How Not to Become God: What Watchmen Can Teach Christians about Living in a Godless World Benjamin Leeper Introduction “WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?”— the slogan is emblazoned in graffiti that contrasts the burnt orange sky, iris orchid skyline, and long shadows of a city that seems to be in constant twilight (Figure 1). Nearby, a man with bright orange hair carries a sign that reads, “THE END IS NIGH.” In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchman, this sidewalk prophet is treated as an amusing oddity—a reminder of a bygone era when the end was not so imminent that its significance could be addressed seriously. The world of Watchman has a history like our own, except for two seemingly minor points of divergence. In 1938, an unknown man wearing a black hood and a rope tied in a noose around his neck violently attacked a gang of men assaulting a young man and a woman. Then in 1959, a man named Jon Osterman forgot his girlfriend’s watch in an intrinsic field experiment test chamber. These two events rippled out into the world, bringing forth an age of vigilante crime fighters, a vastly different
Fig. 1. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, New Edition (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2014), 2:18.
Rev. Benjamin Leeper is an associate pastor at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Sun Prairie, WI. He graduated from Concordia University Nebraska with a B.A. in Communication and Theatre. In 2022, he completed his M.Div. at Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis. Currently, he is writing his S.T.M. thesis at Concordia Seminary on the relationship between Lutheran ecclesiology and the doctrine of justification. He has also contributed to the Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture series from Fortress Academic. He and his wife, Emily, have been married for five years and enjoy living in Marshall, WI. Copyright 2023 Lutheran Society for Missiology. Used by permission. View Lutheran Mission Matters 31, no. 2 (2023) at https://lsfm.global/.. E-mail lsfmissiology@gmail.com to purchase a print copy of a single issue.