Religious Values TV Part II

Religious Values as Seen on TV (Part II) 8-21-05

The devout preacher with a firm notion of his God was carried away in a flood. As he was swept down stream floating on some debris, several rescuers came close to him by boat and he sent them off, for he knew his God would save him. Subsequently he was thrown a life preserver by another group of rescuers, but he let it float away, for he knew his God would save him. As his situation became more desperate, the river becoming ever larger and his location yet further from help, a helicopter lowered a rope and he cast it aside saying, “My God will save me.” Whereupon he disappeared beneath the waters and was drown.

Arriving in heaven he confronted God. “I though you would save me,” he said in an accusatory tone.

God replied, “I tried. Three times!”

(Your editor added the above from memory to complement the sermon following, and retelling the story no doubt departs from the original considerably. We very much appreciate receiving timely notes from Arline’s sermon(s). Where there are glitches, blame the editor.)

Religious Values as Seen on TV (Part II) 8-21-05
The Reverend Arline Conan Sutherland
Unitarian Society of Hartford

Sermon: God Sends a Lifeboat is one of my favorite stories. Don’t you know people just like that preacher? Absolutely sure what God looks like and how God acts? And isn’t some of our laughter just a tad mean-spirited? Now there are times when being just a tad mean-spirited is a correct and valid response, and there are times when it is more nearly a cover up for our own shortcomings. We have all grown up with certain images of just how God looks and acts. Many of us have rejected or moved past our childhood perceptions, but we may be just as firmly convinced that if a motorboat, or a life preserver, or a helicopter came to rescue us it would have nothing to do with God. And maybe it wouldn’t.

Where do we find the Holy?

We’ve been talking about the difference between religious and spiritual - a division articulated in today’s society. Most often “Religion” is equated with an institution. Many Americans are at best ambivalent about religion. Yet the rejection of the religious tradition one was born into doesn’t necessarily mean the rejection of the religious, or as many feel more comfortable defining as spiritual. We human beings are hard wired to seek meaning, to create grammar, to construct sentences in which there are nouns and verbs, to tell stories where there is a beginning, a middle and an end. This search for meaning takes many forms in many places.

One way of defining what people are doing when they are engaged in a religious activity – whether they are sitting in a sweat lodge, singing a hymn, lighting a candle, writing theology, teaching a child right from wrong, or preparing and eating a ritualistic meal like a Sabbath dinner – is to say that they are making the world meaningful – or discovering it to be so (God in Details, intro p. 4)

“In any era, therefore, in which religion, at least as commonly understood, is receding, vitality of the sacred may come as a surprise. The present era would seem to fit such a description, and we find ourselves unable to comprehend the sacred. The past accretions that transformed the sacred into religion – accretions that in many cases have been corroded by secularization – keep us from the refocusing necessary if we are to study the sacred in a secular age. … unless we can revise out thinking about secularization.” (Hammond 1985, 5)

Popular culture is the term used to describe those aspects of our current culture that are up for grabs so to speak, the ones found in forms and places that have not as yet found there way into Culture. Most often popular culture is found on the streets, or as Men in Black told us – the real truth is found in the tabloids. Or, I would argue on radio, TV, or at the movies. There is a feeling communicated by the term that is somewhat skeptical if not vaguely derisive.

Catherine Albanese writes of the creole quality of popular culture. “Popular culture,” she writes, “pieces and patches together its universe of meaning, appropriating terms, inflections, and structurations from numerous overlapping contexts and using them as so many ad hoc tools to order and express, to connect inner with outer and to return to inner again.” (Albanese 1996, 740.)

Popular culture does not provide meaning unambiguously. Usually it highlights places in society where inherited values and actual experience conflict and are ambiguous; where meaning is still being negotiated by various participants. There are conflicting interpretations. These messages don’t simply mirror or dictate cultural norms but are expressions of tension points, of conflict and change in society.

