Judging the ‘Book’ by its Cover

Last Updated on August 2, 2017

Television’s most recent controversy revolved around the new NBC series, “The Book of Daniel.” The unconventional drama is all about the life of Daniel Webster, an Episcopal priest who is at least mildly addicted to painkillers. His wife is an alcoholic. His daughter is arrested for possessing drugs that she’s selling to raise money for a computer she needs for a career in Anime. His son is gay. His other son, adopted from China, is a playboy. His mother has Alzheimer’s and his father, a bishop, is having an affair with Daniel’s own female Bishop.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many foibles featured in this new show. Many Christians were infuriated by the very idea of such a show, mostly because the main characters were the family of a church leader.

If you don’t appreciate the topic of religion, this is a good point to stop reading. I’m about to climb on a soapbox and discuss my take on the subject. If you do appreciate a post about religion occasionally and you are sensitive to criticism of Christianity, then here is another good reason to stop reading. I’m a Christian, but in this case, the Christians got it wrong. So consider yourself warned if you read any further.

Dysfunctional families aren’t new to television. They’ve been around for years. In fact, one of the most popular dysfunctional families in recent history just left the television screen last season, when “Everybody Loves Raymond” ended a nine-year run. The Barone family’s screwy antics didn’t “belittle” the sports journalism industry, (which was the lead character’s profession) but because the Webster family is a church family, some viewers condemned the show as trying to belittle Christianity.

How about the goings-on of Wisteria Lane? Does anyone think that “Desperate Housewives” depicts a typical American neighborhood and typical American housewives? Can I really drive to any neighborhood and find all of that drama happening on any given day? I doubt it.

The American Family Association denounced ‘Daniel’ — before it ever saw it — and insists that NBC is out to mock Christianity. The organization encouraged a massive letter-writing campaign to the NBC network and its affiliates to urge them not to air the series at all. Two NBC affiliates apparently bowed to the pressure from local concerned viewers, who demanded that the series not air, despite the fact that they hadn’t seen it, either. (Although one of the two affiliates now claims it pulled the show not over concerns about its subject matter but rather to make a political statement about the control networks place over affiliates.)

The show aired with a two-hour double episode on Friday night. Many people did the democratic thing and simply chose not to watch. Others did watch, and I suspect there were a good number of people in the audience who watched specifically because of the furor over the series. There’s nothing like a threatened boycott to get viewers to tune in to see what all of the fuss is about. One should wonder these days whether a program that is on the edge might get a little more closer to the edge in the hopes that it will get this kind of publicity going in!

I set Tivo to record it. It isn’t a great show, but it did have some entertaining moments. I honestly didn’t feel that my faith was being insulted by the zany plotlines. I have a hard time believing that those who watched with a genuinely open mind walked away feeling as if Christianity was attacked. Those who feel that way must feel attacked by virtually every show on the broadcast networks, and I’d wonder, therefore, why they own a television set.

Is it so unreasonable to feature a Christian family that has real-world problems? I don’t think so. Granted, the problems featured in “The Book of Daniel” are to the extreme; I don’t know any real-life family that has all of those issues going on at the same time. But to suggest that Christian families in television shows should always depicted as nothing short of perfect is ridiculous. Christian families have problems just as non-Christian families do.

Remember the old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Bad things happen to all people: it’s just that when bad things happen to bad people or when good things happen to good people, it’s not as readily noticed.

Even AMA Research Director Ed Vitagliano acknowledges that Christian families are not perfect:

“While we certainly recognize that Christians do have problems, and they have problems in their families, it seems that Hollywood consistently wants to focus on those types of Christians and those types of ministers — when the reality is that many, many more are hard-working. They work hard to have good family lives — just like a lot of people do — and are faithful to scripture.”

And here’s where we come to an important point that a lot of the protestors miss about Hollywood’s “unfair portrayal.”

