all cultures worldwide, which justify the economic oppression of lower classes or castes with violence. Aristocrats and billionaires everywhere can trace their titles back to some ancestor who stole land or monopolized trade or exploited people or happened to be the best at killing on the battlefield. And yes, I do mean every royal family currently in existence. Sure, they all design special succession rules afterwards, but that just makes it worse. One person having that kind of unearned and unrestrained power is so obviously a bad idea — again, think about those fiercely egalitarian hunter-gatherers — that the existence of any kind of hereditary class system, whether or not it calls itself that, is enough to establish that a society is operating with power-first ideology.

The really insidious thing about the power-first pattern is how it, seemingly paradoxically, engenders an odd kind of powerlessness in its adherents. After all, if power is the ultimate moral good, then the pursuit of power takes on the same level of urgency and unquestionability as any fundamentally morally good behavior. Of course you can’t help but to act in a way that maximizes your personal wealth, says the power-first ideology. Of course no one could expect you to restrain yourself. Of course it makes sense to think of obligations to others in terms of niceties rather than as a fundamental part of your approach to the world, because don’t you have an equal moral obligation to power? That’s part of why so many people get so defensive when they’re called out for harmful speech. Whether it’s ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, or some toxically exclusive idea yet to be developed, power-first is the underlying ideology.

In this episode, I’m going to be exploring how power-first ideology is masterfully explored in the recent Netflix limited series Midnight Mass. Note that there will be major, major spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it yet,  you might want to do that before continuing.

Stay tuned. You’re listening to Thought Squared.

[Break music]

Hello, thinkers and squares! Welcome to  Currently Watching, in which I'd like to discuss last year’s Netflix limited series Midnight Mass. Note there are some minor spoilers right ahead, but there’ll be another big warning before I get to the major spoilers.

I initially began watching Midnight Mass because I heard some buzz about it on Twitter. This received a huge boost when I learned that Rahul Kohli was in the cast. Kohli is most known as Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti from iZombie, an excellent and beloved show, if a little white-feminist-y, that aired on the CW from 2015 to 2019. Ravi was the breakout fan favorite character, thanks to, well, being played by Rahul Kohli, who is absolutely lovely on camera, and I assume just generally in life. 

Now, those of you who listened to the TV Saves the World episode in which Elim and I discussed YA superhero shows may recall that the CW is one of my favorite channels, specifically because at this point they’ve spent a good fifteen or twenty years as the sometimes cringe but always undeniable rulers of character-driven genre television. Notable CW hits include Arrow, which aired in 2012 from then-new showrunner Greg Berlanti, as well as, the big one, Supernatural, created by Eric Kripke and, later, Sera Gamble. You might recognize all of these as some of the low-key biggest names in television. Eric Kripke is the co-creator of The Boys on Amazon, while Greg Berlanti is now executive producing every superhero show even vaguely worth watching, and Sera Gamble has done even more incredible work on the Netflix series You, which is releasing its highly anticipated fourth season next year. 

What makes me so, so excited about these people moving up in the world is that they all understand that great genre television, whether that's mysteries or zombies or horror or superheroes, lives and dies with characters who are determined to rise above the constraints of their world. Because it's that striving, the human impulse to try for the new, that underlies all of what we call genre. Of course, that's partially because the only stories that aren't considered genre are the kind of depressing dreariness that appeals to middle-aged publishers overwhelmed with ennui. You know the books and shows I'm talking about, with the sad, bored, rich white people, acting out stereotypes so tired you could just choke. Usually with a very moody and dark setting so that we really feel the weight of them never challenging themselves or thinking ahead. 

By contrast, the draw for genre TV is imagination, which in my experience, tends to correlate with more self-aware and interesting characters, because the novelty of a well-executed genre universe helps writers and audiences define characters in terms of themselves, rather than having to adhere to some network exec’s understanding of the surface-level details of the real world. I'm not saying all genre shows succeed at this, but I'm also never surprised that at any given point in time, the hot, commentary-rich show of the moment is always genre — whether a superhero show like The Boys, murder competitions like Squid Game, fantasy or sci-fi like Game of Thrones or the Battlestar Galactica reboot, horror like Lost…you get the point. Even the aforementioned depressed literary fiction shows like Big Little Lies or The Affair or Euphoria, which are all written as pure social commentary, accomplish that best when they lean into their genre elements, usually some kind of small-town mystery. Like, when I read reviews of The Affair and saw comments like “The character elements of the conflicting memories ground the murder plot,” I always thought they had it exactly the wrong way around. The murder plot was the story element that grounded the dueling-memories gimmick by giving it stakes and purpose. Otherwise, why would I care that some bored white guy doesn’t always agree with his mistress? Simply reflecting the most boring elements of real life onto the screen doesn’t drive the kind of psychological impact that storytellers strive to have. There needs to be a point, an acknowledgment that the audience’s attention matters.

This brings us to Midnight Mass, which, in my opinion, far outclasses the HBO Golden Compass adaptation as *the* genre show for humanist religious commentary. It reminds me a lot of Chambers, another religious horror Netflix show from a couple of years ago that I absolutely love but have had a very hard time writing up, because it’s such a complex and interconnected text. Both Midnight Mass and Chambers, though they obviously must have been produced just like any other show, feel to me as though they were discovered rather than created, like the writers were toiling in the coal mines of the collective subconscious and managed to strike diamond. Both shows are so thoroughly thought out that every step of the plot feels like turning a diamond to see a new fiery sparkle, by which I mean critical interpretation, arising from the same underlying structure again and again. In Chambers, that structure is explicitly identified with white American colonialism and the many ways in which it violently interrupts human connections, especially among Native peoples, and its genius was finding a setting and premise that perfectly encapsulated those themes into a propulsive genre plot. Midnight Mass has done something similar, but its underlying structure is Christianity in white America, and the themes so perfectly captured in the setting and plot are the ways that Christianity’s power-first implications refract through white American society as denial, white supremacy, violence, conformity and groupthink, such that the only resolution possible is genocide slash extinction. 

Now, there is an interesting caveat in that, as the name implies, Midnight Mass talks about Christianity specifically in the form of Catholicism, mostly because the genre plot elements depend on the physical ritual of communion. It’s pretty obvious that this also works to shield Midnight Mass from controversy, since the Christian power structure in the US is concentrated between Protestant and evangelical, both of which see Catholic traditions as suspiciously exotic. Like, the basic plot of Midnight Mass could absolutely be worked into evangelical church structures without communion, but we all know that show would never make it to air. And yet Midnight Mass arranges itself so artfully around its choice of Catholicism, particularly with its working-class New England setting, that it turns that avoidance into a kind of strength, by using the spectacle of Catholic ritual as cover to aim social critique directly at the heart of white Christianity.

