The Theology of George Bailey
How IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE rebuilds our imagination for eternity
There are three things you should never discuss in polite company: politics, religion, and which Christmas movies are actually good.
Maybe that last one isn’t part of the saying, but it could be. The coldest time of the year has a tendency to bring out our hottest takes. Is The Polar Express the stuff of dreams or nightmares? Is Home Alone 2 underappreciated or overrated? Which Grinch is the definitive Grinch? And of course, there is the annual dialogue over Die Hard, which has become the most performative non-debate of all time. (We, as a society, can collectively shift our seasonal small talk to a different topic if we choose to. I believe in us.)
There are but a handful of films with nearly undisputed appeal—those select few with the power to unite households in holiday spirit across these great United States. A Charlie Brown Christmas is one such example. A Christmas Carol, with its many adaptations, is another.1 Probably none is so beloved, however, as It’s a Wonderful Life.
If you’re expecting a bold new opinion or reappraisal to follow in this article, I’ll be sorry to let you down: I think it is a very good movie. Frank Capra made some magic back in 1946. The black-and-white, Transatlantic-accent-infused, almost gooey-sentimental classic has a staying power that most forties films can’t claim. Old or young, man or woman, politically this way or that, film enthusiast or a “let’s just put something on the TV” person, It’s a Wonderful Life has a way of winning hearts and opening tear ducts even 77 years after its release.
What’s exciting about a good work of art, though, is that it becomes better as you revisit it. A film, book, painting, or poem may be static, yet human beings are not, and revisiting a work of art from a later point in your life may reveal another angle that you didn’t see before. Such was the case for me this past December. I’m publishing this in January, having completed another advent season and thus another rewatch. Yes, I did cry. And yes, I am a slow writer. What got me this year, though, more than Zuzu’s petals, more than lassoing the moon, more than “the richest man in town”, was the overwhelming image the film offered of Heaven.
Now, Heaven is a distinctly Christian frame of reference, but I think it’s fair terminology to use given how heavily the film involves angelic intervention. Still, if you’ll allow me to be so impolite as to discuss religion and Christmas movies in your company, I’d love to explain what I mean—because I’m not thinking about the afterlife.
What on Earth is Heaven?
“Heaven” is a word so tangled up with poor theology and pop culture portrayals that to define it any traditional theological sense requires we work backwards from a bad definition. Too many people—and far too many Christians—think about heaven as a sort of cosmic retirement home. You do enough good things while you’re on the earth, or believe the right doctrines, and once you die you’ll get to enjoy holy barbecues with St. Peter in the premier gated community of the clouds. Hooray!
The funny thing is, the Bible isn’t really interested in the afterlife in the way that we tend to be. Those who read the Gospels for the first time might be surprised to find that Jesus never talks about heaven as a place you go when you die. Rather, he almost exclusively talks about the “kingdom” of heaven—something that people can be part of here and now. One of his most well-known references to the “kingdom” comes in the famous prayer:
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Familiarity by way of Sunday School might make us gloss over what he’s saying here. Heaven, at its most simple definition, is where God dwells. God, in the Christian tradition, is held to be not only the creator but the essence of Love itself. So when Jesus prays that God’s will be done and his kingdom come, he is inviting into earth all that heaven entails: beauty and power, wisdom and justice, truth and glory, and Love as ultimate reality. These are the qualities of the kingdom that Jesus proclaims. The Christian hope is not so much that we go to heaven, but that heaven comes to earth.
I could say more to this point. But at this juncture, you may rightly be wondering—
How does Heaven come to Earth?
You may also be asking “Does this have anything to do with the movie?” and yeah, fair enough. We’re almost there!
If a renewed world is the Christian hope of the future, it raises questions on what that means for the present. The notion of “establishing the kingdom” has historically, and tragically, been twisted to meet human ends. Some Christians have conflated the kingdom with military power—the ideology undergirding the crusades of ages past and the nationalism of our own day. Other Christians, less volatile but similarly misguided, have married the kingdom with theories of utopia. The trouble is, our frameworks for perfection always end up smaller than the world Jesus envisioned.
What then? Surely we’re not meant to sit passively by and wait for Christ to return. Yet our own efforts to make meaningful change usually wind up inadequate. Most of us folks are just trying to get by and do the best we can in our little corner of the world. If that’s all we can offer, are we truly contributing anything to this coming kingdom?
Well, let me introduce you to my friend George Bailey.
