Like Darth Vader, Kylo Ren Was Redeemed: And You Can Be Too

REDEMPTION AS TAUGHT IN STAR WARS

“The greatest teacher, failure is” – Yoda

The conclusion of the Return of the Jedi (1983), the final installment of the original Star Wars trilogy, is one of my absolute favorite moments in all of the Star Wars saga. What’s not to like? There’s the dazzling space battle where against all the odds the Rebels take out the Death Star for a second time, there’s the climactic duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader wherein Vader turns back to the light… and to top it all off, there’s a raucous victory celebration on Endor complete with fuzzy, dancing killer bears. But the scene in the sagas final act that always gets me is a much more quiet moment.

It’s a conversation that Luke has with Vader, alone on a landing platform on the forest moon of Endor. Once in the dark about Vader’s true identity, Luke now knows the dark lord was once Anakin Skywalker. Luke has accepted that this metallic ghoul is in fact his long lost father. Young Skywalker attempts to rattle Vader and shake him from the path he’s chosen. He tells Vader that there is still another way:

“You can’t do this. I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate!” Luke says to Vader. There’s a somber pause, “It’s too late for me, son,” Vader says back. From there Vader beckons Stormtroopers to take Luke away to be presented to the evil Emperor. It’s a death sentence for the young Jedi if he doesn’t join forces with the Empire.

This post is an excerpt from How The Force Can Fix The World, a book by Stephen Kent

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This post is an excerpt from How The Force Can Fix The World, a book by Stephen Kent 〰️

After Luke is gone, Vader walks slowly to the glass window of the walkway, breathing heavily as he always does. He leans forward and grabs the handrail and stares blankly out at the forest before him. Not even Vader’s mask can hide the thoughts tumbling through his mind.

Luke was right — there is conflict within him.

Star Wars fans today are familiar with Anakin’s story from the prequels. But this scene in its original context is supposed to be the first real glimpse audiences see of the man behind the dark mask, the fallen Jedi trapped beneath the black cape and life support system of Darth Vader.

Vader just stares. You’re left wondering what it is he’s thinking. What calculation is he making? Is his conscience stirred by what’s about to happen to Luke? To say “it’s too late for me” is a fatalistic response to Luke’s invitation to walk away from the dark side. He could have said something like,“I’m happy with where I am, thank you very much,” or “I’ve never felt better.” But he didn’t because that’s not true. Vader is miserable; he just doesn’t see another way.

In his despair, Vader opts to continue what he’s been doing since the day he first donned the black armor and breathing apparatus. He doubles down and choses to reside in his shame. Redemption, he feels, is unattainable.

Even the best of us can relate. When you look around the world, do you see a culture of personal growth, forgiveness and redemption on the rise? Or do you see one of vengeance, vindictiveness and retribution taking hold of our discourse and behavior? Perhaps “cancel culture” comes to mind, or criminal justice policies that prioritize harsh punishment over rehabilitation. When I talk to friends both left, right and center, I hear the same worry that we’re on the latter path. We agree that it didn’t always used to be this way, and that something has changed.

It’s no coincidence that politics has polarized and become so extreme at the same time our societies are adopting social media as the primary mode of interaction. Religious affiliation and belief wane as the Twitterverse waxes. The resulting shift in the ideological tide has swept us off our feet. And now we’re all at sea. How do we think about our place in the world? How should we treat one another? Believe it or not, about such things Star Wars holds a lot of wisdom for us.

This chapter is about redemption — the idea that when we’ve messed up, it’s not the end of our story. Often confused with “forgiveness” or “atonement,” redemption is tied to our capacity for hope. It’s something we believe in, more than it is something we do. To give up on redemption is to resign ourselves to living life in the wreckage of our forefathers or the life that we’ve created for ourselves, like Darth Vader.

Star Wars is a story that believes in redemption. It is not just a space opera about the road to hell good intentions can lead you down, it's also a story about the road back home. Maybe that road leads back to family, or to friends or just to a mirror where a person who has done terrible things can learn to look at themselves again and not despise what they see. Darth Vader finds redemption in the faith and good will of an estranged son. Ben Solo, Vader’s grandson, finds redemption in mercy of a rival, and the unconditional love of his parents. To a culture mired in such vitriolic division, where no matter what you do or say it seems there’s always judgement waiting for you, these stories of redemption are absolutely vital. In our own lives we must fight to preserve what little appetite our culture has left for redemption and do the hard work of building it back up again.

