Conservative Christian groups routinely criticize the way in which television routinely mocks the Christian faith. But one TV drama that’s attracted a degree of favorable Christian attention is Friday Night Lights. And it’s instructive to see what happens when a TV producer attempts a respectful rather than hostile depiction of Christianity.
Before I highlight three focal points, I’ll make a few general comments. I think Friday Night Lights appeals to some Christian viewers, not just for its public prayers and church services, but also for its blue color ethos. This is in stark contrast to the airbrushed surfer dudes and valley girls that frequent so many TV shows. We’re deep in the heart of flyover country, here—far from Upper Manhattan or the Left Coast.
American culture has a deeply embedded antipathy towards aristocratic affectations. It’s interesting to ask why this is. We root for the underdog. The working class kid. We appreciate self-deprecating humor. I can think of two or three possible reasons:
i) America is a land of immigrants. Limitless upward mobility as opposed to hereditary nobility.
ii) During the Revolutionary War, we ousted the Royalists and disestablished the Church of England.
iii) But I also wonder if Protestant theology doesn’t underwrite some of this. The priesthood of believers. The repudiation of a spiritual meritocracy, a la Rome. Spiritual pride has no place in Protestant theology, and that spills over into other areas of life.
The idea of a small-town football team that can win a state championship also enjoys the enduring appeal of the underdog. Indeed, this has become something of a cliché in movies about competitive sports.
I didn’t grow up in a small Texas town where football is next to godliness, but from what I know about small towns, public high school, and sports, this seems to be very realistic. It’s a fictional version of Two-A-Days.
The TV series is, of course, a spin-off of a popular film. The film, being a film, was more taunt and gritty, whereas the series spends time on character development.
One of the areas in which the show is refreshingly realistic is in its depiction of gender and gender roles. Hollywood has tried to make women’s lib a reality by creating male and female characters that simulate its ideals. This is not about what is, but what ought to be—so there’s no effort to be the least bit accurate.
It isn’t enough to make women equal. Not only must they be able to do whatever a man can do, but do it ten times better. And this includes physical exertion. So we’re treated to a gallery of feminist superheroines masquerading as the girl-next-door.
On the other hand, it’s also necessary to effeminize men. So we’re treated to a gallery of passive, indecisive, and apologetic male characters. None of this bears any resemblance to the boys and girls I went to school with.
By contrast, Friday Night Lights is convincing in its characterizations. You have strong female characters, but they didn’t step out of a Marvel comic book or Gloria Steinem seminar. They’re also allowed to be housewives and mothers.
And the male characters have the aggressiveness and adventurousness of the typical, all-American male. Natural leaders and risk-takers.
Mind you, in real life there are weak men and weak women as well as strong women and strong men. The show also benefits from a fine ensemble cast.
What’s ironic about Friday Night Lives is the even when a TV producer attempts a respectful depiction of Christianity, he exposes his basic ignorance of Christian theology.
Let’s briefly classify and analyze some of the characters.
i) Religious characters.
Among the main characters, the two most overtly Christian characters are Smash and Landry. But, to some extent, this is paper-thin.
Smash delivers eloquent public prayers, but that’s not so much a reflection of his Christian piety as it is his verbal fluency. He’s a natural born orator. He would be equally eloquent no matter what he was hawking.
I’m not saying that he’s a charlatan. For the most part, he’s seems to sincerely believe whatever he says, whatever the subject—but that’s the problem. He believes his own propaganda. He buys his own sales-pitch, whatever he’s selling.
Landry is also articulate, though he’s not a public speaker, per se. Landry’s a backwoods intellectual. I suppose this is a departure from realism, but the producer and screenwriters are deliberately playing against type with a cowboy philosopher. It works in the sense that it’s intentionally against the grain.
Same thing with the witty repartee between Matt and Landry. It’s too clever to be authentic, but since it’s meant to be humorous, it doesn’t have to be authentic.
The other, newly-minted religious character is Lyla, who’s undergone a religious conversion. Whether it’s genuine or ephemeral remains to be seen.
So, when you begin to tally them, there are only about two or three Christian characters in the whole show. The show also has a pastor or two (maybe three), but they’re only given cameo appearances.
ii) Religiously indifferent characters
Most of the characters are simply indifferent to religion. They’re not into the Christian faith, but they’re not opposed to it. It’s a take it or leave it approach.
This is true for most of the male characters. They’re just not interested in Christianity because their interests lie elsewhere. They’re career-oriented. Football is their faith.
We also have some “fallen women” in the show. They’re into men—the wrong men. They have a moth-like attraction to losers. And it’s passed down from one generation to the next.
Then you have women like Tami and Julie Taylor. Tami is the religiously rootless and morally clueless mother of her religiously rootless and morally clueless daughter.
Finally, you have a preacher’s kid (Waverly Grady), who’s religious in the sense that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are religious.
These all correspond to men and women you can see in real life.
iii) Irreligious characters.
Tim Riggins is an example of a character who is a bit more hostile to religion. In a way, he’s more spiritually discerning than Landry or Smash. He knows, in principle, the difference between the church and the world, and he knows which one he belongs to.
