The relationship between one’s faith/religion and the pull of the present-day culture has been debated for generations of Christians…even the New Testament epistles to the earliest churches weigh in on the subject. Regardless of your personal interpretation of what it means to be “in the world but not OF the world”, you can’t deny that there is a connection of some sort between what parts of our culture we consume and what we allow to consume our thoughts.
The real question, for me, is not whether or not we as followers of Christ are allowing our heads to be filled with media driven garbage and allowing the pull of the culture to dilute our faith. I believe that’s a given. The tempter will use whatever foothold we’ll allow him to find in order to get sinful thoughts into our minds.
My question is this: Are we, as followers of Christ, allowing our faith to have as much impact on our culture as we’re allowing the culture to have on our faith?
There’s a marketing theory that states that the greatest impact of mass media (TV, internet, etc.) doesn’t come from telling people what to think or how to think but rather what they should be thinking about. In other words, the more a subject is discussed in the public forum the more it is perceived to be important.
If this is the case, the importance of faith and its relevance in today’s culture has benefitted greatly from a most unexpected and unlikely voice: an animated TV series that recently celebrated its twentieth birthday.
I am talking, of course, about The Simpsons.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s enough other material in the show to justify not allowing impressionable children to watch it (I wasn’t)…but the devout and honest belief in God is alive and well in the fictional city of Springfield.
And the irony is that one doesn’t need to dig deeply to find it. In the forward to his book “The Gospel According to the Simpsons”, author Mark Pinsky quotes studies that show up to 33% of the episodes contain a clear depiction of faith with a fair number of them making it the primary theme of the plot.
The Simpson family attends church together (almost) every Sunday. Their neighbor, Ned Flanders, was once described by Christianity Today as “the evangelical known most intimately to nonevangelicals”….
I could go on but I’m not going to get into too many specific details here as the link between faith and the long-running sitcom has been covered in-depth by books & blogs. (Even Wikipedia has a separate entry highlighting “Religion in the Simpsons”. Check it out. I’d also highly recommend the Pinsky book mentioned above.)
When it first debuted people of faith often dismissed the show as “anti-family values” and “idiotic”. I’m admittedly going to show my age here when I say this but… Bart Simpson and I could have been classmates as I was in the third grade when the show first hit the airwaves. My parents didn’t approve of Bart’s disrespectful behavior (who can blame them?) so I never really watched it much until I reached high school…nor did I really have an interest to do so.
When I got to college, however, the show’s syndicated popularity had reached fever pitch and one could watch up to 6 episodes per day. That allowed slackers like me to catch up in a hurry. It was then that I realized that my prejudice against it was a bit unfair.
First of all, with a host of literary references and a whole team of Ivy League writers the show’s content was far from idiotic, for sure. But I also found the show’s depiction of Simpson family values to be far more “honest” than irresponsible…to a point.
This honesty is also what I’ve come to respect about the show’s spirituality. I’ve often been challenged by some nugget of truth in its satirical look at the protestant church (known on the show as “The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism”). There’s also an inherent measure of honesty in the surprisingly frequent personal prayers offered up by its characters at meals or bedtime. In its tenth season the show even made an entire episode titled “Simpsons Bible Stories” in which the Simpson family all fall asleep in church and have Bible-story based dreams.
I’m not alone in this respect for the Simpsons, of course, but I was particularly surprised by a recent report in the Vatican newspaper which commended the show for its “realistic and intelligent writing” while still justifying criticism for its “excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the script writers.”
L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, congratulated the show on its 20th anniversary and, in discussing Homer Simpson’s attitudes toward religion, I believe summed up the spiritual impact of the show as a whole when the paper describes the depiction of Homer’s relationship with God as “a mirror” to both the “indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith”.
Perhaps the world could use a few more faith-culture “mirrors” like this one.
Happy Twentieth.
Youth Department