This morning I’m going to speak of two of these ambiguous intersections of the spiritual and culture as they appear on TV: the supernatural and confession as seen on daytime talk shows and cop shows.

True confession time - I had a hard time writing this part of the sermon because in addition to watching some shows, I would go to Oprah’s webpage and then I was hooked! Far too much of my time this week has gone into watching clips and learning about how to dress to accentuate the best parts of my body type and how to stop thinking, “What will they think?” I’ve read stories about how to transform my life and how to celebrate key achievements as well as everyday moments in my life. For the most part, the message is “You can do it. You can change your life and learn to accept who you are.” There are sections on finding your emotional style, how one’s beliefs affect one’s life, and discovering one’s passion. The instructions on how to meditate are good. It’s easy to find inspiration and get a lift to one’s spirits. Positive realistic changes are presented as very doable.

Oprah also talks about angels and demons, about ghosts and UFO’s, about mediums and mystics, the study of the Kabala and the power of prayer. This reflects a fairly typical American eclecticism about the supernatural.

Most shows on these subjects include a live audience often with some carefully chosen members who have experiences to share, scholarly experts, and occasionally members of the clergy. A panel of “haunted” home owners for instance talked from a variety of points of view – belief, disbelief, skepticism, and rationalization.

The audience can watch lively discussions of belief and disbelief in the supernatural and the spiritual. The shows invariably present the negotiations of believers and skeptics. First person experience is recounted. Conversation takes place. And conversation continues long after the show is over. It takes place on the After Show and in beauty parlors and nail salons across the land. One scholar speaks of “the vernacular religion of the laity.” (Primiano, 45) It is crystal clear that Americans are deeply interested in the supernatural.

Another question to ask is who tells the stories and who interprets them? In the talk show environment, women in particular narrate the creation of their own religious roles as mystics, healers, visionaries, mediums, … and devotees of sacred figures. Roles that by extension are validated for the women in the audience – and as you know, the largest percentage of viewers are women.

And then there is confession. Talk shows in America are one of the primary venues in which average Americans confess their sins. They are frequently rebuked, told what is right and wrong, and most often receive some form of absolution – your sins are forgiven or at least understood - go and sin no more. Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, Dr. Laura, et al., are past masters of the art. Celebrities confess to Barbara Walters, Jane Pauley, Diane Sawyer, or Katie Couric.

The practice of confession in the history of Christianity has a long and varied history. Penance was officially decreed a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church at the Lateran Council of 1215. From that time forward, according to Michel Foucault, it has taken on a central role in the orders of religious and civil society. It has he says, quite simply become “one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth.”

“We have become a singularly confessing society.” He writes, “confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relationships, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life and in its most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. … One confesses or is forced to confess. … Western man has become a confessing animal.” (Foucault 1978, 59)

Confession requires two agents: the one confessing and the one confessed to. In Christian tradition the one confessed to, the one who questions and elicits the truth, the one who judges, was the priest or minister; in the psychoanalytic tradition it was the analyst or therapist; in our post-modern mass media world, the role is more often played by a talk show host, often a woman. If Foucault is right and we are obliged to confess, that we are freed only by the truth, is it any wonder that so many of us are drawn to these public confessions? It is also important to note that many find these shows repulsive, a sensationalizing of dirty laundry.

Many of us who can’t imagine watching Jerry Springer, can though often be found watching, Law and Order, or the new show, The Closer, that promotes itself with a spot where the heroine says, “Confession is good for the soul!” Cop shows are another illustration of my thesis that TV shows can be and indeed sometimes are places of real thought about serious religious issues. In a moment from the first episode of Homicide, Detective Howard says to Bayliss, “This is homicide. We work for God.”

