I said:
I should have said, more politely:
(… grr …walks off mumbling “God never lets me get away with anything …” )
**Foggie wrote:
Since it is obviously a waste of my time to convince you of your folly, I will simply summarize my thoughts on this mini-debate within a debate as follows:
-
My not giving proof for my original claim does not “prove” that it’s not a true claim.
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DavidB, myself and others giving a handful of examples antithical to the original claim does not “prove” that it’s
not a true claim.**
Oh Good Goddess!! To paraphrase:
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Just because I can’t support my claim doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
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When others provide evidence contradicting my claim, that doesn’t mean it’s false!
That does it, Foggie; I hearby award you the Pretzel Logic Award with Mobeius Strip Clusters!
OK … when you get a chance, I’ll be waiting for the retraction on how teen pregnancies have been soaring through the roof.
FriendofGod sez:
[Moderator Hat ON]
“God”, hell… I wouldn’t’ve let you get away with that one. And I can smite you here-and-now, none of this “waiting until Judgment Day” schtuff. It is not as if I am completely oblivious to scarcely-veiled insults. You can’t call people “[big] idiots” in Great Debates.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
[Edited by Gaudere on 02-20-2001 at 12:16 AM]
Well, since I’m married to emarkp, and I’m the one who actually wrote the thesis, I’d like to come in and tell about what I wrote. It’s been a couple years, so it’s a little fuzzy in his mind.
The thesis (well, half of it) was specifically on Christian themes in YA literature; so I wasn’t looking at Jewish or Muslim or any other religions’ portrayals–that was another person’s turf. What I found was that religion was largely ignored in the past 20 years (note: not entirely, just largely). Considering that over 50% of American teens go to church, and a much larger percentage than that claim to believe in God, you would think that the current YA lit would try to reflect that somewhat accurately, which it doesn’t.
I also thought that when religious characters were portrayed, it was often (note: not always, but often) done inaccurately. Yes, you get quite a few books on Amish kids or members of other tiny sects with fringe beliefs, and those books often focus on a culture clash (hey, look at the Amish kid! What’s her life like? Let’s understand each other…). Then there are the majority of books that mention religion at all–and they talk about it in a negative sense. There’s sometimes a charismatic but crazed ultra-conservative preacher, or a gullible kid, or a teen who hates gays because of his church, etc.
What I want to know is, where are the books that show average, normal kids going to an average, normal church as an everyday, average, normal part of their lives, as so many real-life teens do all over this country? You wouldn’t even have to make it a major theme of the book–it could just be one of the many settings in which action takes place.
The books like that are mostly (note: not all, just mostly) published by Christian presses. Why, when so many real-life teens go to church, and want to see that portrayed accurately in their reading material?
If you want to know about the books I read, tell me and I’ll dig out my paper and tell you. I second emarkp’s suggestion on the Orson Scott Card dialogue–I’ve only downloaded part of it so far, but he says it much better than I can.
Hi genie! Thanks for showing up to clarify these points.
genie: *What I found was that [Christian] religion was largely ignored [in adolescent fiction] in the past 20 years (note: not entirely, just largely). Considering that over 50% of American teens go to church, and a much larger percentage than that claim to believe in God, you would think that the current YA lit would try to reflect that somewhat accurately, which it doesn’t. *
Um, why would we expect it to reflect that “accurately”, by which I presume you mean “proportionally”? After all, fully 100% of American teens today do not live in an earlier era instead of the present, but as I pointed out above, fully a third of the Newberry Award medal-winners in the past thirty years are set in the historical past. And a number of others are set in “exotic” or fantasy locales. YA literature is not primarily about holding up a mirror to “everyday, average, normal” life, it seems to me. (And “over 50%” seems to boil down, from the surveys I’ve seen, to “not much over 50%”—max about 55% in 1998—for the percentage of teens who attend church regularly. So there is almost as large an audience who wouldn’t relate to that “everyday, average, normal life” anyway.)
I also thought that when religious characters were portrayed, it was often (note: not always, but often) done inaccurately. Yes, you get quite a few books on Amish kids or members of other tiny sects with fringe beliefs, and those books often focus on a culture clash (hey, look at the Amish kid! What’s her life like? Let’s understand each other…).
Yeah, these “culture clashes” are the same sort of thing I’m talking about: they’re comparatively rare in real life and hence dramatic, good material for fiction.
