For one of the classes today, the kids came 3 hours early so we could watch The Alamo. We had already read the book in class, so they knew the story. It was rather hard for them to understand the ungrammatical English of the Tennesseans and the “Texicans” in the movie, but they understood it well enough to be able to write pretty good summaries of the movie afterwards.

I’ve never had much respect for John Wayne as a man or as an actor, but seeing this movie has raised him a bit in my estimation. Because all of the other movie studios only wanted to make a low-budget cheapo film of the Alamo, John Wayne worked on his own for over 10 years to prepare to make the movie, even to the point of spending all his own personal money, and mortaging everything he owned. Granted, it has the typical Hollywood “flaws,” omitting any mention of Christianity, etc. (not to mention John Wayne’s wooden acting), but it is still a better movie than almost anything made today.

There isn’t much of a tradition in Japan of fighting for freedom. There is an idea of fighting to protect one’s own honour, or the honour of one’s lord, yes, but it is a petty, perverted sense of honour, and not the same as the freedom so many Americans have fought and died for. Although all the kids who watched the movie today have been brought up in Christian homes and are getting a Biblical education, all of their parents were saved as adults, so they are inevitably influenced by Japanese culture. Before we watched the movie, some of them thought that what the men at the Alamo did was stupid and wrong. So we talked a bit about men in the OT who had fought for the freedom of their people (e.g. Ehud, one of their heroes) and I had to explain that although the wars in the world are usually evil, that there is such a thing as a just war, and that fighting for freedom can be a righteous thing to do. Then one of them remembered “that thing by John Calvin” and how “it is OK” to fight against a king if you have a lesser magistrate on your side.

Of course, dying for freedom can be easier than the everyday drudgery of living and working after the battle. But I think they got that point, too. As we discussed the movie afterwards, a number of them said exactly what I had hoped they would learn from the movie: that there isn’t any country on earth now worth fighting and dying for, but if those men could sacrifice themselves to die for the Republic of Texas, all the more we should live and work as hard as we can for the building of God’s kingdom till “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”