Magneto was the Hero - Part 1

X-Men and the Cost of Discipleship

Suspendable edit of a 1995 Magneto trading card

When I was a kid I used to look forward to waking up on Saturday to watch cartoons. The Amazing Spiderman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Iron Man were some of my favorites. But, the pinnacle was undoubtedly X-Men; at least for me. Far too often they played reruns, but on occasion the plot would advance with a new episode, or one I hadn’t yet seen.

Now, in my advanced years, I’ve been trying to get my kids to watch them. All seasons are available to stream. But, they’re all girls and have shown little to no interest, even when I point out such heroes as Jean Grey, Jubilee, Rogue and Storm who are all girls too! Oh well. Maybe someday they’ll trust the wisdom of their father. 😂

By the time I was a teenager they started making live action movies of the X-Men beginning with X-Men in 2000. They’ve essentially been pumping out an X-Men movie, or at least an X-Men realm of the Marvel world movie every three years or so since, with the latest in 2024 being Deadpool & Wolverine. They haven’t done as well as The Avengers realm of Marvel’s universe, but have done well enough to keep pumping ‘em out.

I started watching the X-Men movies in chronological order a few weeks ago as something brainless to do here and there after the girls were in bed to break away from other matters that have eaten up my days in recent weeks. I found this list of the movies in chronological order and started chipping away. I hadn’t seen many of them before, and the ones I had seen were anywhere from 10-24 years ago.

I didn’t think they’d prompt a Substack post, but here we are; and I still have a bunch of them left. Before the seed was planted to make a post though, I started tinkering with prompts on X’s Grok artificial intelligence tool. I told it to make an image, based on my profile picture of a Marvel styled X-Men type mutant; or something to that effect. I generated a few renditions and chose this one as my new profile picture:

In reality, I was just trying to reset X’s algorithm since I had noticed a massive decrease in reach on that platform. I had previously heard that changing your profile picture can lead to a reprieve from suppression. It didn’t work. So much for Elon’s “free speech” platform. I must tweet too many bible verses for the tech heathens to allow much of a reach. 😂

If you made it this far, you might be wondering, who (or what) the X-Men even are. The X-Men are mutants, humans born with genetic mutations (the X-gene) that grant them superhuman abilities. They are often seen as a metaphor for social issues, such as prejudice and discrimination. Two key figures, Professor X (Charles Xavier) and Magneto (Erik Lehnsherr), represent opposing views on mutant-human relations.

Professor X essentially wants to live in harmony with humans, whereas Magneto asserts that mutants are the dominant species and should utilize that dominance to prevent oppression. Magneto’s mutant power is magnetism/metal manipulation. Professor X’s is telepathy, mind control, and psychic abilities. Both are some of the strongest mutants out there. That is, their specific powers and their ability to control them helps make them some of the most powerful.

My whole life I’ve thought of Magneto as “the bad guy;” and, he typically has been portrayed that way. As I continued watching the X-Men movies though, something struck me. Magneto, the grand supervillain of my youth, no longer appeared to be a villain at all. At least, not like I remembered. The opening to the cartoon even shows Magneto leading his cohort of “bad” mutants against the X-Men, the “good” mutants, and the two opposing factions on a collision course for one another.

The movie script writers still cast him as the villain, for the most part. But there seems to be a new layer, or a contrast that isn’t quite as stark as I remember from my childhood. Perhaps it is just standard character development that happens over the course of numerous movies. Not all the “good” characters are fully good, whereas not all the “bad” characters are all bad. Nonetheless, Magneto still seems to have entirely flipped the script. I don’t view him as the bad guy at all anymore. Even when he does things that might seem extreme, they have been justified.

Before I found that chronological list I mentioned above, I had watched maybe 2 or 3 of the movies that are Wolverine centric. He’s perhaps the most popular of the X-Men and one of the few who has movies that are focused on him. But, by the time I got to the end of X-Men: First Class, the first movie listed in that list, I had come to the realization that Magneto was actually the hero. It specifically dawned on me with this scene:

Charles: “There are thousands of men on those ships. Good, honest, innocent men! They are just following orders.”

Magneto: “I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again.”

