By Elisa Penha
Editors: Ellena Lu and Alloe Mak
Spoilers for season two of Good Omens
I have been thinking about David Tennant.
Generally, yes, but mostly because of Anthony Crowley, the big-hearted demon Tennant plays in Good Omens. In a broader sense, I have been thinking about the fascinating way pop culture since the late 90s has decided to characterize Eternal Damnation and the figures that govern it—Satan himself, the antichrist, every variation of demon, apocalyptic horsepeople, and so on. “What if the Devil was a good guy?” was by no means a new question, but the proposed goodness of the devilish characters in everything from Good Omens to O Brother Where Art Thou (a comic adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey) demands more of its audience than simply pondering, “what if the Devil is good,” and “what if the Devil is a hot guy who speaks in sarcastic quips and rides a motorcycle and wears leather and is a slap in the face to the Hays Code,” but instead, it forces us to ask, “if the Devil is good and right, then is God bad and wrong?”
No matter the faith on which any story draws, one thing has become clear to me: the naturally born antithesis to the Sympathetic Devil is the Bad God. Further, the Sympathetic Devil is most often reared as a reaction to the authority of this (secretly) malicious God. Mind you—this is not a directive relegated to Christianity and Catholicism or even monotheism at all, but rather a framework used when the antagonist is not an individual, but an institution. The institution of Heaven (when depicted as evil) and the institution of Pulitzer and Co. in the musical Newsies serve functionally the same purpose. They behave as a stifling presence that is widely seen to be benevolent and governing, but that treats its subjects horribly and thereby forces these subjects into reigning terror upon their keepers. This often results in a complete separation of the subjects from the master. One might also turn to Percy Jackson, in which the Sympathetic Devil is found in Luke Castellan, where Luke’s evil is entirely a reactionary byproduct of his witnessing and experiencing the mistreatment of children by his Olympian parents—the Bad Gods—and seeking to rectify this through violent means.
The fear of governing bodies is, too, not a new one to consider nor a revolutionary idea to pose. Its history, however, proves to be of deep importance in understanding why it is so tempting and cathartic to unmask those who lead us as the ones who are causing us harm. A large wave of anti-establishment philosophy seared the Western World after the First World War, resulting—with comical levels of instantaneousness—in an uproar of media; film, music, and literature. Such literature was largely centered around the abolishment of any and all institutions that sought to devalue the collective people, attempted to police them, or that tried to decide on and categorize morals. It is from collective distrust in the bodies meant to protect us that anarchical media is derived, including everything from the British punk musical scene to America’s Harlem Renaissance in literature. Those who seek to destroy institutions for the sake of unearthing the malice behind them and to build new, autonomous operations have long been demonized by the presses. In response, they have learned to co-opt this characterization and turn themselves into the devil-esque before the authorities can. Religion, Christianity specifically, is one of, if not the largest of these very establishments that people have long sought to abolish Eventually from this rose a specific kind of Devil figure—a Devil meant to be an audience surrogate. A Devil which is fun, well-adjusted, and right. A Devil that wears sunglasses. A Devil humanized. If the sinners are those who question all and throw bricks at the windows of government buildings, then, say these authors, let us be sinners! And so come our Good Omens Crowleys and Supernatural Lucifers.
But the question remains: what of the others? While it is transfixing to hear of the elaborate ways the Devil became one of us, it becomes just as—if not more—crucial to wonder where this might leave God and Heaven—where this might leave the angels that we have now been told we must work against. A trope even newer than the Sympathetic Devil or the Bad God has taken life in the last three decades: the Rebel Angel. The Rebel Angel slowly becomes privy to the true nature of the God and Heaven which they serve but struggles to reconcile what a rebuking of their faith would mean for them. This is usually paired with a sincere belief in the purported message of God. The Rebel Angel must ask themself: is it simply the way this message is being spread that is wrong, or is the message intrinsically flawed to begin with? If the latter, what will become of them if they decide to revolt? What will become of them if everything they have ever known and fought for turns out to be rubbish? The Rebel Angel is most often assigned to a Sympathetic Devil (who does not necessarily need to be of the supernatural kind) who is the one to remove the Rebel Angel from the blinding control of Heaven’s authority. It is within this relationship between the Rebel Angel and the Sympathetic Devil that the angel’s true divine betrayal happens. In media texts themselves, this is a betrayal because an angel is told they cannot and should not love a devil. But to the viewer, it is because an angel cannot and should not be queer.
