Jeremy Irons, Portugal & Hollywood’s Bias Against God

Why is Hollywood so determined to portray Christianity as a foe of political freedom when actually it is the originator and guarantor of it? The answers are obvious, sadly, but the ongoing results are vexing.

Night Train to Lisbon with Jeremy Irons, based on a popular German novel, is a beautifully filmed and cast story set primarily during the last days of Portugal’s Salazar regime. Salazar and his anointed successor, until the 1975 revolution, were akin to Franco next door in Spain. The regime offered stability and economic growth, resting on a form of Catholic authoritarianism, while also repressing its adversaries.

Irons is a mundane Swiss teacher living in current times who discovers a bewitching memoir by an idealistic young Portuguese philosopher and doctor who had joined the resistance against the regime even as his father was an official for it. Under the spell of such an electrifying life, Irons spontaneously jumps aboard a night train to Lisbon to learn about and hopefully meet this hero who it turns out died shortly after the revolution.

Irons meets the philosopher’s now aging family, friends, and priest teacher, all of whom were awed by the young hero’s soaring ideals, which equated freedom with rejection of God and eternity. Such transcendence represses appreciation for the vitality of the moment, he insisted.

As recalled by the elderly priest, the young philosopher had courageously unveiled his ideology as keynoter at his graduation, denouncing the dictatorship, which he linked to the church. “I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty,” he explains. He also praises cathedrals while denouncing what they teach. Many indignantly walk out, including his parents to their waiting limousine.

The priest recalls to Irons that after the young philosopher died from a brain aneurism, his coffin was covered by the red carnations that symbolized the revolution. And the priest himself, respecting his former student’s atheism, avoided any religious talk in his funeral homily except “amen.”

Irons relishes every iota of detail about the young hero without direct comment on the atheism, as expected from a droll Swiss school teacher. And Irons is ultimately inspired himself to seize the moment in escape from his own dreary existence.

Portugal’s 1975 revolution is still celebrated today although its consequences were not glowingly positive in the initial wake. At one point communist aligned military officers seized control although later overthrown, and Portugal transitioned to democracy fairly peacefully. More tumultuously, Portugal’s overseas empire was “liberated” into chaos. East Timor was viciously occupied by Indonesia. Guinea Bissau became a cruel dictatorship and remains repressive. Mozambique and Angola became Communist Soviet client states convulsed into horrible civil war for much of two decades, killing hundreds of thousands. Nearly 1 million Portuguese colonialists precipitously fled back to Portugal in the weeks after the 1975 revolution, leaving the colonies without a professional class for the transition.

There’s no indication that the young idealistic philosopher whom Irons so admires is himself Marxist. But his equation of religion with repression synchronizes with the repressive and atheistic “liberation” movements that seized much of the Portuguese empire, brutalizing and killing far more than did the comparatively benign Salazar dictatorship.

Fortunately Portugal itself escaped the full implications of the young philosopher’s atheism, ultimately becoming democratic and mostly remaining Catholic. Here’s one interesting aside: the old Salazar era regime, which belonged to NATO, was the only European country to allow U.S. supply aircraft to land for refueling as part of the emergency arms airlift to Israel during the 1973 war in which Soviet supplied Arab armies nearly prevailed.  May that old regime, despite its abuses, at least get some credit in the annals of Heaven.

And may Hollywood some day awaken from its tormented delusion that atheism and secularism are friends to liberty, when all of history indicates otherwise. As To Night Train to Lisbon, if you watch it, you’ll want to visit Portugal’s capital, which seems impossibly romantic.