‘The Pendragon Cycle’ is a fantasy of Christian masculine power

(RNS) — Big-budget fantasy media has, according to some American conservatives, become enemy-occupied ground. The Daily Wire’s new series “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin” is an attempt to reclaim it — for God and a masculine vision of Christian power.

“The Pendragon Cycle,” created by Jeremy Boreing, co-founder of the right-wing media website The Daily Wire, and adapted from Stephen R. Lawhead’s novels of the same name, tells an explicitly Christian version of the King Arthur story set in early medieval Britain. (Spoilers ahead.)

The seven-episode first season sets the groundwork for Arthur’s rise, following the Welsh bard Taliesin, the Atlantean princess Charis and their son, Merlin. After each of these protagonists discovers the truth of Christianity, they go about the messy work of war and politics with God on their side. 

First released on the conservative media network’s streaming service in January, the show debuted on Prime Video on Sept. 1. It’s become the fifth-most-viewed show on Prime as of Sept. 24 and has an 82%-positive viewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

The series has been boosted by conservative pundits like Megan Basham and Matt Walsh, but even mainstream reviewers have lauded its “impressive production design,” its “intense and crisp” imagery and its restrained approach to religion and politics. As the show’s heroes wander through ancient, rugged landscapes, The Daily Wire’s usual preoccupations — wokeness, leftists, elites — seem far away.

The show’s producers have reinforced this sentiment. “The show is for anyone who loves great fantasy,” Boreing told the Daily Mail. “(It is) not polemical … not for Christians in a way that’s limiting.” Like the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, it aspires to be more myth than sermon. This sets the series apart from other recent conservative films, like The Daily Wire’s “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” and Boreing’s own “Lady Ballers,” which include explicit anti-Islam and anti-trans tropes.

But even as “The Pendragon Cycle” attempts to entertain broad audiences, it also hopes to win territory in the culture war. More so than anything Tolkien wrote, Boreing’s show is a defense of white Christian men and their right to rule the world.

As Boreing and his allies tell it, this is a necessary counteroffensive — a response to Hollywood producers who have “vandalized” the “most beloved myths and stories of America and the West.” Conservatives have railed against prestige fantasy shows like Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” and HBO’s “House of the Dragon” for their race-neutral casting, “nihilistic” worldviews and violations of traditional gender roles. All of these sins, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro has suggested, are evidence that popular producers lack Tolkien’s “deep” commitment to “Judeo-Christian morality.”

Rather than retreating from that fight, as he puts it, Boreing set out to create an alternative, “something beautiful and good that presents our faith and our cultural inheritance as things to be loved and celebrated.” And Lawhead’s novels provided the perfect material.

Lawhead, who attended both Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and Wheaton College before working for the evangelical Campus Life magazine, published the first Pendragon novel, “Taliesin,” in 1987. A sequel, “Merlin,” followed the next year.

Intentionally or not, the books were part of an ongoing battle over faith and gender in Arthurian literature. While feminist authors like Mary Stewart questioned the goodness of the powerful Christian men at the center of the story, Lawhead’s goal was to elevate their goodness, to advance the idea of a “true king” who “lives out of himself for his people.”

To a teenage Boreing, Lawhead’s books were a powerful antidote to the “shallow, ‘nice’” Christianity that he saw around him, he recalled on X. Here was a world with grit and risk, one where “faith was forged in blood and sacrifice” and the Christian life was also a “battle for king and country.” It was the kind of masculine virtue that many Christian men would come to admire in Mel Gibson’s 1995 film “Braveheart,” one that, as scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes, rejected “tender” manhood in favor of a warrior ethos.

But while “Braveheart’s” heroes and villains are both Christian, Lawhead’s novels stage the victory of Christianity over various traditions considered pagan. Literary scholar Kristina Hildebrand shows how this reinforces the books’ masculine feeling, as Lawhead’s male heroes demonstrate not just physical domination but spiritual certainty. In a wasteland of pagan darkness, they are lamps of “true faith,” free of weakness and doubt alike.

For its producers, this glorification of masculine certainty makes “The Pendragon Cycle” a Christian story. Some Christian viewers have criticized the new adaptation for its sexual content and its copious violence (the phrase “flesh squelching” appears in the subtitles of more than one battle scene). But Boreing has defended it as a “fundamentally and explicitly Christian story,” one that echoes the “grit and brutality of the Bible” rather than the “feminized, sanitized Christianity” practiced by many Americans.

The show visibly refuses the so-called woke tendencies of productions like “Rings of Power.” Its cast is entirely white, and women almost always become love interests as soon as they appear on screen. The script is peppered with lines that seem calibrated to make conservatives cheer, like “there’ll be no peace without strength” and “what the barbarian has taken can be won back.”

More importantly though, the show treats Christianity as a straightforward source of certainty, strength and miraculous power, especially for men. At the end of the first episode, the bard Taliesin, who has already refused to follow the gods of his people, walks into a small chapel and is blinded by the light pouring through a cross-shaped window. Immediately, without speaking to the priests or reading a word of scripture, he becomes a wise and powerful Christian, quoting the Gospels, working miracles and even bringing his stillborn son back to life. He shares his dream of a heavenly “Land of Summer,” one “shining with goodness,” and then declares, “And I will be its king.”

But after Taliesin is killed, the work of building a kingdom falls to his son, Merlin, who spends the latter two-thirds of the series rallying the quarreling kings of Britain against the Saecsen (Saxon) invaders. Like his father, Merlin wields his faith in Jesus like a magic wand: With a simple prayer, he can stop time, slay enemies, win over allies and fly into the air. His great show of faith comes in the final episode, when he chooses to trust in Jesus rather than enter battle with his sword. But even then his faith is rewarded with an immediate victory for his side.

The best summary of the show’s message comes from the Christian priest Dafyd in the sixth episode: “Very few can follow a dream. … But they will follow a man with a dream.”

“The Pendragon Cycle” certainly shares much of what Christian conservatives love about Tolkien’s books: great men, moral clarity and a sense of divine providence. But it lacks many of the things that draw broader audiences to Tolkien’s work, from the unmanly quirkiness of the hobbits to the persistent message that only the small and weak can withstand the pull of power. For Tolkien, “strength to defend ourselves” is a fatal temptation; for Boreing, it is a Christian imperative.

(Joshua T. Parks is a PhD candidate in religious studies at the University of Virginia. He holds master’s degrees in church history and medieval studies from Princeton Theological Seminary and Western Michigan University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)