And, we're back for another round of TV church! As I explained in part 1, this four-part blog series is going to explore the crises of faith of eight fictional characters and also examine how religion is depicted on each show. Today, let's meet two children who are their respective family's punching bags and see how they responded to the concept of a different, more heavenly Father.
(I'm here also - M's raised-very-religious partner, S - and I'll be peppering in color commentary and my own experiences as the situation calls for them.)
3. Meg Griffin - Family Guy ("Religion" as Brought to You by a Smug Atheist)
Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, is an outspoken atheist. I am not sure what his background or upbringing were like, but I'm wondering if there is some trauma there, because Family Guy targets religion a lot.
MacFarlane had a plane ticket for American Airlines flight 11 on September 11, 2001. He got to the airport late and narrowly missed boarding. The plane would go on to crash into the North Tower. I feel like Family Guy's many 9-11 jokes (trust me, there are a LOT of them, and this one is probably my favorite) are a way of MacFarlane unpacking survivor's guilt. But I feel like a lot of the 9-11 jokes are more about the perceived blind patriotism that arose after the attack. In the episode where Lois is running for mayor, she gets overwhelming support by saying "9-11 ... was bad." MacFarlane and his writing staff seem to be against any kind of blind faith, and that extends to religion.
The issue with this show, however, is that either you're an atheist, or you're blindly being taken for a ride. And while South Park's episodes on Mormonism and Scientology are incredibly well-researched, Family Guy depicts every religion as a broad stereotype (for example, when Peter decides to convert Chris to Judaism so he will be better at math).
The Griffins, like the Simpsons, go to church, and, much like in The Simpsons, everyone in town goes to the same church. Which is kind of odd, because this seems to be a Catholic church, unlike Springfield's vaguely Protestant one. (The church in South Park, however, lest we forget is "like, Catholic, or something." Catholicism seems fitting as it is the largest of all Christian subsets, so its representation doesn't feel all that odd to me at least.) Peter Griffin is Irish Catholic, and Lois is Protestant, except in one episode we discover her mother was Jewish. This means Lois immediately must be a Jew, and she starts getting excited about things like bagels and salmon while Peter tries to Schindler's List-style take her out with a rifle. Other than Peter, though, the whole family seems to be down with their sudden, random conversion to Judaism.
The only member of the Griffin household that has a religious stance beyond just parroting things is the talking dog, Brian, voiced by MacFarlane and often seen as a stand-in for MacFarlane's religious and political beliefs. Brian is an atheist, and he's a douche about it. For example, in one episode, he forms a relationship with a girl based only on them both being atheists, and they're obnoxious as ****. When they both reach for the same book written by that sexy, sexy Richard Dawkins we discussed in our last post, they joke about how if God is real, he'll send them another copy. When a waiter at a restaurant asks if they would like to try the heavenly cheesecake, Brian jokes, "No, but I'll have some of the 'there's no afterlife' souffle'" and they laugh heartily. While Brian is supposed to be a mouthpiece for MacFarlane, he's often depicted as smug and as a delusional pseudo-intellectual, and I find that kind of funny.
(Brian's atheism seems a slightly later development. There's a second season episode called "If I'm Dyin', I'm Lyin'" wherein Peter incurs the wrath of God by claiming to be a faith healer, causing the ten plagues of Exodus fame to be visited upon the family. Brian's explanation? "God. Is. Pissed.")
So, what happens when Meg, the oldest Griffin child, decides to intensely pursue Christianity and tries to convert Brian? Is this going to be an unbiased episode about the characters' soul-searching and their realistic, fair debates?
Spoiler alert: It's not
Shut Up, Meg
There's a somewhat disturbing trend in Christian youth culture that advises teenage girls to view Jesus as their boyfriend. You might think Family Guy would go this route with Meg's spiritual awakening, since she is a miserable, single teenage girl, but thank goodness, they did not. Meg turned to Jesus more because she was unloved by her family, I mean, look how they treated her when she had the mumps. But, while Meg is suffering from mumps, Peter brings her an old TV to watch, and she sees the show "Kirk and the Lord," hosted by Kirk Cameron. Kirk asks, "Do you ever feel lonely, unappreciated, unloved?" etc and then says, "You know who does love you? The Lord." And that's all it takes to make Meg an evangelical Christian. Suddenly, she's spouting phrases like "This is the day the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it" and "I have been washed in the blood of the Lamb." And that brings me to
Tangent: Is This How People See Christians?
Ned Flanders never really bothered me. Being a middle-aged fuddy-duddy and an overly anxious parent were possibly even more a part of his personality than him being a Christian, Christianity was just the icing on the cake, except he would not eat cake, he just has plain white bread with maybe a glass of water on the side for dipping. And his well-meaning nerdiness is endearing. I never really saw him as a Christian stereotype; his Christianity is just one facet.
