wfn.org | Analysis: Hollywood walks fine line in portraying God

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Jan. 16, 2004  News media contact: Tim Tanton7(615)742-54707Nashville, Tenn.
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NOTE: Audio clips and a photograph of Ray Waddle are available.

A UMNS Analysis
By Ray Waddle*

In a nation where 90 percent believe in God, a lot of Americans claim to
speak to the Almighty every day. So it shouldn't be shocking that the Lord
has been granted some face time on prime-time TV.

"Joan of Arcadia," a new, hour-long Friday night drama series, has been a
surprise hit for CBS. Every week, a girl named Joan has daily conversations
with God as she goes about her swirling life as a modern American teenager.
These aren't mountaintop epiphanies of thunder and lightning. God shows up
disguised as everyday people to give Joan simple, direct advice about high
school, family and relationships with the suffering people around her.

I was agnostic about "Joan of Arcadia" at first. The show is the latest entry
in a long and curious Hollywood saga - the mass-media attempt to tap the deep
well of American religious belief and then script a show that is both a)
spiritually dignified and b) entertaining enough to be financially
profitable. 

It's a treacherous combination - the need to be edgy (for high ratings) and
inoffensive (to that statistical 90 percent of believers). The history of
this TV-and-movie search for God is a series of tilts toward blasphemy or
blandness, cynicism or sentimentality. Does "Joan" suffer the same pitfalls?

Modern-day Hollywood theology, you might say, began with "Oh God!," a movie
comedy that gave us the ancient and affable George Burns portraying a kindly
Almighty in a baseball cap. The flick was a hit. Screenwriters had stumbled
on a transcendent formula for success: Make God nonthreatening,
nondenominational and, if possible, hilarious. Remember, this was 1977. The
nation was weary after Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations and other social
convulsions. Religious pluralism was on the rise. We needed a reassuring word
from a wisecracking Creator.

This benign role of deity on the big screen mutated through the '90s.
Increasingly, God showed up in diverse guises, surprising viewer expectations
(Will Smith in "The Legend of Bagger Vance," Michael Clarke Duncan in "The
Green Mile," Alanis Morissette in "Dogma"). These incarnations glowed with
serenity and wisdom, and were indifferent to church debates and
denominational loyalties.

Prime-time TV, a far more conservative medium than the movies, customarily
alludes to the Almighty only indirectly - that is, through angels, God's
lieutenants on earth. "Highway to Heaven" in the 1980s and "Touched by an
Angel" in the 1990s, much beloved by viewers, offered angels who prodded us
humans to live up to our better selves at crucial moments.

But "Joan of Arcadia" does not settle for angelic messengers. The show writes
a new chapter in televised transcendence. It wants God straight on - God
incarnated in various people in Joan's crazy day.

The writers of the show say they take God seriously (producer Barbara Hall
was raised Methodist and is now Catholic). They wanted a show that gets
people talking about the nature of God, God's presence in the world, God's
messages to the world.

"There is the point that God is available to everybody all the time," Hall
says in a recent Beliefnet.com interview. "And a huge step into seeing God is
looking for him, and that's what most people don't do. And teenagers really
don't. In order to talk to a teenager today - I have a pre-teen - God would
have to get her to take the iPod off. Kids don't listen. You'd really have to
bust through Eminem to get to my daughter if you're God."

Does God get a fair shake on "Joan of Arcadia"? Should United Methodists be
offended? Joan's encounters with God are usually modest, homely, brief. The
divine advice she gets is helpful and action-oriented: It boils down to the
Golden Rule and Ten Commandments. 

Her efforts of reconciliation at home and social compassion to strangers
might even have echoes in the United Methodist Church's Social Principles,
which state, "We believe we have a responsibility to innovate, sponsor and
evaluate new forms of community that will encourage development of the
fullest potential in individuals."

Yes, a little slice of theology is implicitly at work in "Joan." In the
Christian story, after all, the "face of God" is found in other people, in
the jostling, dangerous, everyday world of reconciling relationships with
others.

But "Joan of Arcadia" is not church - it's a TV show, with all the rules and
limitations decreed by TV. This is not the televised version of the Book of
Discipline.

For one thing, God's religion is brand X all the way: There's no mention of
church doctrine or Scripture or Jesus Christ. Joan was baptized Catholic, she
says, but her family doesn't go to church. Everyone is oddly silent on the
subject.

"On our show, God can never identify a religion as being right," Hall says in
one of her own "Ten Commandments" for writing about God on TV.

Also, there's the issue of how the God characters often talk - flip and hip.
Whether God appears as a middle-aged substitute teacher, a 20-something
street vender or a fellow teen, they sound street-wise and sassy, as if to
get a laugh. The need to entertain always comes first on TV. 

And the inevitable risk, or result, is to demean the blinding majesty of God.
"We believe in the one true, holy and living god, Eternal Spirit, who is
Creator, Sovereign and Preserver of all things visible and invisible," the
Book of Discipline declares. "He is infinite in power, wisdom, justice,
goodness and love."

Still, it's unusual to see a TV show put some thought into the question of
God's will on earth. On other prime-time dramas about religion, Hall
complains, God is strictly a loving deity who "fixes everything. I don't see
God as the fixer. We're not doing that. God works through people. He can
guide. He gives Joan information."

As Christian teaching, this might be thin and incomplete. But this isn't
seminary. A TV show about God must somehow steer between offending a world of
believers and saying something spiritually interesting. It must make money. 

In one episode, God, posing as a cleaning woman says, "Every decision is a
chance to do something good - it's all about what you do next. Act with
righteousness."

Joan gets to have hallway encounters with the Almighty. The rest of us will
find the message waiting in the Bible, at worship and in the face of a
stranger in distress.

# # #

*Waddle, a writer in Nashville, Tenn., is author of the new book, A Turbulent

Peace: The Psalms for Our Time.

 
 

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United Methodist News Service
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