Then there are the majority of books that mention religion at all–and they talk about it in a negative sense. There’s sometimes a charismatic but crazed ultra-conservative preacher, or a gullible kid, or a teen who hates gays because of his church, etc.
Also dramatic, of course, and hence good material.
What I want to know is, where are the books that show average, normal kids going to an average, normal church as an everyday, average, normal part of their lives, as so many real-life teens do all over this country? You wouldn’t even have to make it a major theme of the book–it could just be one of the many settings in which action takes place.
Well, as I noted, there are numerous books for adolescents that have churchgoing as part of their background, and I named several. (In the process, of course, I completely overlooked the Beverly Cleary books, as nice and normal and church-inclusive as you could hope to find, and published from the 50’s up through the 90’s.) How many would you expect to see, given that YA fiction also deals with all the historical/exotic/high drama/fantasy settings that I mentioned?
*The books like that are mostly (note: not all, just mostly) published by Christian presses. Why, when so many real-life teens go to church, and want to see that portrayed accurately in their reading material? *
Why not? If what these teens want to read about is real-life teens like them going to church the way they do, why shouldn’t most of these books be published by presses associated with those churches? Those are probably the publishers who are most eager for such books.
If you want to know about the books I read, tell me and I’ll dig out my paper and tell you.
Yes thanks, if it’s not too much trouble.
And I really can’t agree with you about the accuracy or insightfulness of Orson Scott Card’s remarks. Just consider the first few sentences of the interview emarkp cited:
I think that’s tremendously shallow and oversimplistic. For one thing, science fiction/fantasy is much more strongly tilted toward the heavily rationalistic and scientific, and is also highly unconventional in its settings—this is one genre where you won’t see “everyday, ordinary, normal” people going about their usual lives! Naturally, there is much more open expression of atheistic/agnostic convictions, as well as alternatives to conventional religion. (And this is not a purely contemporary development, either: H. G. Wells and Jules Verne were hardly more church-focused than most modern SF writers.) Moreover, the organized religions of our own day are largely irrelevant to their premises (and in books set thousands of years in the future, this is perfectly reasonable; after all, our major contemporary religions came into being only a few thousand years ago at most, and there is no reason to expect that they won’t be vastly altered in another few thousand).
Compare this, for example, to the murder mystery genre, which depends so heavily on settings of safe and ordinary normality to lend extra horror to the corpses who keep turning up in them. Religious characters and circumstances abound—not only in classic writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but in the Brother Cadfael books of the '80’s and '90’s, Lee Martin’s Mormon detective stories, Margaret Frazer’s Sister Frevisse books, the list goes on and on.
Oh, pooh. I can think of four exceptions in current fiction right off the top of my head: Andre Dubus, Anna Quindlen, John Grisham, Alice McDermott. There are dozens more.
Basically, Card seems to have some of the same issues that FoG has, and that your comments on YA fiction appear to agree with: namely, that you’re all seeing more of a “shortage” of positive portrayals of Christianity than really exists. Naturally, you look at books and the media with an eye accustomed to the themes of a devout Christian’s life, and are startled to see so much material that ignores those themes. But there’s still a great deal that doesn’t ignore them, and I think it’s too easy to slop over into thinking that religious or Christian ideas are unfairly disparaged or neglected, without giving enough levelheaded thought to realistically assessing what you could expect to see.
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27477-2001Feb19.html
An excellent missive on teenage pregnancy in Northern Ireland in the 1950s. Looks like it didn’t just pop up in the 1960s after all. Of course, all concerned dealt with it in the best manner: they sent the daughters away to work farms and churches and convents to live in shame, then separated them from their children, who were adopted by nice American couples.
Is this what you’re referring to when you talk about Christians being the standard-bearers of sexual morality prior to the 1960s? Because if it is, it seems like a, well, un-Christian way of doing things.
I did a search on IMDb (“Christian” under plots) and here is a partial list of movies or TV shows that portray Christianity in a positive light (based on their IMDb summaries).
Harley (1990):
A progressive social worker has Harley sent to Texas to live with the Nortons, an open-minded, heartful Christian family, and spend two months on their ranch … Eventually Harley chooses to release his pain in exchange for a return to faith, culminating in his calling for God’s help to save the life of the burglar who framed him.
The Hiding Place (1975):
Corrie and Betsie ten Boom are middle-aged sisters working in their father’s watchmaker shop in pre-WWII Holland. Their uneventful lives are disrupted with the coming of the Nazis. Caught hiding Jews in their attic, they are sent to a concentration camp, where their Christian faith keeps them from despair and bitterness.