A society that underrates the value of redemption is not a society any of us should want to live in. Because while we may want to hold people who do us wrong accountable or “cancel” them, we’ll ultimately be defined by how we treat those who have fallen and are looking for a hand up. Redemption has long been a key element of America’s story. It’s the pursuit of progress — not perfection — and a recognition of our errors that offers us a path to peace with one another and within ourselves. This has been true in America since the founding, and moving forward, this is how we fix our country and the world.

Star Wars isn’t going to solve everything. The saga from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away couldn’t possibly lead us to a new order or to global peace and harmony. But it does point us to some key concepts that, if we take them to heart, could help us on our journey through our flawed world.

So let’s jump in! To start, let’s consider a scandal central to the Star Wars universe: The bad guys get away with murder and genocide.

Space Nazis and Sith Deplorables

Do Darth Vader and Kylo Ren amount to “space Nazis?” Star Wars fans love to debate these kinds of things. They’re both militaristic leaders of expansionary, brutal regimes and have a long track record of war crimes and participation in acts of genocide. Very bad stuff! Nevertheless, both Darth Vader and Kylo Ren experience redemption arcs in their stories. They come back to the light and lay down their ruby-red lightsabers in an effort to finally do the right thing. And both die in some semblance of peace.

Darth Vader intervenes in the torture of his son, Luke Skywalker, at the hands of Emperor Palpatine and his Force lightning. In a move guaranteed to short-circuit his mechanical breathing apparatus, Vader picks his evil master up and throws him down a pit within the Death Star. He relinquishes the dark side and has Luke remove his mask. Vader embraces his true identity, and mere moments before his death, the audience witnesses the return of the long lost Jedi, Anakin Skywalker. Later, at the celebration on Endor, he shows up as a Force ghost, a feat accomplished by only the best of Jedi who’ve become one with the Force (more on that later).

Years later Vader’s grandson, Ben Solo, lives out the same story. Just like his grandfather, Solo turns to the dark side and develops an alter ego. Whereas Vader was born out of tragic loss and anger; Kylo Ren was born out of confusion and betrayal. Yet just as Vader eventually finds his way back to the light, so too does Ren. In the end, he even fights the same villain. In the climactic scene of The Rise of Skywalker Ren helps Rey conquer Palpatine once and for all, giving his life in the process. At his death, Ren vanishes — an indication that he too has become one with the Force.

What gives? How is this fair? Both Vader and Ren are guilty. They’ve done horrible things and are both responsible for atrocities, including but not limited to overseeing the slaughter of millions throughout the galaxy and murdering their own kin. They’re monsters.

Still, despite their monstrocity, most fans (myself among them) yearn for them to change. Why is that?

I don’t know a single Star Wars fan who hungers for Darth Vader to have “gotten what he deserved” or to have been executed for his crimes. But that could be because Return of the Jedi came out nearly 40 years ago.

The discourse around Kylo Ren, however, is noticeably different. Perhaps it’s merely the existence of Twitter making divisive fan debates more visible than ever before, but I’d argue something has changed within the hearts of the audience.

As we approached 2019 and the release of the sequel trilogy's final installment, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, a dialogue began online about what kind of message it sent to fans if Kylo Ren found redemption in the end. You had one segment of fandom arguing that Kylo Ren was the embodiment of privilege, a white male of royal blood with loving parents who still chose to join a quasi-fascist regime and oppress the galaxy. This slice of woke fans filter Star Wars through their politics of social justice and looked at what Star Wars chose to do with Kylo as a signal of whether Disney was a committed ally in the fight against “white supremacy.” Take that narrative as you will. Whether he’s an embodiment of white supremacy or just a symbol of someone’s fall from grace, what’s indisputable is that Kylo is the worst of the worst.

Still, the debate yielded a more viral sensation: #Bendemption. An opposing corner of fandom stepped forward as super fans of Ben Solo, the boy beneath the mask of Kylo Ren, and formed an online community around the hope that Ben could come back to the light. These fans also really wanted Ben to be redeemed so he could hook up with Rey, but that’s beside the point.

If you thought The Last Jedi was divisive, watch your step wading into the #Bendemption discourse online. It’s a microcosm of a few different debates, but most importantly it’s a raging battle over the merits and pitfalls of cancel culture.

You can count me on Team Bendemption. We want hope in our Star Wars, and in the end, we more or less got it. And that’s one of the great things about the Star Wars universe, the accessibility of redemption to its worst characters is ultimately a commentary on what’s possible for you, the audience. You may not be an intergalactic fascist, but if the Kylo Ren’s of the fictional world aren’t redeemable, then maybe you aren’t either.