But there were some stereotypical portrayals of Christians, particularly teenage Christians, that bothered me. I was a somewhat reserved teenager who was attempting to be Christian and had a lot of dear friends who were religious, and when I see a character like Converted Meg in this episode, or Ann in Arrested Development, or the stereotypical missionary kids in Mean Girls, I feel kind of insulted on mine and my friends' behalfs. Religious people are not sexless robots who talk in King James version speak. When I was in high school I would cringe whenever religion was brought up on one of my TV shows because I figured that was where it was going. The token religious character would always be an over-the-top, glassy-eyed sheep.
(I feel like this became a more common thing in the '90s. The Clinton administration was in full swing and America was finally putting the rabid and rampant conservatism of the 1980s behind us. The major religious figures of the day were people like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson whose reactionary nature seemed to make them an easy target for progressives or even just normal, non-religious types. I feel like a lot of the negative depictions of Christians around this time have a lot to do with them and their acolytes... of which my mother could be counted.)
People who had never been exposed to religion at all might believe these stereotypes based on the way religious people are portrayed in media. As a teenager, I listened to both secular and Christian rock music. I loved Green Day, I also loved Thousand Foot Krutch (I still do!). In the Simpsons episode, though, where a Christian rock band (how scandalous!) visited the church, we get this:
What the heck (pardon my language)? My gosh, I don't know what this is, but it sure isn't Christian rock. First of all, it's not rock, it's a mix between country and elevator music and a lullaby, and believe it or not, Christian rock bands do not typically sing about the Bible. I present for your consideration:
A song by a Christian rock band, Thousand Foot Krutch. About fighting with someone or something you've let into your head and you need to feel alive again.
A song by a secular rock band, Linkin Park. A song about feeling numb and having a struggle with someone or something you've let into your head.
A song by a band that could not decide if it was Christian or secular, Evanescence. A song about feeling numb and having a struggle with someone or something and you need to feel alive again.
They're really all the same song, sort of. They're all the same genre, for sure, and great to emo out to.
I used to have the local alt rock station and the local Christian rock station saved on my radio, and would switch back and forth depending on which station was currently playing a song I liked better. So it offended me that people would think Christian rock sounds like ... that awful thing The Simpsons did.
(Oh, trust me - as someone whose listening habits as a youth consisted largely of CCM [i.e. - Contemporary Christian Music], oldies, and 'dad rock,' I can confirm this is absolutely a very specific subset of CCM. This feels like a slightly edgier version of what Sandi Patti was doing at the time or, more accurately, the thing Amy Grant was doing when she went secular for a hot minute.)
Wow, that was a huge tangent. Let's get back to Meg, shall we.
Christianity Is Scary to "Normal" People and Atheism Is Even Scarier
So ... the Griffins are Catholic, right? So why would it be such a big deal when Meg finds the Lord? Isn't that the goal? Her parents seem, while uninterested (I mean, it's Meg), kind of baffled by this new phase.
That's because the Griffins are more of the Christian-by-default ilk I mentioned in both of my last entries and will discuss in the next. They're Christian because they aren't Jewish. (Except when they're Jewish.)
The family is mildly annoyed by Meg's religiousness, but the **** really hits the fan when they find out Brian is an atheist. (I mean, has that never come up before?) And that's scary, right? This person opposes my faith, which means my faith might not be real, which means I might not get to go to heaven. So it's better to try to convert them, or if that fails, to shun them. Lois tells Brian that an atheist is the worst thing a person can be, and it soon makes local news that there is an atheist in Quahog, which is something worse than Hitler. Brian is now having garbage thrown at him, and worse yet, because he's banned from every town establishment, he can't go get a drink.
Brian ultimately decides to lie and tell Meg he has seen the light so she can help him get alcohol. But, because Family Guy depicts religious people as insane, Meg takes him to a book burning on the way back from their liquor run. They burn Origin of Species and A Brief History of Time, of course, but one of the books they also burn is Logic for First Graders (in case you were curious about this show's stance).
(This was something that missed me entirely, TBH. Even as an incredibly conservative religious kid, and I was, at no point was there any kind of suggestion to start burning any kind of secular media. [This gets depicted in Arrested Development as well, so it has to have been at least somewhat commonplace in certain parts of the country.] What I experienced instead were the encouragements to abandon secular art for more acceptable, if not lower quality, Christian art. "Like Secular Artist X? Try Christian Artist Y!" The only reason this didn't work on me better was because, as previously mentioned, I wasn't really keeping up on modern secular music, listening as I was to CCM and oldies. When I got to college, though? That's a different story... but not necessarily one for this blog.)
