Is There Hope for the New TV Season?

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Now, “Religion in the News,” a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from Knight-Ridder News Service, October 4, 2003, with the headline, “This Fall, TV Shows Surprising Faith.”

“This season, it seems as if, like Joan of Arcadia, television will be seeing a lot of God, or at least some kind of higher power. Joan of Arcadia is a twist on the Joan of Arc story, as is the Fox midseason show Wonderfalls, in which a greater power speaks to a sullen young woman through inanimate objects, such as a plastic lion.

“In Fox’s True Calling, which is set to premiere this month, a young woman will be able to save the lives of those who died before their time. Still Life, another midseason drama on Fox, is a variation on Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, with the lead character who has been dead for more than a year. And on Showtime’s Dead Like Me, a self-absorbed teenager dies in a freak accident and becomes a grim reaper, grappling daily with death and the afterlife.

“The new shows are a very different breed, morally ambiguous, sometimes sardonic and emotionally dark. They suggest that receiving a higher calling from a higher power is not easy to live with, and that there are far more questions about the nature of faith and the afterlife than there are answers.

“The creators of this new spiritual TV have slightly different views of why so many similarly themed series have emerged at the same time, a time when television is dominated by simply digested police procedurals, reality series, and family comedies.

“Barbara Hall, the creator of Joan of Arcadia, says she ‘could go into the Jungian philosophy of the collective unconscious, or I could go with there’s something in the zeitgeist right now that people are thinking about this stuff. But,’ she adds, ‘I do think September 11 had something to do with it, and caused people to start thinking about the religion and faith in their lives. But for whatever reason, there is something in the air that people are willing to take a look at or have a discussion of spiritual issues.’

“Just how far do the shows go in their examinations? It varies. True Calling is close to a traditional science fiction fantasy series. Still Life keeps its plot rooted in family drama elements. But others are taking some real risks in terms of asking viewers to immerse themselves in rather difficult questions of faith. Most of the shows decline to get into explicit discussions of the nature of God or the specific beliefs of organized religions.

“In the case of Wonderfalls, says Fuller, ‘Everybody involved has a different idea of what that higher power is. All the voices speak from one godhead or God-source, but what that is, I don’t think anybody knows. We didn’t want to be too pretentious in defining that higher power as anything, well, definable. I don’t think anyone is qualified to do that. The out I leave myself is that early on, God says he won’t answer any direct questions, because, metaphorically speaking, it’s pretty clear that God simply will not explain to us what is going on. Part of God is that he is (or she is) a mystery. It’s part of my Joan of Arcadia rules that the mystery can never be solved.”

Tom: Dave…

Dave: Where do you come up with these things, Tom?

Tom: Well, this is right off the News Service. I mean, these are programs. These are our…you talked about the universities in the early segment. Now we have our children who are, you know, watch TV—not my children, okay…

Dave: Right. Tom, could this relate to the success of that movie? I kept seeing it on United Airlines—you remember the one, God? This guy…

Tom: Bruce Almighty? Yeah…

Dave: Was that successful?

Tom: I don’t know. But it brings up a good point, Dave: all of these things, when they’re introducing ideas about God, and statements—"Hey, we can never know God…”—hey, this is more dangerous than not having anything like this. But people say, “Oh, don’t you see, the TV, they’re moving away from violence and are moving into things that are more spiritual, and these are things of faith, and look how good that is!”

Now, I just want to start with something: Joan of Arcadia? You see, to me, this lends itself to all kinds of confusion. Well, how about this for confusion—I’m a former Catholic. Saint Joan of Arc, all right? Before she was Saint Joan of Arc, she was burned by the Catholic Church as a witch!

Dave: By the way, Tom, if you go into Notre Dame, the church in Paris, there are more candles being burned before the statue of Joan of Arc than there are before the statue of the Virgin Mary! It’s interesting.

Tom: Well, because we have to make expiation, because we blew it—“we…” I shouldn’t even say that—because the Catholic Church blew it with her at the beginning, and then they’re trying to compensate for it. That may be.

But my point is we have utter confusion here, and I think this is dangerous stuff.

Dave: Of course it is. It is more dangerous—something that pretends to lead you into a discussion or an understanding of truth, but says, in fact, you cannot understand it, there is no truth, there’s no way to understand it… Oh, we’re gonna talk about God, but God could be anything, and don’t push your idea of God on me…

I would just ask the question that I’ve asked many times: What does God have to say about it? Why don’t we find out what God has said? And we can prove that the Bible is God’s Word, and we’ve been over that many times. Prophecy fulfilled—you cannot be an atheist and agnostic.

Tom: But, Dave, but this lady, this producer of this program, she says “God says he won’t answer any direct questions because, metaphorically speaking it’s pretty clear that God simply will not explain to us what is going on.” This program…we’ve been talking about Bible prophecy!

Dave: But that’s “God” in this program. Right. So this is a misrepresentation of God. I don’t think it makes God, the true God, very happy. Judgment will come upon these people because of this. They are playing around with God. Talk about taking the name of God in vain and heaping judgment upon themselves!

You see, part of the problem is, Tom, there is no fear of God, as the Bible says. There is no fear of God before their eyes. These people can carry on as though God doesn’t exist, or if He does exist, well, He doesn’t have any ideas anyway. I mean, whatever we say, we can make our jokes, and we can have our fun about God. And what does it really matter?

You know, I was sitting next to a Jewish man on the plane the other day. In fact, quite an important Jewish man—I won’t go into that, lest he be identified. But he said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter about life after death. If there’s something out there, okay. We’ll take care of that when we get there.”

I said, “What? You better take care of that before, otherwise it will be too late.” But this is an attitude people have, and anything goes. And so long as he says, “Well, just as long as we try to be good people in this life, it’s gonna be okay.” But how do you define good?

Tom: Dave, you grew up in a home in which you learned the Bible initially almost by osmosis, because how much of it was taught, and you just had it continually. Our children, especially those of Christian families who allow their kids to watch all this kind of stuff, they’re picking this up by osmosis, and now they’ve got to straighten it out between the truth and what their kids are picking up. It’s an incredible ordeal.

Dave: A brilliant satanic campaign to brainwash.

Tom: Right.