Commentary: What the new film ‘Heretic’ says about Mormon apologetics

Spoiler alert • While not revealing the ending or pivotal plot points, this column does dissect dialogue and other moments in the movie “Heretic.”

“Heretic” is a new horror film about two young women, missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who, while seeking out potential converts, are trapped in the labyrinthine home of a man named Mr. Reed (played with jocular creepiness by Hugh Grant).

They believe Mr. Reed to be a good prospect, particularly after he tells them he has a great deal of interest in religion. But it soon becomes clear that he plans on using them — not to do anything so cliché as to “test their faith” but rather to explore the nature of belief itself.

The movie is well-informed about the lives of Latter-day Saint missionaries. Church members might raise their eyebrows at one or two things, perhaps most prominently the odd character of Elder Kennedy, a clearly middle-aged figure in a suit and black missionary nametag who does not appear to have a companion. Of course, Latter-day Saint missionaries are almost always either full-time young folk with nametags and companions or part-time older people with neither. That we meet Elder Kennedy cleaning a chapel — a common activity for any church member — is sufficiently on the nose to excuse some of these sins, as is some of the genuine dialogue between the female, or “sister,” missionaries about anxiety over baptisms and the correlation between their devotion to their labor and the potential attractiveness of their future spouses.

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed the film (you might know their earlier movie “A Quiet Place”), clearly did their research. It probably helped that Julia Glausi, who runs their production company, is an alum of church-owned Brigham Young University.

But there’s a great deal beyond simple verisimilitude going on in the movie. The film puts its finger on the presumptions that underlie a lot of discussion in the church about what it means to believe — though I’ll not be so bold as to suggest that Beck and Woods keep tabs on online arguments about Mormon apologetics — and, in so doing, helps us think through how exactly religion functions in the daily lives of people who go to church today.

Belief and facts

At one point at the beginning of the second act, I slumped a bit in my seat. Mr. Reed delivers a stem-winding lecture to the confused and, frankly, spooked missionaries who have just learned two things. First, Mr. Reed has locked them in his house. Second — just as alarming, to the missionaries — he has doubts about the essential plausibility of Christianity.

Reed argues that Christianity is an iteration of Judaism with better marketing. He points to dozens of ancient deities who, he says, died and were reborn. He explains that the story of Jesus is simply a remix of clips from earlier mythologies. Hence, Mr. Reed concludes, Christianity cannot be true.

I slumped because Reed’s sermon is a simplification of the contemporary Jesus mythicist theory. This is a fringe academic hypothesis positing that “Jesus” was not a historical person, but an invention of ancient people who pieced together a story from other myths. Jesus mythicism is rejected by nearly all scholars of Christian history and the ancient world, whether they are Christian or not. But that has not stopped it from finding a vast array of adherents on the internet, many of whom appear to advocate for it not because they are conversant in the historical evidence but because they dislike the politics of modern white evangelicals.

But most distressingly, I slumped because it appeared to me that Mr. Reed — and hence, perhaps, the filmmakers — seemed to be buying into the premise that shapes a lot of online conversation about religion. That premise is that religion is like science. It either can be proved with empirical evidence or it can’t, and if it can, you should believe it. If I can show you an ancient street sign that says “Zarahemla,” the Book of Mormon must be true and you should be baptized into Latter-day Saint faith. If you can prove there were no horses in ancient America, the Book of Mormon must be false and the church should crumble.

Neither of these proposals seems to work in real life, to the annoyance of partisans who are frustrated when the evidence that seems blindingly clear to them doesn’t transform the belief of other people.

I perked up a bit when one of the missionaries, Sister Barnes, punctured Mr. Reed’s case. She points out what many scholars have. The mythicist theory amplifies and simplifies points of comparison among these ancient deities, massaging the details of these stories until they extend and contort into roughly the same shape. The theory also simply ignores the many points of contradiction among these ancient myths.

Sister Barnes is correct. But, in another sense, she’s buying into Mr. Reed’s premise that empirical evidence is the key to understanding religion.

This sort of jousting accomplishes little other than making its combatants feel good about themselves. Humans don’t choose to be religious when some imaginary equation of evidence adds up to the right number. The precise alchemy of belief is far more complex and individualized than that. We do things because of how we feel about evidence, about the people presenting evidence, and about how the evidence is being used. And we rarely can explain how precisely the math inside our hearts works.

Belief and feelings

So I perked up even more when the other missionary, Sister Paxton, said she doesn’t believe in God because of facts but because of feelings. That’s an argument that sometimes gets Latter-day Saints mocked by two groups: conservative evangelicals and nonbelievers.

Many conservative evangelicals are steeped in the tradition of Protestant Christian apologetics and are accustomed to arguing that their faith can be proved with evidence from history and science and other empirical sources of data. For them, the common refrain from believers that the Holy Ghost confirms truth through feeling is maddening.

The same holds true for many nonbelievers, who find the idea that one might be religious because of feelings frustratingly nonempirical, nonscientific and entirely woolly-headed.

Toward the end of the film, Mr. Reed offers the sobering conclusion that religion is simply a way to control people, and that is, of course, the determination you would come to if you believe that people choose religion only because of empirical evidence. There’s a long history of people baffled when friends and family join movements or do things that seem confusing and unjustifiable, and a long history of those people deciding that their friends and family must simply be brainwashed or confused or, well, controlled.

But feelings are the reasons why humans do most of the things we do, and even though they are not empirical — you can’t measure them — they are, in fact, evidence. Your love for your family and friends can’t be measured, but it’s real. Many Americans shop at Target instead of Walmart or Whole Foods instead of Kroger because of feelings, or, as some people today say, vibes — vibes that these companies generate with marketing designed to influence us. That’s a form of control, too, and it points to the fact that we are, all of us, ceaselessly influenced by our feelings in genuine and powerful ways. Singling out religion as particularly dark for “controlling” us says more about how one feels about religion than about whether we are in fact “controlled.”

All of this is to say that it is entirely appropriate, and more, entirely human, to believe things because of feelings. There is, ironically, evidence that humans make decisions at the gut level first and generate reasons based on evidence to validate those decisions afterward.

Near the film’s end, Sister Paxton describes a study showing that sick people who were prayed for did not heal at any greater rate than people who weren’t. She then prays for other people anyway, because, the missionary says, she feels like it’s the right and the good thing to do.

That moment, more than anything, is why “Heretic” is smart about religion.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2023′s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and 2012′s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”