The Devil With James Bond! (1967)

Ann S. Boyd on the mythical appeal of spy fiction

For my generation, it was pretty common to have books analyzing pop culture from a Christian theological perspective. Apparently, this genre is older than I thought — in the 1960s, The Devil With James Bond! by Ann S. Boyd was dedicated to the then-contemporary entertainment phenomenon of the Ian Fleming novels and their film adaptations. In addition to the faith-based lens, Boyd goes into the older archetypes behind this new (at the time) genre of storytelling. When I learned about this book, I was already well into working on my comic series combining midcentury spy fiction tropes with fantasy and fairy tale elements, so it was kind of fun to discover at least one author who had beaten me to these basic ideas.

The Devil With James Bond! is easy to find on the internet, and according its entry on Goodreads and other sites, it has gone into the public domain. Several different print versions exist and none of them are cheap, but as far as I can tell, the first edition was published by John Knox Press in 1967. Boyd, a graduate student at Drew University in New Jersey, had previously written the article “James Bond: Modern-day Dragonslayer” published in the May 19, 1965 issue of the Christian Century and then expanded those ideas into the full book.

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My summary of the book

In Boyd’s view, the popularity of the James Bond character is in the context of the apathy and despair of the technological age. Premodern society had given way to modern times and “a more tragic dimension in which a man’s market value depends upon the value of the machine which could replace him.” James Bond is cut from the same archetypal cloth as Perseus, St. George, Christian from Pilgrim’s Progress, all these hero-protagonists that appeal to audiences who want a champion in confusing times.

Boyd acknowledges that the James Bond novels, according to Ian Fleming himself, are obviously meant for fun and escapism and not deep scholarly analysis — and yet, there is more going on in the background. She cites Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, saying James Bond’s adventures reflect the basic arc of the mythological hero in a modern setting. Bond starts out in the first novel Casino Royale as a “wonderful machine” for Britain, then over the series, “gradually becomes less machine-like and more human.” Boyd cites an interview Fleming gave to The New Yorker, in which the James Bond author says the franchise's popularity was due to a want of heroes in real life:

“Well, I don’t regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corney way, and in the end, after giant despair, he wins the girl or the jackpot or whatever it may be.”

The popularity of the Bond novels really took off with Doctor No, the sixth book of the series which also was adapted into the first Bond film. This novel was also the most obvious parallel to the basic plot that Boyd describes as “St. George slays evil dragon, rescues forlorn princess.” In Doctor No, the main “Bond girl” Honey Ryder insists on describing a modified piece of machinery as a “dragon.” Of course, it turns out to be a marsh buggy with a flamethrower. It’s not just ignorance on Honey’s part — the novel gives it more nuance that she just has a different viewpoint outside of a modern lens.

Other novels, Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, explicitly reference the story of St. George. This Mediterranean martyr from the Roman Empire days became known as the patron saint of England (among other countries), and the reference would have been more obvious to British audiences than American audiences. Dragon imagery also shows up in You Only Live Twice, and the villain of Moonraker is named Drache alias Drax. And Boyd quotes Fleming himself, who explicitly described Bond as “a latter-day St. George. He does kill wicked dragons after all.”

James Bond wasn’t the only popular spy fiction franchise: there was also I Spy, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Get Smart, among others. To Boyd, the image of the secret agent bridges the the midcentury Cold War contemporary times to the hero of classical mythology. It also depicts “agency” in the broad symbolic sense of an individual’s capability for direct action, and taps into the public’s fascination with espionage and its impact on world affairs along with concerns about privacy and identity:

“It is here that we may begin to see a relationship between the image of the secret agent and the identity problem of the individual in mass society. The glamorous adventures of the secret agent are only a fictional cover for the peculiar form of existence which the technological age has forced not only upon the agents but also upon the average individual as well.”

The secret agent character has to maintain a “public self” that is very different from his “private self” — something that has a very specific in-story context of course, but is also relatable to people in a general sense. The secret agent has very transient relationships with other people, and little to nothing in the way of permanent possessions. Again, this is all relatable due to the modern automobile age disrupting people’s relationships with moves and job changes, and due to “planned obsolescence,” possessions are not built to last.

