My Faith In Pop Culture

Lisa: Mom, Dad, my spiritual quest is over... I'm a Buddhist! Homer: What? That's it -- no more chat rooms for you! The Simpsons

Fig. 1 Batholomew's angel

In the beginning, there were movies and TV: the sacred texts of the great American secular religion. Hollywood is the Holy Land. The stars are our charismatic gods and goddesses. The movie theatres, our temples. Popcorn and Coke the body and blood of our Savior: sweet, sweet Entertainment.

There is much wisdom to be found in the discourses of Lama Chaplin, His Holiness Hitchcock, or Saint Spielberg:

When things get desperate, eat your shoe.

A boy’s best friend is not always his mother.

No matter how prepared you think you are, you’re probably going to need a bigger boat.

When I was a kid, the most religious thing I did was watch Mr. Wizard every morning before school while my grandmother struggled to brush my knotty, curl-infested hair. I conducted experiments on basil seeds and ivy vine clippings on my bedroom windowsill, corralled grasshoppers and tadpoles just to catch a glimpse of their life cycles, collected rocks, and had a serious crush on Bill Nye The Science Guy (and I still do, but he now shares nerd-swoonability with Neil deGrasse Tyson).


Fig. 2 & 3 Science Guys


In 1996, I turned thirteen and my Christian confirmation was on the horizon. I also discovered my two favorite TV shows of all time: The X-Files and The Daily Show. This year is as prominent in my personal pop cultural fossil record as the iridium-laced KT-boundary in Cretaceous rock strata. I believe that multitudinous moments and experiences contribute to and lead up to what we call peak moments in our lives, but those two shows have definitely had a significant and enduring effect on my current adult mindset. To say they inspired me is like saying Jesus made a fairly good point to a dozen of his buddies around a dinner table. My Confirmation, appropriately enough, also marked an essential attitude adjustment toward religion in general.


Fig. 4 Crackpot

I went to confirmation classes, and you better believe it was reluctantly. More than anything else, it was a ginormous waste of my precious after school Bill Nye time. I knew there was more to life than Sunday School. I mean, come on. How could you not watch The X-Files? Because it’s got satanic subject matter? Aliens aren’t in the Bible? Neither are chocolate Easter bunnies, but you believe in them, don’t you?

At one of the classes, we watched a video featuring a young man describing his atheism. He went on about his beliefs and sounded pretty convinced that there’s no God. Unexpectedly enough, he still went to church with his family and subsequently expressed his contempt for the people he saw there who only showed up once or twice a year for the big holidays. He sounded mildly disgusted by such behavior and continued voicing his opinions about being atheist.

At the end of the video, my confirmation crew asked, “Does he really sound like an atheist?” Internally, I replied (in more 13-year-old language), “Sounds like a bored, apathetic teenager tagging along with his folks because he enjoys making dry ironic observations about hypocritical society.” But of course, the faithful interpreted his comments as a closet Jesus lover trying to express himself. I’m still not entirely sure what they were trying to accomplish in that session, but when you introduce a video like that, it makes confirmation feel like some self-pitying agnostics anonymous program.

At the end of the whole thing, my “secret sponsor” gave me a tack-pin with a mustard seed inside and a card explaining the Bible verse associated with it. It’s a cool verse, and appealed to my burgeoning English major heart. For a moment, I held that pin, re-reading the verse over and over, feeling a little part of me drying up and falling off: my umbilicus to freedom. Something said to me “This is it. You’re Christian now. Deal with it.” Obviously, that’s not what you should feel about your religion. But what the hell did I know?

I soon noticed that my tiny gold cross necklace I was given as a baby matched the one Dana Scully wore on The X-Files, so that never left my neck except to shower. Every night before bed, I prayed a standard obligatory form prayer with blanks that I filled in with hopes for protection over family and friends. Church was still boring, and I began to get self-righteous about all the self-righteous church-goers who judged non-church-goers as being unfaithful or lazy. I decided that I could be faithful whether I spent my Sunday mornings bored to tears or not.

To prove my righteousness, I pointed out an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer stays at home while Marge and the kids go to church. God still hangs out with Homer even though he isn’t “in God’s House” on Sundays. I thought that was awesome. If God couldn’t love me enough to appreciate that I could bask in his glory by sleeping in and watching rented movies on Sundays, then I would give up. If my church were as quirky as Reverend Lovejoy’s, I would have attended more often than not. Still, Methodism had nothing on the entertainment factor of my science or my Hollywood religion. God has Moses. Hollywood has Charlton Heston. No contest.

Fig. 5 Let there be matzos

When I started studying at UF, I felt totally freed from any iota of nagging obligation whatsoever to go to church. My umbilicus to freedom regenerated and I stuck with my televisual roots. I schlepped boxes of X-Files recorded on VHS tapes into my already cramped dorm, clinging to them like Linus’ security blanket. I found that my generation took up watching The Daily Show as standard practice, and Jon Stewart was as ubiquitous a sight in the common room as greasy pizza boxes and dirty dishes.

Ten days after 9/11/01, I consulted the one spiritual adviser every American knows will make them feel some modicum of normality no matter what: television. I sat in front of my thirteen-inch dorm room TV-VCR combo unit and I saw Jon Stewart get choked up during his unexpectedly touching return-to-air speech. It was the first moment I felt the oftentimes invisible connection between tragedy and comedy and how one deeply informs the other. I reached for the nearest tissue and told myself that this man was now worthy of my worship. Another god in my pantheon of show biz.

I was a born-again TDS viewer. Just let Jon into your heart and be saved!

Fig. 6 Moment of Zen

I never had a problem with Jesus. I never had a problem with my parents. I'm not one of these self-loathing-formerly-Christian-church-bashing twentysomethings who go Buddhist just because it's not my parents' religion or because it's hip. I live in Hernando County, Florida. There's no pressure to be hip. Spring Hill would never be prefaced with the adjective "hip."

I was simply never a very institution-oriented person. I loved empiricism, but I wasn't cynical. I had a great family life, great friends, and had fun. I wasn’t on drugs, I wasn’t unintentionally pregnant or festering with STDs. I got educated and got a respectable job. My friends and family loved me and I loved them. I was satisfied with my non-denominational moral compass. It worked for me.

Then one day, I realized I had no idea how or why my compass worked. It wasn’t broken, but my brain needed an upgrade to understand how to read it.

In the December 2005 issue of National Geographic, along came an article about Buddhism’s recent spread across the world. All I knew about it before I started reading that first paragraph was that it involved meditating and it came from a place in which Brad Pitt once spent seven cinematic years hanging out with the Dalai Lama. The article outlined a basic overview of the Dharma with its calm Vulcan-like reverence for logic, and how it’s been manifesting in Western culture. It was very appealing to my Bill Nye-loving brain. I read another shorter article on growing Muslim populations in the world and felt a small pang of regret that I didn’t really belong to a spiritual group I felt I could be intellectually honest with myself about following.

I knew that guilt about someone dying for my sins was not my slice of key lime pie, but I had no trustworthy paradigm to put my beliefs in context. My comparative religion education consisted of little more than Ancient Egypt class and Fiddler On The Roof. The only things I chose to recall from church was eating freeze-dried ice cream at an outer-space-themed Vacation Bible School and ringing spotless gold bells so shiny and expensive you had to wear white gloves to touch them.

I had to re-assess what I had in my spiritual bindle.



To be continued...