free variable

Without fail, the sort of Christianity depicted in television drama is wholly monolithic. It is a cultural Christianity, marked by the sort of trappings that are readily recognizable to non-practitioners. It is chiefly Roman in character because such trappings abound in the sacraments and pieties of the Roman Catholic church — who hasn’t seen a detective go to a confessional or superstitiously mention the intercession of a saint? — and because Roman Catholicism is, if my experience is any guide, a largely cultural phenomenon on the coasts, where most television drama is produced and where the target audience for most mass media lives.

In the sort of Christianity that exists in television’s world, Christian characters fall under four types. The first is the crazed fundamentalist, a straw man who is always as unattractive as possible and is frequently deranged or sociopathic, but whose main crime is always an improper transfer of religiously-motivated ideals from the private world to the public, generally combined with a zeal for violence or offense. The second is the culturally Christian protagonist; his or her public faith consists of mildly rebuking those characters whose temperament is irreverent, in recalling episodes of religious practice from childhood, or in making moral claims that barely stray outside the acceptable bounds of mass-media orthodoxy. There are a spectrum of these characters; one gets a sense that some are actually Christians in a meaningful sense, even though no direct evidence of this appears on camera. The third is the hypocritical clergy figure; we’ve seen the contemporary incarnation of this stereotype at least since The Scarlet Letter, and it is no less tiresome now. The fourth is the nonjudgmental mentor figure, who can be either a priest or nun, a pastor, or someone whose “saintly” nature is frequently mentioned by other characters. Type Four never explicitly expresses anything remotely related to orthodox Christian doctrine or practice, but instead dispenses semi-coherent Yoda-like wisdom or feel-good clichés devoid of the hallmarks of actual faith.

The Christianity of television drama is also one that has missed out on most of the Christian academic and theological traditions of the last two millennia. In a practice so frequent as to be almost a genre convention, television writers will establish a crisis of conscience for a Type Two character by making her soliloquize about how a good God could allow the possibility of evil, cancer, crime, or eating dinner with one’s salad fork. This is, apparently, television producers’ shorthand for something quite like Dostoyevsky’s “furnace of doubt.” Raising these questions is fine, although it is slightly implausible that an adult Christian has never dealt with them before demanded to by the circumstances of a Very Special Episode. What isn’t fine is that these questions are treated by the medium as if they have no answers, or at least no satisfactory answers. The resolution of the crisis does not come, say, in reading C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain or in receiving peace that passes all understanding, but in a motivational-poster-like encounter with a Type Four character or in a brilliant triumph of human agency just before the credits roll. I suppose that there are intelligent people for whom the existence of evil or of human frailty is a stumbling-block to faith; with this in mind, it is unconscionable that the “problem” of evil is presented as one which has no solution, especially when the image of Christians as stereotypes divorced from actual Christian faith is so pervasive in the mass media.

Kierkegaard described despair as originating when we try and understand the eternal in light of the temporal: trying to weigh eternal ramifications of temporal choices, for example, or recognizing that our temporal concerns are irrelevant even as they still eat at us. His solution to despair is not in bucking up and figuring things out for ourselves, or in interpreting temporal events as pointing to evidence that we weren’t really confused. Rather, despair is solved only in total reliance on God. Objections to Christian faith like the “problem of evil,” then, are only remotely sensical if the appropriate relation to revealed truth is “attempts at rationalization.” As Christians, we concede that our facilities will always be inadequate to comprehend the eternal. The portrayals of Christian angst in television drama, on the other hand, don’t appear to acknowledge that: for them, the a struggle of faith is the struggle with the world not being as you think it should, or as you believe God would have it to be. At best, this represents a pre- or post-Christian worldview.

I’m currently listening to Zueignung, Op.10, No.1 from the album “Fritz Wunderlich – Beethoven, Haydn & Strauss, R. Lieder” by Bavarian State Orchestra, Fritz Wunderlich & Jan Koetsier