Another common spy fiction trope is the protagonist being knocked out and waking up again — a death and rebirth within the Hero’s Journey and, according to Boyd, relatable to people’s experiences of the technological and cultural changes of the time period. These changes brought about a loss of traditions and local community ties. The challenge for the fictional secret agent, as well as the average person in real life, is to weather these shocks without losing his identity and integrity — to survive and thrive in a new world of individual responsibility. The secret agent character has a lot in common with the medieval knight, as both present the image of an inner-directed wandering warrior.

So what made the James Bond stories stand out from the other spy fiction franchises that were popular in the 1960s? Boyd says a big part of it is the memorable villains. In the modern era, people have stopped believing the devil exists, which makes him more dangerous. But Bond is out there uncovering all these hidden evils.

And the villains seem to personify a lineup of modern sins that Fleming himself had pointed out. Greed or Avarice is represented in the gold-obsessed titular villain of Goldfinger, for example. Snobbery is personified in the genealogy-obsessed Count de Bleuville in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Self-righteousness is found in the health faddists in Thunderball. There are other examples that match with Moral Cowardice, Malice, Cruelty, and Hypocrisy.

But Fleming particularly condemned Sloth, or Accidie — the classical definition having more to do with “refusal of joy” and inertia than laziness. Boyd points out three villains who personify different versions of this: Mr. Big, who is bored and requires a lot of elegance; Doctor No, who is indifferent to the suffering caused by his own mania for power; and Blofeld, a “Giant Despair” type figure who offers “free death” and whose own speech confesses to accidie, disinterest, and boredom.

“Not only does James Bond represent a modern St. George, but the primary dragon or devil which he must battle is that of the capital sin of our generation, the sin of sloth, the accidie which is a refusal of life and joy, the utter indifference, carelessness, and inertia — in short, the feeling of apathy with which we began this study.”

In the Gospels, Boyd points out, the opposite of sloth or accidie is compassion. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the Christian protagonist has to overcome sloth in various forms, such as the Slough of Despond and Giant Despair. In the St. George story, the villagers just kind of allowed their own young people to be sacrificed routinely to the dragon, with George being apparently the only person attempting to intervene. Sloth involves rejection of God’s love in Christ, rejection of joy, and indifference to the well-being of one’s self and one’s fellow humans.

Boyd shows that Fleming, in another book, wanted to rekindle the “spirit of adventure” in modern youth; she says losing this spirit of strength and courage tends to result in boredom and apathy. Yearning for the spirit of adventure is behind the appeal of the unrealistically glamorous spy fiction genre.

However, people need real heroes from real life. World War II was not far from Boyd’s time, and she points out the real Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a minister of the Gospel who was part of the German resistance against the Nazis. Bonhoeffer first had a broadcast against idolatry of the government halted (likely censored off the radio by Hitler’s government), then soon was barred from working in ministry or publishing, then imprisoned, then finally killed. But as his worldly power was taken from him, his real power continued to grow. He displayed courage in opposing antisemitism and standing up against the Nazi regime, rather than giving in to them as most of his countrymen did at the time. Bonhoeffer worked undercover and made secret international trips to communicate with allies, and was part of a plot attempting to assassinate Hitler. According to Boyd, Bonhoeffer planted a time bomb on Hitler’s airplane, and when it didn’t work out, he had to recover it before it was found. However, in my fact checks for this blog post, I can’t find anything to back up this specific story — only that there was a bomb attempt by Bonhoeffer’s group, but not who specifically was involved. Some specific claims about Bonhoeffer’s actions may be hard to prove either way — he was a secret double agent after all.

“To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent, or a saint), but to be a man. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer also named accidie and tristitia as the forces of despair he had to struggle against while in prison. For Christians, says Boyd, conquering accidie is understanding that in Jesus’s victory, mankind has been called away from a life of sin and toward a life of freedom and responsibility.

My thoughts

For dedicated Ian Fleming fans, The Devil With James Bond! may not offer a lot of new insight into the books themselves. The first three chapters are mainly an overview of the current social context and basic heroic archetypes — these may or may not have been novel ideas in the 1960s, but nowadays in the age of YouTube critics, most people seem to have a basic familiarity with the “Hero’s Journey” concept. Meanwhile, the last couple of chapters are about the struggle against spiritual sloth in real life. It’s really the middle of the book that goes into any significant detail about the James Bond stories themselves.

