Caddickisms » religion

Christianity on TV

Jeff — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:28:11 +0000

This is funny, but not what I'm after.

I saw an article today stating that the BBC ran a survey and received results showing it was “anti-Christian” and ageist. I don’t live in the UK, nor do I watch any current BBC shows other than Doctor Who. This article doesn’t give any numbers or specifics, either, so I really can’t confirm or deny the veracity of what it says (though I can’t say I doubt it). However, it did start me thinking: can I think of a single scripted show anywhere on TV that I think accurately portrays Christians? I couldn’t come up with one. I certainly don’t have a lock on every show out there, but it’s interesting to me that I can’t think of any that even come close. The closest I can come up with from the past are 7th Heaven and Touched by an Angel, but I never really watched either of those shows so that’s just based on inference – it’s more likely that they’re just feel-good shows with a saccharine-Christian overtone.

What I’m trying to come up with, though, are characters who represent real Christians struggling with real everyday problems. Not marginalized, caricatured, superficial, weak, clichéd, Bible-quoters, but characters treated with the same respect as other characters as they go through life trying to make decisions based on their beliefs. People who struggle, and sometimes fail, to live their life according to God’s will as revealed in the Bible; who try to deal with others, including (and especially) those they vehemently disagree with, in love even when it hurts them to do it. Part of the key there is “struggle.”

I’m not even looking for a show that centers on such a character, necessarily, but just includes one.

Something closer to the characters in the movie Second Chance, really, which shows the conflict within the church community as vastly different approaches collide. I’ve reviewed this movie before. It’s got arrogance, profanity, selfishness, humility, love, forgiveness, short-sightedness, integrity, and self-sacrifice – and that’s all just one character: the pastor. (Understand that I’m not saying that the film itself is an example of what I’d like to see on TV. As one reviewer said: “It feels more like an exhortation to the Christian Community and I wonder how someone on the outside would be able to follow it.” I’m just pointing out that the characters here are examples of real people and Christians.)

Seems odd that Christianity is supposedly so prevalent in America and the UK, and yet our media really doesn’t seem to reflect that much – and in fact could be said to skew toward its marginalization.

As I said, though, I don’t know every show out there. It’s certainly possible these characters exist and I’ve just missed them. Can anyone think of a well-rounded portrayal of Christianity on scripted TV?

I’m a prejudiced idiot

Jeff — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:07:18 +0000

Apparently, I’m prejudiced.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I persisted in believing an unfounded assumption rather than taking a few minutes to find out the truth. Because of that stupidity, I missed out on some enjoyment. Luckily, I can make up for that in this case. As I’ll come back to, that’s not always true.

The name “Five for Fighting” applied to a music group immediately conjured up images of hard, driving rock music, with lots of screaming and anger. It’s just the name alone that brought that image to mind. The only music I had heard from the group at that time was “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” which is one of my favorite songs. But I persisted in my faulty image, thinking that maybe this was the song that broke their mold, and the rest of their songs were just as I imagined.

Then I heard a couple more of their songs, and they were all very nice, acoustic piano-driven songs with thoughtful lyrics and beautiful orchestration. And still I rationalized. “Maybe they do one nice song per album.”

Eventually I realized that was a stupid assumption to make and I should look into the group and see if I was missing out on something great. Still, it took a while to do anything about it. In fact, it wasn’t until I started exploring Pandora that I really found out how stupid I am.

I had a lot of my facts wrong. First off, “Five for Fighting” isn’t a group. It’s a guy. He just figured his name was harder to remember than a marketing title, and he was right. I haven’t had any trouble remembering the name (which refers to a hockey penalty) – I just associated it poorly. Which leads to my other large mistake. It’s still amazing to me that presented with nothing but music that I loved, I still had this notion that the majority of Five for Fighting’s catalog would be stuff I hated. I’ve listened to probably 15 of his songs now, and I have liked all of them. Most share the same acoustic, orchestrated, piano-led sound.

While I have a few contenders for my favorite so far, I have to give the nod to the radio hit “100 years”.

That song perfectly blends many of the elements I love. Strong rhythm piano, nice orchestration, a distinctive sound, strong solo work moving into full instrumentation, and lyrics about the passage of time and life. I’m a sucker for the “time passing” motif.

So why, presented with only music that I love, did I persist in my prejudiced viewpoint? Ignorance. Ignorance is at the heart of all prejudice.

There are people who hate others based only on their race. They don’t get to know the people or what they stand for at all – they simply believe their prejudiced views, despite evidence to the contrary. The same applies to religion and politics. There are Republicans who recoil at anything labeled “Democrat” without any knowledge of the message’s content. Likewise, there are Democrats who cringe at anything to come out of a Republican’s mouth, simply because a Republican said it, with no regard for the content of the statement (or its context).

