Recently I attended an opera titled Dialogues of the Carmelites. The setting was France on the cusp of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror. A young woman entered a convent out of fear of the onrushing tumult and chaos, thinking to find shelter and peace of mind among the devout. Needless to say, she finds a temporary reprieve, but witnesses the Mother Superior dying a drawn-out and painful death, questioning her faith in God and His goodness or power, that she should die such an awful death. The citizens disband the convent and forbid the nuns to continue their observances; they defy the injunction and find themselves in prison, facing the guillotine, while the young girl has fled. The end of the play finds the women, one by one, slain for their devotion, including the girl who joins the procession of death at the end, finding her courage and faith and solidarity with her sisters.
Now, I learned since that the performers were Baylor students, and I must say that I was impressed by their performance. Baylor being a Baptist college, the probability that they are Christians to some degree is rather greater than it would be at other universities or performance houses. Still, my musing that followed the spectacle still holds. And it is this: what does God think about people constantly invoking His name, as the numerous women acting as devout nuns did? Or the actress who has to transform from a Mother Superior spouting ecumenical platitudes to a dying woman railing against God and questioning His will?
Now, obviously, God is quite aware of the true state of their hearts, and their beliefs. Additionally, they are merely performing, pretending so to speak lines of piety. This begat the question in my mind of what God thinks of actors who are continuously and repeatedly mouthing lines that sound and seem worshipful and genuine, yet could be coming from the lips of people who are completely opposed to, or have no faith in, what they’re saying.
I would like to differentiate between actors in movies and actors in plays. Some actors portray a genuine believer in a film, spending months enacting a character with faith. Ian Charleston comes to mind, who depicted Eric Liddel in Chariots of Fire so brilliantly. The actor was a homosexual who died of AIDS in the 1980s, so it seems likely that he was not a professing Christian; usually, homosexuals are quite antipathetic towards Christianity, and that is more the Church’s fault than theirs, but that’s a different matter. However, once the filming was done and the scenes completed, the actors could discard their roles and pretenses. They might film the same scene a dozen times, but not for different audiences, nor for alternating purposes.
Contrast that with actors in plays or operas who have to portray the same characters over and over again, with a newness and intensity requisite for each performance. They might perform the same scene fifty times if the play runs for six months, and of course innumerable more times should the piece succeed. What does God think of such people who attempt to evoke complex feelings of faith and doubt over and over again? Does this displease Him? Is it any worse than a hypocritical churchgoer who espouses the tenets of Christianity but doesn’t live them? Or someone who attends out of duty, social decorum, or habit, without any true devotion? He certainly does not condone hypocrites, but do actors pretending to be believers count as hypocrites? I truly have no idea what He makes of them, though I know what Augustine would say. But Augustine was prejudiced against the theater because of his upbringing and profession; besides, he probably saw few if any performances that presented a Christian character in any sincerity or realism.