The book burning is Brian's breaking point, and that brings us to
God Doesn't Exist Because Your Butt Is Too Big
Brian needs to talk Meg out of belief in God. Not talk her into openmindedness, or self-searching, or anything like that. There's no middle road here. There's no God. As Brian states, "If there were a God, would He put you here on Earth with a flat chest and a fat ass?" He goes on to tell Meg that her existence is so miserable that it in itself proves that there is no God, and she agrees, and we go back to the status quo.
So, not only does Meg accept that God doesn't exist, but she accepts that her pathetic, unloved, big-butt existence is absolute proof that there is no God.
So, how is Meg doing, after she gave up on the love and eternal salvation she'd believed in for a couple days? She's fine. She rolls with the punches. Just another "shut up, Meg" day.
What Is This Show's Stance?
Well, this one is not hard to peg at all. You're an atheist, or you're a sheeple.
While South Park has a more ambivalent view on whether religion is inherently good and community-building, or inherently divisive and power-driven, Family Guy makes it really clear where we're at. In a recent episode, Brian has a date with a Christian girl, but when he finds out "going back to my place and getting a little crazy" means watching funny State Farm commercials, not having sex, he is officially DONE with humoring Christianity and decides he should use Stewie's time machine to obliterate it to prevent blue balls, oh, and all the religious war and stuff, I guess, but mostly the blue balls.
They do manage to obliterate religion, but God (who exists in the Family Guy universe, but is described as "mildly autistic") shows up and gives Brian and Stewie noogies until they agree to undo it (man, they didn't know how to end this episode).
Family Guy is one of my favorite shows. But I think it should probably stay away from tackling religion. The Christianity stereotypes are cringe, the Jewish stereotypes are cringe, and its message on religion is ... well, not great. Basically, you can't believe in a higher power and also be capable of independent thought.
So, let's move on to our next entry, who is perfectly capable of independent thought.
4. Dewey Wilkerson - Malcolm in the Middle (How to Become a Deist Without Really Trying)
The Wilkersons are your average middle-class family, and that means that religiously, they are, I guess, whatever "normal" is. But two of their sons are very deep thinkers who are ultimately going to make their own decisions about what they believe.
I won't have as much to say about this show, because, unlike the previous three, it does not repeatedly fixate on religion. Religion only even comes up in a handful of episodes. But, at one point, Malcolm expresses his religious beliefs in one episode, and they are ... absolutely aligned with where I am now and have been for a really long time.
When Malcolm gets a new girlfriend, he has to be grilled by her family first. As they sit there asking "What kind of boy are you," and continuing to stare as he talks, he starts out with the basics, then goes to blurting stuff out from dental records to finally, "Religiously, I classify myself as a hopeful agnostic. I think the basic philosophical question is-" and then they cut him off.
I'd never heard someone classify themselves as a "hopeful agnostic" before, and this replaced Fox Mulder's "I want to believe" as my TV classification of what I ... am. Now. Something that people do not understand about agnostics is that they are not hedging their bets. They may believe in a higher power, but not be confident to declare they can understand it.
To be clear, we're talking about fictional character Malcolm, not me.
But, we're not even talking about Malcolm. We're here to talk about Dewey.
Dewey is about as ludicrously neglected as Meg is. His older brothers treat him terribly, and his parents frequently forget he exists, even scheduling his little brother Jamie's delivery on the same day as Dewey's birthday because, well, they forgot it was his birthday.
As Dewey gets older, you see that not only is he capable of independent thought, but it sometimes torments him. When he's cast as Abraham Lincoln in the school play, he gets cold feet because he has been reading up about this Lincoln guy and is not sure he really agrees with his incongruous political policies. His mother, Lois, brushes it off as stage fright, and then his parents don't even make it to the play. Dewey has to look at another random couple in the audience and imagine that they are his encouraging parents.
Dewey basically raises himself. The family already has one genius (Malcolm) so they just kind of assume the other kid is still alive and don't seem to notice how intelligent he is. But, because he's a kid, he still gets dragged along into all the family's misadventures, including
The Family Joins a Church
When the family is unable to afford daycare for Jamie, they join a church, because the church provides a babysitting co-op. For some reason, the kids need to join too and start going to Sunday school. When Dewey anxiously says he doesn't know how to pray, Hal responds, "For the next half hour, as far as you're concerned, God is the greatest thing in the universe and that's that!"
Reese is placed in teen Sunday school, and Dewey in child Sunday school. Reese seems baffled as the other glassy-eyed, overjoyed teens sing songs with lyrics like, "I don't need your evil weed, you can keep your coke and LSD, because I'm snorting what God gave me, and it smells a lot like love." The Sunday school teacher tells him, "Reese, the only thing that's making you stay here is that little voice in your head asking, 'Why are all these people so much happier than me?'" And the religious teens giggle enthusiastically as if they are DEFINITELY on coke and LSD. (This is another TV episode that really bothered me when I was younger based on its depiction of Christians, another 'is that what they think Christians are like' moment. To be fair, when I was going to the local youth group in junior high, one of the songs they'd occasionally sing was a rewrite of Queen's "We Will Rock You" that started out with "Jesus was a cool dude, 40 days without food" and I won't subject you to the rest, but the older kids in the group were NOT really jamming to this, we recognized it was more for the little kids who were having fun because this was an easy song to sing and stomp and clap to.)
