Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist<\/a><\/i> at the drug store the other day, and since he\u2019s a fellow Vancouverite, I gave it a quick look.<\/span><\/p>\nI was particularly intrigued by the chapter on \u201cfaith\u201d. While it\u2019s more or less what you\u2019d expect from a Hollywood celebrity, it still has some interesting tidbits, such as Fox\u2019s description of himself as a lapsed Protestant who now attends a Reform Jewish synagogue with his wife and kids, or his references to the evangelists and Christian musicians he met or knew in Vancouver while growing up here; I\u2019m only nine years younger than Fox, and I grew up in the evangelical milieu here myself, so I can\u2019t help wondering if I may have crossed paths with any of these people, too.<\/p>\n
Fox also makes at least two references to The 700 Club<\/i>, in contexts that suggest he probably isn\u2019t all that interested in watching the show or being one of its guests \u2014 but one thing he doesn\u2019t<\/i> mention, at least not that I noticed, is that he once co-starred in a prime-time TV special produced by The 700 Club<\/i> in the early 1980s. You can see a fragment of that performance here:<\/p>\n
The reason I remember Fox\u2019s appearance in this special is that, in a weird sort of way, it helped me to get more involved in \u201csecular\u201d pop culture when I was still in my early teens. No doubt Pat Robertson and his cohorts hired people like Fox to appear in this special as a way of luring \u201csecular\u201d audience members in to hear their message \u2014 yet for kids like me, who grew up in the evangelical ghetto and rarely watched prime-time TV, shows like this opened us up to the wider world of mainstream entertainment. When I finally began to watch Family Ties<\/i> a year or two after this special aired, I could tell myself it was probably okay partly because Fox had played a part, however small, in a Christian TV show. (The fact that Family Ties<\/i> co-star Michael Gross had gone even further and proclaimed his faith on The 700 Club<\/i> itself also came into play there somewhere.)<\/p>\n
Thankfully, I haven\u2019t felt the need to \u201cjustify\u201d my interest in popular culture like that in a long, long time. I do, however, still wonder sometimes about those places where the \u201csecular\u201d culture and the evangelical culture bleed into one another. For example, I think the VeggieTales<\/a><\/i> videos are reasonably amusing and morally instructive, but I cannot help but wonder how old I should let my kids get before I clue them in to the fact that some of the gags in those videos come from R-rated films like Scarface<\/i> and The Blues Brothers<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I happened to spot Michael J. Fox\u2019s new book Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist at the drug store the other day, and since he\u2019s a fellow Vancouverite, I gave it a quick look. I was particularly intrigued by the chapter on \u201cfaith\u201d. While it\u2019s more or less what you\u2019d expect from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>I happened to spot Michael J. Fox\u2019s new book Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist<\/a><\/i> at the drug store the other day, and since he\u2019s a fellow Vancouverite, I gave it a quick look.<\/span><\/p>\n