Yeon Sang-ho’s Revelations, recently released on Netflix, accomplishes something contrary to its apparent end goal. Smugly critical of Christianity, the film dramatizes the fall of a young, hypocritical pastor who dreams of leading a megachurch. Believing he has been granted a special dispensation to commit crimes that forward a divine agenda, pastor Sung Min-chan gets up to all sorts of awful chicanery. Faith, Revelations will try to convince us, involves delusions easily explained by psychoanalysis and a bit of common sense.
But in the process of gleefully undercutting Pastor Sung’s occupation—and his frequent, loud protestations of righteousness—Revelations unwittingly illustrates a truth: “After desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:15).
This kind of accidental truth telling isn’t unusual. In the Christian-skeptical works of self-professed atheists—poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, novelist Virginia Woolf, or filmmaker Lars von Trier—concerted efforts to dismantle the church, brick by brick, often reveal the strength of its foundation.
The truth will out.
Revelations states its thesis most clearly toward its conclusion—not in a church but in a psychiatric office. Months earlier, psychiatrist Lee Nak-seong’s testimony successfully portrayed the criminal Kwon Yang-rae as more of a victim than the young woman he kidnapped and raped. Yang-rae walked free. The young woman took her own life.
Now the young woman’s sister, a detective, is attempting to find Yang-rae’s latest victim—and is seeking more details about Yang-rae’s tortured childhood. Reluctantly, she pays a visit to the clinician she blames for her sibling’s death.
In this late scene, the film attempts to present Lee Nak-seong as a truth teller, a lucid voice surrounded by religious maniacs and tortured survivors incapable of thinking straight. Faced with the anxious detective, he coolly explains that her ongoing hallucinations of her dead, accusing sister (visible to her during their conversation) resemble Yang-rae’s obsession with his abusive stepfather, the “one-eyed monster” he holds responsible for his crimes.
And these fixations are just the same as (now-incarcerated) Pastor Sung’s fantasy that Christ ratifies his selfish actions. “Most tragedies are caused in life by a combination of circumstances we cannot control,” Dr. Lee intones. “Things like the Devil and monsters are created by humans to justify themselves.”
The psychiatrist deftly reduces the Devil and sin alike to imaginary playthings, illusions generated to deal with problems better attributed to mere “circumstance.” For a moment, his words echo the conclusions of notorious psychologist B. F. Skinner, a behaviorist who questioned the existence of free will in light of the many environmental factors shaping human action. Dr. Lee, however, admits humanity’s tendency toward self-justification, presuming a moral framework that Skinner never would have approved.
Self-justification is what enables Pastor Sung’s hypocrisy. At the opening of Revelations, the evangelical leader’s humble role as the shepherd of a small but tightly knit church vies with secret aspirations to lead a much larger congregation in a fancy building being erected in their district. When he learns that his superior has no intention of considering him for the position despite his investment in the neighborhood, he drops to his knees and begs God to grant him the opportunity.
A few days later, Pastor Sung’s supplication appears to have worked. The young man slated for this appointment is publicly accused of adultery. Assured of God’s favor, Pastor Sung does everything possible to avoid disqualification for the pulpit he has now been offered, including interpreting visions of divine figures in rainstorms as supernatural stamps of approval for criminal action.
The Collateral Damage of Sin
Before matters careen completely off the rails, Pastor Sung wins a small measure of viewer sympathy. The camera lingers on the rotting walls and leaky ceiling of his dilapidated church office as he tries to befriend an unfamiliar man who has wandered into the worship service. Pastor Sung has recently learned his wife is having an affair—but even rocked by this betrayal and noticing the GPS tracker on the stranger’s ankle, he still manages to mumble a kind of welcome: “Church is for sinners. God loves us all.”
Even these vulnerable moments, however, anticipate Pastor Sung’s fall. The desire to report growing attendance drives his overtures to the visitor as much as any genuine concern. He’s disappointed to discover that the stranger, later revealed to be Yang-rae out on bail, did not fill out the membership form despite being given a freshly laundered church jacket.
Pastor Sung’s confrontation with his unfaithful spouse also erodes our pity. His calls for her to confess hidden sins jar uncomfortably with the false claim that he has “repented for everything” himself.
Revelations is a torrid melodrama, sporting poorly written dialogue, unrealistic characterization, and situations that beggar belief. It does, however, effectively illustrate how desire can partner with self-interest to conceive sin. Pastor Sung’s longing for public renown in his faith community combines with an overwhelming need to appear righteous in his own and others’ eyes. Pride, deceit, and aggression proliferate. The pastor is convinced: God wants him to take all necessary actions—including murdering Yang-rae—to ensure he can step into the new preaching position.
“And sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”
Pastor Sung’s downfall might have been interrupted had he seized a few opportunities for confession. He could have shared his coverups with his wife instead of hammering her in a self-congratulatory prayer session that ignores his own failings. He could have confessed to his church while preaching, ironically, on a passage that points to his own crimes.
Get Behind Me, Self
Revelations sets up Pastor Sung as a straw man; the film confronts the Christian with a series of supposed “revelations” that merely reveal his entrenched self-interest. If he had been moved to tearful contrition when recognizing the silhouette of a crucified Christ hanging in the hills or a winged angel breaking through the clouds, these images would have seemed timely, corrective visions. Instead of heaven-sent messages, they become data points, empirical evidence of self-justifying delusions.
What the film’s creators do not appear willing to realize is that Pastor Sung’s outrageous hypocrisy reifies the very standard he fails to uphold. His risible brokenness, which all humanity shares to some degree, cannot help but point to the need for grace. When embraced with humility, there’s nothing—even murder—that Christ’s blood cannot cover.
Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”
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