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.

Family warmth helps pass on religion

One concern many families of faith share is how to pass on their faith to their children. At least one sociologist has made this a major project in his scholarly career. It turns out that one of the most important factors in children adopting religion is the warmth of the father—or if not the father, then the grandfather.

Vern Bengtson started the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a multidisciplinary investigation of families, aging and social change and has followed families since 1970. He is coauthor of Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations and How Families Still Matter: A Longitudinal Study of Youth in Two Generations.

Associate editor Amy Frykholm interviews Bengtson in the Dec. 25, 2013, issue of Christian Century.

Bengtson states up front that “the highest generational transmission [of religion from generation to generation] occurs in families with a high degree of warmth—particularly if the father is perceived as warm and close.”

In other words, being role models, taking the kids to church, being involved in church and having devotional activities at home are all good, but what really counts is what Bengtson calls “intergenerational solidarity or family cohesion.”

Frykholm asks what we want to know: Why is fatherly warmth so important? Bengtson says he doesn’t know. Generally mothers have more contact with the children, and fathers are more absent. He does, however, offer a hunch, that there is something about religion, at least in American society, that is male-influenced. Thus, he says, “if a father picks up on religion, the kids are going to pick up on it, too. And if the father is indifferent to religion, the kids may be indifferent to religion. This is especially true in father-son relationships.”

Turns out it’s not just fathers that are important in transmitting religion but grandfathers as well. Bengtson tells the story of a family in which the parents split up, and the mother was dysfunctional. “The daughter,” Bengtson says, “who is now in her 40s, talked about how on Sundays Grandpa would take them to church, and they would all sit together. He always had a red carnation in his lapel, and it was the same Sunday after Sunday. She said, ‘I felt so secure.’ ”

So what does religion transmission even mean? How do you know if it’s taken place? Frykholm asks.

Bengtson points out that they didn’t just ask about church attendance and membership. The study included questions about religious intensity, he says, such as, “How religious would you say you are?” They also looked at similarity between the answers of the children and those of the parents.

Which groups do it best? Frykholm asks.

“Mormons, Jews and evangelical Christians have the highest rate of transmission,” Bengtson says. He notes that Catholics, Mainline Protestants and Eastern Orthodox assume the family but put more emphasis on ritual.

He also makes clear that he’s measuring religious intensity, not denominational affiliation. So it’s not about Mennonite parents producing Mennonite children but parents with a religious intensity passing that on to their children.

One interesting discovery Bengtson made, he says, “is that the degree of religious influence across generations has not changed much since the ’60s and ’70s, despite the forces in culture that indicate they should have changed: increasing secularization with decreasing church attendance.” In other words, “Parents and grandparents influence their children in much the same way as they did in the 1970s.”

This may feel sobering to those of us who are fathers, seeing how it seems to fall on our shoulders. But it also gives us some insight into what we should be emphasizing in our families: warmth and cohesion.

Taking religion seriously

Few films treat religion at all, and most that do treat it with disdain or humor, while some use it to promote a certain religious belief. Stephen Frears’ new film, Philomena, is one of the rare films that takes religion seriously and walks a fine line between between criticizing it and acknowledging its goodness.

 

The film is based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith, which tells the true story of Philomena Lee's 50-year-long search for her son. Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays Sixsmith, a journalist who has just lost his job as a Labour government adviser and is at sea about what to do next. Then a woman approaches him to talk about her mother, who gave birth to her son Anthony at the convent in Roscrea, in Ireland, was forced to sign away parental rights to her son—but still cared for him until he was adopted at age three—and worked as an indentured laundry lady.

Eventually, Martin agrees to write a human-interest story, and he and Philomena (Judi Dench) begin their search for her son. In flashbacks, the film shows young Philomena giving birth, then working in the convent and being allowed to see her son one hour each day. Her anguish when the boy is adopted has stayed within her, held at bay, for 50 years. She approaches this search timidly, not wanting to offend the Catholic Church, which she remains devoted to.

Martin, on the other hand, grew up Catholic and has long since left the church and converted to atheism. He is vocal about his criticisms of the church and the Christian faith, though he lets up when he sees that Philomena is not in agreement with him.

