Superman is Only Good Because of Christian Parents

Hello friends- a quick personal note: As you may be aware, I’ve signed a book deal with HarperCollins/Nelson Books this past year. The manuscript is in the editing phase, and we now have a title.

Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning.

I’ll have much more to share about this as we get closer to its 2026 release date, but for now, enjoy this week’s newsletter!

We live in the stories we tell ourselves.

- Grant Morrison, author of All-Star Superman.

The new Superman movie opened this past weekend to rave reviews and huge box office success. In a culture exhausted by cynicism and a decades-long obsession with deconstruction, there is a deep longing for a recovery of earnestness, sincerity, and virtue in our new cultural moment (a subject I cover in much more detail in my forthcoming book).

There’s a moment in James Gunn’s Superman where the Man of Steel goes to great lengths to save a squirrel. Not a bus full of orphans. Not the President. Just one insignificant squirrel. A tiny, chittering, nothing-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things squirrel, about to be crushed beneath the foot of a kaiju-sized monster. And Superman—godlike, invincible, and pressed for time—stoops down and rescues it.

It’s a small act, but it’s also a vital moral and theological window into the character of a hero who’s been central to American culture for over 80 years. It’s a character that only makes sense in a moral universe shaped by the Christian story.

In Gunn’s big screen version of Superman, we discover that Superman’s Kryptonian parents didn’t send him to Earth out of love or desperation, but with a mission to rule the planet. In this version of the myth, Clark Kent is a sleeper agent, designed to become a tyrant-king. But the twist is that he never heard the full message from his Kryptonian parents when he was young, and instead of a tyrant, he becomes a righteous super-servant of all.

Why?

It’s because Superman’s adoptive parents are Christians.

The movie doesn’t directly show their religious affiliation, but the long history of comic book lore positions the Kents as old-fashioned Methodists living in Smallville, Kansas ( the denominational detail is specifically named in Action Comics #850). Clark Kent’s parents pray for him regularly, and they even took him to church as a boy.

Christian Morality Isn’t Automatic

Throughout the long history of Superman comics, DC has often presented interesting hypothetical alternatives to the traditional Superman story of an alien from Krypton who landed in Kansas to good God-fearing farmers. The goal of these stories is to get readers to imagine what would’ve happened if his spaceship had landed somewhere else.

What if he had been raised in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany? In each of these “elseworlds” stories, the outcome is the same. Superman becomes something entirely different in this context, like the Nazi “Overman” (seen below). His morals and character reflect the ethos of his cultural environment.

These “what if” stories aren’t just creative thought experiments. They’re narrative stress tests that point to a deeper truth: Superman’s morality is not inevitable. It’s distinctly Christian.

Our identities are not merely collections of traits or personality quirks, but the story we internalize. Humans are storied creatures, and the shape of those stories—how we define “the good,” what we believe about sacrifice, power, love—comes from the guiding stories of the home, communities, and cultures we inhabit.

Psychologist Dan McAdams calls this our “narrative identity,” and it’s not something we invent in a vacuum. It’s inherited, absorbed, and mimicked.

If you grow up in the rural Midwest, in a town with one grocery store and three churches, your moral instincts will be shaped by the direct Christian input of your parents and the people of that town who sit in the pews of those three country churchs and latent Christian assumptions that linger in the culture of America’s heartland–even though their pews are emptier than what they used to be.

It was Ma and Pa Kent passing on Sunday school lessons about loving your neighbor, turning the other cheek, and laying down your life for the least of these that become etched into Clark Kent’s narrative identity. It was seeing how his parents were Christ-like, in whatever limited measure that they embodied the virtues of Jesus, that became the template for Superman’s heroism in his adult years.

Historian Tom Holland makes a similar point in Dominion: the values we treat as “universal”—human dignity, care for the weak, sacrificial love—are not actually universal. They’re Christian. They didn’t emerge from Rome or Greece or Babylon. They came from those who preserved and passed on “The Way.”

Drop baby Superman in ancient Sparta, and he’s not stopping to save a squirrel or use restraint when confronting his enemy, Lex Luthor, who never stops trying to kill him.
In Rome, his power would’ve made him an emperor. In Viking mythology, he’d have slaughtered his enemies, impregnated a sizeable harem of women, and died gloriously in battle.

But in Kansas, he learns something radically different: that the meek inherit the world. The greatest of all should be the servant of all. He learns what Christian theological language would call “kenosis.”

Superman Reminds us to Look Up.

In Christian thought—based in Philippians 2:5-8—kenosis refers to Christ “emptying himself” by taking on humanity, humbling himself as God in the flesh, and choosing sacrificial love. He does this not because he’s weak, but because he’s strong enough to carry our burdens.

James Gunn’s Superman forces us to confront our secular assumption that Superman’s restraint, sacrificial love, and care for the least are just normal. But they aren’t. It’s the unique vision of what goodness looks like, shaped by the Christian story.

These Kryptonian parents sent Superman to be a Caesar, but Ma and Pa Kent trained Clark Kent to be Christ-like. Superman doesn’t just remind us what goodness looks like. He reminds us where it came from.

This modern mythological character resonates with us because–as C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and many other Christian voices have argued– every glimpse of the true, good, and beautiful we see in all the great myths bears witness to the true myth. Superman is one such icon, whose virtue, willingness to use power to serve, and compassion for even the smallest of creatures bear witness to the source of all that is true, good, and beautiful.

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