Did You Just Call the Christian God a Mary Sue

“While the four officers languished in the Sick Bay, Lt. Mary Sue ran the ship, and ran it so well she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vulcan Order of Gallantry and the Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood. However the disease finally got to her and she fell fatally ill. In the Sick Bay as she breathed her last, she was surrounded by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott, all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday of the Enterprise.”

Paula Smith, ‘A Trekkie’s Tale’, The Menagerie (1974)

 

A handy chart of Starfleet insignia for ignoramuses like myself who know next to nothing about Star Trek. Thanks to m1kclark at newgrounds.com.

So I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed the other day and stumbled across a screenshot of a post that went as follows (well, with a few adjustments for the sake of keeping things polite):¹

Greek myths are great because their gods are so human. They argue, they mess up at things, they make fun of each other, they tick each other off, it’s great, there’s so much human interaction and then Christianity comes in like that guy and is all like “oh my god is infallible and knows everything and immortal and everywhere at once and you can’t see it but its [sic] totally there and stronger than everything” shut up Christianity go take a writing class

Below this, another user had added a comment:

did you just call the Christian god a Mary Sue

I laughed. And then I thought, huh, what an interesting proposition. Might a bit of a compare-and-contrast exercise between the God I worship and the fictional character type known as Mary Sue help me reflect on his attributes in a fresh way?²

If you’ve not come across the term Mary Sue before, here’s a quick introduction. Our story begins in the 1970s, when the literary genre known as fanfiction was taking its first wobbly steps. A Star Trek fan called Paula Smith noticed that one common but lamentable pattern in fanfiction written about the series was the centring of stories around a prodigiously capable and extraordinarily attractive young female protagonist, who would quickly worm her way into the affections and usurp the roles of the established cast, save the day by exercising a vast range of skills that it defied all logic for her to have ever acquired, and then usually die in some splendidly heroic fashion and be deeply mourned from all quarters. Smith wrote a four-paragraph story parodying this tendency, ‘A Trekkie’s Tale’,³ and dubbed its main character Mary Sue, a name which subsequently came to be derogatorily used to refer to any original character who displayed similar sorts of attributes. There isn’t a definitive list of the attributes required to qualify as a Mary Sue,⁴ and the already blurry edges of the term are made even blurrier by the way that people sometimes toss it about merely as a generic insult for (usually female) protagonists they don’t like or think are poorly written, but the following constitute some of the characteristics most heavily associated with the type.

A Mary Sue is best at everything. She has phenomenal talent in just about any field one cares to name. She has no flaws; if she does, they’re endearing, or actually strengths in disguise. This, as you can tell, is the heart of the accusation outlined in the first post quoted above, and it’s not at all an inaccurate one when applied to God. The LORD is best at everything: he wields ultimate power over every single entity in existence; morally, he’s entirely inscrutable; he does everything perfectly; he has no flaws. This aspect of Mary-Sue-ism is indeed something he exhibits to the extreme.

Concomitant with that first aspect, though, comes another: a Mary Sue is best at everything compared to the preestablished cast. It’s in these terms that the accusation made in the above-mentioned post is framed, and here the accuracy falls apart. Granted, the author of the post is completely right to observe that the LORD in his supreme power and righteousness is on a totally different level to the highly anthropomorphic deities that populated the panthea of pagan societies; but it’s incorrect to treat said pagan deities as the preestablished cast whom the LORD, as Mary Sue, subsequently usurps. For starters, the author of the post talks as if the concept of this almighty, flawless, omnipresent, invisible God sprang into existence together with Christianity, which is patently not true whatever your religious persuasion: the character of the LORD had been described in literature for centuries before Christ trod the earth. (So blame the Jews for that particular bit of Mary-Sue-ism, why don’t you; people have tried to blame them for virtually everything else they dislike about the world, after all.) Moreover – and at this point religious persuasion does become relevant – it isn’t merely that the character of the LORD was invented earlier on than the author of the post gives him credit for, but that he isn’t an invented character at all. On the contrary, he invented everything else, and indeed that’s the reason behind the comprehensive omnipotence for which the author of the post has so little patience. The idea that the LORD usurps pagan gods couldn’t be further from the truth: they make pathetic attempts to usurp him. And pathetic attempts they are, because, as we’ve already established, the LORD is inexpressibly greater than any other power in existence. He made every other power in existence.