Let’s get into it. This is where the minor spoilers end and the MAJOR spoilers begin. If you haven’t finished the third episode of Midnight Mass, I am about to spoil a HUUUUGE twist for you, so this is your very last chance to pause and skip to the next segment. Go ahead and hit pause. [wait]

All right. I assume if you’re still here, it’s because you’ve watched past the third episode in Midnight Mass and hopefully through the end. Or, you just don’t care about spoilers. So, let’s get right into it.

Midnight Mass is a show about a religious community that, over the course of some weeks, realizes that the god it is worshiping is, in fact, a blood-sucking, brain-devouring vampire, that the sacrament they’ve been taking at communion is its blood, and that the eternal youth bestowed upon them by drinking that blood comes with a price tag of everything: their humanity, their homes, their community, and their lives.

It opens by introducing us to the character of Riley Flynn, a prodigal son who left Crockett Island, the fictional New England island setting, to be a venture capitalist in tech. The show opens with him making the sign of the cross after accidentally killing a woman while driving under the influence, and he goes to jail for four years, which for us lasts about two seconds. We pick up with him returning home to the island, trying to figure out what his life is now that he’s seen both the highs and lows of off-island society. He chats with his mother, who’s an economically anxious concerned citizen right out of the Stephen Miller playbook, lamenting the island’s dwindling population while upset that environmental advocates, who helped them after an oil spill, now care more about the waters not being overfished. Riley’s fisherman dad turns out to be quite personally upset with him over Riley’s alcohol addiction, despite Riley being in recovery and four years sober, while his younger brother mostly bikes around to the Neil Diamond song Soolaimon.

With this first state and zeroth turn of our story structure, some clear patterns are already being drawn, with themes of addiction and faith and death, and most of all, the conflict between an insular small town and the wider world around it. I almost called this a thinly veiled metaphor for the current social crisis, or at least the political part of it, except there’s really nothing veiled about it. There might not be any posters or campaign slogans, but the central conflict is exactly the American crisis: the need to move on from our provincial, settler-colonial, white supremacist, resource-extracting, power-first conception of ourselves, versus the unnaturally huge boost our society has and still receives from refusing to do so. Native peoples and slavery never come up in the show, but it couldn’t be more obvious that the islanders understand very well that their community has historically been privileged beyond reason, which is why they’re so at a loss for what to do as that privilege declines. For example, if the fish are as sparse as Riley’s mother says, then why is Riley’s father going out and fishing every day? He seems to be a well-respected member of the island. Are you really telling me the community couldn’t figure out a different job for him? Shouldn’t basic common sense imply that leaning too hard into the identity of fisherman will only further the family’s, and the island’s, collapse? It’s just a background detail, but it exemplifies the ways in which the show centers the many contradictions of the power-first approach to the world.

The main examination of that mindset comes via the main plot, which centers on a character first called Father Paul and later revealed to be Monsignor Pruitt, the town’s old priest who, as is revealed in the third episode, was magically de-aged when he encountered a vampire in a cave near Jerusalem. He’s so struck by his de-aging, and by the vampire’s leathery wings, that he immediately names it an angel of the Lord, brings it back to the island with him, and starts adding its blood to the Communion wine, while it happily feeds on the island’s cats and marginalized residents. It seems like vampire mythology doesn’t exist in-universe, but the genius of this show is that it wouldn’t matter if it did. Even if all the characters were diehard Twilight fans, the in-show premise and narrative would have divided them in just the same way.

The first and biggest question is, of course, why on earth anyone’s reaction to a real-life vampire would be admiration and worship. And the show’s answer is quite simple. [Clip: “The resurrection of the body. New and everlasting life.”] All the pieces lined up for Pruitt: the bodily act of sharing blood, the supernatural power that he found in such a way that he could convince himself it was his destiny, and most of all, that his prayers for youth and good health and mental clarity and avoidance of death all seemed to be answered at once. Here was a way to satisfy all his resentment at the natural cycle of life not only despite, but seemingly because, he spent so long denying that cycle out of fear. [Clip: “Our whole lives have been wasted. You know, just staring across the church. Too scared to come down and be with you. I mean, too scared to tell our own daughter the truth.”] The vampire’s power allowed him to temporarily recast that fear of real life as noble self-denial, and the attack as a divine favor from God, whatever the physical mechanics. And the cherry on top was that he knew people who really could use the healing properties of vampire blood, like his secret girlfriend and baby mama Mildred Gunning. With such well-chosen character beats, it would have been more shocking had he not immediately concluded that the vampire must be unquestionably good.

That’s the first turn and second state of our diamond story premise, so let’s take a minute to examine the critical implications already arising. One is this idea of having an easy way out of engaging with the complexities of life, whether that’s death, or the inconvenience of reality, or having to imagine what it’s like to be different. It also draws on our now well-established modern mythology that embracing the vampiric mindset means literally rejecting humanity for power. Which is, of course, exactly how the power-first mindset operates: the denial of the humanity, nominally of others, shared among just enough to form a privileged class that benefit themselves at those others’ expense. And the part of vampire mythology that so perfectly exposes this mindset is that denying others’ humanity enough to see them only as a source of power necessarily entails rejecting one’s own humanity first. That is the literal state of being a vampire.  

Now, there has been a pretty strong trend over the past fifteen years of urban fantasy to recast mythical monsters, especially vampires, as having the ability to be ethical. Like how the vampires in Twilight go hunting a lot instead of just chowing down at the high school. And Midnight Mass does have examples of humans who are turned but don’t immediately start murdering people. That all bolsters a theme that starts in this state, which is the role of self-awareness in morality. Pruitt’s problem here wasn’t only his religious endorsement of specific expressions of power. It was also that, before he watched the consequences of his actions play out fully, he didn’t have the self-awareness to stop and think that perhaps the surface-level similarities between vampires and Catholicism were, well, just that. Because doing so would mean having to face the most complex thing any of us face in life, which is, in fact, humanity. If Pruitt admitted to himself that the vampire was truly evil, then he’d have to start rethinking his whole conception of how he fit himself into humanity as a whole, when he’d already built his entire life around avoiding that complexity by, as he would put it, giving himself over to a higher power. Just like…you know…a vampire does. See, this is what I mean by a completely interconnected premise. Every critical path eventually loops right back around. It’s SO COOL!!! 