They visit the convent, where the nuns tell them the adoption records were lost in a fire. Later, Martin hears that the convent deliberately destroyed the records in a bonfire and had sold the children to adoptive parents, mostly in the United States.

Through his previous work, Martin has contacts in the United States. He learns that Philomena’s son had been adopted by Doc and Marge Hess, who renamed him Michael Hess. He grew up to be a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration. He was also gay, and closeted because the Republican Party was “rabidly homophobic,” according to one character. He had died nine years earlier of AIDS.

Philomena had longed to know if her son ever thought of her, and it looks like she’ll never know. They eventually locate Michael's most serious boyfriend, however, and he tells them Michael is buried in the convent’s cemetery back in Ireland.

Throughout their search, Martin’s knowing, secular, unsociable self contrasts with Philomena’s naïve, Catholic, gregarious sensibility. On several occasions they have discussions about religion, and Philomena, the one most hurt by the church, is more at peace than Martin. This comes to a head in a climactic scene.

The screenplay, Dench’s typically fine acting and Frears’ direction make this a fine film that avoids sentimentality and steers clear of preaching a certain message. And its handling of religion is remarkably evenhanded.

Experiencing God is hard work

Surveys show that Americans are into the supernatural. Some would say obsessed. According to a 2011 Associated Press poll, 80 percent of Americans believed in angels—even 40 percent of those who never went to church. A 2009 poll from the Pew Research Center reported that 20 percent of Americans experienced ghosts, and 1 in 7 had consulted a psychic. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans believed in something paranormal and that 40 percent said that houses could be haunted.

In an article published on Oct.14, 2013, in the New York Times, T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, surveys some studies of this phenomenon.

Some scholars, she writes, believe these date show that belief in the supernatural is hard-wired. She refers to anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought, and psychologist Justin L. Barrett, author of Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, who argue that the fear that one would be eaten by a lion or killed by a man who wanted your stuff shaped the way our minds evolved. 

“Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were more likely to survive if they interpreted ambiguous noise as the sound of a predator,” Luhrmann writes. “Most of the time it was the wind, of course, but if there really was danger, the people who worried about it were more likely to live.”

The thinking here is that the search for an agent evolved into an intuition that an invisible agent, or god, may be there. Luhrmann notes that this theory can be argued from different theological positions. Boyer is an atheist and treats religion as a mistake. Barrett is an evangelical Christian who thinks God’s hand steered evolution.

Luhrmann argues, however, that intuition and sober faith are two different things. She asks us to consider how some people attempt to make what can only be imagined feel real. “They do this by trying to create thought-forms, or imagined creatures, called tulpas,” she writes. “Their human creators are trying to imagine so vividly that the tulpas start to seem as if they can speak and act on their own.”

That term, she explains, comes from the explorer Alexandra David-Néel, who wrote that Tibetan monks created tulpas as a spiritual discipline during intense meditation. Tulpa practice has now become popular, with dozens of sites on the Internet with instructions on creating one.

Luhrmann describes how these work. She interviewed a young man who set aside an hour and a half each day for this. “He’d spend the first 40 minutes or so relaxing and clearing his mind. Then he visualized a fox (he liked foxes). After four weeks, he started to feel the fox’s presence and to have feelings he thought were the fox’s.”

Later, he stopped spending all that time meditating, and the fox went away. Luhrmann concludes that “experiencing an invisible companion as truly present—especially as an adult—takes work: constant concentration, a state that resembles prayer.”

“This very difficulty may be why evangelical churches emphasize a personal, intimate God,” she writes, and why “churches that rely on a relatively impersonal God (like mainstream Protestant denominations) have seen their congregations dwindle over the last 50 years.”

This will not surprise those familiar the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism, which delves into the work of contemplation, paradoxical as that sounds.

Luhrmann ends her essay thus: “Secular liberals sometimes take evolutionary psychology to mean that believing in God is the lazy option. But many churchgoers will tell you that keeping God real is what’s hard.”

The preferred story

Among the major films released this year, there may be none more overtly religious than Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and based on Yann Martel’s best-selling book, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002.

The book and the film, which is remarkably faithful to the book, are about storytelling and about belief. In both the book and film, the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) tells his story to a skeptical Canadian novelist (Rafe Spall). He recounts growing up in India, where his father owned a small zoo.

