“X-Men” comics have challenged us politically, existentially, and more recently, spiritually. A lot of us have been talking about our religious upbringings and the theological implications of Jonathan Hickman’s “House of X,” “Powers of X,” and all of the “Dawn of X” books. In light of Passover, Easter, Mid-Sha’ban, and the other springtime holidays, we thought now would be a great time to talk about ways in which “X-Men” has made us consider our beliefs.
For more discussion on the issues discussed here, check out our regular coverage in Mutantversity!
Check out Part 1 of this discussion.
Life, Death, and Mutation
About a week and a half ago, my grandpa died. As you’d expect, I wasn’t thrilled about it and I started to think a little too hard about a lot of things; so when I had a chance to write about my own interactions with religion and the X-Men it seemed like a weird, but fitting way for me to reconcile with it all (it’s also much cheaper than therapy). Both of my parents were raised Catholic in rural Australia, with my mum often caught on the periphery of the clergy’s darker side. So pretty unsurprisingly both of them fucking hated the church and fled for Melbourne at the first chance they had. Consequently, I’ve always lived with religion at arm’s length (aside from a couple of guilt-driven Easter masses), it didn’t help that when I was little I went to this kindergarten in an old church that had this big poster-frame on the side of it. There would be a new poster in it every month and that would talk about the death of Christ or the original sin and the godlessness of the masses. Heavy stuff for bubba James’s first interactions with religion.
Point is, it seemed like I always saw the structures of religion before the ideas of it. I was exposed to something de-romanticised and beauractratised. But once Grandpa passed I think I got to see the personally applicable side of religion, my mum would talk about how much it meant that he got to die on the farm he made for himself, how he got to be buried in the same country he had lived in ever since migrating in the 50s. At the funeral we got to have the symbols of his life on equal display to the signs of the church. I got to see how you can take agency over faith and use it to frame and define the narrative and purpose of a life. This is all a very long-winded way to say that I think I can finally define why I love the new advent of mutant spirituality, the actual doctrines of it don’t matter so much as the fittingly unifying formation of it and emotion behind it.
These comics feel so empowering because it draws on that same idea of defining yourself through a religion that’s fluid and forming through collective memories. The mutants are building a personal utopia as they speak. They aren’t building new rules or structures, they’re reveling in their freedom and defining the meaning of it all. That’s the thing about Krakoa, it’s cohesive. Mutankind are one people literally united by a living body, a mutant island. You don’t see plumbing or public transport on Krakoa for the same reason you don’t see police stations; their society simply works. It’s unified and utopian, ideas and rituals form as a product of shared cultural traumas and experiences, they all want their society to succeed so naturally it will. You can also see this in the vulnerability in resurrection, these people are presented naked to the masses, their identity is questioned. It should be an isolating experience, but because of the inherent celebration and the universal acceptance they’re greeted with, it’s unifying. Krakoa represents a society of self-acceptance through societal acceptance, “love thy neighbor” and “Make More Mutants” are two sides of the same coin. There’s a really great essay by Dani Kinney that says all this much better than I ever could, but I think there’s still something to it.
This idea of religion through acceptance seems to show why The Crucible is so divisive, it’s not an organic progression, as Cyclops puts it “in paradise the pragmatists have won.” The Crucible feels defined and logical, it’s a ritual built on the exile of Scarlet Witch from the mutant race and it’s built to make certain mutants feel unwelcome in Krakoa, they’re being forced to earn their birthright. So suddenly these people who are so used to acceptance and the celebration of identity are watching their family be degraded and othered, it suddenly doesn’t feel like solidarity, it feels like a transaction. It’s asynchronies like this that bring on a reckoning, that cause a crisis of faith, so let’s pray for Nightcrawler to turn out okay.
Continued belowDawn of Krakoa
This era of X-Men feels different for a lot of reasons, more greenery, better fashion, endless polyamorous wish-fulfillment (oh, to see both Scott in a speedo and Jeanie in a bikini). But more than anything, this is an era where mutants are taking agency over the mutant metaphor. They get to define themselves instead of letting the world define them and it’s what little baby-James never saw in those poster’s on the church-wall, religion is supposed to help you find an identity, not prescribe one onto you.
It feels so impossible for the genie to go back into the bottle after all this. How do you move past something that’s so exciting, so tangibly new. How could the X-Men go back to that small manor in Westchester after Krakoa? The thing is, without a small miracle, that genie is inevitably going back in. Eventually we’re going to be back to a big happy family of X-Men nestled away in Westchester with good-hearted Charles Xavier gliding by in his wheelchair as humble headmaster. Krakoa will have fallen, and be for the most part, forgotten for the sake of new stories. Who knows, maybe we will get that small miracle and it’ll stick around, maybe the MCU will make a HOXPOX movie and the status quo will be stuck on Krakoa forever thanks to the supreme power of Disney merchandising. But I think that no matter the outcome, this period of X-history will have something uniquely aspirational to look back on. It showed us that everyone can identify with the mutant metaphor in one way or another, all of us see who we are through it. But when mutants build a culture, a nation and a collective identity, then that same metaphor dares us to ask who we could be.