Supernatural is a CW television show that began airing in 2005 about monster-hunting brothers Sam and Dean Winchester who are on a cryptid-filled journey to find their missing father and solve the mystery of their mother’s death. However, the series takes a turn in its fourth season (into a genre I affectionately dub Bible fanfiction) with the introduction of Castiel (also known as Cas), a Christian angel who raised Dean from Hell in the aftermath of his death in the season three finale. There are now prophets, and archangels, and Heaven and Hell, and, most importantly, there is God. However, Supernatural makes one thing abundantly and instantly clear: just because the demons are not on Sam and Dean’s side does not mean the angels are either. In fact, the angels and other creatures of Heaven are actively working against the brothers whose goal becomes to stop the impending Biblical Apocalypse by preventing the breaking of 66 Apocalyptic seals. Heaven and Hell both want the Apocalypse to happen, at the expense of all of Earth, and the brothers present Cas with the shattering notion that Heaven is not all that nobler than Hell if both are working towards the same catastrophic end. As Cas becomes closer to the brothers (particularly to Dean, whom he saved), he begins to doubt. Dean Winchester is the Sympathetic Devil to Castiel’s Rebel Angel. Dean is jaded and entirely untrusting in the supposed goodness of God and Heaven because he does not believe that a good God would have allowed him to lead such a horrible life. Cas soon finds himself becoming enamoured with humanity as an extension of his deep love for Dean, but it is this very love that puts Cas at odds with the family and doctrine of Heaven that he has known his whole life.
The queerness of Castiel is not immediately explicit in his introduction, and won’t be for a long time (though whether you agree that it was made explicit at all merits a separate conversation entirely). Despite this, it is impossible to ignore the queer framework of Castiel’s slow disillusionment with the church and begin to wonder (and see) why such a thing is undeniably present in the first place. Queerness has long existed at a crossroads to the Christian faith. The use of Christianity by homophobes to justify the ousting and persecution of queer people is a prevailing one. Bigotry is never used literally by the angels in Supernatural when shunning Castiel. It is instead veiled subtly beneath commentary of his newfound love of humans—his relationship with Dean being the scapegoat for such pointed critique. Castiel’s love for Dean is portrayed as a contradiction to his existence as an angel of Heaven. He cannot have both. The choice presented to Castiel is a familiar one: sacrifice your identity or sacrifice your life—your purity and space in Heaven—because you and Heaven cannot work in conjunction if you love who you love. This is the conundrum of the Rebel Angel. He is a rebel because he is in love with somebody who will not compromise themselves for Heaven, and therefore he is in love with somebody wrong.
Good Omens was originally a 1990 novel written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett before being adapted for television by Amazon Prime in 2019. Good Omens follows the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale who have been secretly sustaining a friendship that would much dismay both Heaven and Hell for the last six thousand years. When Crowley misplaces the antichrist, he and Aziraphale must work together to find him and hopefully stop him from ending the world, there being only one week left before the Biblical Apocalypse is set to occur.
Crowley and Aziraphale’s friendship is the driving force of Good Omens and it is surely a force to be reckoned with. The two play fast-and-loose with good and evil, with Aziraphale being entirely alright (though hesitant) with doing morally ambiguous deeds if he believes it will serve a greater good or to keep Crowley safe. Crowley, on the other hand, is not so hell-bent on being truly evil more so than he enjoys mildly inconveniencing people for his own entertainment. Crowley’s demon-ness is not based on any malicious action. In fact, Crowley used to be an angel before he began to ask questions about the operations of Heaven. Crowley of Good Omens is an enrapturing subversion of tropes: he is a Rebel Angel who successfully severed himself from Heaven and so he evolved into the Sympathetic Devil. Aziraphale is still firmly lodged into Heaven’s doctrine and Crowley spends much of Good Omens trying to get Aziraphale to see what he once saw and to leave Heaven behind, as he did. Aziraphale, however, does not agree with Crowley and instead believes he can persuade Crowley to rejoin Heaven. Aziraphale is of the firm belief that Crowley’s “demon-ness” is something that can be changed with enough forgiveness from Heaven and enough repenting on Crowley’s part. The queer subtext of this cannot be overstated. A man who is being urged by those who claim they love him that there is something twisted within him—something that should and can be unwound. For his own good, of course. Something his God would find repulsive—so repulsive that he would be denied entry to Heaven. That he was born with a heart upside-down. That with enough penance, he can flip it over again. But only if he is sorry. But only if he scrubs all evidence of perversion from his altar. But he will not. And so he will be left behind.