I should be clear here that I’m not trying to make an anti-religious argument. I don’t think that everyone who’s interested or immersed in religion is trying to find an easy way out of confronting the complexity of humanity. In fact, it seems to me that the motivation behind most religions is to try to get people to develop that complex self-awareness, and it does seem to work in plenty of cases. The problem, of course, is that you have to actually do it, instead of constantly using the guidance as a reason to avoid doing it. And as far as I can tell, there simply isn’t any way to talk every single person in the world into that first genuine mode. There’s always going to be people who aggressively misunderstand, just as there will always be people able to find true grace in any philosophy. The real question is how to keep the first group from accumulating so much power that they cement their toxicity into the overall culture. And that’s why I keep saying this show is an examination of white Christianity, which over the centuries has warped itself so fully around the toxicity of what it calls God’s favor that it perceives any attack on white supremacist values as an attack against the very nature of morality, just as the Midnight Mass pro-vampire squad considers it a sin to say that the vampire might not be an angel of God. That is, the central commentary of the show is not on religion, but on how it’s inextricable from politics. The dynamic between Pruitt and the vampire is a symbol for religious white conservatives unearthing old-school authoritarian fascism as a way to artificially revitalize themselves by denying complex reality. Specifically, the reality that the insularity and arrogance that the US developed over the past few hundred years just does not work anymore.

This is bolstered by the composition of Midnight Mass’s anti-vampire squad. They are a big-city atheist,  Riley; a progressive Catholic woman, Erin Greene; lesbian and doctor slash scientist Sarah Gunning; and a South Asian American Muslim, Sheriff Hassan. Each of them has their own reasons to be wary of the principles underlying the island’s insular white Christianity. Both Riley and Erin have recently returned to the island after experiencing the highs and lows of the wider world — Riley first as a venture capitalist and then in prison, and Erin from having dropped out of high school and traveled for years after being abused by her mother, only to be similarly abused by her husband, who she left when she realized she was pregnant. Sarah is a doctor who had to leave the island for her education, and has always felt judged for her sexual orientation by the local religious establishment, though we later learn that Pruitt’s weirdness towards her is because he’s her father. And Sheriff Hassan, played by the overwhelmingly sexy Rahul Kohli at his most pensive and sorrowful and hot, is, of course, both brown and Muslim. 

Right off the bat, the entire anti-vampire squad has one thing in common, which is that they’ve all experienced a huge amount of life outside of the bubble of white Christianity. In the case of Riley and Erin and kind of Sarah Gunning, this comes down to basic personality. They were the most interested in seeking out the wider world, because slash therefore they feel more comfortable with it. (I say because/therefore because plenty of people who seek out the wider world react very badly to its complexity. But these three had the right personalities to positively reinforce that feedback loop.) This shows in the plots for Sarah and Sheriff Hassan, who are good people with identities that lots of other people in the world violently object to, and who’ve had to become masters of accepting and navigating that complexity in order to hold on to their humanity. 

Let’s start with Riley and Hassan. Riley is presented as the dramatic parallel and foil to Monsignor Pruitt. They come back to the island on the same day, both with revolutionary power: Pruitt’s in the form of the vampire, and Riley’s in the form of his self-aware approach to the world. Both, too, are addicts. Riley’s addiction is, on the surface, the more obvious and serious of the two, in that he killed a woman while driving under the influence due to his alcoholism. Since then, he’s been sober for four years— though in prison, as Pruitt points out — and actively working on his recovery, including attending AA meetings. Of course, AA requires belief in God, which Riley doesn’t have. But he does believe that he doesn’t want to harm others, and that he needs to take responsibility for his actions. [Clip: “I killed someone. So who’s to blame there? I am to blame there. God? Well he just kind of let it happen, didn’t he?”]

Pruitt’s addiction, of course, is avoidance, and it’s exacerbated by his vampirism, which not only requires a constant supply of blood, but also turns him more and more amoral, in keeping with the show’s in-universe vampire mechanics. This is what leads them to the showdown of the series climax, in which we see the full extent of the difference between Riley and Pruitt. Faced with the knowledge that Pruitt has killed someone, fed on their blood, and feels no guilt whatsoever, Riley admits that he’s jealous. Pruitt figures that this counts as a statement of loyalty, that having admitted that he longs for the simplicity of power-first denial, Riley must therefore be willing to contort his moral compass enough to justify accepting it. But instead Riley does something that Pruitt didn’t expect. He uses his hard-won self-awareness to simultaneously recognize and reject the moral nihilism of unchecked power. He would rather take harm onto himself than knowingly and intentionally push it onto someone else. And that’s exactly what he does. Admittedly he could have done it in a way that made more of a public impact, but again, the genius of this show is that it wouldn’t really have mattered if he had. 

So, we’ve got two guys here. One of them says that God has reached down to form, quote, “the New Covenant,” by giving him the gift of bodily resurrection, which justifies him lying to people and murdering them. The other one thinks he’s just a person, and not necessarily a good person at that. He’s full of doubts and questions, and even more, he’s not interested in being handed justifications to ignore them. And when he’s killed and brought back to life, he chooses death again — real death, without even the dream of an afterlife — in order to save the world. Tell me, what allegory do you think is being formed here? Because I’m pretty sure that one of these guys is meant to be Jesus, and it’s not the one who believes in God. And, yeah, I’m into it. At some point, we have to declare that, whatever the historical value of certain creeds, and however powerful their grip on our minds, if they can’t reliably guide us in navigating the truth of reality, then it’s our moral responsibility to stop treating them like they do. Which ironically is pretty close to what Jesus himself believed, at least as far as I can tell. So, yeah. Within the context of Midnight Mass, Riley Flynn is Jesus, and he carries the divinity of self-awareness.

Now this is usually the point where religious types like to imply that that doesn’t exist. Specifically, they ask, how do you determine morality without some external reference? Which of course is a question the show itself considers. [Clip: Riley: “Rational recovery. It’s based more on reason and psychology. It’s about empowering people instead of saying they’re powerless.” Pruitt: “So you’re the higher power. Is that how it works?”] 

What Pruitt is really asking here is: if you’re relying on yourself to be your own moral arbiter, then how do you know if you’ve done it right? And there isn’t an easy answer to that, because the fact is, you don’t. The problem is, because we humans are necessarily limited creatures, on some level all of our decision-making is self-worship. When Pruitt decides that his lack of guilt over murdering Joe Collie indicates that no sin was committed, he’s treating himself as the unquestionable higher power. When Bev Keane holds everyone to her version of faith, she’s playing God. This is how we humans often end up doing much worse when we believe we are blamelessly executing some objectively correct philosophy that has been handed down to us and can’t be questioned. As the Nuremberg trials established, there’s no such thing as just following orders that doesn’t implicate the follower just as much. Which leads to Midnight Mass’s argument that the only way to differentiate between your worst urges and your best ones is to embrace the complexity of humanity.