Tim is the antithesis of Smash: if Smash suffers from inflated self-esteem, Tim suffers from low self-esteem. His nonexistent expectations immunize him from disillusionment, but because he doesn’t trust anyone, he’s a lonely loner. A sympathetic oaf.
At present, the producers and writers are flirting with a possible conversion experience, but that remains to be seen.
What’s striking is how little difference there is between the religious characters and the religiously indifferent characters, or even the irreligious characters. I’ll highlight three things:
i) Vulgarity
By contemporary TV standards, the vulgarity is mild, and it’s mild by athletic standards. But in this show, the believers talk the same way as the unbelievers. Unfortunately, that has the ring of truth.
This seems to be one of those generation-gap issues. Vulgarity entered the general culture in the Sixties. And since that time it’s penetrated the church.
Of course, it was always around, but there’s been a shift in my own lifetime. Permit me to share a personal anecdote. The first time I recall hearing vulgar language in school was an isolated incident in 6th grade, on the playground, when some of the boys had a dustup over a game of dodge ball.
The first time I heard vulgarity on a regular basis was in my freshmen year (1972) of junior high. And that was basically guy thing. There’s a reason we used to call it locker room language. Now the world is our lockerroom.
As I recall, Tom Wolfe also commented on this phenomenon in an interview on C-Span when he was plugging his new novel about Charlotte Simmons. Now Tom Wolfe is a very worldly man, with his ear to the pop culture. He’s far from naive. But when he began to hang around college students to get a feel for modern-day campus life, he was struck by the coarsening of the popular discourse.
He noted two differences: men had always used vulgarity, but they didn’t use it all the time. The women were now as foulmouthed as the men.
I’m not going to get into a general discussion of when vulgarity is appropriate or inappropriate in Christian discourse. For the moment I’m just going to make one small point: I’m curious about Evangelicals who flaunt bad language. Who go out of their way to be obscene or scatological. Who are quite self-conscious in their use of vulgarity.
I wonder what they’re trying to prove. Is it just to show how hip they are? How they don’t suffer from Victorian hang-ups?
Why do they think this is a good witness? Or do they even care?
Once again, I’m not talking about bad language in every possible context. Just the kind of faddish, ostentatious profanity that is becoming mainstream even in some Christian circles.
Ben Shapiro has dubbed his generation the porn generation. And we seem to be inaugurating the porn church for the porn generation. Speaking of which:
Let’s move on to a far more serious issue.
ii) Fornication
The producers don’t seem to have any inkling of the fact that, in Christian ethics, premarital sex is a sin. The producers show some of the destructive consequences of premarital sex, but the idea that their single Christian characters ought to be celibate almost never crosses their mind.
I don’t expect the producers and screenwriters to approve of Christian sexual ethics. I’m just interested in the fact that they don’t even seem to be aware of traditional Christian morality. They apparently know that extramarital sex is sinful, but not premarital sex.
And it almost makes me wonder how authentic this is—not in the sense that it’s inauthentic, but, unfortunately, that it may be all too authentic. I can see how fornication and easybelievism go hand-in-hand. There’s no real connection between the altar call and the marriage bed. You just recite a verbal formula. That’s how you get saved.
iii) Cheating
On a related note, there’s no fundamental distinction in Friday Night Lights between dating and marriage. This is illustrated by the idea that you can “cheat” on your boyfriend or girlfriend.
This, too, is very realistic. It’s endemic in the general culture. It’s become a self-evident truism.
It may shock a lot of people to hear this, but you can’t cheat on a boyfriend or girlfriend. You can only cheat on a spouse or fiancé.
Earlier generations understood that. My mother, who was born in 1918, tells me that back when her generation was dating, the purpose of dating was not to go steady. Rather, the purpose of dating was to find a spouse, and with that in mind, dating was a winnowing process. You dated a number of different people to find a suitable mate. So you were free to play the field.
(Incidentally, some Christians think we should replace dating with courtship. I disagree. My mother’s generation had the right idea.)
I suspect the reason for the change is that, in the age of no-fault divorce and broken homes, going steady has become a substitute marriage.
Indeed, a lot of folks seem to take fidelity more seriously in dating than in marriage. And they also have an amusingly Puritanical notion of what constitutes infidelity. It isn’t just sex with someone other than your boyfriend or girlfriend. If your girlfriend is seen kissing another boy, or your boyfriend is seen kissing another girl, that’s “cheating.”
Once again, I hate to break it to you, but you can’t cheat on a boyfriend or girlfriend. You can only cheat on a husband or wife, fiancé or fiancée.
Dating is not a commitment. Marriage is a commitment.
An engagement is also a (qualified) commitment, although cheating on your fiancé is not the same thing as infidelity. You can only be unfaithful to your spouse. And it’s not inherently sinful to break off an engagement, whereas it is inherently sinful to break up a marriage.
Adultery has no counterpart in dating. Fornication is a moral counterpart, but not a marital counterpart.
So, what we have in the pop culture is a form of legalism that is more permissive about marriage, and less permissive about dating. This represents an unscriptural inversion of values. And it’s more Puritanical than the Puritans.
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