Heretic: A post-secular masterpiece

Review by Nathan McLaughlin

I have long been an advocate for greater and better representation of Mormons in media, and I have developed quite a taste for horror as a genre that compellingly engages with some of the most central human questions. So when I saw the teaser for a horror movie whose protagonists were Sister missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dealing with the complexities of human questions and religious identities, I was incredibly excited!

Not only that, but the representation looked incredible! “This is every Gen Z Sister missionary companionship,” I would quip. Others would agree. April Young-Bennett, a prolific Latter-day Saint writer, blogger, and feminist wrote for Exponent II: “I didn’t underestimate Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes. I knew them. They reminded me of myself when I was a young missionary, and they reminded me of other missionaries I worked with. I related to them so much, that by the time the movie reached its climaxed, I was shaking. No one wants to see their friends get trapped by a psychopath.”

But not everyone has been so positive, the first question someone asked me when I explained there was “a horror movie about Sister missionaries coming out,” the first thing they said in response was a question: “Is it ‘Anti’[-Mormon]?” I must confess, I was shocked by this question. It felt like a category error. I replied, “It’s a movie about the human experience. It doesn’t have to be ‘anti-’ or ‘pro-’ Mormon, Latter-day Saints are just its protagonists. It can be a whole spectrum of things!” But they insisted, “Okay, but, I don’t know, I feel like it’s going to be positive or negative, and I feel like it will likely be negative.”

This conversation was so odd to me at the time, but this exact thing played out multiple times over the course of months every time I would bring it up with Latter-day Saints, and even with some ex-Mormons. I want to investigate Mormons, our place in the world, our perceptions of ourselves, and our gripes regarding media representation, and I want to do that with the movie Heretic. I believe Heretic is incredible. It’s a special and careful interrogation of religion in the 21st century and our narratives about it.

On August 16, 2024, in the weeks leading up to the release of Heretic, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the largest Mormon denomination—released a statement entitled “When Entertainment Media Distorts Faith.” This statement felt anachronistic to me. The notion that a faith can simply demand different representation in a democratized media landscape where TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram dominate discourse about religion is out of time.

Still more bizarre, the statement, grouping in Heretic with Hulu’s the Secret Lives of Mormon Housewives, claims Heretic “do[es] not fairly and fully reflect the lives of our Church members or the sacred beliefs that they hold dear” months before the movie even came out. How the Church’s internal organs would be aware of how Heretic reflects the lives and faith of its protagonists months before it came out is unclear.

The statement also complains about its “mischaracteriz[ation of] the safety and conduct of [the LDS Church’s] volunteer missionaries,” this despite the fact that the Church’s newspaper, the Deseret News, glowingly praised the directors of the Saratov Approach a full year before the movie came out—the movie deals with a true rather than fictional portrayal of somebody kidnapping Latter-day Saint missionaries. There was no scolding for the Saratov Approach in its questioning of the safety of Latter-day Saint missionaries.

More than this, the review of the Saratov Approach from Deseret News also praises the movie for showing that the missionaries “believed that their faith would get them through,” but this is also a theme in Heretic, so why was one received well by Mormons and the other not? To put it bluntly: one is written by Latter-day Saints for Latter-day Saints and the other is written by non-Mormons for a broad audience not exclusive to Mormons.

Mormons have a bad history with media representation. It’s understandable, as a perpetually misunderstood group, why we would be concerned about representation in a media landscape that constantly sensationalizes, dehumanizes, monoliticizes us. But I’m happy to say, that’s not what Heretic is. In fact, I would suggest Heretic is fully aware of Mormons aversion to representation and is intentionally engaging with that in a proactive and beautiful way!