Now what, exactly, is the complexity of humanity? Well, quite simply, it’s that everyone is different and that’s OK. Which, when you think about it, is extremely trippy. Not only because there are seven billion of us in existence, but also because so many of those differences are essentially random. That can cause some big problems for our lil primate brains, which have evolved to spot patterns and assign meaning to them to inform our social responses. If everyone is different, to the point that you can have billions and billions of people who are all unique individuals, then how can we ever know if we’ve assigned the right meaning to the right pattern of behavior? How do we know if any specific action or belief means that we should engage our social response to bad, vs whether we should just shrug it off as something people do?

There is of course no easy answer. But one great way to start figuring it out is by experiencing humanity from enough different angles that you can start to build an internal model that fully separates the concepts of people, morality, and social expectations. In Midnight Mass, the character who most embodies that humanistic knowledge isn’t Riley, but Sheriff Hassan, one of the best thought-out characters on the show. First he voices the exact critiques of Christianity that I’ve been making throughout this episode: 

[Clip: 

Hassan: Uh, he knows all about Jesus. 

Bev Keane: Well, I imagine not quite all. 

Hassan: Muslims believe that Jesus is a prophet of God, and that the Injeel, the Bible, was revealed to him, just as the Torah was revealed to Moses before that. See, we love Jesus, and we love the message that was revealed to him. 

Bev Keane: Well! I suppose we learn something new every day, don’t we? 

Hassan: But we also believe after the time of Jesus, thanks to the interference of men, there were deviations in Christianity. People altered the message: priests, popes, kings. That’s why there’s so many versions of the Bible. People got in there, made their changes. 

Bev Keane: I don’t think this is relevant.

Hassan: Okay, we do though believe that the Bible contains some of the original word of God. 

Bev Keane: That’s very generous of you.

Hassan: But we also believe that God revealed the Koran, as the final message. Never to be altered.] 

The first time I watched this, I couldn’t believe my eyes. To get such a straightforward and beautifully written defense of the attainability of truth, and against Islamophobia, directly from a Muslim character who was allowed to be just as amazing and just as angry as every other character? This is the kind of representation marginalized peoples dream of. I was blown away, by the acting, by the dialogue, and most of all by the way they found the perfect premise to encapsulate this big, abstract, centuries-old dynamic into a resonant character conflict. Like, that is the pinnacle of television writing.

And, because Midnight Mass is still smarter than you, it follows up that religious humanism with its post-2001 political analogue. When Sarah Gunning asks Sheriff Hassan to look into St. Patrick’s church because she knows it’s at the center of the vampiric porphyria contagion, he replies with this. 

[Clip: 

Hassan: Did I ever tell you why I moved here? 

Sarah Gunning: No, no I don’t think you did.

Hassan: Didn’t tell anybody, now that I think about it. It’s almost as if nobody asked. You know, I was 21 when the Towers went down. Watched on TV in my dorm room, just, weeping. I was a kid and I wasn’t religious at all, really. But I went to the mosque that day because they had a blood drive. The line went for blocks. I wanted to help. I wanted to protect this country. So I moved to New York and enrolled in NYPD training. Now some of my friends, they weren’t happy. NYPD is against us, they’d say. But I’d tell them, no, you’re wrong. I’ll show them they don’t have to be afraid of us. I’ll show them who we are. So I worked my way up. You know, traffic and translating and transcribing wiretaps, then Vice. I get married. Ali is born. And I’m promoted again — detective now. Top secret security clearance for the joint terrorism task force. I’m helping the FBI fight terrorists. We’re taking collars. Petty stuff. Pot. Parking tickets. And leaning on them hard if they’re Muslim. You know, we’ll drop the charge, help you out, you go to the mosque and listen. I thought we were supposed to be fighting terrorists, not flipping some pothead student in Queens to spy on Americans. So I complain, gently, one time. Everything changed. I was surveilled, by other cops. I mean, they even had an official file on me. And not just me. See, after the Towers, Muslim officers were promoted fast. Especially if we knew the language: linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge. We were very desirable for that. But it started to occur to them, with so many of us on the force, elevated to positions of real authority, what if that had been our plan all along? What if we were interlopers? What if we were infiltrators? What if we were double agents? And they fucking panicked. Internal Affairs was suddenly all over us. We were being followed, we were being recorded. Civilians too, surveilled at mosques and cafes. And suddenly I’m out of plain clothes and I’m back in uniform. Night shift, street beat. More and more, I realize I’ve lost their trust. I roll with it. I keep my head high. Dignity. Dignity is a word my wife uses. Show them dignity. And then she’s diagnosed, and she’s robbed of her dignity so fast. And then she’s gone, and I couldn’t. Ali and I get as far away as we can, and I find this gig on this little island. So sleepy, it could be dead. No elections, no staff, just a tiny room at the back of a grocery store and a bunch of fishermen without a notable incident of intentional violence in almost a century, and I beg for the post. Dignity. Ali is bored to tears. But he’s safe. And I still think I could maybe move the world that one millimeter. Maybe here’s where we make a difference. Not in the big city, in this tiny village. Win over the fucking PTA and call it a victory for Islam. So I don’t intimidate. I don’t overshare or overstep or intrude in any way. I don’t even carry a gun. And still, still, Beverly Keane, and a few others too, look at me like I’m Osama bin fucking Laden. And you’d like me to investigate St. Patrick’s?]

This monologue gave me shivers. Because it is the perfect, the PERFECT, description of what it’s like to be an idealistic professional in the US, especially if you are noticeably different in any way. You’re tolerated for just as long as you’re willing to pretend that you don’t know any better than your bosses, even though the whole reason they hired you was so that you would know better. There is a special kind of mindfuck that comes from being subjected to this contradiction over a long enough timescale, and Rahul Kohli plays it absolutely perfectly. 

The behavior of Hassan’s FBI managers underscores how overwhelming human complexity can be. Earlier I talked about how Pruitt’s fear of complexity drew him, slash is equivalent to, the power-first shortcut of vampirism. Now I’m hypothesizing that whenever we see these kinds of injustices, it’s because there is a central question of human complexity that people are afraid to fully internalize, which pushes them into power-first reasoning to force an external solution on others. For the FBI post-9/11, the central question was: Why would anyone become a terrorist, and how can we predict it? The problem is, at an individual level, the answer is literally as complex as people are, which means there is no foolproof prediction method. Moreover, the answers we do have for mitigation are ones like “Stop destroying marginalized societies for profit,” which is currently not an option among the highest ranks of American power, just like it wasn’t an option for Pruitt not to call the vampire an angel. That is the central uncertainty, and the central powerlessness, that Hassan’s bosses were afraid to acknowledge, causing them to reject their own and others’ humanity by doubling down on the power-first, complexity-reducing heuristic of racism. It’s yet another example of how complexity, power, self-awareness, and experiential humanistic understanding are intrinsically tied together, different sides of the same cognitive structure. 

