Debunking Mr. Reed: A Response to Heretic's Arguments

Have you seen the recent A24 horror movie Heretic? It’s about a pair of Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, who enter the home of a charming older man named Mr. Reed. They think the guy wants to talk to them about their beliefs, but they soon learn that he has something much more sinister in mind.

It’s a really interesting idea for a horror film, but it might leave you with a few questions. Mr. Reed poses some thought-provoking arguments against Christianity, and while Heretic never presents these arguments as definitive, the movie doesn’t definitively refute them either. We just get a few hints of what the Christian response might be, so it’s up to us, the viewers, to flesh these ideas out a bit more.

You might even have to do a bit of research to figure out what’s wrong with Mr. Reed’s case against the faith, and I’d like to help you out a bit. Unfortunately, we can’t go through Heretic with a fine-toothed comb in a single article, but let’s take a look at the man's main arguments against Christianity and see just where they go wrong.

Plagiarizing the Faith
When Heretic moves from Mr. Reed’s living room to his study, the guy uses board games and pop music to argue that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all just different versions of the same basic idea. He compares them to Monopoly–which was plagiarized from an earlier game called The Landlord’s Game–and various pop musicians who’ve been sued for ripping off other people’s songs.

Then, in a seemingly irrefutable coup de grâce, the man explains that the story of Jesus is also just another iteration of a story that was around long before the rise of Christianity. History, he says, knows numerous other gods and saviors who allegedly rose from the dead, were born on December 25, or had twelve followers, so the Gospels are essentially just a hodgepodge of these earlier mythologies.

Like I said, this argument can be challenging, but if you do a bit of digging, you’ll find that it’s nowhere near as airtight as Mr. Reed makes it out to be. For example, the idea that Christianity is just one of three major iterations of the same basic monotheistic belief isn’t really an argument at all. At best, it’s an irrelevant observation, and at worst, it's just an unproven assertion.

Of course Christianity shares similarities with Judaism! The whole point of our faith is that it’s the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people in the Old Testament. See, the Old Testament is essentially a story waiting to be resolved. It tells us that God created a good world, that humanity messed it up, and that God was going to use the people of Israel to fix it.

But a problem arose. The Israelites proved to be just as sinful as the rest of humanity, so God found himself in a pickle: he had to restore his wayward people before he could use them to repair our broken world. That’s where the Old Testament ends, and unsurprisingly, it's also where Jesus comes into the picture.

He came to restore Israel (that’s why, as he says in Matthew 15:24, he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”) and gather a faithful remnant of Israelites, and after he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, that remnant was finally able to fulfill its vocation and bring his salvation to the rest of the world.

So yes, Christianity shares several similarities with Judaism, but those parallels don’t prove anything. The religion of ancient Israel was supposed to give way to something different (even if nobody expected it to be quite this different), so our faith isn’t just a ripoff of Judaism. It’s the long-awaited fulfillment of Judaism.

Dying and Rising Gods
But what about the second part of Mr. Reed’s argument? When he says the story of Jesus was plagiarized from various pagan mythologies, that’s not just an assertion. It’s an actual argument, and it’s not unique to him. A lot of real-world atheists use it too, so I’m sure some of you have even heard it before.

Now, on the surface, this argument seems rock-solid, but like I said before, if you do a bit of digging, you’ll find that it’s little more than smoke and mirrors. As Sister Barnes explains in Heretic, Mr. Reed ignores the numerous differences between Jesus and these other saviors, and she even points one out. She says that one of these figures has, as she so elegantly puts it, “a freaking bird head,” whereas Jesus almost certainly had a normal human head.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you research this argument, you’ll find something shocking: almost all of the evidence for these parallels to the Gospels comes from after the rise of Christianity. So if anything, the line of influence was the other way around. As far as we can tell, it looks like the devotees of these gods borrowed elements of Jesus’ story and incorporated them into their own beliefs.

On top of that, if we look closely at the alleged similarities, we’ll see that they’re often not nearly as impressive as they’re made out to be. To take just one example, the Egyptian god Osiris is supposed to have died and risen again just like Jesus, but that’s not actually the case. Yes, he dies in his story, but he doesn’t return to anything resembling a real human life. Rather, he ends up “living” and reigning in the underworld, and if you ask me, that’s not a real resurrection. That’s just a different way of being dead.

I could go through a whole host of other supposed parallels that end up being similarly shallow, but you get the point. The evidence doesn’t support Mr. Reed’s theory in Heretic, so once again, his plagiarism argument shows itself to be a theological house of cards. If you just blow on it a tiny bit, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Controlling the Masses
Mr. Reed’s last major argument against Christianity is that all religions are simply about control, not truth, and in my opinion, this might be the least persuasive argument of all. Much like the guy’s first main point, this one is also just an unproven assertion, but it’s worse than that. It’s demonstrably false, and the narrative of Heretic bears that out.

Mr. Reed tells Sister Paxton that Mormonism dictates every choice she makes, so he always knew exactly what she was going to do. But then something unexpected happens. As the man is making his grand speech, the young missionary stabs him in the neck, proving him wrong. He didn’t see that coming, so it looks like religion isn’t quite as controlling as he thinks it is.

And anybody who’s even remotely religious will see a similar dynamic in their own life as well. I’ll use myself as an example. Yes, I’m Catholic, and yes, I believe everything the Church teaches, but the Church doesn’t control me. I’ve freely chosen to believe, and if (hypothetically speaking) I ever choose to leave the faith, I’m free to do that too. Nobody is putting a gun to my head and forcing me to stay Catholic.

What’s more, apart from my religious convictions, the Church doesn’t have much of a say in my day-to-day life. Nobody tells me what clothes to wear, what music to listen to, or what movies to watch, so to say that my religion controls me is pretty laughable.

The Power of Prayer
Last but not least, we have to talk about an argument that comes from a surprising source. At the end of Heretic, as Sister Paxton and Mr. Reed lie nearly dying on the basement floor, Sister Paxton reveals that she doesn’t actually believe in the power of prayer. She says the issue was once the subject of a scientific study, but the researchers found that prayer has no effect on people’s recovery from illness.

However, despite her unbelief, the woman prays anyway, and surprisingly, her prayer is answered. Sister Barnes, who we previously thought was dead, rises up and saves her friend from Mr. Reed’s last-ditch effort to kill her, and then she slumps to the floor and finally dies. It’s a bittersweet end to this harrowing adventure, and it provides a thrilling narrative response to Sister Paxton’s unexpected skepticism.

But Heretic is just a movie, not real life, so how can Catholics respond to her argument against the effectiveness of prayer? The easy answer is to point to prayers we’ve seen God answer, but I don’t think that’s enough. Unless we’ve been given genuine miracles, skeptics can always say that our prayers had nothing to do with it, so we need to deal with the argument more directly.

And to do that, we have to understand something about prayer. God is a person, not a vending machine, so prayer isn’t a mechanical process that can be studied scientifically. God doesn’t answer us simply because we say the right words or perform the right ritual, and he’s definitely not a lab rat that performs on command. He only gives us what we want when he knows it’ll lead us closer to him, so prayer doesn’t really lend itself to this kind of scientific inquiry.

Grappling Tools
If you’ve seen Heretic, you know I’ve only scratched the surface in this article. Like many great films, this one raises more questions than anybody can answer in a single sitting, so it would take an entire book (at least!) to thoroughly examine the fascinating debate between Mr. Reed and his Mormon guests. I simply hope I’ve given you the tools you need to begin grappling with these weighty questions yourself, and if I’ve done that, I’ll count this as a success.