George Bailey didn’t want to run the Building and Loan. He wanted to go to college. He wanted to travel the world. He wanted to have a honeymoon. In every case, he could have folded and pursued his own dreams. But he didn’t. George Bailey saw a need and stepped into the gap. He chose to store up treasures in heaven rather than on earth.

As we head towards the Christmas season, I want to highlight the hidden lessons of the film It’s a Wonderful Life.

The Catholic neoreactionary writer the Social Pathologist wrote some great reflections about how Protestantism was superior to Catholicism in adaptating to modernity. In it he points to George Bailey as an archetype of the Protestant man.

Which brings me to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve always enjoyed the movie but only recently have seen some of its deeper theological significance. While Catholicism has been a factory of saints, Protestantism has been a factory of George Baileys. (Casting Jimmy Stewart was perfect) It is true that he is fictional character, but he is also an archetype of the a type of man that we all know, and the type of high minded [mainline] Protestant man who is slowly disappearing due to the cultural forces that have been unleashed since the sixties. Although the movie is fictional it, unnervingly, is beginning to resemble real life.  Bedford Falls may be a fictional town but I remember the world I grew up in strongly resembling it, the world I live in now is slowly turning to Pottersville. The genius of the movie is the depiction of what world would have looked like without Protestant George Bailey. The irony of it is that is was made by a Catholic.

Now I do have disagreements with Protestantism, but my intention here is to praise one of its strengths. And its strength was to produce thousands of George Bailey’s, who in various fields and in their own small way were able to transform the world. Catholicism may have a great theology of the Incarnation but Protestantism, at its best, produced the goods, and bought Christianity to the day to day affairs of men. [emphasis added]

There are actually two great Protestant archetypes in the film, George Bailey and Mr. Potter. Potter, like Ebenezer Scrooge, is an example of what happens when the Protestant ethic is combined with avariciousness and a lack of charity. (The actor who played Potter had previously played Scrooge in radio broadcasts). The film thus contrasts these two characters.

As I’ve noted, in a previous era it would have been common for the president of the local bank to be the most powerful person in town. That’s Potter here, a genuine, wealthy elite.

Bailey is not at that level. He never becomes personally wealthy. He’s not really elite in the social status sense. But he runs the Building and Loan, which appears to be the second largest financial institution in town. That alone grants him status.

What’s key to Bailey is his institutional orientation and civic mindset. Bailey takes over the Building and Loan after his father’s death and treats it as his personal responsibility to sustain that institution through depression, war, and relentless outside attacks by Potter.

Read More