When I saw this scene and heard Magneto say that I thought, “wait…Magneto has been the good guy the whole time!?” This might not seem like that big of a deal to those who don’t know much about the X-Men. Magneto has been vilified my whole life. The only people defending Magneto and his ilk were the fellow Marvel fan friend who was trying to get a rise out of you. Everyone knew that Magneto was the bad guy, and that he was only making it harder for the good guys to show the humans that they all should and could cohabitate.

Sure, there were a few episodes of the cartoon I watched growing up where Magneto teamed up with the X-Men for a common goal. Heck, even in the classic Sega Genesis game, X-Men 2: Clone Wars (a favorite growing up), you can play as Magneto for about half of the game once he realizes he has the same goals as the X-Men; at least for the purposes of conquering the main foe in the game.

But. Magneto. Was. The. Bad. Guy. Yes, he and Charles had a checkered past. But Charles helped mutants AND humans. Magneto just used mutants and wanted to destroy humans. Right? Wrong. Even a historical look at Magneto through the comics will reveal that he hasn’t been the prototypical bad guy. He’s been the guy that does what he deems right, based on his lived experience. Interestingly enough, he has rarely been wrong.

X-Men badge logo/Suspendables rendition (cause S-Men just doesn’t hit as hard 😂)

I’ll do my best to focus on the movie versions of Magneto from here on out since that is most likely the avenue that you may encounter him, if you ever encounter him again at all. Magneto’s statement about having been at the mercy of men who just follow orders is rooted in his early beginnings. He and his parents were captives at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Magneto was separated from his parents at one point and this is when his powers were first revealed as the traumatic event “unlocked” his previously unknown abilities.

This past Monday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. With my recent X-Men movie viewings, Nazi Germany has been prevalent enough as it relates to Magneto’s storyline. Whenever I dabble into WWII era history, even if it is included in a fictitious story like the X-Men, I often end up thinking about the fbi’s field trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. One other common thought is that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Shortly before I got suspended I finished the audiobook Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas.

This seminal work has had profound impact on me. Little did I know at the time, just how powerful the impact would have been in relative short order. Bonhoeffer was one of the first German pastors to speak out against the Nazi party, which he began doing in April 1933, just a few months after Hitler became chancellor. In early April, the Nazis instituted the “Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums;” that is, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.

This “law” excluded Jews and other political opponents of the Nazis from all civil service positions. They were barred from working in government. An additional law, which came later that year, forbade the vast majority of “non-aryan” peoples from practicing law. Still in 1933, which was very early on in the Nazi regime, the so called “leaders” of the German Evangelical Church in Berlin demanded that he withdraw from ecumenical activities; Bonhoeffer refused.

Many self-proclaimed Christians and church leaders of the time, especially in Germany, claimed that Bonhoeffer was divisive. They said he was disrupting unity of the church. They held him out as an extremist. They claimed that as long as they focused on the gospel and love, that they were fulfilling their duty. They would urge Bonhoeffer to stop antagonizing the government and the church. They would say that the oppression from the government wasn’t really that bad and that Romans 13 mandated that they obey the government. Many would say that the church, and therefore Bonhoeffer, must support the government’s edicts.

But, Bonhoeffer wouldn’t budge. Instead, he’d only grow more “antagonistic.” That is to say, he’d only grow deeper in his bold proclamation of the Truth. Similar to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, the German church, by and large, adopted what was commonly referred to as “the aryan paragraph.” In part, this statement claimed, “those of non-Aryan descent or married to someone of non-Aryan descent may not be called as clergy or officials in the general church administration … correspondingly, shall apply also to members of the church bodies as well as those in volunteer church positions.”

So the church forbade membership and even volunteering to “non-aryans.” You could not be a pastor, or any part of church leadership, if you were not aryan, or even if you were aryan but married to someone who was not. This led to a schism in the church which resulted in the “German Christian” and “Confessing Church” factions. There were about 3000 pastors in each group and 12,000 who weren’t closely affiliated with, or did not adhere to the beliefs of, either faction.