Carving out space in our popular culture for this message is becoming increasingly important, as matters in the real world have become quite perilous.

Remember the Bible story in which Jesus stops a mob from stoning to death a woman accused of adultery? It’s in John 8:7 where Christ intervenes and says, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” The crowd had intended to kill the woman in accordance with Mosaic law, the ultimate cancellation. But Jesus’s challenge to the mob — to look in the mirror and judge themselves first — stops them in their tracks. Their judgment of the accused woman was correct, but still, no one was willing to be the first person to claim the mantle of purity and serve as executioner.

If Jesus were around today, he’d be very busy.

In our world, we are all of us just one tweet away from a virtual stoning at the hands of a mob looking for any wrongdoing in our past that can be dredged up online. Mean tweets from when you were 15? Photos of you dressed up as a Native American for a school play in 4th grade? The Twitter mob knows no statute of limitations.

The hard truth is, we’re all just one slip up from being branded: “sinner,” “adulterer,” “racist,” “sexist,” “screw-up” — “space Nazi.” For this reason, we need to believe in redemption — the kind you see in the character arcs of Star Wars villains. Yes, they’re just stories, but they’re stories we need to hear. They’re stories that extend grace to the outcast and hope for anyone who's not just slipped up — but done real harm. And unless you really think you’re blameless enough to pick up that first stone and merk an adulteress, I think you’d agree that stories of absolution have a way of always hitting home.

Save your apologies

Cancel culture is largely considered to have started on elite college campuses in the mid 2010’s. A small but energized band of typically far-left activists would push to ostracize someone from social or professional life, for transgressions real or imagined, or blockade well-known conservative figures from appearing on campus for events small or large. Back in 2014, Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was supposed to give a commencement address for graduates of Rutgers University. Student activists protested. They staged a sit-in outside the office of the university president, chanting ‘cancel Condi.’ Rice was no stranger to student protest, having experienced it throughout her tenure in the George W. Bush administration for her role in the Iraq War.

This is fair game in a free country. Most people understood this to be the case. People can dislike you, there can be disagreement and dissent, and both parties ultimately have to deal with one another's existence. Condolezza Rice eventually bowed out of the Rutgers commencement, offering in a statement, “I have defended America’s belief in free speech and the exchange of ideas. These values are essential to the health of our democracy.”

Things have changed a lot since that time. I remember hearing these stories back then and thinking, “These are isolated incidents,” “College activists grow up eventually,” “Once these kids graduate and enter the workforce, they’ll adjust to reality.”

I could not have been more wrong.

Left to metastasize within institutions of higher education, universities have exported the ethos of cancel culture to the highest rungs of journalism, media and corporate America. The idea of “discomfort” with ideas evolved steadily to speech equaling violence. Team Bendemption may have won in the Star Wars universe, but in the real world the mob usually gets their way. And when it does, it’s never pretty. You’ve probably heard a few cancellation stories yourself. As I write this, the news cycle is latched onto the latest cancel culture story involving Alexi McCammond, a young Black journalist who after departing the website Axios was hired to be the Editor-in-Chief of Teen Vogue.

Her tenure there was short lived. The staff of Teen Vogue “resurfaced” tweets of McCammond’s from when she was 17 years old. The posts were objectively racist, directed at Asians. But here’s the thing, these tweets had already been brought up in the public square two years earlier. She’d already been exposed, already apologized publicly, and already suffered for her past sin. Yet, in an effort to quell the uprising at Teen Vogue, McCammond apologized again in the strongest possible terms.

The Asian American Journalists Association came to McCammond’s defense, somewhat. They condemned her past remarks, but made pretty clear in their press release that this was in the past and that instead of dropping the ax on McCammond, Teen Vogue should look to elevate Asian Americans in their workplace and audience:

“We denounce the racist tweets. But we also believe that there is room for everyone to acknowledge, learn and grow from past mistakes. We support the long overdue appointment of more journalists of color and women for top leadership positions. And we believe in this moment’s potential for difficult conversations around allyship, and learning how we can better support each other — we spoke with McCammond and the chief diversity officer at Conde Nast about their efforts to understand and address our community’s concerns. We look forward to continuing our dialogue and being a resource and thought partner as they work to build an even more inclusive newsroom and produce thoughtful and equitable coverage.”

But none of this mattered. The staff at Teen Vogue weren’t looking for a mea culpa, they wanted to see McCammond’s head roll. She backed out of the job before she’d even set up her office.