This problem of prejudice is exacerbated by the sound-bite driven, attention-deficit guided media coverage that focuses on isolated incidents or statements with no regard to context, frequently presenting a misleading, or even wholly inaccurate, picture.

Don’t allow prejudice to guide you. Don’t be ignorant. Don’t assume that you know; know that you know. Find out the truth. You don’t have to agree with it, but discover the truth. Unlike choosing which music group to listen to, some choices can have lasting and dangerous consequences.

And on your way out, take a listen to this lesser known Five for Fighting song that I discovered after I started paying attention.

Ohio Board Tells Students, “Thinking Isn’t Important”

Jeff — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 07:46:41 +0000

Ohio Board Undoes Stand on Evolution – New York Times (free subscription required)

The Ohio Board of Education voted 11 to 4 Tuesday to toss out a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution and an accompanying model lesson plan…

Okay… this makes no sense to me. What is the problem with a critical analysis of evolution? Is the case for evolution so bad that it can’t withstand critical analysis?

What is science, anyway, but systematic, critical analysis?

Emphasis added below:

“This lesson is bad news, the ‘critically analyze’ wording is bad news,” Martha W. Wise, the board member who offered the emergency motion, told her colleagues during 90 minutes of contentious debate here Tuesday afternoon. “It is deeply unfair to the children of this state to mislead them about the nature of science.”

Whoa. Back up the truck. First of all, this deserved an emergency motion? Pure political maneuvering:

Michael Cochran, one of three lawyers on the 19-member board, criticized Mrs. Wise’s supporters as undoing a lengthy process that had led to adoption of the standards with an emergency motion on an afternoon that four members, three of whom support the lesson, were absent.

“It is absolutely disgraceful that we’ve had this for three years, and we can’t wait another month,” Mr. Cochran said. “I think that’s by design. Not intelligent design, but by design.”

Second, how is teaching critical analysis, the foundation of science, “mislead[ing] them about the nature of science”?!?! Misleading?! Holy cow, that’s a whole new type of stupid.

When I first read this, I was dumbfounded for a few minutes. How could anyone say that teaching kids to question theories is a bad thing? Further, how could anyone get hung up on the phrase “critical analysis” as the root of the problem?

Plus, last time I checked, evolution was far from proven. It’s still a theory, though a well-regarded one. To my mind, that means we should be even more aware of its holes, poking and prodding at it until it either collapses or is finally proven. That, at its core, is what science is all about! Come up with a hypothesis (theory) and then try to disprove it: look it up — that’s the “scientific method.”

I am flabbergasted that the Ohio school board would hold such a dim view of science. It’s ironic that the board probably thinks it is protecting science with this foolishness. All they are doing is taking a huge step backward.

“Bible bill” sponsored by Democrats

Jeff — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 18:21:03 +0000

Democrats in 2 Southern States Push Bills on Bible Study – New York Times

A couple of Democrats are endorsing a Bible class in public schools—but only if it’s based on a specific textbook about the Bible (“The Bible and Its Influence”) and not the Bible itself (or, for that matter, any other textbook, apparently).

This has stirred up some ill-will among Republicans who have been pushing for Bible classes for years (which the same Democrats have opposed). They are accusing the Democrats of using religion as a political tool in this election year. And the Democrats really aren’t denying that assertion:

The Democrats who introduced the bills said they hoped to compete with Republicans for conservative Christian voters. “Rather than sitting back on our heels and then being knocked in our face, we are going to respond in a thoughtful way,” said Kasim Reed, a Georgia state senator from Atlanta and one of the sponsors of the bill. “We are not going to give away the South anymore because we are unwilling to talk about our faith.”

Not all liberals are happy either.

Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued that “The Bible and Its Influence” was “problematic” because it omitted “the bad and the ugly uses of the Bible,” like the invocation of Scripture to justify racial segregation.

Both points of view here are valid. The Democrats are obviously pandering, though I have no reason to believe that they are being dishonest. And since this textbook purports to show the “influence” of the Bible, it ought to show how it is mis-used as well.

I would imagine some very interesting discussions could come out of a class of this nature—though I don’t think I’d refer to it as a Bible class. As I understand it from this article, it would be about the effect the Bible has had on history, not the message of the Bible itself.

For my money, the best quote was at the end of the article:

For his part, Mr. Stetson, founder of the group that produced the textbook, said a political fight was not what he wanted. “We are the first English-speaking generation to have lost the biblical story,” he said, lamenting that studying the Bible had become “a political football.”

Though I’m not sure his textbook is the answer, I think he nailed the problem.