Showing Christian families in crisis yields very important opportunities: opportunities to show how that family’s faith can help them get through. How better to show that a strong spiritual background can lead people who’ve gone astray back on the path they should be on than to get them off that path!

There’s very little educational opportunity in showing a happy family to whom nothing bad ever happens, because it seems so completely unrealistic. Do you know anyone to whom nothing bad has ever happened? I don’t. Life is far from perfect. If it was, I doubt we’d be so uptight about a television show to start with.

Drama depends on conflict. Hollywood may want to focus on the bad things that happen to Christian families, but Hollywood is at least neutral in the sense that it wants to focus on the bad things that happen to non-Christian families, too. It’s not about religion so much as the drama of our daily lives, and more importantly, how we get through that drama, that is of interest to most viewers.

It is through the portrayals of Christians through real-life crises — which the AMA and its followers apparently wish to reject — that gives non-believers the taste of what role faith and belief in God has in people’s lives. The sad fact is that faith doesn’t always solve problems. People who believe in God aren’t always happy and don’t always get everything they want. But those who share that personal relationship with God have extra coping mechanisms that some of their non-believeing counterparts do not possess. And that’s one of the important differences that shows like this can portray… if given a chance.

And regardless of how wild the problems are, and how unlikely that any one family would have so many going on at once, it’s clear to me that the family members do care about each other. Dysfunction aside, it is a loving family. Perhaps it’s their underlying Christian beliefs that keep them from losing sight of how they really feel about each other despite the turmoil around them.

One of the other big complaints about the show is that it depicts Jesus Christ as a character. ‘Daniel’ isn’t the first show to do that, either. “Joan of Arcadia” was the first prime time show to introduce Jesus as a character. On ‘Joan,’ Jesus’s appearance changed constantly, reflecting the notion that God is everywhere and within everyone; on ‘Daniel,’ he appears as a more traditional manner: with long hair and a white robe, as one might imagine him. The character of Jesus appears to Daniel Webster, who has conversations with him. No one else sees Daniel’s Jesus and no one else can hear him but Daniel. The dialog between the two is modern, witty, sometimes comic. It doesn’t sound like dialog between a follower and a savior, but rather between two friends.

Consider this exchange between Daniel and the Jesus character:

Daniel: Why is it so easy to talk to you?

Jesus: Because I’m a good listener. Plus, I never burden you with my problems.

Daniel: You have problems?

Jesus: Now we’re talking about you.

Daniel: Tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do anymore.

Jesus: Yes you do.

Daniel: No…I don’t.

Jesus: It’s just hard. Life is hard, Daniel. For everyone. That’s why there’s such a nice reward at the end of it.

Is this character of Jesus really Jesus, or what Daniel imagines him to be? Is it really divine discourse, or is it simply a visual representation of Daniel’s own conscience? Each viewer is left to decide that for himself. After watching the show, I tend to think that it’s more the latter. Some of the exchanges are quite comic. If you have a hard time picturing God as having a sense of humor, then it would make more sense to view this Jesus character as a figment of Daniel’s imagination.

It’s this character who stops Daniel on more than one occasion from taking a pill to hide his sorrows, and who also helps guide him to do the things he needs to do. How can it be a case of mocking Jesus to portray him as one who would try to lead people to do the right thing? Even if there’s an occasional quip or one-liner, if Jesus leads people to do what they’re supposed to do, how is that a case of mocking him?

I talk to myself from time to time, usually in my head, but there are times when I feel that during these internal monologues about things that are weighing on my mind, I hear answers to questions or points I hadn’t considered before. Is it an inner voice that tells me these things? Maybe. I don’t think it’s directly the “voice of God,” but maybe what a lot of us think is the voice of God is more accurately an inner wisdom that He gave those of us willing to listen. Maybe it’s not so much God talking to us when our conscience bothers us, but our own God-given good sense that too many of us are often too quick to ignore.