On Law and Order, religion is used in three ways: first as a locator. We know for instance that Ray Curtis is a good Hispanic Catholic. He crosses himself in front of a corpse and speaks of belief and struggles. Other characters wear religious garb or symbols. Second there is a kind of moral reasoning that evokes a religious analysis of ethical issues. In the second half of each show, the lawyers untangle ethical knots and problematic issues The Assistant DA, McCoy, is a lapsed Catholic who nevertheless refers frequently to his training at the hand of the Jesuits. And third, religion is often portrayed as a possibly destructive force. Religious fanatics bomb an abortion clinic; parents who belong to a fictitious religious group clearly modeled on Christian Scientists refuse medical help for their daughter who dies; priests abuse young boys; an African mother murders in order to protect her child from a ritual cliterectomy. “Ripped from the headlines,” is one promotional slogan. Portraying these aspects of religion and their possibly destructive power speaks to the fears of many in the audience. It is instructive that this potentially terrifying force is portrayed as being contained by the judicial system. It is therefore safe for us to think about. And the hope is that our systems are adequate to contain the terror of powerful forces.

How one can function ethically in a corrupt and immoral world is a question at the heart of most cop shows. Sgt Friday may have functioned in a world of moral absolutes. Today’s cops and DA’s don’t. In this world it is not enough to apprehend the guilty, one must also obtain a confession within a certain amount of time, using appropriate methodology that will stand up in court.

And so we arrive at the interrogation room or the confessional. This is a pivotal moment. Tension mounts as the skilled interrogator tries to extract a written confession before the suspect has to be released or before a lawyer is called. This is the turning moment of the story and not incidentally an opportunity for award winning acting. This is the moment for communion between the police and the suspect in which the truth can be revealed and absolution given and received.

It is in this confessional, the interrogation room, that many spheres interact: the police investigators and the prosecutors as well as the actors and the audience. The meaning the audience derives is far from clear – this is one of the tension points where society is negotiating meaning. We as the viewers identify with the various characters. We recognize the ethical dilemmas and the religious meanings being sought in this increasingly multi-cultural world, where values rub against one another, where moral ambiguity must be confronted. The opportunity to wrestle with these ethical, moral, and spiritual issues presents itself to viewers several times a day everyday.

What does it all mean? How does all this impact our lives? I don’t have the answers but I do think that we will benefit from recognizing that we are fascinated by the supernatural. Talk TV and shows such as Medium or the 4400 allow us to explore these ideas to talk about them and not to leave them out of the arena of discourse. One doesn’t have to be a true believer and a certifiable kook or weirdo to entertain possibilities that there might just be something to it – Maybe area    exists after all. Or maybe humans do have the capacity to communicate empathically. Maybe we just don’t as yet have the knowledge to explain it. Maybe everything isn’t explainable and rational?

And confession? I think this is really a subject worthy of further discussion. What do you think? Where and to whom do you confess? As a minister I hear confessions. It is a great privilege to be witness to spiritual struggles. One that I can speak of, because at one level it was so public, was the man who in the first flush of his scientific career discovered how to create the firebombs that American forces dropped on cities in Germany like Dresden. Professor Hottel spent the rest of his life studying fire so as to find ways to ameliorate its damaging effects. Hoyt Hottell and his family were and some still are Unitarian Universalists. The depth of his contrition and anguish was palpable. Few of us have done something that dramatic, that deadly, and that public. But we all carry remorse. What does our way of being religious offer us?

While confession as enacted on TV loses the specificity and religiosity of its spiritual referents, it does help us acknowledge the power and perhaps if Foucault is correct the need for humans to confess and to find absolution. We can do more than participate vicariously as we watch cop shows, we can bring it to the forefront of our thought.

Because our interest in the supernatural and the ritual of confession are reflected on television, we benefit from the opportunities given for us to reckon with questions of meaning and identity. We also as a society are given the possibility of real cross-cultural and cross class encounters in a society for which that is increasingly difficult.

Benediction:

Go out into the world in peace
Have courage
Hold on to what is good
Return to no person evil for evil
Strengthen the faint-hearted
Support the weak
Help the suffering
Honor all beings

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised8/24/05)