When I was in third grade, my Sunday school teachers made an ill-fated attempt to “be relevant” to their audience by showing the finale of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi in class, drawing analogies between Luke and… Jesus? Paul? I guess we were supposed to become better Christians by redeeming our evil mouth-breathing fathers or something, but the whole class had stopped paying attention the instant a lightsaber ignited.
I remember being mildly amused that one would even attempt to sum up Luke-vs-Vader with a compact aphorism like “love your neighbor”. Little did I know, this humorous moment crystallizes an important truth about both texts: both Star Wars and the Bible resist easy moralization.
Of Smugglers and Rogues
As is my M.O. for this series, let’s start easy in a galaxy far, far away. After a first viewing of any of the Star Wars films, one’s first inclination might be that it’s a classic example of neo-Campbellian good-vs-evil, a dualistic fable couched in lasers and sound effects. Luke, Leia, Obi-Wan = good; Emperor, Vader, faceless stormtroopers = bad.
But the films quickly disabuse us of the illusion that this morality is black-and-white. Even in the first film, Han Solo is a morally gray smuggler with a penchant for shooting first, talking smack, and only rescuing princesses if rewards are involved. And it just gets deeper from there — in Empire, Luke gives in to anger in Dagobah’s dark-side cave, and later finds out the big baddie Vader is his father! In Return, our first glimpse of Luke The Jedi is him Force-choking the disturbingly realistic snot out of some Gamorrean guards. Luke then tries intimidating Jabba the gangster, and when that fails, the dude just stone-cold murders Jabba and his entire staff. And there’s also the obvious redemption of Vader, ultimate bad guy of the galaxy — clearly, good and evil were more complicated than we thought.
This trend of moral ambiguity continues into all nine films. In a deep-dive essay on prequel lore, I talked a bit about how Anakin Skywalker was essentially right to end the corrupt, power-hungry Jedi Order, but even if that’s too intense for you, Anakin is the very textbook definition of a morally conflicted protagonist. He fights for the “good guys”, but then he also murders a bunch of Sand People — “the women, and the children too”. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan Kenobi is presented by Revenge as a hero, but… instead of intervening with his best friend with the space equivalent of professional counseling, he dismembers Anakin and leaves him to burn alive.
The sequels are no different, despite their status as new kids on the block — Rey, female protagonist, taps into the dark side more than once throughout the three sequel films. Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is evil through and through, except he also rids the galaxy of Supreme Leader Snoke and later turns to the light side. Finn, renegade stormtrooper, is literally an embodiment of moral conflict, as he navigates what it means to be a Rebel. And Luke himself seems to doubt everything about an absolute Good when we see him at long last in The Last Jedi.
Things get even murkier after diving into extra-cinematic Star Wars sources. The Mandalorian stars a murderous bounty hunter who nonetheless is the closest thing to a loving father that Baby Yoda The Child will ever have. Dark Disciple by Christie Golden follows Jedi Quinlan Vos and assassin Asajj Ventress as they both skirt in, around, and between the light and dark sides of the Force. Ahsoka Tano from Star Wars: Rebels is a “grey” Force-user agnostic to both Jedi and Sith teachings.
Clearly, the Force is not a simplistic case of Good vs Evil. (Or, even if it is, the Star Wars narrators never deign to explicate what that absolute Good looks like. There’s no fourth-wall-breakage proving that Luke was the perfect Jedi, even when characters within Star Wars seem to think so. I’d argue that this ambiguity makes for a more compelling story, and the attempt to summate all of the Force’s truth would cheapen its emotional and narrative importance.) Rather, viewers must construct their own definition of the Light Side by piecing together all of these disparate sources.
Of Killers and Kings
Once again, as it is with Star Wars, so it is with the Judeo-Christian Bible. Every time we readers think we have learned something absolute about God or Goodness or Truth, a counterexample rears its ugly head in the pages of Scripture.
Take the prophet Moses, for example. He was probably a lot like Charlton Heston, legendary for freeing the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, delivering the Ten Commandments to the people, and being the only human to see the physical “glory of the Lord” (Exodus 33). Dude’s face literally shone with holiness. But in Number 20, when the Israelites were on their way to the promised land, Moses got a little overconfident and “rebuked a stone”, hitting it with his stick and causing it to gush drinking water. Despite this being a literal miracle, God tells Moses that he’s done wrong and as a result will not live to see the Promised Land. Turns out Moses is just like every human, a mix of good and evil at once.
The king Jehu ruled over Israel in the dynasty of David. He was anointed by the prophet Elisha and is credited in the book of Kings with ending the bloodline of the murderous queen Jezebel, a name so infamous it carries negative connotations to this day. Clearly, Jehu did something right in the eyes of the biblical author, because Jezebel was as bad as they came in the Hebrew Bible. But Hosea, a prophet writing several decades later, writes that “the Lord will punish the house of Jehu for the massacre of Jezebel’s family”! How can king Jehu be in service of God and guilty of a massacre in the same act?!
Then, there’s the famous King David, who is perhaps one of the most famous household names out of the Hebrew Bible. Killed Goliath, became King, evicted the crazy Saul, etc etc. But David wasn’t all good, either — in 2 Samuel 11, he has an affair (possibly involving rape) with the married Bathsheba, and when she gets pregnant as a result of their union, he has her husband killed to cover it up! It really puts a damper on the mental image of David lounging with sheep composing innocent worship-poetry. Even the Bible’s most vaunted heroes are a mix of good and evil, and cannot be characterized as simply as we might hope.
Conclusion
When we encounter morally grey characters in stories, it’s tempting to create some head-canon that absolves them of wrongdoing or erases their misdeeds. That ultimately makes for a worse story, both in the Bible and in Star Wars, because monolithic characters are less interesting characters.
Lucky for us, we have stories of shooting-first smugglers and flawed kings instead.