McCammond’s story is bad news for anyone who’s ever fallen from grace. Not only will your faults be exposed and not only will you be ostracized for them, but there will be nothing you can do to make it right. If you tell that to someone for long enough, eventually they’ll start to believe it. They’ll begin to think, like Darth Vader, “It is too late for me.” And that’s when folks embrace the dark side.

That decision to embrace the darkness and infamy, it’s something that worries me a lot, actually. As religious belief has declined and social trends like cancel culture continue to rise, the eagerness of some to toss out the virtue of asking for forgiveness is troubling.

There’s a lot of powerful people out there now saying “NEVER APOLOGIZE” because the cancellers aren’t looking to forgive, only control. Instead, the reasoning goes, we should be vigilant and strive to keep what Obi-Wan Kenobi might have called the high ground. That’s a smart tactic if you’re looking to win a fight, but it has a corrosive effect on the culture. It walls us off from the possibility of redemption.

We tend to favor the path of least resistance. Have you noticed people around you becoming more callous and attached to their politics or in their worst opinions? I sure have. I tend to believe this happens because finding kinship with “the other side” or admitting you were wrong tends to be way harder and more thankless than just sticking to your guns, embracing the darkness and being the villain your opponents believe you to be.

As Vader and Ren’s stories show, the feeling that “it’s too late” to make amends can be extremely destructive. To fight that feeling in our culture, we should follow Luke Skywalker’s example, sensing the good in others regardless of what evil they’ve committed and extending grace to the fallen.

Redemption isn’t fair

Here again we’re confronted with the unfairness of it all. Though it’s been around for thousands of years, still wherever you see it redemption is something of a scandal. Let’s go way back in time for a moment.

In ancient Egypt, there was this practice known as the Duat, where the deceased had their heart weighed on a scale against a feather known as the Feather of Maat. The feather, likely plucked from ostriches, represented truth and justice and were believed to possess a supernatural quality to assess the righteousness of the heart on the scale. Your purity, respect for the law, and overall goodness were determinable in this ritual. What happened to you in the afterlife boiled down to the weight of your heart versus the feather.

Take a wild guess how that played out for the most of the deceased.

Fast forward a few thousand years to about 27 AD, and Jesus Christ is on the scene offering something different from the rituals and law of the ancient world. The human heart is understood at birth to be overweight, your debt impossibly large, your bar tab of blunders wildly run up. Redemption in Christ through the blood shed at his crucifixion equated to an interest-free payment on the debt. You can’t pay him back. All that’s expected is recognition, gratitude and acceptance.

Accepting Christ’s sacrifice breeds peace in your heart, making it light as a feather.

As seen in the Christian faith, this peace and redemption is an unearned gift that requires an act of atonement by God himself. Christ is born unto a virgin and lives a perfect life only to die by brutal crucifixion as a blood sacrifice for the sins of the world. Jesus, the very son of God, dies so that we can live. Such a substitution is the epitome of injustice.

There is no mathematical logic to a belief system that says, for example: Darth Vader… I know he murdered dozens of Jedi younglings, subjugated entire worlds and shrouded the galaxy in darkness, but if he just accepts Christ as his Savior then of course he should get to enjoy eternal life and the glorious bounty of Heaven.

That makes no sense. Yet it’s this incalculable gift — the grace coming from an outside source — that holds the power to change lives.

Atonement on Starkiller Base

In the original Star Wars trilogy, we see this kind of goodwill change Darth Vader’s heart as Luke extends grace to his father. In the sequels, we see the relationship reversed as Han’s unconditional love for his son eventually leads Kylo Ren to relinquish the dark side and live as Ben Solo again.

Han Solo knows his son, Ben Solo, is suffering under the heavy metallic mask of Kylo Ren when he confronts him on a catwalk within Starkiller Base in Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The Star Wars audience knows instinctively that the saga’s mentors and father-figures are often marked for death, but as I sat in the theater on The Force Awakens’ opening night, even I wasn’t ready for what would happen.

“Take that mask off, you don’t need it,” Han says to his son.

“What do you think you’ll see if I do?”

“The face of my son,” says Han, without hesitation. You might think you know who you are. But no one knows you like Dad.

Hear the echoes of Vader in Ren’s reply: “It’s too late,” he says.

“No it’s not. Leave here with me. Come home,” Han answers. “We miss you.”

The lighting in this scene is particularly effective. Ren’s face is lit in blue light from above; red from below — a symbol of his conflicting identities. As Kylo Ren struggles to delve deeper into the darkness, Ben Solo is called to the light. For the villain, this conflict is unbearable. To end the struggle, Ren must sever all ties with Solo. But that's not something he can do as long as his parents are alive. Ben Solo lives as long as Han and Leia continue to call him home.