Oh, also, although Sheriff Hassan is certainly copaganda, I do think his speech somewhat mitigates that. It’s an indictment and rejection of the policing mindset, and a perfect way of showing how inseparable it is from racism. Both are about defending a falsely simplistic idea of the world by seeking to punish all differences in the name of power and hierarchy, under the power-first presumption that power is self-justifying. Hassan’s recognition of how policing turned against him captures the heart of the police abolitionist argument — namely, that the people whose actions do need to be limited for society to not turn vampiric and genocidal are definitionally the ones beyond police intervention. Like, remember how Robert Mueller refused to even consider prosecuting Trump in 2020, because it’s just not done at that level? And there’s clearly a seed of a good reason, which is that if the DOJ could prosecute the president at will then they could end up with ultimate power, which leads us into the nightmare of living in a police state. But of course, refusing to do it when it’s actually necessary leads us into the nightmare of fascism. Either way, the institutional motive of police becomes upholding the exact problems that they’re supposed to be fighting, just as Robert Mueller did and just as Sheriff Hassan’s FBI bosses did. You can see why the sheriff looks so haunted all the time: he’s fully realized that the career he chose with the best of intentions was always destined to be meaningless. 

There’s one more great thematic Sheriff speech that I want to play for you. When his son Ali expresses interest in converting to Christianity following the seemingly miraculous healing of Leeza Scarborough, Sheriff Hassan says this: [Clip: “Do you know what it does? What pancreatic cancer does to someone? Would you like me to tell you? Because I don’t want to. I never, ever want you to know what she went through. It’s better for both of us. And that’s right. She kept her faith, she honored him till her last moment. If God really worked that way, if he decided that he was going to heal some people and not others, if he chose to spare some and not others, if he handed Leeza Scarborough a miracle but let a child die of a brain tumor across the way on the mainland, no. That’s not how it works, Ali. It’s not. That’s not how God works. No matter how exciting the stories are at St. Patrick’s, or the Buddhists, or Scientologists. It’s not magic. It’s not.”]

If Riley’s function in the story is the personal knowledge that his truth isn’t synonymous with the island and its religion, then Sheriff Hassan’s function is the humanistic knowledge that truth must never be perceived as synonymous with any group. Riley and Erin and even Sarah have the option of coexisting peacefully alongside the likes of Bev Keane and her need for conformity, but the Sheriff actually cannot do so without rejecting his own humanity, as symbolized by his wife and religion. Once again, Midnight Mass is explicitly identifying humanity by its complexity, the fact that we come in all sorts of variations that mean both everything and nothing, in order to say that loving our differences is what makes us most human slash divine. In other words, in terms of story function, Sheriff Hassan is every bit as much Jesus as Riley is, and he embodies the divinity of humanism.

This brings us to Erin Greene’s plot. Remember, Erin is the one who left her abusive mother and then her abusive husband. She’s also the second harbinger of doom in the series, when the vampire blood she’s unknowingly ingested at church reverses her pregnancy. The blood literally returns her body to a pre-pregnant state. 

Now, by the norms of contemporary urban fantasy, this is par for the course. It’s a cliche of these stories that vampire and werewolf women can’t get pregnant. Some stories go so far as to call out the misogyny of the trope even as they write it. The reason is technically logistical, in that vampires and werewolves already sort of reproduce by turning humans, so to have them reproducing sexually among themselves tips the scales too hard. But when you think about it, that’s actually a thematic problem. These mythological creatures exist to create narrative tension between the ideas of power and dependency, and their inability to reproduce cements their dependence on humans, to both explain and contrast with their power. In Midnight Mass, that tension between power and dependency meshes perfectly with the inherent tension between the human desire for conformity, and the even greater moral need to overcome that desire and embrace differences. Which is where Erin’s pregnancy comes in. Midnight Mass doesn’t subvert this misogynistic trope, but it re-centers the social commentary to show that a society that refuses to admit complexity is definitionally incompatible with children and the future. After all, children are just as fundamentally other to their parents as Muslims are to a certain kind of Christian, or as the future is to people caught up in the past. 

Erin’s pivotal moment in the story is when she advocates the entire concept of caring for the unknown other as though they’re already family, by pointing out to everyone that it’s their moral duty to ensure that no vampires make it off the island. 

[Clip: 

Sarah: The ferries still aren’t running. Sturge was messing with the boats, we saw him today.

Hassan: Boats. Phones, power. They’re cutting us off.

Erin: Boats.

Wade: I have a canoe by the Uppards. I mean, I don’t think it gets anybody to the mainland, but off the island, at least.

Leeza: My parents. My parents are out there, they’d have to come with us, right? Get them to a doctor. There’s room on the fishing boats. There’s plenty of room.

Erin: That’s not what I’m talking about.

Hassan: No, she’s not talking about leaving.

Erin: As soon as they come after us, like Bev said. That’s why they didn’t sink them. That’s why they just pulled some plugs. Because they need the boats, so they can leave…after. Sarah, you said it was a contagion. If one of them, just one of them, makes it to the mainland…]

This starts to cement Erin’s metaphorical function in the story. Up until that point, I’d kind of thought Midnight Mass wrote Erin as a little too much of a perfect girlfriend character, sort of a post-manic pixie dream girl. But when she was the one who pointed out the moral necessity of their self-sacrifice, I realized the show was imbuing her with the divinity of selflessness. And, yeah, it’s a slightly on-the-nose pairing given gender tropes in television. But it does work. Especially when she gets the big ending monologue, the one that sums up the whole series and, indeed, endorses a literal philosophy of selflessness. [Clip: “Myself. My self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing. That word, self. That’s not the word. That’s not right, that isn’t — That isn’t. How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons, little lightning bolts like fireworks inside. And I thought I’d despair or feel afraid but I don’t feel any of that, none of it. Because I’m too busy. I’m too busy in this moment, remembering. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body is mostly just empty space after all, and solid matter? It’s just energy vibrating very slowly and there is no me. There never was. Electrons in my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing, and I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy, not memory. Not self. My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after and everything else is pictures picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain. And I am the lightning that jumps between, I am the energy firing the neurons and I am returning. Just by remembering, I’m returning home. It’s like a drop of water falling back into the ocean of which it’s always been a part. All things a part. All of us a part. You, me, and my little girl and my mother and my father. Everyone who’s ever been, every plant, every animal, every atom, every star, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach and that’s what we’re talking about when we say God. The one, the cosmos, and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I’ll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It’s a wish, made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything, I am all. I am that I am.”]

So, Erin Greene is also Jesus, and she carries the divinity of selflessness.