In It’s a Wonderful Life, we first encounter our guy through the eyes of heaven—namely, his guardian angels. The film portrays these beings as stars, which is a cool creative choice. (Even if what the movie has to say about bells and wings makes for little more than cute nonsense.2) George, we learn, has spent his life as an unsung hero: saving his brother’s life when they were kids, sacrificing his dreams to preserve his family’s Building & Loan, standing up to the machinations of town banker Mr. Potter. These selfless deeds have earned him a lot of goodwill from his community, but precious little material benefit. In fact, the good he’s done has usually come at his own expense.
When we get to George in the present, a stroke of bad luck and Mr. Potter’s maliciousness have quite literally driven him to the edge. With the threat of bankruptcy and arrest on the horizon, we find him drunk and despairing on the Bedford Falls bridge.
Now, I have a soft spot for the unassailable good guys of cinema—the Paddingtons, Clark Kents, Waymond Wangs—and George Bailey is surely among their number. But I think it’s important we see George in this place of despair, being cruel to his loved ones, and even considering ending his own life. Suicidal ideation surely isn’t typical Christmas movie fare! Without that darkness, I think what follows in It’s A Wonderful Life would ring hollow.
With a snap of the fingers from Clarence – Angel Second Class, George witnesses an alternate timeline in which he never existed. In this reality, Mr. Potter’s greed has turned the town of Bedford Falls into a cesspool of materialism and sleazy business. George’s brother is dead. His old employer, Mr. Gower, is in prison. His Uncle Billy has been put in a mental institution. What truly shakes George, however, is looking into the eyes of Mary—his wife, the woman who loved him and led him to be the force for good he has been in Bedford Falls—and finding her a stranger. A reality without their love has made for a town without love.3
Insignificant as his actions may have felt at the time, George realizes just how impactful those goods deeds were—to his friends, to his family, and to the community at large. “Each man's life touches so many other lives,” Clarence says. “When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?”
It’s an encouragement all of us need at some point in our lives. Even at our lowest point, we’re still worthy of life, and our presence does infinitely more good for the world than our absence would do. But It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t simply an affirmation of the present. It has a hope for the future.
In Bedford Falls as in Heaven
I don’t need to tell you the film’s ending is glorious. Returned to his original timeline, an enlivened George Bailey runs home through a snowing Bedford Falls, gleefully shouting “Merry Christmas!” to each and every thing along the way. In a eucatastrophe that befits the holiday’s holy meaning, George comes home to realize that the threat of bankruptcy and arrest has vanished. Mary and his Uncle Billie have rallied the community together to raise more than enough money to save the Building & Loan. The people of Bedford Falls, it turns out, hadn’t forgotten George’s kindness.
Watching this scene, it struck me: I think this is what the kingdom of heaven looks like.
If you come to Jesus’ words in search of a clear-cut explanation of how the kingdom works, you’ll walk away with a mosaic of promises and pictures. It’s part of what makes him so fascinating as a teacher. But my favorite of his parables might be this one:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field: it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31–32)
George Bailey is a man who planted many seeds. Often, his generosity hurt him more than it helped others. He had to sacrifice his own dreams and hopes to do what was best for his family. And he even doubted whether any of it was worth it. But in It’s a Wonderful Life’s final moments, the seeds of goodwill that George planted over the years—though he neither asked nor expected anything in return—all come to harvest in a sudden and unexpected revelation.
If we dare to hope in the kingdom of heaven, I think we should open our imagination for such a future possibility to be true in our own lives.
Perhaps the things we have been called to do in the present are more than questions of momentary obedience. Perhaps these moments are even now being woven into tapestry larger than we can see.4 Perhaps, in the fullness of time, we may find ourselves just as surprised as George Bailey—not by how many good things we’ve done, but by how much goodness has been done through us. One man’s life touches so many others, after all.
However invisibly or impossibly, I’ve come to believe that the good we do in this life is tending a seed. We don’t know the day it will reach fullness and flourishing, but I do think that the work is worth it. If Frank Capra can imagine such a beautiful ending for his story, how much more could God?
Even our smallest acts of charity may prove to be the means by which heaven and earth have been brought together.
If you’re unsure which version of A Christmas Carol is the greatest of all time, I can only offer this wisdom: there’s but one adaptation in which the Great Gonzo plays Charles Dickens.
Bad angelology is the one thing I can fault this film for. With all the love to Clarence Odbody, the idea that cherubim originate as a former human souls misses the whole point of humanity’s physical resurrection. But I digress.
An entire article could be written about the miraculous character of Mary, but that article has already been written. Check out "There Is No Mary Problem" by Clare Coffey; it’s really spectacular.
I’m paraphrasing N.T. Wright with this tapestry line. Check out his book Surprised by Hope if you want to hear someone way smarter than me talk about this same stuff.
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