I notice that it was yesterday in 2000 that the wildly popular cartoonist Charles M Schulz died. And as it happens the next day, today, sixteen years ago, the last of the original Peanuts strips appeared.
Among the many reasons I find Schulz interesting is because of the religious themes that ran through his strips. Originally they were quite orthodox, even, looking at the earliest among them, quite conservative Christian. But, things shift. As of course they do in any lived life.
I decided to dig around the web to see if I could find what that course might have been.
And I found a simple outline of his religious life. Schulz was raised a fundamentalist Christian within the warm embrace of the Church of God. Throughout his early adulthood he remained active in the church. However by the mid 1970s his views shifted significantly. He seems to have moved through a vague universalism, toward a form of deism, until finally he called himself a “secular humanist.” However, other than making that assertion once or twice he remained deeply private and did not discuss religion in the last several decades of his life.
While he preferred the term “secular humanist,” it seems to me he continued always to have a religious sensibility.
He lived. He suffered. He succeeded in many ways. And he was an observant sort. So, of course, questions kept rising. And with that a wry response to what Charles Schulz encountered and considered, evoking a love of the world, and we humans even with all our foibles, gently bubbled out of his pen.
and with that the tiniest of suggestions. It might be worth digging around and looking at those strips oldest and what followed over the years. I recommend google images with the search terms “Charles Schulz” and “religion.”
No telling what you’ll find…
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