Secondhand Lions and Faith


Walter, the boy, comes to his Uncle Garth and Hub's home after living with his unreliable mother. Walter's mother has trained him to be uncertain of what to believe in because of her faults in her duties as being a mother. She leaves him thinking that she was going to college to better their future, but when he calls the college she says she is going to he is informed that she lied to him. Soon after he finds that she went to Las Vegas for the summer to do nothing more than have a good time. Through his times with his uncle Hub and Garth he learns quite a few things about faith as well as teaching his uncles a thing or two. When he asks his uncle Garth whether the stories about Africa were true or not he learns that it really doesn’t matter if they were true or not because,

"If you want to believe in something, believe in it. Just because something isn't true doesn't mean you can't believe in it. Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage, and virtue mean everything. Power and money, money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this that love, true love never dies. Remember that, boy. Doesn't matter if it is true or not. A man should believe in those things, because those things are worth believing in."

At the end of the summer with his uncles the boy’s new faith is tested when his mother comes home and asks him if he knows where the money is. She says its ok to take it because the money they have was stolen in a bank robbery, but he won’t believe her and says “They couldn't have robbed any banks, they were in africa!” His mother responds by presenting false evidence and doubting him by saying “Here Dan's got actual evidence and you believe in that africa crap?”, but he stays true too his faith and says he believes in his uncles and their story.



When the boy arrives at the beginning of the summer, many traveling salesmen come to the home attempting to sell their various goods, but every time the uncles scare them away by shooting their shotguns at the salesmen. The boy tells them to have faith that what they are selling is worth buying, so the next person to come they see what he has. He sells them a skeet shooter so they can have something to shoot at besides him. The uncles in the movie were quite reckless, to the point of nearly killing themselves multiple times. The boy is scarred that they will die before they have taught them all the things he needs to learn from them. The boy convinces the uncles to have faith in their duties of raising him into becoming a man. By doing this he gets them to promise to stop allof the unnecessarily dangerous thing they do until he is out of college and stay alive. They stay true to their word. The uncles finally died, after all the close calls they have encountered, when they attempt to fly a bi-plane upside-down through the doors of their barn and missed, crashing into the side of the barn.