Stranger Things: Good, Evil, & a Higher Power
Since the release of its first season in 2016, the Netflix show Stranger Things has dominated and attracted audiences of all ages, including teenagers. Vol. 2 of Season 4 just dropped a couple weeks ago, so I think it’s a perfect time to write about the values that come from this series, specifically the religious ones.
Stranger Things is primarily a story of good and evil. Throughout the series, the protagonists are fighting against a supernatural evil lurking in the “Upside Down”, an alternate dimension.
Stranger Things isn’t the only story with good protagonists fighting evil villains. This is the premise of nearly every story, fairytale, and myth.
One of the most famous myths, if not the most, is the Bible and the story of Christ. Those that don’t believe in the teachings of the Bible would consider the bible to be just that: a myth. Those that do believe in the teachings of the Bible would argue that the Bible is the one true myth.
C.S. Lewis wrote about this:
“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things'.”
C.S. Lewis is claiming that all myths are just God expressing himself through human creativity.
That would then mean that Stranger Things and its good and evil mirror the good and evil in the Bible. Even though Stranger Things wasn’t created as a metaphor for Christianity, I believe there is value in interpreting it that way.
Stranger Things & Christianity
Stranger Things explores an evil lurking in the world that can’t be seen, but can be felt. The “Upside Down” and the various monsters in Stranger Things would often haunt and reveal themselves to certain characters and eventually kill them, like we saw with Vecna in Season 4.
As scary as it sounds, this is similar to the way evil is taught in the Bible. The whole idea of Christianity is that God is good and perfect, but evil was brought into the world because of our sin. The Bible also talks about the Devil and Hell, which I connect to the monsters in Stranger Things and the “Upside Down”.
The following Bible verse about evil stuck out to me because I think it clearly parallels with the “spiritual forces of evil” in Stranger Things:
"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."
The Bible clearly teaches that there are good and evil forces battling each other, just like Stranger Things.
Good & Evil as Arguments For a Higher Power
Good and evil can be used as arguments for the existence of a power beyond us. It’s impossible to watch Stranger Things without believing that in that fictional world, there are good and evil powers lurking. In Stranger Things, there is obviously some sort of higher, supernatural power.
Even if the idea of good and evil powers in the Bible sounds just as unbelievable as Vecna and the “Upside Down”, I encourage you to look for the good and evil playing out in the real world everyday.
It’s difficult to look at all the good, love, and joy in our world as well as the evil, sickness, and hatred without believing that there is something beyond all of it. There has to be something defining what’s good and what’s evil and something controlling these powers.
The problem of evil is a common argument against the existence of a higher power. It basically states that a good god wouldn’t allow evil to exist. But just like how good and evil in Stranger Things prove a supernatural power, the good and evil in our world can argue for the existence of a higher power.
“How Evil Proves God’s Existence” by Patt Flynn explains this concept really well (give it a read!). Here is an excerpt from this article:
“The problem of evil points toward the existence of God—the God hypothesis, as it were—because if atheism were true, I would not expect there to be any evil at all, just as I would not expect steeping tea in an abandoned cabin, precisely because I would not expect there to be a contingent universe (frankly, I would expect nothing), a moral standard, moral obligations upon conscious rational agents, and so on. But because there is evil and because theism better predicts or explains those things needed to make sense of evil, then evil provides great evidence for the existence of God.”
What this is saying is that if there was no god, there wouldn’t be any moral standards or evil because there is nothing to define them. So, evil isn’t a reason that a higher power can’t exist. In fact, it provides a very good argument as to why a higher power does exist.
Regardless of all this, I believe the message of good and evil in myths, the Bible, and Stranger Things is so important for teenagers today. Many of us feel like the world is full of so much evil, and that’s because it is. Our world is filled with sickness and injustice and hatred and sadness, and it’s easy to feel hopeless because of it. But, the structure of most myths show us that although evil is very real, good will win in the end.
This is the message of Christianity: our world is full of sin and evil, but one day, Christ will return and defeat the evil power.
Although the final season of Stranger Things is still to come, I’d bet Stranger Things will end just the same, with the good overcoming the evil.
Written by Peyton Price - Entertainment Values
