Religion and Les Misérables

I recently saw the Theatre Tulsa performance of the musical Les Misérables, and was deeply moved by it for a number of reasons. (I was not the only person to look for the director afterwards and say that I’d seen it on Broadway but found this performance more meaningful.) The novel and musical are about an escaped convict, Jean Valjean, who rose above hatred and tried to do good in the world.

Of course one of the main themes was that opposition to the overwhelming forces of oppression is nearly always doomed to failure. Victor Hugo’s novel, and the musical, are based on the 1832 “June Revolution” in France, a hopeless revolt against the re-establishment of the monarchy that had been overthrown during the earlier French Revolution. Those who are miserable because of the oppression by the rich will remain so. Even the American Revolution did not change this; in place of English kings we now have American corporations virtually enslaving us.

But the novel and musical also illuminate several aspects of religion which can, like any biological or cultural adaptation, be either good or evil.

First, consider the Javert kind of religion. This was the police officer who dedicated himself utterly to wreaking imprisonment and death upon anyone who had violated even the smallest law. He never stopped looking for Jean Valjean, to punish him first for stealing bread then for violating parole. This is a kind of doctrinal religion—here is the law, in violation of which you die—that leads to oppression. But even Javert had to struggle with a moral dilemma: confronted with the mercy that Jean Valjean showed to him, he could not decide what to do, and committed suicide.

Second, consider the Valjean type of religion. At first he simply did not know what to believe about the Catholic priest who showed totally undeserved mercy to him. What he ended up doing was, with a religious but not doctrinal faith, using what opportunities he had to try to make the world a better place, first by raising Cosette and then by joining with the June revolutionaries. As the musical said, if you’ve loved someone you have seen the face of God.

There are yet other kinds of religion from which to choose. One is the conviction that, if you assent to the correct doctrines, you are on God’s side and you can do whatever you want to other people, with God’s blessing. That is, you are saved even if you do horrible things to other people. Another is the flip-side of this belief, that people who do not assent to your doctrines are damned, even if they have done nothing wrong. Both of these kinds of religion are beyond the scope of Hugo’s novel. But France was no stranger to them. They were the foundation of all of the persecutions against Protestants and Jews in the middle ages, most notably the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.

We cannot be ignorant of the fact that the ground is fertile for these two kinds of religion to continue growing. They are only too well known in the Muslim world—to many Muslim extremists, your religion makes you right and even the slightest deviation from it makes you worthy of death. This is also uncomfortably close to the view of many American conservative Christians—as I have written before, this has been an important part of my experience, and I share this experience with many hundreds of thousands of other Americans. These conservatives have guns and I do not see how, under the right circumstances, they could keep themselves from using them, since they believe that God has commanded them to have their guns ready.

I would not expect the American conservative Christians I have known to have Javert’s kind of moral dilemma before turning on me, under the right circumstances.

I renew my devotion to oppose all hateful versions of religion, with the even slight hope that a (probably doctrine-less) religion of love can replace them.