Steven Greydanus, being normal, gets this and so when he reviewed Won\u2019t You Be My Neighbor?<\/em> a year ago<\/a>, he offered a morally sane assessment of the man:<\/p>\n Ultimately, this is not because of the style or substance of\u00a0Mr. Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood<\/em>, but something unquantifiable and unreproducible: Rogers\u2019 manifest goodness. His hopes for a more united country may have been dashed, but in one respect he undoubtedly succeeded: He wanted to make goodness attractive, and he did.<\/p>\n Is\u00a0Mr. Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood<\/em>\u00a0hagiographical? Is it necessarily a bad thing if it is? Hagiography is usually a bad thing in biography because most of us aren\u2019t saints. (One remarkably hagiographic detail: Each morning, after swimming laps \u2014 there\u2019s underwater footage of Rogers\u2019 slight frame in the pool \u2014 he stepped on the scale, and, according to the man himself, every day he weighed in at 143 pounds: a number that, to him, signified the 1-4-3 letters of the words \u201cI love you.\u201d)<\/p>\n Rogers wasn\u2019t a perfect man, even if one of his sons recalls that it could be difficult \u201chaving a second Christ for a father.\u201d But when his widow, Joanne, recalls reassuring him toward the end of his life, as he contemplated the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 and wondered out loud if he were one of the sheep, that if anyone qualified as a sheep, he did, it\u2019s hard to imagine any reasonable person disagreeing.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t live in Mr. Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood, and our world will never greatly resemble it. But what\u2019s stopping us, any of us, from trying to bring to our interactions with others a little more of what we admire in Mr. Rogers? Is the divisiveness and cruelty of our world a reason not to treat each other with kindness and love, or is it more important to do so?<\/p>\n Like Jesus, like Mr. Rogers,\u00a0Won\u2019t You Be My Neighbor?<\/em>\u00a0challenges each of us to try to be better neighbors.<\/p>\n Would you be mine?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Likewise, in his review of the new biopic Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood<\/em><\/a>, Deacon Greydanus expresses perceptions of Mr. Rogers that emanate from what most people would call ordinary human decency:<\/p>\n \u201cAt the root of all learning and relationships,\u201d Mr. Rogers once said, is \u201clove \u2014 or the lack of it.\u201d There is so much lack in the world. Humanity is like a gaping wound of lack of love.<\/p>\n Mr. Rogers loved us all as much as he could. It wasn\u2019t remotely enough. He was a lonely prophet in the wilderness, long since shouted down by competing voices.<\/p>\n Rage and hopelessness are increasingly ubiquitous cultural realities. Divisiveness and polarization spread and metastasize \u2014 in the political sphere, but also in popular culture, in our churches, in our homes and families. (The holiday season has always been stressful, but increasingly family get-togethers are like parties in a minefield, events to be survived as much as savored.)<\/p>\n Beautiful Day<\/em>\u00a0is about forgiveness and the seemingly unforgivable. I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s a point of contact with director Marielle Heller\u2019s last biopic,\u00a0Can You Ever Forgive Me?<\/em>, starring a caustic Melissa McCarthy as the unprincipled literary forger Lee Israel; if so, it\u2019s almost the only one.<\/p>\n Forgiveness has become almost an old-fashioned word, a relic of an ethos we as a culture no longer quite believe in. We find it increasingly hard not only to like or tolerate one another across cultural or moral fault lines, but even to imagine or accept the idea of liking or tolerating one another.<\/p>\n There are exceptions: an\u00a0African American befriending Klansmen<\/a>\u00a0and leading them gently out of racist hatred; an\u00a0Orthodox Jew inviting the scion of a white-supremacist family to weekly Shabbat meals<\/a>\u00a0and turning him from his ugly heritage.<\/p>\n Yet these exceptional examples, while they inspire, also cause discomfort. Warfare is simpler without fraternizing with the enemy.<\/p>\n Lloyd\u2019s path forward is clearer because Jerry shows signs of penitence and reform. What would it mean to love him if he were unrepentant, or (what is almost worse) made noises in the direction of repentance but continued in the same abusive patterns of behavior?<\/p>\n Beautiful Day<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t have all the answers. Mr. Rogers didn\u2019t have all the answers. I called him a prophet in the wilderness. Like many prophets, he was an odd duck, and\u00a0Beautiful Day<\/em>\u00a0attests his eccentricity as well as his virtue. It also attests, very subtly, the effort and the cost of his constant generosity to everyone. (There\u2019s an oblique but startling moment at the end that, without in any way detracting from his virtue, hints at the darkness of Mr. Rogers.)<\/p>\n But, like a prophet, he was in touch with something larger than himself, and that something occasionally comes into focus in\u00a0Beautiful Day<\/em>, particularly in a rare sequence of sustained cinematic silence and in a moment in which we see Mr. Rogers praying for various people by name, as he did every day \u2014 a list that here includes Lloyd, his wife, their son \u2026 and Jerry.