Lindsay Clancy, Wicked, and Maleficent — same inversion: the villain becomes the hero.
Hollywood retold Sleeping Beauty and The Wizard of Oz so the witches walk out as the wounded party. Maleficent is the misunderstood queen. Elphaba is the girl the world failed. That is not a kids’-movie update. It is a catechism: if she suffered, she cannot be guilty.
That catechism is now in the comments under the Lindsay Clancy trial. A mother killed her children. The defense reached for postpartum psychosis and the insanity plea. A lot of the culture reached for something else: sympathy that recasts the accused as the real victim. Yesterday, we walked the testimony that changed our first read. Tonight, we ask the bigger question: how did a Christian people learn to call evil good?
This is not Court TV. It is a Catholic reading of spiritual warfare aimed at the conscience. Satan rarely shows up with a pitchfork. He shows up as a rewrite. First the fairy tale. Then the news. Then your own judgment.
Tonight with Avoiding Babylon:
- Wicked and Maleficent: how the villain-as-hero rewrite trained the imagination
- Sleeping Beauty and Oz inverted, and why that catechism stuck
- The Lindsay Clancy case; what the court is hearing vs. what the culture already decided
- How a Christian conscience gets twisted until mercy means denying the crime
- Calling evil good and what Catholics owe the dead, the living, and the truth