German Christians adhered to Nazi rule and were proponents for government intervention over church matters. They were loyal to Hitler and his polices, with the goal of moving all Protestant German churches towards this alignment. The Confessing Church, which Bonhoeffer aligned with, were proponents of basic, biblical doctrine such as the Bible being the only source of God’s revelation and that no authority apart from Jesus Christ being Lord of all aspects of life.

Similar to the aryan paragraph, the fictional world of the X-Men, eventually introduced the “Mutant Registration Act” (MRA). The fictitious Senator Robert Kelly claimed that mutants were a danger to national security. He pushed for the act arguing that mutants also pose a threat to humanity. Magneto saw the MRA as the first step toward mutant persecution whereas Professor X worked to stop him, while simultaneously opposing the MRA through peaceful means.

On one hand you might be thinking, “clearly the aryan paragraph was wrong and the MRA was fake, so what’s the point?” The arguments against Nazi Germany are easy enough to make. So too is the exercise of arguing against something like the MRA since it is fake and abstract. The X-Men have often been compared to the civil rights movement. Still, the civil rights movement was about 60 years ago so it strikes as more abstract. Bonhoeffer’s Nazi Germany adds another 20 years or so to that mark, making everything easier to view through the lens of history or fiction, thus far.

In last week’s post I mentioned the non-bishop from the Episcopalian sect who gave an anti-biblical screed directed at President Trump. I’ve heard many Catholics refer to the current Pope as the “anti-Pope.” Like the Confessing Church of 1930s and 40s Germany, the COVID era brought a schism to many churches because of clear failures in upholding sound doctrine. That era has brought with it peak apostasy and ushered in “the Woke Church.”

The Woke Church has embraced all cultural marxist topics related to so called “inequality.” Included in that broad stroke are matters of social justice, sexism, economic philosophies, racism, LGBTQ acceptance and other anti-biblical approaches to such matters. Where the German Christian church jumped off the deep end, biblically speaking, with exclusion, the Woke Church has jumped off the deep end with inclusion.

In his article on the Woke Church, Dr. Paul Chappell says, “A Christian with a high view of the accuracy, sufficiency, and authority of Scripture sees every social topic in light of the relative theological positions and practical instructions of God’s Word.” That is in alignment with the Confessing Church’s position, yet seemingly all too few churches today. Chappell goes on to say, “Christians with a weak view of Scripture are more likely to allow the culture to both describe the problem and prescribe the solution.” That, like the German Christian faction, is where most churches arrive today.

Bonhoeffer wrote, in his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Indeed this is true. Matthew’s gospel says, “Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”

Similarly, Luke’s put’s it this way, “And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” Bonhoeffer could not have known when he wrote those words that he would die for the Truth of the cross seven years later in a bleak concentration camp.

Although the German Christians were seemingly a minority, like the Confessing Church too, it was the 12,000 pastors who claimed to pick no side which resulted in further apostasy. In the summer of 1933 the churches held elections of all presbyters and synods. The German Christians won 70-80% of all seats. So, what changed? If the overwhelming majority of churches didn’t pick a side, how did the German Christians dominate by such a margin? Cowardice. That is what it comes down to at least.

The vast majority were not willing to pick up their cross and follow Christ. They caved to the anti-Christ pressures around them of government and culture. The night before the election, Hitler himself appealed to the churches in a radio address. Nazism was sweeping the nation, indeed had already swept it. So the vast majority voted through their fear of man, instead of through their faith in Christ.

It’s no different than what we see today in the Woke Church. Nor was it all too different than what Magneto, Professor X, and other mutants faced in their fictitious realm. More on all of that, and more on Bonhoeffer next time. Until then, reflect on the cowardice that has led to these paths, the fictitious, historical, and present, to this point. It’s a tale as old as time. A tale that even plagued those shortly before Christ’s ultimate sacrifice.

Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”

-John 12:42-43

Postscript:

I hate to leave this one unfinished, but there’s much more to each aspect we’ve touched on so far and it was already about the length of the average post. Furthermore, as you may imagine, other aspects of this Suspendable life have been very active this week, already causing delay of this post by one day. Thanks for bearing with me. This, this, this, this, this…

…and related matters have taken up most of my time this week; and I haven’t even gotten to shipping out Suspendables merch yet. For a guy who has been indefinitely suspended forever without pay, I sure run low on time. Until the next one!