Markup View

Author: bejjinks

Jul 16th 2014 at 3:40:46 PM

I'm a Christian and I agree with the consensus, this trope is poorly defined and described. Most people will assume that anyone who has a moral foundation "must be from my religion". Superman was never ambiguously Christian. He may have been ambiguously patriotic fighting for truth, justice and the American Way but his moral fiber was never religious.

If we are going to have an Ambiguously Christian trope, it needs to be one in which other characters express an uncertainty about the religion of so and so. If it is only the audience or reader expressing such an uncertainty, it is probably just a case of wishful thinking such as, "I wish Superman was a Christian so I could use him as an example for my Sunday School class."

If we define Ambiguously Christian as I suggest, than it can include the opposite as well, characters who are explicitly Christian but behave in such a way that you wonder if they really are who they explicitly say they are. Then we could include examples like Klingor from MASH who explicitly is a Christian and even when a woman suggest he have an affair, he answers, "I'm not that kind of guy." However, even though he is explicitly Christian, he cross-dresses, drinks, gambles, gets in fights, and uses magical amulets.

I happen to read an article about Jamie Farr, the actor that played Klingor, in which he spoke about the difficulty of being a Christian in real life while the creators of MASH kept pressuring his character to be as unchristian as possible.