But what if it is supposed to be the real Jesus, and this is how he approaches us? What if Jesus is just a normal guy, “one of us,” as a pop song suggests? Would you want him to treat you as a servant or as a friend? Would you want to be intimidated by his glory and power, or would you want to feel enough at ease to laugh and joke with him as quickly as you’d cry and bare your heart to him? Must the two always be mutually exclusive in God’s case?

As a Christian, it bothers me that so many of us seem willing to accept depictions of Christianity only when it is perfect with no problems. We jump on a bandwagon to condemn something we haven’t even seen ourselves, based on what we think we know to be true, without first taking the time to make sure we know what we’re talking about. We listen to whoever we think knows the most about the subject — even if they haven’t seen what they’re condemning, either — and go along with whatever they have to say.

Does God really want us to follow him blindly? If I were God, I wouldn’t. Does following God not mean more if we have first taken the time to open our minds to what He wants for us and decide for ourselves that His way is, in fact, the right way?

We sweep under the rug remarks by our religious leaders who go from calling for the assassination of one foreign leader to declaring that a stroke is God’s punishment against another. We pretend that this is acceptable, or we just quietly shake our heads and pretend we didn’t hear it, yet we go on demanding that everyone else view our religion as above reproach.

The AMA even takes issue with the writer of the show, whom it labels as a “practicing homosexual.” How does it know he practices homosexuality? And if practicing means, by their definition, that he actually goes out and has sex with members of the same sex, how, exactly does the AMA know this?

And as importantly, does the group go into the bedrooms of all television writers, including practicing heterosexuals, to make sure that no sexual activity is happening outside of the bonds of matrimony? Or is heterosexual sexual relations without marriage no longer something to be concerned about by the standard-keepers of society?

It sounds to me as if we’re undergoing some kind of moral triage to weed out the “bad” from the “not-so-bad” before deciding which direction we throw our stones. When we begin prioritizing sin so that we can find our comfort zone from which we lash out against those who we believe don’t meet our own standards, rather than dealing with all sin head on, I think our own position is in deep trouble.

I’d like to believe that there really are churches where there are no politics, no disputes, and no failures of character. If so, I want to visit one of those churches. I want to meet the people who are in attendance. I want to know how they never have a dark thought or an unfulfilled desire in their life. I’d like to know what that’s like. My experiences inside church are much the same as outside: there are good people and bad, but mostly people more good than bad, usually trying to do the best they can, often falling short, and occasionally failing miserably. That doesn’t make them bad people, it just makes them human.

The great risk in judging a book by its cover, without ever opening it up and looking at the pages, is that it often gives people the opportunity to turn the tables on you. Sometimes, you don’t come out looking much better than what you’ve condemned.

What are we so afraid of?

If we are really to be taken seriously by non-believers in our quest to spread God’s love, it seems to me that we should not rush to judgment about things we haven’t seen. Our challenge should be to avoid being intolerant of ideas we think are so different from our own when we haven’t even taken the time to hear them first.

Will “The Book of Daniel” go down in television history as one of the best dramas of all time? No, I don’t think so. Does it exaggerate the struggles that all families face? Certainly, just like virtually every other show on television. Does it depict a family that has faith and Christian values? Yes, despite the fact that those Christian values are often on shaky moral ground from time to time. But take a cross-section of a church’s congregation and I’m sure you’ll find some of the problems the Webster family has scattered throughout. That’s not meant to disparage the Christian faith, but rather to show that being a Christian does not automatically rid one of worldly problems. I’d like to think that you wouldn’t find a single family with all of the problems the Websters face, but if you did, and if you found them in church, the first thing that should go through your mind is the happiness that despite all they’ve gone through, they’re still looking for some spiritual peace!

Does the show mock Christianity? Not as much, I’m afraid, as some Christians did because of it. But then maybe that’s the biggest lesson to be found here: Christians aren’t any more perfect than non-Christians. We all make mistakes. And we are all capable of learning from them.

It only requires that we give ourselves the chance.