“For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

October 7 changed this nation. It rocked the nation of Israel to its core, of course, but it made a change in this nation whose impact will ripple out for a long time. This is because it revealed a fundamental brokenness in our culture that many folks didn’t understand or believe was there. It seems appropriate, then, that not long after this, a movie was released, based on a book, both of which (although the book did a better job of it) explored this tension between the good we know we should do and the evil we actually do. Let’s spend a few minutes today wrestling with this ugly tension through the lens of the latest Hunger Games saga installment, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Suzanne Collins, the author of the Hunger Games series, seems to have a pretty grim perspective on life and humanity. At least, she doesn’t seem to expect that we are going to go through any major period of moral improvement anytime soon. Really, this fits with the broader pessimism of our culture. For a brief stint in our nation’s past, we became so confident of our ability to make the world a better place and to make ourselves better, that an understanding of Revelation among Christians arose called “post-millennialism” which held that Jesus was going to return after the millennial kingdom mentioned in Revelation 20. We weren’t going to need Him to come and make things right because we were going to get there ourselves, and He would just show up after we finished in order to tell us what a good job we did. That Western optimism mostly died after World War II. Today it feels a best like a distant memory.

Collins released The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2020, and in it she told the backstory of Coriolanus Snow. Snow was the evil President of Panem throughout the Hunger Games trilogy. In the Hunger Games, Snow is a sociopath, but one who fully believes in the harsh measures he takes to secure his power and the life the citizens of the Capital enjoy. In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Snow is a high school senior still trying to figure out who he is and who he is going to be.

Snow’s family used to be one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Capital. Both of his parents died long before the events of the book, his mother in childbirth (along with his sister), and his father in the war with the Districts. When the war ended and the economy and industries in Panem began to transition back to peacetime operation, the Snow family fortune vanished. When the book opens, Snow is living with his grandmother (the Grandma’am) and his beloved cousin, Tigris, in the family’s apartment. They manage to scrape together a subsistence lifestyle while maintaining the mirage of wealth for the outside world. Only a very few people know of the dire financial straits the family is really facing.

Coriolanus is a complicated character. He still carries the emotional scars from the death of his mother and a father who was a blend of absent in the war, and fairly cold but with high expectations. He remembers his mother’s warmth, but is relentlessly driven to achieve greatness because of his father’s lingering voice in his head. His cousin, Tigris, helps to keep him grounded, while the Grandma’am continues his father’s (her son’s) legacy of pushing him forward to keep the Snow name on top.

When the story opens, the Hunger Games are ten years old, and many citizens of the Capital are beginning to openly question their morality. The Games aren’t nearly the spectacle they are by the time of the 74th Games in the first Hunger Games book. In fact, much of the spectacle they become is the result of the events in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Presiding over the games now is not the current President who appears only ever by name in the book, but Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the Head Gamemaker and chief scientist of the Capital. While we discover that the games were originally the idea of Snow’s own father and Casca Highbottom, the Dead of the Academy where Snow attends school, they have been Gaul’s baby from the start.

In the face of waning interest and a growing moral discontent with the Games, Dr. Gaul proposes a new approach. Twenty-four students from the Academy will be selected as mentors for the District Tributes in hopes of generating more buy-in from the people. Whoever does the best job (which eventually becomes winning the games) will receive the Plinth prize, a lucrative and prestigious college scholarship. Snow, hoping for a strong candidate from District 1 or 2 to be given to him on the strength of his family’s name, winds up being stuck with the female tribute from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird.

Lucy Gray winds up being a spectacle herself, and with the help of Snow’s drive, desperation, and willingness to cheat in order to advance himself, she winds up winning. The saga of those events comprises the first two-thirds of the story. The final part finds Snow punished for cheating by being forced to join the Peacekeepers, the main infantry of Panem, and the muscle the Capital uses to keep the rest of the Districts in line, on a 20-year deployment. Although he is originally assigned to a different district, Snow finds that he has fallen in love with Lucy Gray, and asks to be assigned to District 12 in hopes of being able to find her again.

This, of course, happens fairly soon after his arrival, and the two begin a secret romance. Their romance sets the stage for the real tension of the book as Snow wrestles internally with who he wants to be. He has several paths stretched out before him. One path is to pursue a life with Lucy Gray and the Covey, her gypsy family, as they make their simple, but happy life together. Things aren’t easy for them, but they really do love each other, something Snow hasn’t often experienced in his life. Another path is to stick to the Peacekeeper life he has been assigned, serve his time, and return to the Capital where he will start from the bottom and work his way back up the social ladder from there.

Pushing against both of these options, though, is his enormous personal ambition combined with a growing and genuine belief in the worldview of Dr. Gaul and the Capital more generally which looks down on the members of the various Districts as almost sub-human and who are in need of the firm hand of the Capital to keep them from giving in to their baser natural instincts. In fact, all people are fitted with these natural instincts. When pushed and put into the right environment, people are little more than animals who will fight and kill one another in a naked battle for the survival of the fittest. The Hunger Games themselves are the perfect example of this. Put into an arena and given the proper motivation (the threat of starvation, for instance), the children tributes become vicious animals willing to murder each other violently in their bid for survival. The job of the Capital is to use the necessary methods to keep people from giving in to these instincts. The most enlightened members of society (which, of course, are all the Capital citizens) have the right to do all of this for the good of everyone. And if they happen to benefit personally from their efforts, well, that’s just the lifestyle they are owed for their noble sacrifice. In this sense, the Hunger Games are merely a microcosm of how the world itself works.