(This depiction feels very much like someone having been told about what youth group is like by someone who was invited one time by someone they were dating and went because they wanted to sleep with that person, then got so weirded-out by the whole experience that they never went back.)
So, back to Malcolm in the Middle. Reese sees some paintings that one of the parishioners did, one of which is Elijah in a fiery chariot, and he decides this is BADASS and is immediately converted. (That's going to be a common theme in this blog series.) (This is another thing that bothered me when I watched this episode for the first time as a teen - of course, the stupidest person in the family is going to be the one who becomes a Christian. I don't want people to think Christians are stupid.)
Now that Reese has been awakened to the Word of the Lord, he's happy, and he's hugging Dewey and telling him that he loves him, rather than punching him. Dewey is concerned that Reese may be brainwashed, but is at the same time considering religion. He tells the Sunday school teacher, "Ever since we joined this church, all I do is think about stuff. What kind of God makes a kid think about stuff when they're not even in school?"
The teacher responds that God has His reasons, and Dewey says, "Right, like Pastor Roy said, God is so much bigger than us, trying to imagine what He is thinking would be like an ant trying to imagine what we are thinking." The teacher agrees, and that leads to Dewey using a pretty horrific analogy to describe how he's basically becoming a Deist:
Dewey's beliefs reflect the deism that Voltaire expressed in Candide, that God may have created the universe but then basically left it alone, and because we have no way of communicating with God, the best we can do is be good people and not think about an arbitrary higher being who may or may not give a **** about us. "Il faut cultiver notre jardin," etc etc. Yeah, I'm comparing Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle to Voltaire. Deal with it. (To paraphrase Isaac Hayes's backup singers, "I can dig it.")
Why This Makes Sense for Dewey
Dewey takes comfort in his acceptance of Deism, because it leads him to believe that all people are equal and while they cannot predict what God is going to do, they can focus on treating other people on Earth as they should be treated. This makes sense, since Dewey has a somewhat tyrannical mother. In an early episode, Malcolm describes God to Dewey as "kind of like Mom, but invisible."
Not only were the Wilkerson children not raised religiously, their parents apparently have never had a conversation about their own religious beliefs. In a season 6 episode (two seasons after the one where they join a church), Hal says something about how he can't wait until he and Lois can just spend eternity together in the afterlife. Lois announces that she doesn't believe in an afterlife, and Hal is horrified.
Hal is obviously of the "I'm normal, so I am going to heaven" mindset that has been so prevalent in all of these entries so far (he, after all, was unable to paint over the gory crucifixion mural the church people painted in Jamie's bedroom and said they had to find an atheist contractor to take care of this), and finding out Lois doesn't believe in an afterlife destroys him to the point that Lois has to lie (badly) and tell him, "I'm sorry, Hal, I just realized I do believe in an afterlife after all." Hal is ecstatic that he has his eternity with Lois back. This is very reminiscent of Lisa Simpson agreeing to pay lip service to Christianity and Marge being happy that now Lisa is going to go to heaven again.
If the parents couldn't even talk to each other about religious beliefs, how could they talk to their kids about it? I mean, to be fair, Lois and Hal are really terrible parents. But their kids are going to figure out their religious beliefs on their own. Reese is going to latch on to anything that seems badass. Malcolm is going to philosophically examine why his life is the way it is. And Dewey is going to imagine that God is, like his parents and his brothers kind of are, an authority figure standing over his anthill with a shovel that could drop at any minute, but that leads to a blissful "nothing really matters" (how many times am I going to mention Queen?) frame of mind.
What Is the Show's Stance?
It's hard to say, because this show rarely touches on religion. The creator of Malcolm in the Middle based this show on his own upbringing, with Malcolm based on himself, so some of this may have been based on personal experience, but I don't even know if it was. Religion doesn't even come into play until season 4 (unlike the last three shows, which jumped on it pretty quick).
The biggest stance Malcolm takes on religion is depicting the churchgoers as being, well, kind of plastic and vapid, with plastered-on smiles, and the fact that the stupidest person in the family is the only one to really latch on to religion (for completely misguided reasons - he believes that he can also fly away in a flaming chariot).
But, Reese isn't alone in basing his religious faith on God being a total badass. More on that in part 3, when we will cover two grown men who deeply intertwine religion into their identities even though their faith is as stable as a house of cards. No, I'm not covering House of Cards.
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