And yet, The Devil With James Bond! seems to be well received by the small community of fans that do get into serious critical essays — for example, this fan site and this theological essay. (The book seems to have a lot of low or mixed ratings across different sites it’s listed on, but I would guess the dislike is due to material quality issues and not the content of the book itself.)

One point in the book that really hasn’t aged well is the notion that with mass upheaval, when people are atomized and lose their livelihoods and traditions and local communities, people will simply wake up like a Joseph Campbell hero and become the individualistic wandering knight and “learn to code” so to speak. I can imagine Hannah Arendt and Eric Hoffer shaking their heads in the background — not to mention how these things tend to bear out in real life. In this kind of vacuum, non-consensual loss of one’s previous way of life and community isn’t some character-building event — people are likely to just fall into despair and addiction. Others join cults, authoritarian movements, and hate groups.

What does still stand is the idea that escapist popular fiction — even though it is not meant to be taken seriously as deep literary work — is a window into where society is at and what people want, and the fantasy tropes that animate people’s mundane lives.

While I can find no evidence that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an inspiration to Ian Fleming — and neither does Boyd claim he was — it is relevant because even though Fleming set his stories contemporary to the 1950s and 1960s Cold War era he had written them in, he was drawing from his own experiences working for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division during World War II.

In recent years, there has been a lot of discomfort over the appeal of fictional heroes and superheroes, considering it fascist-adjacent — such as this NPR article from 2016. Discomfort even as commentators acknowledge that unapologetically strong characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America did, after all, fight the Nazis during the Golden Age of comics. I’m not a fan of the “heroism is fascism” trend — I don’t know who is supposed to be helped by pathologizing the traits that defeated actual fascism. I’m also not a fan of scaring people into thinking everything is fascism, because — as actual fascists would know — scared people are easy to manipulate and control.

It is true that the Nazism and other fascist and authoritarian-right movements promote the idea of strength and heroism and inner discipline and traditional values, in the same way that Communism and other authoritarian-left movements promote the idea of compassion and equality and empowering the powerless. This does not mean that actual heroism, compassion, strength, equality, and so on are authoritarian concepts in and of themselves!

In fact, if you look at any biographies of Bonhoeffer or other anti-Nazi dissidents during the World War II era, you will see that the Nazi movement preached strength of will and heroism in theory, but relied on cowardice and conformity and despair and apathy in real life. Movies like the aptly titled Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace depict the courage it took to resist the fascist tide.

So, how does one discern the difference between true heroism, and the fake heroism that is a cover for authoritarian and totalitarian movements?

One such “tell” is that totalitarian ideologies demand complete personal devotion, to a creepy all-encompassing level. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this idolatry early on — seeing that the Nazi movement demanded the total devotion that Christians should only give to Christ.

Another aspect of authoritarianism is using fake virtue as a socially acceptable excuse to hurt and punish other people. The Ku Klux Klan claims imagery of knighthood and chivalry in attempt to make their racist hatred appear somehow noble. Modern far-right influencers claim to speak for the virtue of masculine strength, but promote violence as a tool for control. Then there are the far-left activists using the idea of “punch a Nazi” to physically attack elderly feminist women and get away with it, socially and legally. These self-appointed “anti-fascists” have more in common with actual Nazis than the people they accuse.

So where does that put Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his role in various plots to assassinate Hitler? A third difference between real heroism and evil merely pretending to be heroism, is — well — being in touch with the real world. By the time the former pacifist Bonhoeffer was trying to kill Hitler, the real war was underway, as well as the real targeting of Jews for mass murder. In contrast, Hitler had targeted the entire Jewish people for genocide by means of scapegoating, “master race” delusions, and conspiratorial false accusations — and German society went along with it.

And this loss of touch with reality brings us back to spiritual sloth or accidie. To be in touch with the real world is to be in touch with one’s own humanity and the humanity of others. In Nazi Germany, conditions of spiritual sloth drove not just the resentment and scapegoating that animated active anti-Semites, but the callous indifference that kept others from actively intervening as their neighbors were dragged off to the murder camps.

So, even though the book is decades old, Ann S. Boyd’s The Devil With James Bond! continues to be quite relevant. Fiction is a window into the soul of society, and the appeal of heroic characters continues to endure. Whether a story is realistic fiction or fantasy, whether serious literary work or lighthearted escapism, writers can do their best to reflect the core truths of the world.