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{"id":154,"date":"2010-11-30T00:08:19","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T04:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/philosophicalfragments\/?p=154"},"modified":"2010-11-30T00:08:19","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T04:08:19","slug":"whats-better-grilled-cheesus-or-the-absent-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/philosophicalfragments\/2010\/11\/30\/whats-better-grilled-cheesus-or-the-absent-god\/","title":{"rendered":"What's Better: Grilled Cheesus or the Absent God?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I\u2019ve been wondering for some time now about the pervasive absence of God-talk from popular television and movies.\u00a0 To be clear: I\u2019m not wondering why <\/em>God is absent.\u00a0 The entertainment industry has collectively decided that talk of God and spiritual subjects is potentially controversial and alienating, and therefore better avoided.\u00a0 Thus you can watch countless movies and television shows in which characters go through their lives, confronting issues of life and death, marriage and childbearing, and so on, without ever once considering whether God exists, whether there is a soul or an afterlife, or whether Jesus Christ is who he claims he was.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m wondering is: What is the effect of this absence on the people, and especially on the children, who watch movies and television?\u00a0 Because this way of avoiding God-talk is, in itself, making a statement of spiritual significance to the audience.<\/p>\n

My doctoral dissertation was devoted to Kierkegaard, and among the manifold influences on Kierkegaard were the German Romantics.\u00a0 The German Romantics had a tendency to examine literary and dramatic genres in terms of the worldviews they expressed, and Kierkegaard picked this up.\u00a0 So ancient tragedy was not merely a genre; it reflected a particular way of dealing with reality, a particular way of living in the world, and a set of beliefs and values came along with it.\u00a0 One of Kierkegaard\u2019s earliest pieces contrasted the worldviews expressed in ancient and modern forms of tragedy.\u00a0 Attending the theater was attending training in how to live.\u00a0 By watching the motions, the passions, the decisions of those upon the stage, we are trained for our own motions, passions and decisions.<\/p>\n

Which leads to the question: What is the worldview communicated by now-contemporary movies and television?\u00a0 When children watch thousands of hours of movies and television, in which untold thousands of characters face untold thousands of decisions, including extremely important decisions, without once asking what God would have them do<\/em>, or how this will affect their souls and their eternal destinies<\/em>, or whether there is such a thing as eternal truth and salvation<\/em>, how does this effect them?\u00a0 Are we illicitly training our children to face life\u2019s decisions without reference to God, by showing them an endless succession of fictional characters who do precisely that (and get along just fine, thank you very much)?<\/p>\n

All of this was brought to mind when I watched a recent episode of Glee entitled Grilled Cheesus<\/em>.\u00a0 One of the male leads produced a grilled cheese sandwich which bore the apparent outline of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 It was a clever play<\/a> on Pancake Jesus, the Holy Toast, Cinnamon Nun and other gastronomic apparitions that strike many of us as silly.\u00a0 It was also profoundly condescending toward the kind of simple faith that is lived by billions of people around the world.\u00a0 The entire episode featured the gay student, Kurt, who is far the most articulate of the students (and a sort of avatar for the gay creator of the show, Ryan Murphy), offering impassioned and eloquent criticisms of (mostly Christian) faith, while the Christian students offered lame defenses, acted befuddled, or got upset that someone had the audacity to question their faith.\u00a0 At the end of the episode, Kurt tells his father (whose coma-inducing heart-attack was the event precipitating the discussions about faith) that he does not believe in God, but he believes in their love for one another.\u00a0 The faux profundity was disappointing.<\/p>\n

I am a fan of Glee.\u00a0 But let\u2019s be honest.\u00a0 Its depiction of faith was by and large cynical, skeptical, and mocking.\u00a0 One character, Sue Sylvester, says that \u201cAsking someone to believe in a fantasy, however comforting, isn\u2019t a moral thing to do.\u00a0 It\u2019s cruel.\u201d\u00a0 (Yes, she later accepts her special-needs sister\u2019s offer to pray for her, but this is never accompanied by an intelligent response to Sue\u2019s statement.)\u00a0 Or, when one character offers the lame apologetic that \u201cyou can\u2019t prove God doesn\u2019t exist,\u201d Kurt replies (as though these were remotely analogous), \u201cYou can\u2019t prove that there isn\u2019t a magic teapot floating around the dark side of the moon with a dwarf inside of it that reads romance novels and shoots lightning bolts out of its boobs, but it seems pretty unlikely, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d\u00a0 Kurt also says that God is \u201clike Santa Claus for adults,\u201d and that churches hate gays, women and science.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen some assess the episode more positively, but the fact is that there was not a single genuine defense of faith (or even theism) presented in the entire hour.\u00a0 The only positive portrayal <\/em>of faith came in a visit to an African-American church (even in the most skeptical precincts of academia, I always found that the one unassailable form of Christianity was the African-American church).\u00a0 But even the young black woman who takes Kurt to the African-American church can only offer this defense: \u201cyou\u2019ve gotta believe in something,\u201d because otherwise \u201clife is just too hard.\u201d\u00a0 As though Christians have not been presenting intelligent and compelling defenses of their faith for two thousand years.<\/p>\n

I am going to write a column on this shortly, but for now I wanted to ask you: Which would you rather have?\u00a0 A television show that has the courage to raise and address questions of faith and salvation, even if it does so in a way that is broadly disparaging of faith?\u00a0 In which faith questions are at least shown as relevant?\u00a0 Or would you rather have movies and television shows that ignore those questions and essentially train us and our children in going through life without reflecting on God or incorporating God into our lives?\u00a0 In which faith appears not so much untrue or unreliable as merely irrelevant? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"