Image of the Beast (1981):
Third and best known entry in the Mark IV series of fundamentalist apocalypse films.
Never Ashamed (1984):
Tim Hughes goes through a transformation from juvenile delinquent to a kid who has “seen the Light”.
Additionally, I know there have been a few made-for-TV movies in recent years that deal with the life of Jesus and his followers:
I have to get to class soon, but I’ll try to find more movies and TV shows later. Hope this helps!
ladybug, the movies you list didn’t exactly burn up the box office It has to matter, for purposes of this debate, how successful the movies were. Anyone with an axe to grind and 50 grand can make an anti-Christian (or pro-Christian) movie; if nobody goes to see it, that doesn’t tell us anything about the success/failure of the Evil Humanist Conspiracy[sup](pat. pending)[/sup].
Surely we can include “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Exorcist,” and the “Omen” trilogy as successful pro-Christian-themed movies.
'Cause, they didn’t show Satan as being the white hat, that’s for shit-sure.
Well, if opposition to Satan is what we are talking about, then there are a whole bunch of movies that could be considered pro-Christian. There was that Schwarzenegger flick that came out a few years back and several others in that whole doomsday-apocalypse-action genre. I’m not sure these are really pro-Christian so much as anti-evil. Not the same thing.
I think I would have to agree with the various statements that Hollywood and TV generally ignore specific religious issues.
I would agree that they are filled with things that would go against Christian morals, however, such as promiscuous sex (pick any episode of Seinfeld, for instance).
Not so sure if that amounts to anti-Christian, however, either.
I missed that episode. Chocolate babka, Superman, breakfast cereal, “anti-dentites,” soup Nazi, Festivus, yes, but where is the promiscuous sex? Although there was that one episode about being master of one’s domain, but that was NOT about promiscuity.
Sorry. I thought flowbark wanted movies that portray Christianity in a positive light. The reference to “Ebert’s Guide to the Movies” led me to believe that any pro-Christian movie was acceptable, not just blockbusters.
flowbark, I apologize if I misunderstood your meaning.
OK. For those of you uninterested in YA literature’s portrayals of Christians, skip all of this.
Kimtsu, I’ve given up trying to summarize my paper. I’m going to post the paper on the Web; it might take me a little while, but I’ll post the link as soon as I can. You can just read the whole thing and see what you think. It’s pretty quick reading, and only half of it is on religion.
The rules stated that I must write no more than 20 pages; I had a period of about 10 weeks to do it. You can imagine, therefore, that while I did a lot of reading, I eventually had to stop reading and start writing. It’s entirely possible that I missed many good sources.
Meanwhile, I’d like to address some of your other points.
Sure. But there are piles of realistic YA fiction, about realistic teens struggling with realistic problems. And if religious teens have to get used to reading about areligious people, don’t areligious teens have to get used to reading about religious people? YA lit is often about understanding others different from ourselves.
You mentioned some authors, yes. We pointed out that many of them published before my cutoff date of 1979. Others were Jewish, which I wasn’t concentrating on. Still others, including Beverly Cleary, are really children’s authors, and I focused on YA authors, so I’m not counting books written for 3rd and 4th graders. Children’s books, while still non-representative, are better, it’s true.
OSC never said that SF characters should be Protestant. He just said that there should be some mention of religion in a book that claims to have invented another culture, futuristic or not. Even in out supposedly rationalistic modern society, many people believe in religion or answer needs to believe in something higher with belief in aliens or angels or whatnot. I find it hard to believe that human culture will ever rid itself of the need to worship someone or something, and SF/fantasy should address that somehow. It usually doesn’t, and the invented culture winds up being much more 20th century American because of it. (You can always tell in what decade an SF story was written because of the attitudes–in the 50’s stories, women are always 50’s women. 20-30 years from now, I think you will be able to spot a 90’s story by the large cultural holes left by the author’s avoidance of religion.)
Sure. Mysteries have always had more than their share of religious figures, especially Catholics, which are traditionally associated with mystery and gothism (is that a word?) in our WASP culture. But those are all adult authors. Find me more than a few YA mysteries like that (my paper mentions a couple).