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t come to a climax, as the real Tom Junod\u2019s\u00a0Esquire<\/em>\u00a0profile did, with Mr. Rogers leading Junod to pray himself, as he never had before. The term \u201cgrace,\u201d so notable in Junod\u2019s account of Rogers, is absent here. The film\u2019s Mr. Rogers is clearly religious, but his faith doesn\u2019t make as much of an impression here as it did on Junod.<\/p>\n Yet I came from the film not just inspired but challenged once again by the simple goodness of Mr. Rogers:\u00a0thinking about what I can do to be a better neighbor to those around me \u2014 and certainly to refrain from acting on my less generous impulses. (I can stop when I want to.\u00a0Can stop when I wish.\u00a0I can stop, stop, stop any time.)<\/p>\n None of us by ourselves can guarantee a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Perhaps we can\u00a0at least aspire to be prophets in the wilderness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That, and sentiments like it, should be all any normal Catholic has to say on this extraordinary, and yet ordinary, decent, good, and holy man.<\/p>\n But in the increasingly diseased world of American Christian conservatism, which is now light years from healthy Catholic orthodoxy, Ed Feser (already a Folk Hero for the Most Wrong Subculture in the Church for his championship of war on the Church\u2019s teaching concerning the death penalty) delivers this demented broadside<\/a>:<\/p>\n The Mr. Rogers biopic<\/a>, with Tom Hanks in the starring role, comes out this week and has been getting a lot of positive attention \u2013 in some cases,\u00a0embarrassingly rapturous attention<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0This might seem surprising coming from Hollywood types and secular liberals, given that Rogers was a Presbyterian minister.\u00a0\u00a0But of course, Rogers\u2019 adherence to Christian teaching has nothing to do with it.\u00a0\u00a0Commenting on the movie,\u00a0Angelus<\/em>\u00a0magazine\u00a0reports that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cHanks mentions that Rogers was indeed an ordained minister but seems to take comfort that Rogers \u2018never mentioned God in his show.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0In\u00a0the movie\u2019s trailer<\/a>, a man says to Mr. Rogers \u201cYou love broken people, like me,\u201d to which Rogers replies \u201cI don\u2019t think you are broken\u201d \u2013 never mind the doctrine of original sin.<\/p>\n So, why the adulation?\u00a0\u00a0The movie poster reminds us that \u201cwe could all use a little kindness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0Daily Beast\u00a0<\/em>story linked to above tells us that Rogers was America\u2019s \u201cone true hero\u201d and that \u201cHanks could very well be a living saint,\u201d all because of their extraordinary\u2026 \u201cniceness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Indeed, \u201cTom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers may save us all,\u201d because the movie reminds us that\u00a0\u201cthe world we live in now still does have niceness in it.\u201d<\/p>\n Niceness.\u00a0\u00a0Well, it has its place.\u00a0\u00a0But the Christ who angrily overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, who taught a moral code more austere than that of the Pharisees, and who threatened unrepentant sinners with the fiery furnace, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, was not exactly \u201cnice.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, my point is not to criticize Rogers himself, who I\u2019m sure was a decent fellow, and who was, after all, simply hosting a children\u2019s program.\u00a0\u00a0I don\u2019t know anything about his personal theological opinions, and I don\u2019t know whether the movie accurately represents them or even refers to them at all.\u00a0\u00a0The point is to comment on the idea that an inoffensive \u201cniceness\u201d is somehow the essence of the true Christian, or at least of any Christian worthy of the liberal\u2019s respect.\u00a0\u00a0For it is an idea that even a great many churchmen seem to have bought into.<\/p>\n This is evident from the innumerable vapid sermons one hears about God\u2019s love and acceptance and forgiveness, but never about divine judgment or the moral teachings to which modern people are most resistant \u2013 and which, precisely for that reason, they most need to hear expounded and defended.\u00a0\u00a0And it is evident in the tendency of modern Catholic bishops to emphasize dialogue and common ground rather than conversion, orthodoxy, and doctrinal precision, and to speak of the Church\u2019s teachings on sexual morality, if at all, only half-apologetically, in vague and soft language, and in a manner hedged with endless qualifications.<\/p>\n Such \u201cniceness\u201d is in no way a part of Christian morality.\u00a0\u00a0It is a distortion of the virtues of\u00a0meekness<\/a>\u00a0(which is simply moderation in anger \u2013 as opposed to too much\u00a0or too little<\/em>\u00a0anger), and\u00a0friendliness<\/a>\u00a0(which is a matter of exhibiting the right degree of affability necessary for decent social order \u2013 as opposed to too little affability or\u00a0too much<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n
Against candy-ass Christianity<\/h3>\n
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