“I’m being torn apart,” says Ben. “I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?”

“Anything,” Han answers.

Ben unclips his lightsaber from his belt and hands it to Han, both men hold the handle of the blade in silence. Then the blue light fades, Kylo’s face is bathed in red, and the budding dark lord does the unthinkable. He murders his father.

When you watch this scene, you can read it a dozen different ways, and I’ll admit I see different things each time I view The Force Awakens. But it’s not a stretch to think Ben asks Han to help him fulfill the deed of patricide and that Han intentionally allows his son to take his life, without resistance. Han is a Christ figure, dying for the sins of his son.

It’s the ultimate act of unconditional love, to let Ben’s journey run its course. And it turns out to be an effective antidote to the darkness in young Solo. Once Ben experiences the pain of that deed and sees just how unconditional a parent's love can be, his days wearing the mask of Kylo Ren are numbered.

He’s broken by it, and while Ben Solo does delve deeper into the darkness, still, his mother lives. It’s her love for him and the grace extended by his enemy, Rey, that helps hammer his redemption arc home. That kind of love and mercy is hard to come by in the real world, and an increasing number of people are unlikely to even understand where these kinds of moral stories come from.

A kingdom on Earth

By and large, the western world was built with the Christian story and allegories like that of Star Wars woven into its understanding of the human condition. When you grow up around it you are part of a society which, perhaps unwittingly, holds itself accountable to a God in an afterlife. With the exception of staunch atheists, we skew toward a belief in divine judgement rather than our fellow man being the ultimate moral authority in the universe.

Christians are still the most populous religious group in the world, dominating five continents as the most-adhered-to religion. The runner up however, are the unaffiliated. The non-religious. The secular. 2021 was the first year in eight decades of surveying American’s religiosity that Gallup found less than 50% of respondents were members of a church, mosque or synagogue. Maybe you think that’s good, maybe you don’t. But regardless of your opinion, there’s a side effect of religion’s decline that we all have to reckon with.

The rise of the non-religious as a majority group shifts the burden of accountability, atonement and justice away from the divine and towards the immediate dominion of man. “Well, that’s nothing new,” you might say, “We’ve had a justice system here in the United States for centuries.”

True, but an American is not asked to put their hand on the Bible and say “I Swear to tell the truth, the Whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, So Help Me God" for no reason. That happens because our nation has an institutionalized but fading belief that no matter what happens in a courtroom we ultimately answer to the Big Man upstairs. Without that, the stakes of what we do on Earth are raised tremendously. And that’s not good.

To be human is to do harm to others. As a species, we’re beautifully designed wrecking balls with passionate hearts and wild minds. We mess things up daily despite our best intentions. In light of this, whether you’re a firm atheist or a Muslim, Christian or Jew, organized belief systems that hinge on redemption being achievable seems like one of the more rational things mankind has ever done.

Trading Redemption for Reckoning

When you take all of this into account, is it really surprising that the American psyche has taken such an ugly turn? Politics is becoming toxic, and redemption stories are becoming counter cultural. Where are we? And how do we get out of the pit that we’re digging ourselves?

The conservative right has some serious problems, chief among them the crisis of faith we’ve just reviewed. It’s resulted in thousands of supposedly Christian Americans being drawn into the QAnon conspiracy theory like a X-Wing caught in the Death Star’s tractor beam. Absent hope and carrying a hollow belief in the Kingdom of Heaven, the right has run away with a cult dedicated to trying to save the world from satanic cannibals. Even though Christian belief would tell you the world can’t be saved. But I want to focus on the political left for now, to better understand the battles we’re seeing all over TV news and on our city streets.

Let’s be honest in saying that the political left has long had a standoffish relationship with the idea of American exceptionalism. They’re more skeptical of patriotic displays, flag waving — all that kind of stuff. This makes sense if you look at the 1960’s and 70’s, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement as one of major sorting events in American political history. The Democratic Party absorbed a majority of the Black vote after the franchise was extended, and the anti-war movement created a generation of Democrats molded in opposition to a considerably corrupt, law-and-order Republican president, Richard Nixon.

Star Wars’ creator, George Lucas, is among that cohort of Democrats whose appreciation for the country went hand in hand with distrust. But while that generation undoubtedly saw the worst of America — the pointless war abroad, segregation, the fire hoses in Birmingham, an active Klu Klux Klan terrorizing Blacks in the South, numerous political assassinations and national panic over Soviet Communism — they also saw things rapidly improve.