Finally, we have Sarah Gunning, the doctor. She’s one of the more understated characters, even though she’s completely integral to the show, and after thinking about it for a while I realized why. Everyone else in the anti-vamp squad has been traumatized away from power-first thinking through powerlessness, whether through incarceration or abuse or discrimination. But, although Sarah has experienced life from a different angle as a queer woman, she doesn’t give any explicit speeches about her trauma. And I think that’s because she’s a doctor, and specifically, because she’s a doctor who’s on the island to take care of her mother, even though there’s plenty of other jobs she could have. In other words, she’s the show’s argument that you don’t need to be traumatized by powerlessness to navigate complexity and selflessness. You just have to be willing to dedicate yourself to that journey, and to be aware not only of the known forms complexity can take, but also of how to recognize its emergent and unknown forms. Sarah is also Jesus, and she carries the divinity of empiricism, as she explains in her speech about the first doctor to try instating mandatory handwashing. 

[Clip: 

Sarah: Have you ever heard of Ignaz Semmelweis? 

Erin: No.

Sarah: He was a Hungarian physician in the 1840s. Finds himself in charge of two maternity wards. One was a teaching school, best and brightest, birthing to autopsies, everything in between. The second was a clinic for women who couldn’t afford medical care. Wasn’t even run by doctors, it was midwives. No surprise that one of the clinics had a higher mortality rate than the other one. The surprise was which one. It was the first one, the teaching school. Death rate was staggering — women had a better chance of living if they gave birth on the streets. But it didn’t make any sense, and it drove him nuts. He did study after study after study and beat his head into the wall until finally he suggested that maybe, just maybe, for no reason that made any sense…maybe his students should wash their hands. After performing the autopsies, before going into the birthing ward. So he started a mandatory chlorine hand wash. Lo and behold, death rates plummeted. And the scientific community ate him alive. Germ theory was two decades away from acceptance. Ideas in that direction were met with disdain, ridicule, exile. Semmelweis was committed to an asylum. An asylum! By another scientist! In fact, he died there. Oh, and when they replaced him at these clinics, got rid of that crazy silly hand wash, mortality rates went right back up again. So yeah, Erin, your story is crazy. Let me tell you something crazy while we’re at it. I mean, what’s a little crazy between friends, right? So my mom has made a recovery that is — unprecedented doesn’t quite seem to cover it. And I’ve been trying to understand it quietly for now because if I told anyone in the medical community what I’m seeing here, they would think that I’m crazy. They would think I’m fucking insane. So I’ve been running tests, lots of tests, which means taking blood to send to the mainland for analysis. But I haven’t sent them yet, because I keep doing this, just to see it again. That’s the thing about science. It deals in what is observable, testable, repeatable. You’re telling me today that Riley Flynn caught fire in the sunlight. 

Erin: That’s right.

Sarah: He literally combusted in the sun. You’re right, Erin, that’s crazy. That is batshit, hold the phone, padded-room, clozapine, insane. 

(Vampire blood hisses as Sarah holds it in the sun)

Sarah: Fucking bonkers.]

This speech highlights something really important about empiricism, the philosophy that underlies science. People like to say that science is about technical knowledge and religion is about morality, which is why the two can coexist. And that can be true! But part of why religion feels threatened by science anyway is because empiricism lets ordinary people judge the relative correctness of conflicting truths for themselves, without needing to account for any expression of power. And if you’re someone who’s invested their life into the idea that conflicts are supposed to be resolved by referencing external power, whether human or divine, then empiricism may strike you as a dangerous and misleading form of self-worship, as Pruitt would put it.

Now, there’s a very important caveat here, which is that it is of course just as possible for empirical people to be immoral dickheads as it is for religious people to be selfless and reasonable, and vice versa. In fact, it’s entirely possible to hold attitudes that are simultaneously empirical and power-first. If you look at the current state of the US, neck-deep in the social crisis, an empirical yet power-first person lacking selflessness or humanism might conclude that the best way to fix the system is to cheat and exploit their way into becoming a billionaire to force progressive change. This would of course fail, because the consequences of such behavior would cascade through society and the aspiring billionaire in a way that puts progressive change well beyond them, in the same way that Pruitt trying to save the island by allying with a vampire ended up killing everyone. Being able to foresee the full effects of any action, both moral and practical, takes more than empiricism. One needs to be able to imagine how others will react in ways that are outside of one’s own direct experience, i.e. humanistic understanding. It takes the willingness to put the well-being of others ahead of your own, i.e. selflessness. And reconciling what those two might tell you with any conflicting urges takes self-awareness, like the self-awareness Riley displayed in his self-sacrifice. [Clip: “You weren’t quite right, what you said about why I brought us out here. I didn’t bring you out here to scare you or to isolate you. I brought you out here so I’d have nowhere to go.”]

Yes, we’ve finally gotten to the point of this breakdown, the third state and second turn of our diamond premise. Why are all four of the anti-vamp squad Jesus? Because the pure genius of Midnight Mass is to use them to show how self-awareness, humanism, selflessness, and empiricism all work together to create truly principle-first morality independent of religious faith. And I really mean independent in the sense of uncorrelated, since Erin and Hassan are both believers while Riley and Sarah are not. 

Now you might be thinking, Preeya, the divinities you assigned to all of them are pretty arbitrary. Wasn’t Riley’s sacrifice just as selfless as it was self-aware? Isn’t that humanist understanding that Hassan has just as empirical as Sarah’s scientific philosophy? Isn’t Erin’s ability to trust despite her history just as self-aware and humanist as it is selfless? Yes, yes, yes! In fact all of that is exactly my point. Midnight Mass presents us with a decomposition of morality that is simultaneously a statement about the fractal nature of that decomposition. After all, since each of us contains multitudes, complex self-awareness necessarily demands some level of humanist understanding of others and of what may have been wrongly internalized from society, which requires the selflessness to be willing to put aside preconceived notions, which requires empiricism to determine which ones are helpful and which aren’t, which leads you right back into self-awareness. They are four inseparable components of the cognitive structure we call human morality, just as feeding on humans is the inseparable flip side of endless life in the cognitive structure of vampirism.

This fractal interlocking extends to each state of our quote, “diamond” premise. Our first state was the ongoing existence of the island in the wake of the inwardly-focused, selfish, unaware, power-first movement that is US colonial white supremacy, and our third state with the anti-vamp squad is its inseparable flip side, i.e. outwardly-focused, humanistic, self-aware, selfless, principle-first morality. I say inseparable because both of these modes are fully encompassed by humanity, and very often are reactions to each other. Similarly, the second state introduced Pruitt and the vampire as symbols of divinity, and the fourth state is the inseparable flip side, i.e. the demonic and genocidal nature of unchecked power-first thinking. Both of these are fully encompassed by vampirism, and while Pruitt is initially the human symbol of the good parts, the human symbol of the bad parts is none other than Bev Keane.

