The Weekend Economists travel the Yellow Brick Road, November 14-15.

[MattSh]

30. The Wizard of Oz - Religious or Atheist?

I said there would be other, alternative allegories, and here are two of them...

Religious Allegory

Over the decades, The Wizard of Oz has been seen by many Christians (and used often in sermons) as an allegory of faith. Consider: The Yellow Brick Road is the path to enlightenment, with the characters encountering a variety of emblems of sin and temptation along the way toward the Emerald City, which is a kind of a heaven. (In another reading, Oz itself can be heaven.) Also, the Wicked Witch is killed with water, suggesting baptism. (It also helps that there are a number of resonances between Baum’s story and John Bunyan’s influential spiritual tale The Pilgrim’s Progress.)

also...

The religious allegory has more than just Christianity; it's about the 3 related religions. The 3 Oz characters represent the 3 religions. Ths scarecrow is Judaism, where the way to God is through the knowledge of the law (brain...and the Hebrew word for 'law' is halakah, literally 'road' or 'way'); the tinman is Christianity (he is literally the resurrected (brought back to life or use) Christ (the anointed one, on which oil has been put), in which the law is fulfilled by love of God and one's neighbor (heart); and the lion is Islam, in which seventh heaven is reserved for men who die in jihad and women who die in childbirth (courage). When they find their way to God, they are told that they must deal with the problem of evil. The poppy field? Earthly pleasures that cause us to lose our focus. It's all there: forbidden fruit, water as a medium for purging sin (think the flood and baptism), etc. And in the end, this message: even if God doesn't exist, the religions serve in God's place for the regulation of societies with wisdom, love and courage.

Atheist Allegory

This theory I.D.'s almost all the same elements as the religious allegory, but then interprets them in the opposite direction — that is, God, a.k.a. the Wizard, isn’t real, there’s a mortal behind the curtain, and all that spiritual mumbo jumbo is illusory. This theory corresponds better with the book, where Oz is more about duplicity and illusion, than the movie. (For example, in the novel, the Emerald City is only emerald because the Wizard makes everybody wear green glasses there.) In fact, early in the book’s publishing career, Christian Fundamentalists tried to get it banned for suggesting that humanity’s gifts came from within and were not God-given.

Link coming later...