In 1922, H. B. Parkinson released “Trapped by the Mormons.” Trapped by the Mormons is a horror movie that, like Heretic, featured Mormon missionaries, but in Parkinson’s story the Mormons are the antagonists. Monsterized as womanizing near-inhuman kidnappers by utilizing the same undertones as anti-Mormon racism, the movie is intensely critical of Mormons and in particular of their historical practice of polygamy.  In 2013, Anthony DiBlasi, attempted unsuccessfully to replicate the same sensationalism in his Mormon thriller, Missionary, but without the racial undertones as Mormons are currently conceptualized as intensely White Patriotic Americans, as well as a notable lack of polygamy in its narrative.

Nonetheless, Mormon Horror has always been characterized by male missionaries kidnapping unsuspecting non-Mormon women. Heretic completely flips this trope on its head. Instead of male missionaries kidnapping unsuspecting non-Mormon women, Heretic centers women missionaries being kidnapped by an anti-Mormon man.

Not only that, but the movie presents anti-polygamy sensationalism out of concern for women to be historically hypocritical from men who themselves have investment in patriarchal systems and engage in heavy-handed, abusive, control tactics to “save them” from patriarchal religion—indeed, Heretic’s antagonist, the anti-religion Mr. Reed, arguably shows more disregard and even contempt for the agency and bodily autonomy of women than even the historic practice of mainline LDS polygamy.

I would argue this movie operates in some ways as a grand parable of religion’s challenging encounter with 20th-century modernist secularism and its own triumph over it. Concern about polygamy as expressed by Mr. Reed is a stand-in for anti-religious control masquerading as enlightened “care” for the oppressed. Mr. Reed is a stand-in for “enlightened” anti-polygamy actors of the 19th & 20th-centuries who themselves are stand-ins for anti-religion secularists engaging in the same imperialism and control they critique religion as engaging in.

This movie is a post-secular masterpiece. It is earnestly invested in interrogating secularism as an abusive, imperialistic, and, yes, patriarchal(!) movement designed by White men in an earnest effort to feel self-important as liberators of poor marginalized people in religious institutions and cultures they deem oppressive. In reality, they just earnestly seek to control others and force them to accept their proselyted message of enlightenment. This isn’t just hidden in the subtext of the history of Mormon media representation (which the film is aware of and in dialogue with), it’s explicit in the text!

Perhaps to the surprise of many, this movie is intensely positive about religion and rigorously skeptical of secularism— hyper-critical of New Atheism and quite optimistic about the future of post-secular religion. The plot goes to great lengths to articulate this thesis.

 

SPOILERS AHEAD! Please don’t read if you don’t want the movie to be spoiled!

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When the Sisters first encounter Mr. Reed, he asks them about polygamy. Interestingly, the film takes the position that Mr. Reed’s proselyting tactic is more violent than the Sisters. He offers secret knowledge as something scary and destabilizing, but tantalizing and socially-necessary to inquire about. This is a control tactic that offers only dubious consent to Sisters Paxton and Barnes who have to ask to hear what he has to say unaware and uncomfortable about what this could be.

In contrast, when Sisters Barnes and Paxton proselyte earlier in the film, they directly state to people what they’d like to talk about and position it as a non-judgemental offer—giving consent to those they interact with. In contrast, the Sisters only interacted with Mr. Reed because he requested to meet with them under the pretext of interest in the LDS Church. He lied about his intentions. This interaction which was supposed to be mutual and consensual, was actually violent and oppressive.

The script’s insistence that Latter-day Saints proselytization in American neighborhoods is far less violent than the control tactics of the anti-religion is fascinating and is only the first of several subversions in American religious discourse the plot engages in.

Contrary to the stereotypical presentation of the intelligent Atheist enlightening the brainwashed religious masses, Mr. Reed is categorically wrong about many of his claims about religion. Citing fabricated similarities of many religions made up by Peter Joseph in his self-produced “documentary,” 𝘡𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘨𝘦𝘪𝘴𝘵, Mr. Reed, like the stereotype of the Reddit Atheist, betrays his ignorance even as he boasts learnedness.