At this point, though, another significant aspect of the Mary Sue type becomes relevant: a Mary Sue is to be identified with the creator of the story in which she appears. An author who writes a Mary Sue is writing herself into the story – and I think it’s fair to say that she may be validly characterised as the God of her own fictional world. Nonetheless, she doesn’t write herself into the story as she actually is in real life: the character is an idealised version, more attractive, more accomplished, more adept, and more admired than her real-world counterpart. The author fashions a plotline around this improved fictional version of herself for the sake of her own personal wish-fulfilment. The Mary Sue character is remarkable and flawless because she represents what the author wishes she could be like; God is remarkable and flawless, on the other hand, because that’s just what he’s like. In the case of a Mary Sue, then, an imperfect author inserts an idealised version of herself into the world she created. In God’s case, he’s already a perfect author; he couldn’t idealise himself any further. He did insert himself into the world he created, though. The eternal Word, the one without whom there would be no story at all,⁵ gave up the privilege of experiencing the universe as its author, and became just another character living through the plotline day by day. He kept the flawlessness that comes with being God, but aside from that flawlessness, his experience was, it must be said, pretty different to that of your typical Mary Sue.

 

And this represents an idealised version of the start of the process of writing something.

A Mary Sue is beloved by the established cast, but Jesus was rejected by the world. What makes this difference particularly striking is that, with your average Mary Sue, even though she is best at everything – and best at everything compared to the established cast, moreover – there’s still always a bit of a question mark over whether she really deserves all the attention and adoration she gets. Why should every other character’s storyline get swept aside in favour of an overwhelming focus on hers? The only person worthy of that kind of extreme elevation is – well, God. And yet when God showed up as a human character in the grand story of history, the rest of the cast was unimpressed with him. The rest of the cast actually ended up having him killed. When your average Mary Sue has died her splendidly heroic death, everyone rallies round and mourns for her; when Jesus faced a death more heroic than any other ever could be, the subjection of himself to the wrathful judgement of the almighty and perfect Author of the universe, on behalf of other characters who hadn’t even properly recognised him for the authorial self-insertion he was, let alone given him the attention and adoration he deserved – when Jesus faced that, his closest friends abandoned and disowned him.

In that respect, then, Jesus couldn’t be much further from your average Mary Sue. But then again, take another look at the first two Mary Sue attributes I mentioned above: previously I was applying them to God more generally (probably principally the Father? I’m not much good at Trinitarian theology), but try applying them to Jesus in particular. A Mary Sue is best at everything, specifically when compared to the preestablished cast; and Jesus is best at everything, specifically when compared to the preestablished systems whereby humans might relate to God. The book of Hebrews is literally all about this jazz: it’s like a giant list of things Jesus is better than.⁶ He’s better than angels; he’s better than Moses; he’s better than the Levitical priests; he’s better than the tabernacle; he’s better than the sacrifices required by the Law; he’s better than anything that previous generations encountered. And why? Because he’s not just another character; he’s God. Of course he’s best at everything. That’s not the surprising thing. The surprising thing is that the almighty and perfect Author wrote himself into the story at all.

When a fanfiction writer inserts herself into the world she creates as a Mary Sue, this remarkable and flawless and unilaterally beloved character, she does it to elevate herself. When God inserted himself into the world he had created in the form of the Lord Jesus Christ, he was doing the opposite. He’s already remarkable and flawless and worthy of being unilaterally beloved; in stepping into the human story, the Word humbled himself to an unbelievable degree.⁷ God’s the ultimate universal Author, he could have told any story he liked with human history, and yet he chose to tell one whose fundamental plot point is his own Son’s willing sacrifice of himself so that we might have life. And so even the most flawless, capable, heroic Mary Sue who ever saved the day is, like everything else, nothing special at all compared to Jesus.

Footnotes

¹ Though I didn’t have the presence of mind to save or bookmark the post when I saw it, I did fortunately manage to track it down elsewhere, so here it is for your consultation: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/366339750935374696/.

² In case you hadn’t twigged, this kind of thing is basically the entire premise of my blog at its most typical: I wander around fictional media going ‘God is like this in such-and-such a way’ and ‘God is not like that in such-and-such a way’ with the aim of moving myself to worship – and if I can bring any of you lovely readers along with me, so much the better.

³ Full text available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20100830041159/http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/dark/1000/marysue.htm.

⁴ Although for a fuller discussion of how the term is used, check out this very helpful article on TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue.

⁵ Because everything that has been made was made through him: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+1&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+1&version=ESVUK.

⁷ I mean, I couldn’t not link to Philippains 2 here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=philippians+2&version=ESVUK.