We learn how Pi gets his name and follow his religious pursuits as he adopts his mother’s Hinduism, then Catholicism, then Islam. His atheistic father emphasizes the importance of science and reasoning, and Pi adopts that as well. For him, the world is a vast body to be explored with curiosity and love.

Then economic troubles arrive, and Pi’s father must sell the zoo. He books his family and the animals on a cargo ship bound for Canada. A storm sinks the ship, and the teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) alone survives among the humans. He finds refuge on a 26-foot-long lifeboat and is soon joined by a wounded Zebra, a vicious hyena, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In a short time, only Pi and the tiger remain.

Their journey together make up the greater part of the narrative, and one of the amazing accomplishments of Martel’s novel is to maintain the reader’s keen interest over such a limited scope. The miracle of the story is that the boy survives his journey across the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. The miracle of the storytelling is that the author pulls this off.

The film does, too, though not as well. There are points where it felt long, and I wanted relief from the tension. But while the book focuses on Pi’s ponderings about life and faith, Lee uses some astounding images to beguile us. At times the water’s surface is like a mirror that reflects the sky so that Pi seems to be both underwater and above the clouds. He also shows Pi’s hallucinations as he struggles with thirst, hunger and fear.

Perhaps the film’s crowning achievement is the digital magic it uses to show a tiger on a boat with a boy. It looks so real, down to the smallest detail. We even see the tiger grow thinner as the food disappears. If this film isn’t nominated for an Oscar for best special effects, something is wrong.

The novelist has come to Pi because he was told that Pi would tell him a story that would make him believe in God—a tall order that sounds anathema to skeptics.

After Pi reaches land and is recovering in a Mexican hospital, two representatives of the Korean company that owned the ship ask him why the ship sank. Pi doesn’t know but tells his story. The two men say that no one will believe that story. So Pi makes up another story that replaces the animals with people from the ship and describes how he alone came to be left.

He tells the men they can choose which story they want to use. The novelist asks him, Which story is true? Pi says, Which story do you prefer?

Life of Pi is a fable about storytelling and belief. We choose the stories we want to believe. Our faith in God is not based on fact but on belief, just as not having faith in God is based on belief, on believing a different story.

I imagine theists and non-theists will enjoy this film for different reasons. Both will enjoy the riveting story of survival and the humor that runs throughout. But non-theists may not like the lesson inherent in the story.

Either way, it’s a well-made film.

Prejudice and religious ignorance

Mennonites are used to being misunderstood, both in negative and positive ways. We often hear others ask about horse and buggies or plain black clothing when they hear we are Mennonites.

On the other hand, some people laud Mennonites for being committed to peace and justice, not realizing the great diversity in our ranks on those subjects.

We all carry prejudices. We prejudge others, make assumptions about them, often out of ignorance about those people and what they may believe.

Much of our media betrays great ignorance about religion—not just Mennonites but many religious groups. And if you spend much time on the blogosphere, you encounter great ignorance as people spout views that are at times hateful, certainly prejudiced and that show ignorance about the groups they are putting down in order to advance their own views.

One of the groups most commonly misunderstood are Muslims, whose numbers are growing rapidly in the United States. And worldwide Islam is the second largest religion.

Nevertheless, it is treated as monolithic and homogenous. As religion scholar Philip Jenkins writes, “Arguably, over the span of its development, Islam worldwide is quite as diverse as Christianity.”

One of the stereotypes about Islam is that it is Arab, yet, Jenkins writes, “Of the world’s eight largest Muslim countries, only one—Egypt—is Arab in language and culture, and it would not be too far off the mark to see Islam as a religion of South and Southeast Asia.”

A recent book, Woman, Man and God in Modern Islam by Theodore Friend (Eerdmans, 2012, $35), is an excellent source for getting to know modern Islam.

Friend, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an award-winning historian, traveled across Asia and the Middle East in order to understand firsthand the life situations of women in Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. The book relates hundreds of encounters and conversations with people he met along the way.

Friend writes that the reader will find “respect for Islam conjoined with faith in women and in their creative and productive potential.”

Meanwhile the media regularly report bombings by Islamicists but ignore peaceful overtures by Muslims, such as “A Commond Word” in 2007.

