Seven Reasons Why We Need Mister Rogers More Than Ever

“Love is at the root of everything,” he says in the film. “All learning, all relationships. Love, or the lack of it.”

Neighbor tells us that some of his critics took Rogers’ message of self-love and self-acceptance as his license to coddle a generation. They equate Rogers’ open-handedness to a baseball game where no one keeps score.

But Junlei Li, a professor of psychology and human development and co-director of the Fred Rogers Center, says that Rogers was simply expressing—embracing—a cornerstone of Christian belief: “You are the beloved son or daughter of God.”

God loves His children unconditionally. He loves them, in Rogers’ own words, just the way we are. That doesn’t mean we should stop learning and growing, any more than Rogers’ thought his young viewers would be better off without learning to read or count or tie their shoes. We can always be better. We can, and should, always improve, as much as our skills and gifts allow us to. But it’s not a condition of God’s love. That love is constant—more than the sun or moon or stars.

Mister Rogers showed us what that love looks like. He shaped countless children who can, and perhaps should, speak into a world that very much needs Rogers-like wisdom.

Fred Rogers died in 2003. He never knew a world with Facebook or the iPhone, with ISIS or the #MeToo movement or Donald Trump as President.

But as Won’t You Be My Neighbor suggests, Rogers—his wisdom, his heart, his gentle bravery—is very much needed in this world of ours. Our nation turns its lonely eyes to him.

Even though he’s gone, Rogers gave many of us some powerful, beautiful lessons. And maybe it’s up to us to now be the heroes that he taught us to be.