In another example, Mr. Reed asserts that religion is capitalistic because it innovates, remixed, and is altered by different individuals and communities because of their needs. He does this after bringing up the Landlord’s Game and Monopoly’s taking of it. The Landlord’s Game was an explicitly anti-capitalist board game that never sought to establish sovereignty over ideas and instead allowed others to innovate on it freely until it was captured and patented by the capitalistic Monopoly. The Landlord’s Game, like religion, explicitly rejected the notion that innovation and remixes are “stealing,” in direct contradiction to capitalism as embodied in Monopoly. Embarrassingly, Mr. Reed is undermining his claim with this metaphor.

Mr. Reed is presented as a know-it-all skeptic who thinks of himself as the champion of reason, liberation, and innovation, but he, much like the secularists of the 20th century, is none of these things. The Sisters prove more resourceful, introspective, and intelligent than he is. They act with far more precision in their improvisation than Mr. Reed does after years of planning.

In a cruel hypocrisy from Mr. Reed, he has not come up with the structure of his prison by himself and has rather innovated on the structure of a traditional Mormon Endowment. Only clued-in audience members would be aware of this, but his prison operates as a sort of anti-endowment. Complete with pews facing a table that operates like an altar, the first room is the exposition-heavy Instruction Room. The rest of the rooms proceed deeper and deeper in the earth towards Hell, instead of higher into the Heavens as occurs in a traditional Mormon temple.

Just as in the traditional Mormon Temple layout, the Sisters are given a dubious offer to opt-out, but are given no information of what they are consenting to when they start their journey. Luckily, the LDS Church has recently made attempts to fix this to a degree—the covenants made are read out before the experience—but Mr. Reed, in his cruelty, has made no such alteration.

Mr. Reed attempts to give an Endowment of Knowledge in the form of education on “control,” which he calls “the one true religion.” But in a subversive reversal of Mr. Reed’s patriarchal religion, Sister Paxton receives her own Endowment of Power and is able to stop him from murdering her. Later, Sister Barnes is resurrected with her own Endowment of Power for a brief moment to act in self-sacrifice to finish Mr. Reed off and save Sister Paxton.

Sister Paxton, not Mr. Reed, is the titular character—the heretic. She is a heretic to his religion of control. She rejects unrighteous dominion in favor of persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and love unfeigned. In a stirring act of defiance to his religion of control, she offers a beautiful prayer for Mr. Reed after explicitly rejecting prayer as a method of control (specifically rejecting it as a method of controlling outcomes). She does this as Mr. Reed claws his way to her in an effort to murder her. Sister Paxton yields control to Mr. Reed, God, and, against her knowledge, Sister Barnes. She does this, knowing “faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death” with “charity towards all,” even her enemies (D&C 121:39-45).

The film is insistent that in our analysis of religious institutions and their mechanisms of control, we often forget that religion can be a way for individuals to gain control over their own stories—not by controlling the world around them, but by controlling their own interpretation of it. It never suggests patriarchy, control, or queerphobia don’t perpetrate religious spaces—Sisters Paxton and Barnes explicitly don’t dispute that—instead, it insists like Lewis Gordon that “structures set the conditions for us, but they do not determine what we 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 do and the meaning of our various projects in life” (“The Human Condition in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence”, italics original).

Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes never yield control in the most intimate ways—they never let Mr. Reed define what they believe reality and the sacred to be. They never allow him to steal what is most precious to them. They similarly insist that faith is a spectrum in conflict with both their own traditional received narrative (embodied in a quote shared by Mr. Reed from Latter-day Saint Church leader Gordon Hinckley) and the narrative Mr. Reed offers.

The film suggests religious believers in the 21st century are presented with the harrowing task of walking a tightrope of faith that rejects the binaries offered by 20th-century modernism and many religious institutions’ fundamentalistic retrenchment in response to modernism. In other words, the believer in the 21st century must have the ingenuity, stamina, and intelligence to reclaim their own narratives despite what the voices of control within and without their religious spaces insist. They must claim their own revelation, agency, and understanding for themselves.