Weirdly, I kind of think Bev is the most fun character in Midnight Mass. Like, I fear for my life every time this woman speaks, but I love it. The credit for that goes directly to Samantha Sloyan, who really elevates the writing. You see exactly how the power of the vampire blood initially overwhelms Bev for all the right reasons — which, through her refusal of complexity, promptly turns into all the wrong reasons. 

Bev’s relationship to complexity is interesting. If you’re familiar with the analysis of Trump voters as the feudal barons of their area, the ones who are at the end of all the local money chains, well, that’s pretty much the first thing we learn about her as a person. That and she’s willing to kill innocent animals while trying to rid the island of pests. Of course she’s deeply racist, hates outsiders, and loves mostly power. But it goes beyond that, doesn’t it? It’s not just that she hates outsiders, it’s that she hates the idea that morality requires perspective. It’s not just that she loves power, it’s that she loves any excuse to lean into what she already knows while disregarding whatever she’s not interested in. 

But Bev is also portrayed as a full person. She’s the show’s recognition that human complexity means more than harmless differences or well-intentioned mistakes gone awry. It also means harmful differences, and malicious intent that proclaims itself good because it refuses to believe that good has any other meaning. And the point of Bev’s arc is that, if such people are allowed the power to take things too far, your community ends up dead because someone burned all the houses down to root out dissension. Why, it’s almost as if a healthy society with a future requires the Bev Keanes of the world to engage genuinely with the complexity of questions like this. 

[Clip:

Annie: Bev, I want you to listen to me. Because your whole life, I think you’ve needed to hear this. You aren’t a good person.

Bev: Well. That was uncalled for.

Annie: God doesn’t love you more than anyone else. You aren’t a hero, and you certainly, certainly aren’t a victim.

Bev: I wouldn’t lecture, Annie Flynn. Not until you pull the plank from your own eye, as it were. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but if Riley Flynn, a drunk and a murderer, was evidence of the quality of his parenting — 

Annie: He was. Every part of him. And God loves him, just as much as he loves you, Bev. Why does that upset you so much? Just the idea that God loves everyone just as much as you?

Bev: She’s stalling. Check around back.]

Given all the effort our society puts into rooting out wrongdoers early, you might think that the problem could have been solved if someone had just sat Bev down and explained all of this to her at some formative point. But I’m not saying that, because as Midnight Mass shows, what really unleashed Bev on the community wasn’t just herself, but the interaction of her personality with the overwhelming power of the vampire, which in Pruitt’s hands created the need for a strong second-in-command. Just as vampirism generates power for itself and its lackeys as long as they’re willing to reject humanity, Bev Keanes are great at upholding and maintaining hierarchies as long as they have what they consider a sufficiently virtuous and powerful reason. Their rejection of human complexity drives them to define truth in terms of power, and then biases them towards action because they’re not spending all their time overthinking…unlike some of us. Bev Keanes are the natural adherents of the power-first mindset of white supremacy and settler-colonialism and resource extraction, to complete the loop back to the original state of our diamond premise. Pruitt plays into the power-first mindset by taking the easy way out at every turn, but Bev actively keeps him there, by spinning a fantasy of violent justice that, because she now believes it’s allowed, means that she also believes everyone else must conform to it. 

[Clip: 

Bev: Yes, Wade, what would you like to say?

Wade: I mean…[stammers] That’s Joe Collie, Bev! [stammers] What the hell did you do?

(Bev slaps Wade)

Bev: “The man who acts presumptuously by not obeying the priest who stands to minister there before the Lord, your God, that man shall die.” Deuteronomy. You’re correct. This is Joe Collie, this isn’t Ed Flynn or Leeza Scarborough or you, Wade. This is the man that put your daughter in a wheelchair. This man has been a scourge to this community his entire life. He’s a sinner, a lech, and a heathen of the first order. He’s a maimer of children and a blessing to no one, and God has called in his debt. Father, Monsignor. Tell them. Tell them why you did what you did.

Pruitt: Something just came over me, I mean, I don’t — 

Bev: Because something moved through you! You forget, Wade, you forget, our lord is a warrior, and so are his angels. Our lord sent angels to Egypt to slaughter the firstborn of the Egyptians, turned cities to salt, women and children alike, and drowned the world when we were too lost to our sins. Monsignor Pruitt himself is a miracle of the lord, and a performer of miracles, as you damn well know yourself, Wade. He is a miracle. God has a plan. He is working through him, and we are to do our part, to witness and do our part. “And do not think that I have come to bring peace. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” It was Jesus who said that, Jesus Christ himself, so if you want to question him, now, Wade, if you want to pick and choose which one of his works are palatable to you — return all his graces to sender, then, and let your little girl sit back down in that wheelchair. Do not cherrypick the glories of God! Now wrap him up and put him in the car.

Wade: [stammers]

Bev: (to Pruitt) Is your conscience heavy? Do you have guilt in your heart for doing what you had to? 

Pruitt: No. Not at all.

Bev: Then ask yourself why God let that guilt pass you by and carry on.]

Yeah, that woman is terrifying. Here’s the speech where she proposes turning the entire congregation into vampires.

[Clip: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ, our lord of free will.” The heartbreak you feel at his choice, how must God feel? I’m sorry that Riley chose what he chose. It breaks your heart, but that isn’t the worst part, is it? It’s that some people aren’t content to ruin it for themselves. They have to poison it for others as well. I’m sorry to have to say this, I’m sorry to have to think this way, but the world is the world and we have to be smart about this. As wise as serpents, as innocent as doves. Who knows who he talked to? Who knows what else he’s done to deprive others of God’s graces? Judas was part of God’s plan too, Judas was part of it. The acts of the apostles, when those brave early followers were sent out into the world as sheep among wolves, all the believers who were of of one heart and mind, no one claimed that any of their possessions were their own, but they shared everything that they had. There will be others like Riley, there always are, who try to poison the ears of the faithful against their god. But tonight, let’s have faith in our church. Let’s share everything that we have. Easter vigil has always been a night of baptism, hasn’t it?]

Whew. Yeah. Earlier I mentioned my personal feeling that Christianity became irredeemable when Constantine associated it with colonialism and raw power. But Midnight Mass, with its emphasis on life and death and its pointed commentary around who chooses which for themselves, is saying something even more radical: that the moral foundation of Christianity has always been suspect.

That foundation is, of course, that one particular guy achieved everlasting life, and that the power demonstrated by his resurrection is what proves his way of thinking. Usually people attack this foundation by disputing the factual basis of his life or simply not believing that he was resurrected. Like, I certainly don’t believe it. But Midnight Mass goes one step further, by asking the incredibly needed question: should it matter like that? What if chasing eternal life, not just as a metaphor but as an actuality, is a bad foundation for a moral philosophy? 