America has changed radically, both in speed and in substance. Interracial relationships went from being taboo (or illegal in some places) to commonplace in just a few decades, right alongside huge decreases in the prevalence of racially prejudiced viewpoints and a surge in support for things such as gay marriage.

But when you grow up in that period of progress, it’s easy to take for granted those advancements. And that’s exactly what is happening right now.

The murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer lit the country on fire, both morally and literally. Protests led by a much younger generation of leftists came with a rapid tossing out of America’s redemptive narrative, the same narrative that put Barack Obama in the White House and kept him there for eight years. What has replaced it is a new ‘R’ word: Reckoning.

Almost overnight, America went from pursuing a newfound ideal of colorblindness and racial harmony to a hyperfocus on racial difference. What started with the rise of Black Lives Matter, something I’d argue is a defensible campaign, quickly morphed into things such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the rapid proliferation of Critical Race Theory amongst academics and schools. The latter of which looks at racism less as a surmountable state of mind and more as a pre-existing medical condition tied to being white. And if you harbor views that go against left politics, well they’re not mere differences of opinion. Those views are evidence of internalized whiteness, an incurable ailment treatable only by buying the right books and keeping up with the ever changing vocabulary of social justice academia.

The left’s relationship to America’s founding sin, slavery and racial subjugation, went from being a delicately formed scab to being an open wound courting infection. And it happened very fast. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 obviously played a part in this.

I want to concede that on one hand, it’s vital that America be vocal and proud of its transformation since the Founding, but on the other hand, there has not been enough done to fully recognize the darkness buried just inches beneath all the progress.

Any Star Wars fan can tell you: Wrestling that darkness is essential if you want to move forward.

Entering the Cave

In Episode VII: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is training to be a Jedi with Yoda on the swamp world of Dagobah. One day Luke feels an energy coming from a nearby cave, which Yoda says is a place shrouded in the dark side of the Force.

Luke asks what is inside the cave, to which Yoda replies, “Only what you take with you.”

The “cave” is a popular metaphorical device in fiction going back as far as the Greek classics of the 8th century BCE. Heroes enter caves and experience possibility — sometimes fantasy and ecstasy, other times terror. It’s a device that’s commonly used to show what lies dormant within the protagonist. Their fears, desires, weaknesses and wants are put on full display. In Luke’s case, he runs right into Darth Vader, a spectre who very recently killed Luke’s mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi. The ghost is evidence of Luke’s burning desire for vengeance — justice, if you will.

Luke duels Vader and wins, decapitating the Sith Lord almost effortlessly. The villain’s helmet rolls to the ground and bursts open, revealing Vader’s identity. Only, it’s no stranger Luke sees behind the mask.

It’s his own face. And now Yoda’s point is clear. Luke, in all his goodness and strength of heart, could become like Vader if he isn’t careful. He is no knight in shining armor, he is just another person one push or stumble away from wickedness. When you understand that about yourself, when you recognize both what you’re capable of and what you have already done, only then can you start to make peace with it. Only then can you maybe make things right.

Atonement and Accountability

I’d argue that conservative America needs to spend some time in the cave. The pursuit of a colorblind America is a worthy one, but it creates a blindspot in recognizing what the left calls “structural racism” — the simple idea that racism lingers not just in our attitudes or actions, but also in the way our institutions work. A commonly cited example of this type of racism is the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which criminalized crack cocaine and powder cocaine differently. Crack was a known street drug running rampant in the black community. Powdered cocaine was the drug of more affluent whites. The sentencing disparity between the two was nearly 100 to 1, an inequity that wasn’t addressed till 2011 under the Fair Sentencing Act.

Today, there’s a potent air of denialism about stuff like this on the political right, and it doesn’t serve them well.

As a nation of individuals, the United States is remarkably not racist. We live, play, work and love amongst each other, across racial lines, in ways that are unprecedented in human history. We’re a multi-racial democratic republic, and compared to the rest of the world we’re doing well. But our government, the institution that represents and embodies the collective, has largely shirked its moral responsibility to atone for its wrongs, whether that be slavery, Jim Crow or the ill conceived War On Drugs.

What did we really do as a country after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law? As far as I can tell, America simply carried on with business as usual. And in the absence of any official reparations for slavery, disenfranchsiment and legal discrimination, individual Americans are increasingly the ones trying to make things right over a travesty in which they played no part. It’s why Nike and Coca Cola are now on the front lines of racial justice, forcing this reconciliation into every corner of our lives — places where we’d much rather be left alone.

