Doctor Strange Is The Most Religious Superhero Movie Ever

We get a taste of this during he and Mordo’s first real disagreement. Mordo believes that Kaecilius’ zealots must die. They deserve it. There’s no other way. Strange pushes back, arguing that there must be a better way.

Those differences—Mordo’s dogmatic sense of justice and Strange’s more contextual leanings and desire to show, perhaps, a bit of grace—come to a head during their climactic staredown with Kaecilius and Dormammu. They discover that a good chunk of Hong Kong has been destroyed, with the rest of the world surely about to follow suit. A portal to the Dark Dimension hovers overhead. Strange, using his time-shifting relic the Eye of Agamotto, zips up to confront Dormammu and freezes the both of them in an endless time loop. The loop keeps the earth frozen in time, too—as long as Strange is willing to die at Dormammu’s hands for eternity. The only way that the loop can be broken is if Dormammu leaves and promises never to return.

“You can’t win,” Dormammu tells Strange.

“No,” Strange admits. “But I can lose. Again. And again. And again.”

This is an explicitly Christ-like sacrifice. While most superheroes are willing to die their for the good of others, Strange actually does. He suffers. In what appears to be crushing loss, he wins.

And so we come back to the issue of Strange’s “flexibility.” In this fold, it’s not moral relativism. It’s a mirror of what God did for us. God broke the rules. Or, at least, He broke the rules as we understood them.

God wants us to be in communion with him—but His perfect nature requires perfection from us. It’s not possible for us to be perfect. So where does that leave us? In the Old Testament, it left us with being forced to atone for our sins constantly and to treat any wrongdoing incredibly harshly. It left us where Mordo is—following a path that may be impossible, in the end, to follow.

But in Jesus, God found a way around His own rules. He bent heaven and earth for us. Through an out-of-the-box game-changer, He saved us because we were wholly inadequate to save ourselves.

Doctor Strange is not a movie for everyone. Its spiritual, occult trappings should give prospective Christian viewers pause. But underneath those trappings is something special, I think. Something resonant. In a movie filled with unreal images and impossible happenings, there’s something very real going on.