To hear Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster reminisce about early inspirations, it’s hard to decipher any overtly religious influence on their creative process at all. Instead, the now-deceased duo credit their shared love of early science fiction and inspiration from the athletic stunts of Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd’s fight scenes for the idea of a “meek and mild-mannered reporter” with a super secret.
Far from mirroring obvious biblical themes, the hero’s first comic appearance in June 1938’s Action Comics #1 showed baby Superman dispatched to earth by an alien scientist and found by a “passing motorist” — who turns him over to a city orphanage.
This was also the ninth year of a worldwide economic crisis that left people hungry for more than just food. And something about this strange new character created by two young men who had attended Hebrew school in Cleveland, Ohio as boys captured the American imagination. It continues with this week’s release of James Gunn’s “Superman.“
Symbols of faith
But one element of the original story was clearly reflective of their religious heritage — a baby saved from destruction by parents who send him forth in a small vessel and who gets raised by strangers, before eventually reclaiming his heritage as a “champion of the oppressed.”
While mirroring the life of Moses (and apparently also inspired by the super-strong Samson in the Book of Judges), this hero also embodies on some level the historic Jewish longing for a coming Messiah — one who would “proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”
That same Isaiah reference, of course, is something Christians now connect with Jesus, like he himself did in a Nazareth synagogue.
Six months after that first comic strip, the name “Kal-El” was introduced in a Jan. 17, 1939 newspaper strip (“El” meaning God in Hebrew and “Son” in Kryptonian). Later that same year, more Christian overtones began to be written into the story - with a 1939 revision portraying the young Superman adopted by Mary and an unnamed husband. (By 1951, Mary had changed to Martha.)
In a 2002 thesis called “Superman as Christ-Figure: The American Pop Culture Movie Messiah,” Anton K. Kozlovic identified 20 allusions to Jesus in Superman films. They included subtle elements like being raised in small towns by surrogate fathers who were humble laborers, and more obvious references like “Superman: The Movie” (1978), where Clark Kent is told by his true father, “They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.”
No depictions of Superman have leaned more into Christian themes than Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns” (2006) and Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” (2013) and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” (2016). Those films featured a singular birth, guidance from Clark’s supernatural father about his mission on earth, revelation of his supernatural gifts at age 33, handing himself over to authorities, getting stabbed in the side, falling in a cruciform pose after sacrificing himself to save the world, awakening after three days, and returning after a long absence.
A universal hunger for deliverance
Every Superman comic or movie, of course, centers on the hero — or his earthly neighbors — facing impossible odds. A boy falls into Niagara Falls, a school bus lurches into a river, a steel structure is falling on city crowds.
Death is imminent — inescapable. Until Superman arrives on the scene. No vignette illustrated this better than the plane hurtling toward the earth in "Superman Returns."
“That’s part of the attraction of Superman,” said E. G. Marshall after playing the U.S. president in Christopher Reeve’s 1980 film. “The chance — the hope, even — that there is a superbeing, a form of superman, that there is an intelligence greater than our own.”
And that “eventually, one day,” he said, “we’ll make contact with that life.”
Philadelphia native David Corenswet, a married father of a 1-year-old who plays the new Superman, says the character is “definitively different from everybody else on the earth - he’s not human… and he has these powers that nobody else has.”
“And at the same time, he wants desperately to be a part of humanity.”
How and what that human side looks like is where Superman depictions have diverged the most.
Goodness as the new edgy?
In “Superman III,” Christopher Reeve experiences a darker side of himself — with anger, recklessness and even cruelty. In "Man of Steel," Henry Cavill breaks “the rule” of superheroes when he kills the evil General Zod, lamented Jeff Weiss in Real Clear Religion: “Thou shalt not kill, even though you can.”
In another review of the earlier movie in Christianity Today, Jackson Cuidon suggests that a more aggressive, macho image of Superman was “there mostly to satiate that part of the American psyche that wants their messiahs to punch things, too.”
Director James Gunn makes a conscious pivot with the newest Superman, who goes out of his way to protect even a squirrel’s life and who the director describes as “not indestructible,” as the audience sees him bleeding in the opening scene.
Gone are the darker, somber overtones and angst-ridden superheroes so many lamented in Snyder’s D.C. universe. This new Superman wears bright colors, smiles a lot and worries frequently about his dog — while his fellow superheroes are downright goofy.
This more positive, aspirational energy has been evident in the film’s marketing tagline, “Look up.”
Superman’s goodness is center stage in the new film.
“I question everything and everyone,” Lois Lane shares with Clark Kent after a discussion of favorite punk rock bands they each liked in younger years. “You think everyone you’ve ever met is beautiful.”
“Maybe that’s the real punk rock,” he responds.
“Transgression is overdone and stale,” reflects Christian author Brett McCracken about the new movie. “Normie is the new radical.”
To find this goodness in ourselves may also likewise inspire people to look toward superheroes. When asked what he hopes audiences will take away from his depiction of Superman, Gunn responded, “being able to place a little bit more importance on being a good human being.”
“We’re surrounded by a lot of meanness,” he continued. “Superman’s surrounded by a lot of meanness in the movie, but he stands against that grain. And that’s what makes him rebellious.”
“And in a way, I think that in today’s world, Superman’s the edgier, more rebellious character, because he’s the one who’s standing up for the values that most people are not.”
Echoes of the ‘true myth’
So how again could all of this arise out of a fable concocted by Jewish twentysomethings who weren’t all that observant in the first place?
No matter the theology or lack thereof, perhaps deeper human aspirations are at play — reflected in ancient stories of Greek heroes sacrificing their life to save their people, or modern recountings of Frodo’s singular task to destroy the ring, and Harry Potter’s exploits as the “chosen one.”
J.R.R. Tolkien once argued that all myths are filtered echoes of the “true myth” of Jesus Christ.
Recalling an Oxford stroll with Tolkien while discussing this subject when they were both in their 30s, C.S. Lewis later wrote what he came away hearing from the author of “Lord of the Rings”: “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
It was nine days after this conversation, on Sept. 28, 1931, that Lewis first expressed his newfound belief in the actual divinity of Jesus Christ.
Lewis himself would later teach that all myths contain strands or elements of truth and point to deeper realities, even if the specific events described didn’t literally happen.
Or perhaps even if the creators of the myth didn’t ever intend for their story to mean something deeper in the first place.