No matter how incessant the social justice messaging gets, however, it’s never the right move to deny the faults of our nation. We’ve got to embrace these sins, seek redemption and move forward.

So how do we do that? To answer that question, we’ll have to take a look at the mechanics of Force ghosting, the Star Wars universe’s ultimate sign of closure and peace.

Force Ghosting

Accountability and atonement matter. It’s why Catholics confess their sins to a priest; it’s why Muslims practice “tawbah,” repentance between them and their maker; and it’s why America’s in a pickle today. Most Americans today are not religious in the sense that they attend houses of worship and practice a faith. That means they’re lacking fundamental understanding of the world that allows for redemption and atonement. That’s one of the reasons we need Star Wars and stories like it so badly: to bridge the gap between the religious and the secular and to transpose the wisdom of the world’s religions into a key that everyone can hear.

Star Wars doesn’t just borrow from the Abrahamic religions. It also derives a lot of wisdom from eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism chief among them. Take Force ghosting for example — that is, how a select few in the Star Wars lore have lived on after death and been able to physically manifest themselves to counsel and advise future generations of Jedi.

It’s not just the holiest of Jedi who return as Force ghosts. Darth Vader appears as a Force ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi. This is troubling at first to many of us whose views on redemption have been shaped by Judeo-Christian philosophy. Why should Vader get to live on after death while his thousands of victims are just gone? The same can be asked of Kylo Ren, who vanishes into the Force upon his death. How are these villains worthy of such honor?

Well, they aren’t. The inner peace that Force ghosting and Force vanishing symbolizes isn’t something you achieve by being good. You don’t earn it in that way.

This is where George Lucas draws on Hindu and Buddhist tradition to inform the rules of the Star Wars universe. These eastern religions teach that to achieve peace you have to battle and tame your own inner chaos.

This philosophy manifested in a story line of the Star Wars animated series, The Clone Wars. Long story short, sometime between Episode II and III, Master Yoda hears the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn reaching out to him from beyond, and at its behest, our favorite tiny green Jedi takes off across the galaxy. He’s led to a metaphysical realm inhabited by ethereal beings who present him with several trials to prove himself worthy of eternal life through the Force.

What Yoda learns is that the power to conquer death requires a head-on confrontation with his own inner darkness. During Yoda’s trials the ethereal beings that possess the knowledge of the Force ghost power say to him, “You are the beast, and the beast is you.”

Yoda must duel a dark version of himself. It’s in that confrontation he realizes that the mangled, frightening, red eyed being he’s fighting is no alien creature, but his other half — just as much an authentic part of him as the gentle and kind mentor helping Jedi pupils everyday in the temple on Coruscant.

Once Yoda chooses to see his dark-self as an equal, the Guardians say to him, “You have conquered your hubris.”

Hubris and “The Shadow”

When you acknowledge and accept your darkness, your brokenness, and your capacity for wickedness — only then will you truly know yourself. The famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called this thing within us “The Shadow,” but he thought of it less like a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde situation and more like a simple affirmation of your blind spots. Jung said denying the existence of those blind spots is what gives them power, feeds them, and lets them grow in strength. In essence, he might argue that you have to engage the Shadow and hold dominion over it in order to keep it in check.

That’s what Yoda does when he lays down his pride and his Jedi-like sense of purity to conquer his hubris. By the end of his journey, he’s discovered the secret that allows him to live on after death and advise the next generation of Jedi. We see him appear several decades after his passing in Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, when Luke is in desperate need of guidance to help Rey.

Fans of Star Wars tend to talk about Force ghosts as if they were in heaven, as if this life after death were a cosmic reward for good behavior, a thing reserved for the “good people” and not the bad. This just isn’t so.

Anakin Skywalker’s and Ben Solo’s redemption are deeply personal affairs. The Force does not deem them “pure” by any means. Ben Solo vanishes into the Force because he’s conquered his shadow. Anakin lives on after death as a Force ghost because he has put to rest an alter ego that had seized the steering wheel of his life all those years ago. Both villains achieve peace through a reckoning with their inner darkness that results in balance and harmony.

America is in the middle of such a reckoning today. Indeed, our nation’s failures have never before been so widely acknowledged. And we should see that as a good thing. Our dark passenger is out in the open, and we’re in the middle of the fight.

But let’s not forget that the battle isn’t about eradicating the past. It’s about accepting it, coming to terms with who we are and moving forward with our chaotic side in check.

