Religion and the Bible on TV

Every year around Easter, we find old Jesus films on TV, from The Greatest Story Ever Told to  Jesus of Nazareth to The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

Increasingly, shows with religious themes are showing up on TV. In March, CNN is in the midst of a six-part series called “Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery,” in which biblical stories are described by scholars and re-enacted.

The Weather Channel showed “Top 10: Bible Weather,” in which 10 calamities from the Bible are paired with equivalent phenomena from our time, with re-enactments standing alongside news footage.

The UP network broadcast “Noah’s Ark,” and PBS’s series Nova rebroadcast the 2008 documentary “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.”

Later, the Smithsonian Channel showed “Siege of Masada,” a one-hour special about the Masada legend, followed by “Killing Jesus” on the National Geographic Channel.

Beginning April 5, NBC will show “A.D. The Bible Continues,” produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, whose miniseries “The Bible” was so popular on the History Channel last year.

Why so many shows with religious themes? The main reason is that they’re popular.

But are they helpful? And do they offer a reliable portrait of biblical stories and themes?

That will depend on the show and on viewers’ needs and desires.

 

One new series on USA that’s received a lot of attention is “Dig,” which premiered March 5. It promotes itself as being “based on reality and true.” We’ve heard that before.

Kimberly Winston writes for Religion News Service that the show “moves quickly between multiple story lines and locations, bouncing off prophesies and spinning conspiracies around the Second Coming of Christ, the Book of Revelation and the restoration of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, where much of the series is filmed.”

It includes a high priest’s magical breastplate, a spotless red heifer and a doomsday Christian group living in a bunker, with plenty of action and suspense. The many plot lines can leave viewers feeling confused, and some of the characters are far from complex.

Its references to the Essenes, the 12 gemstones on the high priest’s breastplate and the red heifer may lead some viewers to look up such information from the Bible, but I doubt it.

Instead, viewers who stick with it may enjoy the suspense, the settings—Jerusalem, Norway, New Mexico—or the esoteric nature of the story.

With the plethora of offerings on TV these days, including many fine ones, why not have some using religious themes and retelling biblical stories?

I also notice that other dramas—realistic ones, not just fantastical ones like “Supernatural” or “Grimm”—often include characters who are religious. And they aren’t always stereotyped as naive or fanatical.

What TV shows have you found particularly good in how they portray religion or Christians?

A related point is that if religion relates to all of life, then shows that portray life authentically and with a certain moral compassion (without being moralizing) should qualify as well.

Private service doesn't always mean the best service

Some ideologues like to promote phrases like “free enterprise” and “big government,” the former being good and the latter being bad. Yet they often fail to define these terms with any specificity. And they often fail to note the possible consequences of living out these ideals. Increasingly, state governments are turning to the private sector to handle services previously performed by the state. The argument is that government spending is wasteful and inefficient. But often what gets lost is accountability as these for-profit companies make profit, not service, their main goal.
Brian Joseph investigates one such service in his article “The Brief Life and Private Death of Alexandria Hill” (Mother Jones, March/April). 

Alexandria Hill, or Alex, 2 years old, died on July 29, 2013, in Rockdale, Texas, while under the care of Sherill Small, her foster mother. Last November, Small was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole.
Not on trial was the private foster-care agency that okayed Small for being a caretaker, or “mentor,” for Alex. Joseph’s article looks at such agencies and asks how accountable they are.
The agency involved in Small’s case was the Lone Star branch of the Mentor Network, a $1.2 billion company that specializes in finding caretakers for a range of populations. Private foster care, Joseph writes, is “a fragmented industry of mostly local and regional providers that collect hundreds of millions in tax dollars annually while receiving little scrutiny from government authorities.” 

Finding foster care has always been difficult, and with high caseloads and tight budgets, many state and local child welfare agencies are turning to private agencies. This means that in many places, “the government can seize your children, but then outsource the duty of keeping them safe—and duck responsibility when something goes wrong,” writes Joseph.
As part of an 18-month investigation, Joseph asked every state whether it knew how many children in its foster system had been placed in privately screened homes. Only eight could, and not one had a statistically valid dataset comparing costs, or rates of abuse or neglect, in privately versus publicly vetted homes.
Christina Riehl, senior staff attorney for the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law, says: “There are so many places where the government puts money to fix a problem without adequately checking to see if the money is actually fixing the problem.”
Joseph talked to former workers at Mentor who said they faced great pressure to OK caretakers. How much money the company makes is tied to the number of foster parents on their roster. As a result, says Roland Zullo, a researcher at the University of Michigan, “the lives of these children become commodities.” 

Alex’s death is not the only such case. Joseph notes many other cases where foster parents were not adequately vetted and harm came to children. And in most cases, the agency was not held accountable.
In one case, a child sustained permanent brain damage from nearly drowning during a private foster-care placement, but California only fined the agency $500.
When Joseph asked a spokesman for the California Department of Social Services why the state didn’t penalize the agency more, he said, “There’s not a huge group of people trying to be foster parents right now, and that’s a challenge—finding enough homes.”
Finding homes for neglected children is a huge challenge, and there are many wonderful foster parents. But giving a blank check to private agencies and failing to monitor their success is not in the best interest of children. “Free enterprise” isn’t always best.