In some ways this is a very old question. We’ve all had the debate around whether doing good deeds just to get into heaven later counts as true morality. But what Midnight Mass pinpoints is that a lot of people are all too willing to interpret eternal life quite literally, and most especially on a societal level. That is, the power-first reasoning not coincidentally endorsed by such quotes says that if your culture was wiped out, then it automatically means you must have been sinful. But if it’s persisted in a position of power, that’s proof of being favored by God. It’s that easy to flip principle-first morality into power-first by the simple application of human imagination.

The thing is, I don’t think that this emphasis on eternal life is itself independent of the colonial forces that later took over white Christianity. After all, Jesus was primarily an anti-imperial activist. The power of his resurrection story had a lot to do with the sheer overwhelming power and cruelty of the Roman empire, and people’s amazement that someone who resisted it was able to transcend the ignominious and painful ending the Romans inflicted on him. If we were to write a similar story in the American empire, it would certainly involve an innocent Black man who was falsely accused, did incredible activism in prison, was sentenced to the electric chair or lethal injection, and yet survived. Think of how helpless we all feel in the face of the American death machine, which not only goes around the world gobbling up territory and executing anyone who stands in its way, but also forces each of us to mortgage various amounts of our lives to keep its cruelty going. A story of a power that even it cannot break would be inspirational. In fact, this is exactly why I keep talking about white Christianity. As far as I can tell as an atheist, Black liberation theology is the only true Christianity, because it’s the only one that’s using Christian teachings in a cultural context substantially similar to the original.

At the same time, if even Black liberation theology attained power through violence for hundreds and hundreds of years, it would recreate exactly the problems we see with white Christianity. Because even as we celebrate the overcoming of evil, we can see how that evil shapes the story of resistance so fundamentally that it’s almost impossible not to replicate. The idea that there is some greater power that justifies resisting evil doesn’t inherently challenge the power-first philosophy that created the evil in the first place. I would offer the popular conservative conception of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. as contemporary evidence in point. He was a skilled and savvy organizer, but since his death, white power-first conservatives have been all too happy to beat Black Americans with his memory. In their view, Dr. King’s ideals were right because he’s the one formally associated with the power and impact of the civil rights movement, whereas ordinary people who don’t have power must therefore be wrong, even if they’re espousing and living those ideals much more coherently. Perhaps this is the central lesson we should take from the past millennium of Christian violence. In a short-term logistical sense, power can only be defeated by greater power. But if we try to run with that in the long term, we simply end up recreating the cycle of power and oppression, as empire reconstitutes itself again and again from the cultural memory embedded in our frameworks of rebelling against it. The idea of any power as an indicator of morality must be fully deconstructed for humanity to peacefully coexist with itself. And that goes double when the power involves rejecting so natural a function of life as death.

So, let’s review everything here. We’ve taken the initial premise of a small, insular American town, founded on the belief that its existence is self-justifying, confronted with the complexity of its children and one longtime resident returning from the wider world. We turned that through ninety degrees and found in that structure an extensive exploration of the science fiction metaphors used to represent good and evil, along with some pointed commentary about how well they mesh with certain real-world religious aesthetics. We turned that through another ninety degrees, and found thoughtful and clear defenses of the importance of self-awareness, humanism, selflessness, and empiricism in principle-first morality, and the many manifestations they can take, including the transcendent quality we like to call divinity. Then we turned that through yet another ninety degrees to see the grotesque interactions of science fiction levels of power with the worst of humanity, generated by those who resent the work needed to accept the full implications of human complexity, even as they aspire to the power and authority that follow the genuine completion of such work. It’s this refusal to understand alongside the need to control that encapsulates the original premise, the small, insular American town, founded on the belief that its existence is self-justifying. The way each of these states both reacts to the previous one while re-expressing all the information contained at the start is what I mean by the diamondlike, interconnected story premise. 

Oh, and there’s one more thing. I’d also like to discuss the racial and disability politics embodied by Leeza Scarborough. While Midnight Mass’s conception of Muslims as the sociopolitical other makes a lot of sense with the premise, it does leave out that Black people are obviously the first and foremost other in the American imagination. The show strategically integrates Black representation by giving the mayor a Black family, including Leeza as his daughter, and from there just fiatting that they’re a part of American Christianity. But, as I said before, that’s only kind of true, isn’t it? We all know that white and Black Americans often attend separate churches that emphasize very different politics. And while I’m sure that there are Black people who go to white churches and vice versa, and that Midnight Mass’s depiction is implicitly revealing some truths around which Black people were ever allowed on the island in the first place, I just wish they’d found some way to acknowledge that that’s what they were doing, instead of shrugging the whole question off. 

Then there’s the disability politics angle, which is also somewhat underwhelming. The whole concept of the wheelchair user who magically heals and has the moment where they walk themselves out of their chair is a sore spot for disability activists. Both because many wheelchair users will never have that moment, and because lots of other wheelchair users can already walk, just not all the time. The false binary of wheelchair equals permanent bad, walking equals permanent good is exactly what disability activists are trying to move society away from. The harm of such narratives centers around the ableist expression of power-first: if having more power is good, powerlessness and visible dependence on aid must be bad. Which is exactly the opposite of the point Midnight Mass is trying to make.

But, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Midnight Mass actually recognized and subverted this, albeit at the very, very, very end. After the whole island has been burned and everyone has died, Leeza turns to Warren in the boat and utters the very last line of the show. [Clip: “I can’t feel my legs.”] It’s kind of a throwaway line, so I don’t feel like it totally reverses the previous arc, but since the pro-vampire argument got started with “Look at Leeza Scarborough, now returned to a state of relative power,” it is nice that the show is willing to admit that, hey, if power-first is always bad, then quote “healing” Leeza with vampire blood doesn’t justify the essential moral atrocity at the heart of vampirism. Which again gets us right back into human complexity and the difficulty of telling good actions from bad — which leads us right into next episode’s My Fake Presidency.

For now, take a break, re-up on whatever you’re taking if you need to. I’ll meet you back here sometime in the future, when I’ll be expanding on some of the implications of the complexity framework I laid out in this segment. Next time on Thought Squared.

Credits:

The music in this episode is Next One by Roa. All Thought Squared episodes have transcripts available on BuzzSprout.  If you’re a philosopher, mathematician, scientist, or theoretician who would like to explain to me why my thoughts are wrong and/or redundant, please reach out to Thought Squared on Twitter with the message, “I would like to be interviewed on air.” Or, you know, just do whatever you were going to do anyway.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.