Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004) is an excellent movie, primarily because of its characterizations. Eastwood portrays Frankie, the boxing manager who begins the movie as a hard-hearted, mean-spirited curmudgeon, and who makes an astounding transformation into a soft soul whose kind-hearted smile makes your heart want to break. The catalyst for this transformation is Maggie (played by Hillary Swank), the new kid whose indefatigable spirit convinces Frankie that she has the potential to be a world-class fighter. Morgan Freeman and the largely unsung Margo Martindale also give excellent performances. What really made me love this movie, though, was how it forced me to think about an issue now facing the Christian church. It’s difficult to discuss without giving away the ending, so please don’t read on if you haven’t seen it yet.

As a Christian, the aspect of this movie that fascinated me the most was how ineffectual the movie’s main religious character was. Throughout the movie, Frankie attends his local church and relishes verbally sparring with the priest, Father Horvak (played by Brian O’Byrne). Father Horvak recognizes that he’s being toyed with, and he moans and groans through the encounters with a “don’t you get it?” kind of condescending demeanor. But after Maggie is crippled in her last fight and asks Frankie to assist her in suicide, Frankie turns to Father Horvak for real guidance. What we hear from Father Horvak is not a message of God’s love, but simply “If you do this thing, you will regret it.” This is not enough to deter Frankie, who administers a lethal injection to Maggie and then disappears, never setting foot in his own gym again, and as Morgan Freeman’s final narration tells us, hopefully finding some measure of peace in his final days, presumably without God’s presence to comfort him. This paradox is a very difficult one for Christians to handle, and we may be tempted to write the movie off as “anti-Christian”. But I think that it bears more consideration.

One of the most serious indictments of the modern Christian church, in my opinion, is the fact that we generally lead with our objections, rather than by our example. Father Horvak illustrates how ineffective this tack is. It’s not enough to say, “Don’t do it, you’ll be sorry,” without offering a point of view that is more loving than the contrary.

Christian groups voice their objections constantly though the media. One of the most vocal is the anti-abortion “Right to Life” camp. But simply saying “no” to abortion does not solve the problems of the people who have unwanted children. Neither is it enough to simply say “yes” to abortion, as evidenced by the situation in Russia, where there are now two abortions for every one successful birth. Another Christian Right-to-life value system would make it illegal to withhold care from brain-dead patients. In the well-publicized case of Terry Schiavo’s death, House Majority Leader Tom Delay attacked what he called “an arrogant, out of control, unaccountable judiciary”, pledging to make them “answer for their behavior.”

But to continue to state these objections without offering loving solutions causes us to lose sight of the life God wants for us. What should a mother do who feels that she cannot support a child and believes that the child will be severely retarded? How many more decades should Terry Schiavo’s husband have endured, hoping that his wife would recover? And what would we do in Frankie’s case, in Million Dollar Baby? My reaction to the blanket Christian “no” to these cases is similar to C. S. Lewis’ reaction to his wife’s death, as represented by the quote above. I don’t believe that God desires that kind of misery for us. One of Jesus’ teachings was to cast off legalism in our understanding of right and wrong. Throughout the gospels, Jesus sparred with the Pharisees, denouncing them at one point as “hypocrites” and a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 23) for blindly quoting God’s law without looking for the deeper message of love. I fear that to blindly denounce the assisted suicide in Million Dollar Baby would make me no better than a Pharisee.

So, what would I do, if I were Frankie? I would feel compelled to do everything I could to keep Maggie’s spirit alive. But I’m not sure what I would do after months of trying with no success. I certainly don’t think that God intended for us to live like Maggie, unable to even breathe without machinery, losing limbs to bed-sores. To what degree should we trust in ourselves and keep people alive through our artifice, rather than trust in God and let them die the death that seems meant to be?

In the end, I don’t think I’d ever be able to judge the situation unless I was the one living it. And whichever decision I made, I would pray to God every day that it was the right one. As for now, I’ll thank Him that my loved ones have remained safe and healthy yet another day.