You can’t “cancel” the beast

I’ve taken you on quite a journey with this chapter. So let’s bring it home.

Look around you. We don’t have peace, we don’t have atonement, we don’t have empathy and we don’t have healing. Everytime you turn on the news, some cartoon character, author, book, actress or private citizen is being cancelled, discontinued, fired or destroyed. All in the name of “accountability” or “justice” for an amorphous group or to quiet a small but rowdy online mob.

It’s easy to say we just need to rediscover the virtue of forgiveness. But there’s a blockage in our veins that makes even approaching the task of forgiveness a huge hurdle. It’s exactly what Yoda had to conquer in The Clone Wars: Hubris, ego and self-righteousness.

One of the things I’ve been most surprised by with millennials and Gen Z is that for two generations who came of age online with massive digital footprints documenting the stupidity of their youth, they seem incredibly eager to litigate each other’s sins in the public square. “Cancel culture” went from being a social media punchline to an issue of immense national concern in just a matter of years. There’s a real sense that we’re all being watched by one another, and that any day now someone is going to dig deep enough into your social media history to uncover a skeleton. Your life will be put on hold. Your character will be called into question. You may apologize. Either way, you’ll be “cancelled.”

How did we become simultaneously so self-loathing and so arrogant? I think it has something to do with how the social media era has allowed people to curate ideal versions of themselves to present to their peers. We can pick and choose what is seen. We filter our lives through sepia and clarendon. At a certain point, it becomes easy to forget the not so great posts we might have made ten years back. We start to believe our own distortions about who we are and forget about our brokenness.

We’re in the midst of a hubris pandemic. The widespread mentality of the day is poisonous. If you can hide your sins well enough and whip yourself convincingly in the public square, you’re well positioned to be the judge and jury of others on social media or in the pages of the New York Times or Washington Post.

It needs to stop.

Peace and Purpose

We all have things in our lives that help to keep us humble. I value my Christian faith for a lot of reasons, chief among them is that it orders my life and gives me purpose, direction and a sense of hope. But right up there with hope is an almost daily recognition that I’m a work in progress. Star Wars has always done the same thing for me as a fan. It’s a story that asks me to look in the mirror and reckon with my brokenness.

Whether in our personal lives or our history books, we’ll always struggle with the crushing weight of human mistakes and our shared capacity for evil. Both the failings of our own and those of our forefathers will always haunt us. But recognizing that fact is the beginning of redemption. You have to see your shortcomings, name them and know them in order to own them. As Yoda says to Luke in The Last Jedi, “The greatest teacher, failure is.”

When you live your life in the knowledge of your own imperfection and in the hope of redemption, extending forgiveness to others comes easier. And for yourself, it makes finding peace and purpose in life more attainable.

The next time you watch Star Wars and see a character vanish into the ether or become “one with the Force,” I want you to remember their debts to mankind didn’t vanish along with them. They’re still there. The rest of the galaxy has to live and wrestle with the consequences of their mistakes. In an ideal story, your reformed villain doesn’t punch out at the very end and skip the part where they try to make amends. But those aren’t the Star Wars stories we have, at least not on the big screen.

Instead I want you to be asking, “Am I really certain that I’m much better than them?”

Maybe you are in this moment. But what about tomorrow?

TIPS: Redemption starts within you, here’s how to begin that journey

1) You’re a work in progress. Embrace life being a journey of self-discovery, moral restoration and change. But bear in mind, you owe it to everyone around you to give them space for their own redemptive journey.

2) One step at a time. In your own search for redemption, you can’t take it all on at once. In the time you have available to you, set small goals for improvement and cleaning up the messes you’ve made.

3) Enter the cave. Whether it’s with Star Wars, at church, in a temple or synagogue, or in quiet meditation, spend some time with the sides of yourself you’re not fond of. What Star Wars teaches us is that our darkness isn’t an alien or outside force, but an equal part of our being waiting to be recognized. That doesn’t mean you hand it the keys to the car.

4) Say you’re sorry. This is elementary school advice, but there’s an increasing need to be reminded of this virtue. If you messed up, or said something you didn’t mean or made an error in the past, say you are sorry. Then move on. Maybe your persecutors don’t move on, but that’s on them — not you.

5) Reach out. When we don’t bother to seek redemption in this life it’s often because of overwhelming shame, or our fear of rejection. Calling up your estranged child or friend to see how they’re doing may be scary, what if they don’t want to talk to you? Fear is the way to the darkside. Reject it, and choose hope. Redemption is just downstream.