It's probably the subject matter that keeps it from being as widely viewed as it deserves to be. Not that many people care all that much about the question of organized religion anymore. As a gay man, inculcated with self-loathing by organized religion from early childhood, I accept that I will never be free of a life-long fascination with the intersection of religion and politics and watch these things with a cobra-like fascination. As a psychotherapist once said to me when I tried to persuade him that religion no longer had a hold on me, "You may have eliminated the concrete images, but the molds they came in are still there."
I won't take the time to do more than sketch the broad outlines of the plot. If you want a more thorough summary, here's a good one.
What makes Herrens Veje such a gripping drama is that it works on more than a single level. It works much of the time as a theological, sociological, or ethical academic study. It's also a powerful character-driven soap opera. It's the story of a middle-class Danish heir to a family which has produced 250 years of clerics in the national Folkekirke, which, despite it's name ("People's Church") is a state-run national church, administered by bishops with centralized authority and considerable social standing. Current head of the family is Johannes Krogh. He's married to Elisabeth and they have two sons, Christian and August. The story shifts as the focus shifts from Johannes the pastor, to Johannes the husband and father, and back again.
Somewhere in the first four or five episodes I realized the power of the writing and acting when I found myself raging against this man, Johannes, a tyrannical misanthropic bullying patriarch who appears to have only two real goals in life: maintaining his status and authority in the community as priest, and holding on to his power to dictate to the entire world around him which he assumes derives from that authority. That much loathing for a fictional character is a clear indicator of good writing and/or good acting.
Johannes is mean-spirited, a perfect illustration of the theological construct of man-as-sinner. Some reviewers describe him as having a "godlike" power over his wife and his sons. To find that an appropriate choice of words is to define God in Old Testament terms, a being you cross at great peril. Elisabeth, his wife, is a companion piece, a buffer to her husband's expectations, but at the same time the kind of enabler that tyrants need to make their worlds go round. Rather than come to her sons' aid as they seek unsuccessfully to gain his approval, she tries to persuade them that their father is only showing his love by insisting they live up to his standards. In his own mind, of course, Johannes is "raising up a child in the way he should go," a model of Christian rectitude.
Christian, the older son, tries to get out from under his father's heavy hand, first by dropping out of his graduate degree program in theology and going for a degree in business instead, and then sabotaging that effort, disgracing himself by getting caught plagiarizing his dissertation and dropping out of school altogether. August is, by comparison, a golden boy. He follows his father's footsteps into the church and becomes a chaplain in Iraq, but then faces a moment of truth which changes his life. The two brothers share a love/hate relationship with their father and spend their lives shifting between standing up to him and buckling under.
I watched the first dozen or more episodes with rapt attention before the inevitable weakness kicked in that virtually all serials suffer from when they have to pad the plot line to keep the series going. At that point I began to realize I had been seeing things through a theological lens, watching the characters deal with heavy topics like the meaning of sin and the source of religious authority. Luther broke from the Catholics and their belief in the importance of good works, arguing that we don't need to pursue forgiveness, that God granted it once and for all through his Son's sacrifice; our only obligation, as unworthy but forgiven sinners, is to embrace the gospel narrative as truth.
And as the series (as I chose to view it) switched focus from theology to soap opera I began to be disappointed in the direction it was taking. I wanted to go on viewing things through the lens of a one-time Lutheran. I was at home with the doctrine of the three "solas" - sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura - only faith, only grace, only scripture - and began to take issue with how focus was taken off the central message of Lutheranism and the struggle for meaning and reworked into a father-son struggle for dominance and independence. It pains me to have to admit, though, that there is no justification for critiquing a story for not being the story as you would have written it.
Christian has now once again taken up his father's way of life and decides to finish his theological dissertation. For a time he tries earnestly to keep this a secret from his father, keeping in character. But when he turns to his father to help him work through a fine point of Kierkegaardian philosophy, it becomes clear that the authors of the series have decided enough theology already, we need to get out of these clouds and down to soap opera, if we are going to have any hope of retaining an audience. At first I thought I was missing the point, that Johannes knew Christian was on the right track and only needed to summon the passion required to conclude this thesis on that note. But then I realized I was reading all this into the story, that Adam Price and the other writers had moved on to a simple, and more dramatic, battle of wills.
All that notwithstanding, the story does continue on two levels simultaneously. The series takes up a wide array of topics currently separating modern-thinking churches from traditional conservative ones: patriarchal cultural practices, hollowed-out religion, substance abuse, euthanasia, homelessness and sexual orientation. All topics tearing modern churches apart as they struggle with polarized views. Topics begging theological explanations that get worked out in the non-churched world more as psychological dramas rather than intellectual debates about right and wrong in an academic context. "Pity," I thought to myself. I was enjoying being in the classroom again, wrestling with the question of ethics and morality. I was reminded once again that the world prefers to handle these heavy topics under the rubric of entertainment.
But the seriousness of Ride Upon the Storm cannot be dismissed quite that easily. If I have it right, that it is more soap opera than social criticism, I still have to ask the question, who comes off the worse for wear: Johannes the arrogant hypocrite, or the church he comes to represent? The lens through which I view Christianity is that it shares with communism the honor of being among the noblest of ideals ever to occur in the human mind. The problem with both these schools of thought is that they are unattainable goals. Just as we cannot live by the Marxist slogan, "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs," we cannot live up to the ideal of turning the other cheek, or selling all we have and giving to the poor." Just not in our nature. That means that what goes on in churches is a grand illusion. We're not Christian in the sense that we model our lives after Christ's teachings; we're Christian in the social sense, the tribal identity sense, people who would live in an ideal world if we could, but are content to live in the less-than-perfect world in which we find ourselves. That helps explain why when young people confront the hypocrisy of their elders they leave the churches in droves. All it takes is somebody to point out the hypocrisy. We say we love our fellow man, but as the church council in this Danish hit piece demonstrated, when Johannes went all Christian and opened the church to the homeless, they were not about to allow them to come in and get dog hairs all over the cushions.
As a theological piece, Ride Upon the Storm" exposes the losing battle the church is having getting the next generation into the pews. The churches are not christian organizations, they are middle class social clubs for the most part - at least in the case of the Danish "folk-" church, the Church of England, and virtually all of the state churches around the world which mistake social conformity for Christian rectitude. And it's not gentle satire; it's a right-between-the-eyes frontal attack on the failure of the churches to practice what they preach.
Ride Upon the Storm, whether you see it for its theological insights, its reflection of social realities, or аs a knock-down-drag-out psychological family drama, is a brilliant piece of work. A film in twenty episodes. Very much worth your time.
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