He Changed the Entire Future Trajectory of Bedford Falls for the Better
This post was originally published on Aaron Renn’s substack and is here republished with his permission.
As we head towards the Christmas season, I want to highlight the hidden lessons of the film It’s a Wonderful Life.
The Catholic neoreactionary writer the Social Pathologist wrote some great reflections about how Protestantism was superior to Catholicism in adaptating to modernity. In it, he points to George Bailey as an archetype of the Protestant man.
Which brings me to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve always enjoyed the movie but only recently have seen some of its deeper theological significance. While Catholicism has been a factory of saints, Protestantism has been a factory of George Baileys. (Casting Jimmy Stewart was perfect) It is true that he is fictional character, but he is also an archetype of the a type of man that we all know, and the type of high minded [mainline] Protestant man who is slowly disappearing due to the cultural forces that have been unleashed since the sixties. Although the movie is fictional it, unnervingly, is beginning to resemble real life. Bedford Falls may be a fictional town but I remember the world I grew up in strongly resembling it, the world I live in now is slowly turning to Pottersville. The genius of the movie is the depiction of what world would have looked like without Protestant George Bailey. The irony of it is that is was made by a Catholic.
Now I do have disagreements with Protestantism, but my intention here is to praise one of its strengths. And its strength was to produce thousands of George Bailey’s, who in various fields and in their own small way were able to transform the world. Catholicism may have a great theology of the Incarnation but Protestantism, at its best, produced the goods, and bought Christianity to the day-to-day affairs of men. [emphasis added]
There are actually two great Protestant archetypes in the film, George Bailey and Mr. Potter. Potter, like Ebenezer Scrooge, is an example of what happens when the Protestant ethic is combined with avariciousness and a lack of charity. (The actor who played Potter had previously played Scrooge in radio broadcasts). The film thus contrasts these two characters.
As I’ve noted, in a previous era, it would have been common for the president of the local bank to be the most powerful person in town. That’s Potter here, a genuine, wealthy elite.
Bailey is not at that level. He never becomes personally wealthy. He’s not really elite in the social status sense. But he runs the Building and Loan, which appears to be the second-largest financial institution in town. That alone grants him status.
What’s key to Bailey is his institutional orientation and civic mindset. Bailey takes over the Building and Loan after his father’s death and treats it as his personal responsibility to sustain that institution through depression, war, and relentless outside attacks by Potter.
If you read my Newsletter #49 on defending institutional integrity, which was adapted into a chapter in my book, you’ll note that I talk about the three dimensions of trustworthiness, competence, and missional integrity, as well as sustaining those for the long term. We see that Bailey hits all of these dimensions. (What makes Potter’s theft of $8000 particularly painful is that it will falsely make Bailey himself look like a thief, as untrustworthy).
Bailey’s life is also shaped by a general ethos of civic mindedness. As a kid he saves his brother from drowning, and stands up to the pharmacist to prevent an accidental poisoning. But he does not just practice these individual acts of charity. Via the Building and Loan, he’s trying to improve the overall civic life of Bedford Falls. He keeps the Building and Loan on mission, providing accessible financing to allow the ordinary citizens of Bedford Falls to buy quality housing at a reasonable price.
As the Social Pathologist says, the genius of the film is that it shows us what the world would have been like without George Bailey. Bailey didn’t just save or improve the lives of individual people, although he did do that. He changed the entire trajectory of Bedford Falls for the better.
Without his civic minded and institutional spirit, the town would have turned into a slum, something we’ve seen happen all too many times in today’s world, one with precious few George Baileys.
It’s very relevant that Bailey was essentially a sub-elite. The incumbent institutions and power structures of Bedford Falls, represented by Potter and his bank, are corrupt. The Baileys are disruptors. They build a new, outsider institution to bypass that corruption and ultimately heal or at least preserve the town.
Today, many of our institutions and power structures are likewise corrupt, or certainly at least off mission and poorly functioning. Real elite leadership today will often involve the same approach, building new institutions that can sustain and improve community life.
What’s different for Protestants today is that we no longer live in George Bailey’s Christian America. Protestant civic mindedness today will look different from the past. It will undoubted mean more focus on institutions to serve its own community specifically. This is how minorities operate, and religious American Protestants are now a minority.
At the same time, it’s important to learn the lessons of the Quakers. As sociologist E. Digby Baltzell noted, one reason for the diverging fortunes of Philadelphia and Boston is that Quakers built sectarian institutions whereas the Puritans of Massachusetts built up truly public ones.
Even minority institutions should have a broader civic spirit that attempts to extend outward into and to improve the larger community.
Comparing George Bailey, someone animated by a mainline Protestant spirit, to the modern American evangelical, we see that the latter are typically anti-institutional, with low degrees of civic mindedness apart from evangelistic outreach and mercy ministries. This is one reason why, despite their numbers, evangelicals are so low impact in our society. This is what needs to change.
There’s another lesson to be learned from It’s a Wonderful Life: sometimes you choose your duties, sometimes your duties choose you.
George Bailey didn’t want to run the Building and Loan. He wanted to go to college. He wanted to travel the world. He wanted to have a honeymoon. In every case, he could have folded and pursued his own dreams.
But he didn’t. George Bailey saw a need and stepped into the gap. He chose to store up treasures in heaven rather than on earth.
I’m not saying we are obligated to try to jump in and fix every problem we see. In fact, that can be bad if, for example, we start over-functioning for other people. Having a focus on our own mission is also important. But we shouldn’t let those things blind us to the opportunities that might be right in front of us.
I started this newsletter as a small, underground monthly email because I saw a critical gap in the church in terms of reaching men, an area where the evangelical world was just flat out wrong in some important ways. I didn’t see anyone else addressing it, so I felt I had to step up, even though I had different plans at the time. This worked blossomed into by far the most impactful thing I’ve ever done. It changed how the evangelical world thinks about our cultural moment.
Being made in 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life is a product of a bygone America. And the world it portrays is fictional as well. But it has lessons to teach us about what’s gone wrong in America, and what would need to be recovered to put the country on a better track in the future.
Image Credit: Unsplash