Ignorance of religion has enormous consequences, whether it’s a white supremacist killing Sikhs or U.S. soldiers burning copies of the Qur’an or the U.S. invasion of Iraq helping overturn half a century of women’s right to be treated as equal citizens in Iraq.

And with the recent rioting over the anti-Islam video reveals religious ignorance going many directions. 

Religious ignorance extends beyond Islam. Every day some media reinforce views of religious groups that are simplistic and fail to build understanding.

One media source that helps counter this practice is Religion News Service. For example, the weekly report dated Sept. 5 included an article on Mormons okaying Coke and Pepsi, one on Seventh-day Adventists arguing about female clergy, a Q&A with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the “Ground Zero mosque,” one on Jews in New Orleans, a Q&A with David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association, and one on the trial of Amish bishop Samuel Mullet Sr., whose followers forcibly cut the beards of Amish men.

There are many sources for learning about others and their beliefs before we make judgments about them. Jesus’ warning about judging others (Matthew 7:1) is pertinent. Let's take time to understand others' religious beliefs before we make judgments about them.

Questioning assumptions

Every year I choose my five top books of the year. I believe I've already read one of my top five for 2012.  When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $24, 202 pages) collects 10 incisive essays on an array of topics, though common themes thread their way throughout, including education, religion and the nature of humanity. (Robinson is also an outstanding novelist; her novels Gilead and Home have appeared on previous top five lists of mine.)

When I read a book for review (and I've reviewed this book for the Wichita Eagle), I underline passages that strike me with their insight, the beauty of their language or their troublesome nature. Typically, by the end of my reading I’ve underlined a dozen or two passages at most. My copy of this book, however, is filled with such markings. There are few spreads without something underlined.

Such a plethora of insights and apt sentences make it difficult to do justice to the book. Any quotation will represent a small sample of what could be quoted.

In the book’s first essay, “Freedom of Thought,” Robinson notes what will become evident throughout the book, that she tries to free herself of constraints and not simply accept the standard approaches to certain areas of knowledge. She writes that the tendency of much of what she took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics and cultural history “was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.”

Over and over, Robinson questions the assumptions made by so-called scholars that see human nature as simplistic, reductionist. She points out that often “the most important aspect of a controversy is not the area of disagreement but the hardening of agreement, the tacit granting on all sides of assumptions that ought not to be granted on any side.” One example, she notes, is “the treatment of the physical as a distinct category antithetical to the spiritual.”

She writes, “We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.” Then, adopting her role as a teacher of fiction writing, she adds, “Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.”

She challenges assumptions about religion or ancient peoples (“The Babylonians used quadratic equations.”) and points out the limits of science. She concludes that essay thus: “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.”

In “Austerity as Ideology,” she applies this failure to see the mystery in humanity to current views of economics. She note that “market economics … has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens.” She also shows that “America has never been an especially capitalist country.” Meanwhile, “our wealth is finally neither more nor less than human well-being.”

In the title essay, we get a glimpse of what has already become evident: the wide and extensive range of Robinson’s reading. We also gain some insights into her fiction. She writes, “In a way Housekeeping [her first novel] is meant as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood.” Remarking on her study of Latin in high school, she notes that her “style is considerably more indebted to Cicero than to Hemingway.”

She discusses her growing up in the West (Idaho) and the kind of individualism that often inheres there. However, she writes, “there is no inevitable conflict between individualism as an ideal and a very positive interest in the good of society.”

In “The Fate of Ideas: Moses,” Robinson defends the integrity of the Old Testament against critics who want to write it off. She pulls no punches in her interaction with Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, calling it a “dumbed-down pseudo-syncretism.” She calls some of the thinking behind such criticism “the flip side of fundamentalism” and concludes with: “Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic [Jesus] invokes comes straight from Moses.”

In spite of these punchy quotes, Robinson’s style is more formal and florid, more—as she writes—Cicero than Hemingway. And she often includes a smile if not a laugh. For example: “I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.”

She questions accepted opinion and helps us think through its implications and its reasonableness. In “Cosmology,” her concluding essay, she takes on scientism and atheism: “The difference between theism and the new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology.” 

If you read When I Was a Child, be ready to have certain assumptions challenged and think through important issues while enjoying a master of prose.