Sister Paxton is not saved by an Elder in her church, she is not saved from ignorance by Mr. Reed. Neither imperialistic secular modernism nor traditional patriarchal religion saves her, instead she and Sister Barnes must carve out their own salvation by relying on each other, interrogating what they truly believe, and choosing to hold those beliefs dear despite the influences of others.

Sister Barnes’ resistant method in response to 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘰𝘯 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 and the prejudice around temple garments is to reject what others think of her. She also rejects what Mr. Reed thinks of her faith in a God despite the death of her father. Sister Paxton interprets the world around her in radical faith-affirming ways despite what others within and without her religious community think. These Sisters are an embodiment of Millennial and Gen Z religious believers living in the world of the 21st century.

They reject stark binaries in favor of spectrums of experience and rigid static belief in favor of colorful and creative ideas. They reject assertions that critical views on religion imply its falsehood and insist on creative and radically knowledgeableknowledgable, active faith. They believe first and foremost that religion makes them better and more kind people. They doubt and hold loosely the particulars of various elements of their religious tradition, and yet they believe all the same.

Mr. Reed’s project relies on an outdated separation between critical approaches to religion and religious faith. The 21st-century believer will not be so gullible as to allow the violence of secular modernism or rigid fundamentalism to deter them from radical, real, and flexible faith. Heretic is not an anti-religion film. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is the most pro-religion movie you are likely to see this year, not that it necessarily needed to be.

Mr. Reed, as a stand-in for secularism, has an overly simplistic assessment of religion, a violent desire to control the very groups he claims to want to liberate, and his own dogmatic assertions about the way the world is. This movie is post-secular to its core. There will never again be religion as it was before secularism—Sister Paxton will never be the same after she encountered Mr. Reed. That said, Heretic suggests religion after secularism is a powerful, radical, even heretical thing in the face of dogmatic and cynical secularism—and I think that’s beautiful.

More than that, on a personal note, as a socialist, Gen Z, gay Mormon, my faith has always been something people wish to take or mold in their own image. Mormons, Christians, and Atheists alike claim they have some special insight into my condition that will liberate me from my misguided allegiance to a faith they see as inconsistent, unintelligent, or harmful, but, like Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, I press on. I refuse the cool “intellectual” rebuke of secularism and the rigid binaries in my own faith community, I insist on my own radical agency over my own beliefs.

Not only do I feel Heretic represented Mormons in general well, but I think it perfectly captured the experience of 21st-century believers of all religions. Beyond even that, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes were not only Mormon. Their Mormonism was not the only feature that defined them as it does so many Mormon characters in various forms of media. Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton were fully formed, introspective, powerful, and creative people in their own right. I felt a kinship to them and a deep understanding of who they were. The way they moved in the world was strikingly similar to the way I move through the world, and yet they still felt like unique and real people.

With all that said, I would like to leave my fellow Latter-day Saints with one more thought as well as a warning. Hollywood and Broadway have misunderstood Mormons and Latter-day Saints to extraordinary degrees in the past, but Scott Beck and Bryan Woods saw me—they saw us. More than that, they understood us. I recommend anyone with the stomach to watch Heretic, go and see it. It’s incredible, moving, and real. I hope we can stop instinctually complaining, and remain open-minded. Representation for various religious groups, including Mormons, has never been perfect. But, and this is my warning: if we keep our guard up as much as we are—if we refuse to let others attempt to understand and represent us—I’m not sure when we will be blessed with another Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton.

And that would be intensely devastating.

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Nathan McLaughlin is a Latter-day Saint organizer, activist, and undergraduate student at the University of Utah studying religion and philosophy. His interests include postsecular religious theory, liberation theology, 20th-century philosophy, Marxism, Mormonism, critical approaches to Sacred Texts, and issues of gender, race, and class. He enjoys film, roller-skating, and participating in inter-religious dialogue and community events.