How He Revived a Forgotten Christian Virtue

I’m ashamed to admit this has happened a few times in the past several months: I am taking a lunch break, flipping through channels to see if there’s anything to watch. Forrest Gump is on. I smile fondly. Then, within 10 minutes I am inexplicably teary-eyed as I watch the story of this idiot careening through a litany of catastrophe, only to come out the other end a celebrity-millionaire-war hero, living in the southern mansion of his birth, married to the girl he loved his entire life.

Why is this movie good? Why does my gut believe it to be some profoundly true story when my head knows how absurd the plot is? Watching it, I alternate between crying and laughing at myself for crying.

Out of sheer bafflement, I had no choice but to do a hard think on why Forrest Gump has such a grip on my emotional state. What I realized is that, in an age of cheesy Christian-genre art from well meaning evangelicals, Forrest Gump succeeds in telling a better Christian story than them all, while keeping religion in the periphery. It does so by reviving an ancient Christian virtue that has fallen long out of fashion.

Gump the Holy Fool

“Innocence” is a term that seems to have lost much of its substance. We use it today to mean merely “without guilt,” usually in the context of a courtroom. But there used to be a more meaty, positive sense to it. That’s why there were popes and saints named “Innocent.”

Someone who was truly “innocent” was not simply a non-criminal; they exhibited some purity of heart and intention. They were wholly without conniving self-concern or arrogant self-regard. Their words and actions aimed only at the Good—not the grand, abstract good of the political activist, but the mundane good at their feet, the simple care for the person in front of them.

Such a person would more likely be described today as naïve. To be so unconscientious of one’s own interest or advantage would seem to require complete ignorance of the ways of the world. This is the type of person who engages in long conversations with the salesman at his door, not because he is interested in the product, but because he believes the salesman’s questions and proddings are being made in earnest, and it would be indecent to dismiss him.

This kind of innocence is a prized Christian quality in past centuries. But we don’t hear much about innocence in Christian culture today, maybe because it just sounds foolish to us. What a devastating loss.

The story of Forrest Gump recaptures the unfashionable Christian ideal of innocence. The moral tenor of the story is refreshing yet firmly rooted in tradition, like something out of a Book of Saints’ Lives. It is because of Gump’s innocence that the hand of God is on him. No matter what travesty befalls him, he never fails to reap the benefit from the turning of fortune’s wheel.

Like a true Holy Fool, he embodies the inversion of curse to blessing. Forrest’s legs are twisted and in need of braces, yet he teaches a young Elvis Presley to dance. His superior officer in the Army, who becomes a jaded drunk after being crippled in Vietnam, is finally healed after becoming Forrest’s first mate on his shrimping boat. Through the stupid leadership of Captain Gump, Lieutenant Dan makes his peace with God and learns to walk again.

All who love Forrest are blessed by him. When Jenny invites him to sit with her on the bus, she doesn’t know that she’s inviting a man into her life who will save her. The college that offered him a football scholarship gets in return, not only an all-American athlete, but decades later a man who will mow the grass for free. When Bubba makes room for Forrest on his bus seat, he unwittingly opens the door to unimagined wealth. Forrest honors the deal made with his best friend to share the profits of their shrimping business, even though Bubba died in the war. He gives the money to Bubba’s mother instead, and this simple act of loyalty turns a poor grieving mother into one of the wealthiest women in the city. Curse to blessing, always.

Jenny, the Other Side of the Coin

The movie wouldn’t work without the subplot of Jenny’s life. Her lack of innocence and her suffering counterbalance the absurdity of Forrest’s charmed life. Raised in an abusive home, she blazes a trail through abusive relationships, drugs, sex, and nearly suicide. The only bright spots in the tumult are her rare encounters with her childhood best friend who loves her.

There is one sense of this love story that our hyper-therapized culture might recognize as a statement about the “self.” Forrest is the bright, naïve child who loves his mama and does what is right. Jenny lives in the shadow realm, bearing the suffering of the world that Forrest floats through. She is the wild twin who hates her father and keeps falling. What drives the plot forward is the understanding that Forrest and Jenny need to be reunited at the end. Integration, as the therapists call it.

The typical story told today is about extending acceptance to the part of ourselves that is wild, mysterious, and dark. The straightlaced rule-follower learns to break rules and disappoint his parents, etc. But Jenny is the opposite. Healing for her means accepting the light that Forrest offers. It isn’t until she finally comes home to him that things start to change for her.

The most powerful moment of the story comes when Jenny briefly returns to Alabama and stays with Forrest. He walks with her through the country roads where they grew up together. They come upon the dilapidated home of her childhood, where her drunken father used to chase her for God knows what purposes. Seeing it, she flies into a rage, pelting it with rocks. But the rage quickly turns to grief as she collapses in tears.

This is a process that most often gets worked through in the therapist’s office, but Jenny has the privilege of being escorted through the painful scenes of her past by something like her guardian angel. Forrest is present but does not interject himself into her grief. He is merely there with her in his simple innocence. Even as he narrates the scene he treats it with respectful distance, and all he can say to the listener is, “Sometimes there aren’t enough rocks.”

Most of us are a Jenny in need of a Forrest. When we look back on our life, we can still feel the acute pain of those chapters. In some of them we are the victim, in others we are the perpetrator, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s darkness either way, and we’re running from it, too scared even to grieve.

And instead of a Forrest, the “light” in our lives presents itself in lame platitudes: “It’s all for the best,” “No regrets,” “Positive vibes only.” Or even Christian-ese ones like “God has a plan for you.” The point is not to say that any of these are true or false, but that they can never go deep enough. Whether we use cheap slogans or grand statements worthy of a TED talk, ideas don’t heal us, try as we might to paint them over our problems. What heals us is the simple presence of someone who genuinely cares for us, even (or especially) if they are silent.

So we come again to Forrest as an embodiment of the forgotten virtue of innocence. In the best possible way, he is too naïve to try to “fix” Jenny or help sort out her obviously troubled life. There would be a preachy arrogance in that. He takes the superior approach of complete un-self-interested devotion to his friend. He takes her by the hand and walks with her right up to the gaping wound at the bottom of all her suffering. And after Jenny grieves what she alone can grieve, he takes her back to his home.

She is healed in the end. Forrest discovers her at last holding down a simple life as a waitress, raising a son on her own. And that is where their threads reunite into the full expression of the love they shared as children. The movement of her story from tragedy to loving marriage and motherhood is the greatest example of Forrest’s ability to transform pain into joy.

That his innocence is the wellspring of this transformative ability demonstrates that this story is fundamentally Christian. It is a story of impossible—miraculous—inversions. It is about a man who wanders through a minefield, too stupid to understand the ubiquitous perils, and finds an earthly paradise on the other side. He is able to do so because he is tapped directly into a deeper kind of cosmic order that never fails to reward purity of motive and innocence of heart. While most of us are too busy wisely scanning the horizon for opportunities, making plans for our own enrichment, Forrest can only see three feet ahead. But it is precisely his lack of connivance that blesses his path. He acts only out of humane decency to those he meets.

It’s interesting that a profoundly Christian story would experience so much box office success. As silly as it was, it nevertheless struck us as a powerful work of art. And power, in art, always derives from the truth that it conveys. Its resonance with the public demonstrates our craving for our Christian stories, especially if they don’t come with the cheesy “Christian” label. It’s a lesson I hope the Church can internalize for the coming generation.