In the end, Snow buys fully into all of this. He betrays his best friend, Sejanus Plinth, lies to Sejanus’ family in order to ingratiate himself to them so that he can access Sejanus’ father’s enormous fortune to fund his rise to power, lies to Lucy Gray who abandons him (further confirming his pessimistic suspicions about people), and makes himself a disciple of the amoral Dr. Gaul. All of this paves the way for his becoming the evil dictator who rules the nation with an iron fist in The Hunger Games.

While the movie was good, it wasn’t nearly as good as the book. Part of this is because the movie tries to stay so faithful to the book (except for a number of changes that didn’t make a lot of sense to me). While the first two-thirds of the book are sufficiently action-packed to make for a good movie, the final part moves more slowly as Snow wrestles with himself over the path he is going to take. This just didn’t translate well to the big screen.

What really caught my attention in all of this was just how many echoes the story has of the Gospel story. I doubt Collins intended this, but they are there all the same. For starters, there is this tension we have been talking about. This almost perfectly reflects the tension Paul expressed to the Roman believers here in Romans 7:15. If you are at all like me, you know exactly what Paul is talking about. You wrestle with wanting to do what is good and right, but giving into to what is wrong and sinful far more often than you’d care to admit.

Channeling Paul in his letter to the Galatian believers, but in a more cynical light is Dr. Gaul’s pessimistic understanding of people. Paul writes in Galatians 5:19 that “the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar.” Or, as Paul wrote earlier in his letter to the Roman church, “What then? Are we any better off? Not at all! For we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin, as it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; all alike have become worthless. There is no one who does what is good, not even one.'”

The authors of the New Testament have this incredibly dim view of our ability to achieve any kind of moral progress, let alone moral perfection on our own. We are broken at every point and will always do the sinful thing if given the chance. We cannot produce anything good on our own. And if you doubt any of this, just look around. Read or watch the news. Look at the images of college students across the country in the wake of October 7 actively taking the side of Hamas in their violent attack on innocent Israeli citizens. Look at the open denials that Hamas raped wives and mothers in front of their husbands and children and then killed them, or that they murdered, even beheading, babies simply because they were Jewish babies. Look at the number of groups chanting in the streets, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that is a fairly obvious call for the genocide of an entire group of people. The moral rot is there in all of us. It just takes the right set of circumstances to release it out into the open.

There are two responses to this gross moral corruption that lies at the heart of all people. One is the response of the Capital and which Snow embraces by the end of the book. If people are moral monsters like this if given the freedom to do so, then their freedom must be taken away. Freedom must be exchanged for security. Of the two responses, this is the more natural response. This is the path that governments all around the world take on a regular basis. Even societies that begin with great amounts of political freedom gradually drift in this direction. Our own nation is a perfect example of this drift. This response is the easier of the two as well. Sure, we don’t get to do as many things perhaps as we did before, but at least we don’t have to worry about violence in the streets. We can close our doors at night and not fear who might come knocking on them. Of course, once a government starts to grow and take this power of social regulation to heart, there is no natural endpoint to the progress short the kind of stifling totalitarianism we see rapidly advancing in China. Ideas have consequences and this hopeless, Gospel-less view of humanity creates victims.

Fortunately, there is another way. John Adams wrote many famous things in his lifetime, but one of the more well-known was this: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We cannot regulate our own behavior. That much is clear. We can take the path of allowing the State to regulate it for us, or we can walk the path of virtue. Yet this virtue doesn’t come from us, so if we are going to walk this other path, the path that actually has the power of maintaining our freedom, we are going to have to look to another source.

Paul writes about this other source in Romans 3:21: “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, attested by the Law and the Prophets. The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, since there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

The Gospel offers what Suzanne Collins can’t seem to find. It offers hope for a genuine moral transformation. With the power of the Holy Spirit in us, positive moral progress is a live possibility. The restrictions Snow came to embrace are not a foregone conclusion. Listen to one more thing Paul wrote: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.”

Through faith in Christ, we will find access to the kind of virtue that is capable of sustaining freedom. This is not natural. It requires the help of the Spirit, but we have that very help in spades when we put our trust in Christ. The more our culture continues to turn away from this particular path (and reaps the bitter fruits that come from such a turning), the more those who stick to it will stand out. In this kind of a world, the church has a real opportunity to shine like a city on a hill, offering hope and direction to all those who care to receive it. The world will hate us because we put the lie to what it declares to be the only solution which itself threatens the world’s grip on power, but our kingdom will endure. And when we align ourselves fully with that kingdom, we will endure with it.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was an average movie and a terrific book. Watch it, but definitely read it. And when you are finished, re-immerse yourself in the Gospel story that offers the beautiful counterpoint we need to refresh our hope. The world is going the way of Panem. It always has been. Let’s commit to showing the world something truly different. Our Gospel commission demands no less.