The second season of Good Omens ends with Crowley confessing romantic feelings to Aziraphale, asking that Aziraphale leave Heaven to be with him—as Crowley has left Hell—and kissing Aziraphale. After the kiss, Aziraphale tells Crowley “I forgive you” and Crowley answers “Don’t bother.” Unlike Supernatural’s tumultuous history of teetering the queer line, Good Omens has turned such “implications” into canon. Unravelling them outlines why queerness is such a gutting vehicle to use when exploring religious apprehension. Aziraphale and Crowley will not be able to be together until Aziraphale is able to accept that Crowley’s demon-ness is not something that needs fixing. That Crowley’s love for Aziraphale is not something that must be forgiven before it can be consummated nor something for which Crowley needs to feel remorse. This is not the fault of Aziraphale, nor does Good Omens portray it as such. Rather, it is the fault of six thousand years of deep indoctrination on the part of Heaven, which will take far more than a kiss to undo. Aziraphale does not want to “change” Crowley. Aziraphale wants to save him. But this, too, is a dangerous line to walk, because what does it mean to save a person from themselves, if not erasing them entirely?
I suppose what makes the fundamental queerness of Rebel Angels so powerful is the sheer vastness of the conflation between the Almighty and the Self, and what happens to those who have built their Self in accordance with the word of the Almighty. There is an unrequited love inherent to a queer person searching for solace in a faith that rejects them. What better representation of such a stark dilemma than to demonstrate it with a personification of faith itself? Aziraphale wishes to love Crowley and Castiel wishes to love Dean but they cannot love each other if they wish to stay holy. However, their faith is as contingent a part of them as their queerness is, and to allow either of these facets to exist without the other would be a compromise that makes them innately not themselves. It is not as simple as learning to rebuke religion entirely in order to be happy with your chosen lover. Repression of faith is still repression. Religion and identity must not work as foils to one another, and yet they so often do. How does an angel learn to do both? How does anyone? The incongruous selves that exist simultaneously inside Rebel Angels is a hugely accessible one—a tragic one, at that. The idea that there is any part of oneself that must be prayed away in order to reach Heaven is a deeply unsettling one. Perhaps it is from this terror that these new and increasingly prevalent depictions of Heaven as unpleasant and authoritarian stem—why the Sympathetic Devils run from God in order to find unsanctioned queer freedom because convincing themselves that Heaven is not somewhere they want to be may aid them in finding peace with their lives on Earth. Rebel Angels are merely queer people who cannot, and should not be expected to, sacrifice their love of God in exchange for their queerness.
There is no other way this story can be told because the admonishment of faith in the face of identity is a queer tale as old as time. So, the question then becomes: What comes first, identity or faith? And what if I told you they were the same thing? That attempting to cut one from the other, for a religious person, was as good as cutting them down the middle and expecting them to go on walking? That Rebel Angels only exist because society has built the false idea of separation between the two? That society has built the false idea that queerness is rebellion against virtuosity to begin with? Gay Angels in pop culture are just as fierce a reactionary measure to the Bad Gods as Sympathetic Devils are, only they are the version of the story in which the Devil does not find comfort in leaving God behind, but turmoil. Rebel Angels learn love from their religion, and so those whom they love become an extension of their piety. But when Rebel Angels are told that they are loving the wrong people they must re-examine their place in the world of God altogether. Whether the queerness is intentional, as it is with Aziraphale’s love of Crowley, or screened beneath a guise, as it is with Castiel’s love of humans as a result of his love of Dean, the struggle devolves into Rebel Angels being forced to learn how to incorporate somebody their Heaven has deemed “Godless” into their worship without themselves losing the supposedly unending love of God in the process. But this is not a struggle without end. The solution, it seems, comes when Rebel Angels decide then to find God in the faces of those they love instead of from the doctrine which has barricaded them. Or, more simply, when the Rebel Angels love not in spite of their faith but because of it.
While I have spoken exclusively of the conflation of faith and queerness as applied to Biblically adjacent media, the true desire masked by the sea of Rebel Angels and Sympathetic Devils and Bad Gods is not one relegated only to Christianity. There lies, in between it all, the painstakingly human plea that we may govern ourselves in a way that allows us to express love as we please and that we not have to give up the safety of religion to do so. I myself am an atheist, though I was raised Christian and Jewish. My atheism, however, is not a negation of faith, but an expression of it, merely found in a place outside of organized religion. I find myself enchanted by the depictions of gay angels in modern media—a sort of character that almost tricks you into believing it should be an oxymoron, but could not be any farther from it. Gay Angels rebel against Heaven not because they hate it, or wish to see it destroyed, but because they wish to be loved by it in return.
Castiel once said to Dean Winchester: “I cared about the whole world because of you.” What, pray tell, could be holier than this?