Interestingly, I never noticed until I started researching it. I never expected to see Christian themes in my reading material, except in books published by religious presses. When I started looking around, I realized that while YA lit has made huge efforts to integrate every lifestyle and ethnicity, it has studiously ignored portraying religion. Obviously, overtly religious material is appropriately published by the religious presses, but I think it would be entirely fitting for mainstream authors to show their characters as attending church, Bible study, or youth group as , or wondering about how God fits into their lives or whether religion can answer any their needs, as so many real life teens do. When a fictional teen wonders about God, he usually ends up rejecting faith. On an individual basis, this is fine and great, but collectively, it gives the impression that religion is stupid and useless, which it isn’t. A balanced collection of YA lit would present both sides–some teens would choose faith, and others wouldn’t.
goboy: The lead characters on “Seinfeld” were all unmarried. Ergo, for them to pursue and engage in any sex at all is, by the moralizers’ definition, promiscuous.
Sister Act was a smash hit. Also, Dead Man Walking is absolutely about Sister Helen Prejean’s efforts to save a murderer’s soul; it did fine box-office-wise, and won Susan Sarandon an Oscar. I can also mention Keeping the Faith, the Edward Norton movie also starring Ben Stiller and Jenna Elfman. It was a reasonably good romantic comedy built around religious characters, for whom spiritual questions were central in deciding what to do. It was modestly successful at the box office, but by no means a blockbuster.
But don’t forget to look in the other direction, i.e. movies that presented Christian characters in a negative light and that seriously bombed. A handful of examples:
Crimes of Passion. In 1984, director Ken Russell was reasonably hot, having done Altered States a couple of years before. Topline star Kathleen Turner was definitely hot, coming off Body Heat and Romancing the Stone. Anthony Perkins wasn’t especially hot, but he was in the public eye, having finally made a sequel to Psycho the year before. Crimes of Passion had a fairly high-profile launch, and usually kinky/trashy flicks with big-name stars can be counted on to draw something of an audience, but when people found out the priest played by Perkins went “over the edge” in his attempts to “save” the prostitutes of the ghetto, this movie sank without a trace at the box office.
Pass the Ammo. Tim Curry as a corrupt television preacher held hostage on the air by displeased members of his flock. Cast also includes Bill Paxton and Linda Kozlowski (Mrs. Crocodile Dundee). A very pointed satire of televangelism, made in 1988 at the height of related scandals (Bakker, Swaggert, etc.); came and went with startling alacrity given its timeliness and generally positive reviews.
Apprentice to Murder. Another 1988 film, this one is actually based on a true story from the Depression. Donald Sutherland is a pulpit-pounding priest who sees Satanic conspiracies everywhere; he recruits a young, impressionable helper (Chad Lowe), and together, they commit murders in the name of Jesus. Definite box-office failure; it now relies on extraordinarily misleading box art to pull it its few video rentals.
Fletch Lives. The 1989 sequel to the surprise hit, again starring Chevy Chase, directed by the same guy who did the first one. This time, the bad guys include a TV evangelist who’s involved in a real estate scam for his Christian theme park, Bibleland. Major bomb, both financially and critically. (Critics, of course, don’t mean anything; look at the receipts for The Wedding Planner.)
Priest. This 1994 movie looks at a Catholic priest who keeps his homosexuality secret and has a crisis of faith over a girl’s confession of being sexual abused by her father. The priest is presented honorably, but of course he’s gay, and the Catholic Church in general is seen rather negatively as authoritarian and inflexible. Very, very good reviews for the most part (I didn’t see it), but made like a dollar and a half at the box office.
Stigmata. Did okay on its first weekend in 1999, but dropped out of sight thereafter. The hero is a priest, played by Gabriel Byrne, but as he investigates supernatural phenomena he discovers he’s also fighting the influence of highly-placed conspirators from the Vatican (one of whom, a Cardinal, is played by Jonathan Pryce).
I wouldn’t have included “The Apostle” in that list. Unlike the others, it wasn’t just a vague feel-good semi-Christianity, nor Angels as a plot device, but a truly great film explictly about a Christian’s struggle. A southern evangelical fundamentalist Christian at that. It took a human, and extremely flawed (he kills a guy), character with a faith strong and loud (he doesn’t just talk to God, he yells at Him) enough to scare even more moderate Christains, and portrays him in a sympathetic light.
This, I think, is the type of film FoG is asking for. If it did better and was more mainstream, the example would blow his argument out of the water.
The problem is that, IMHO, “The Apostle” was brilliant! Saying “more movies should be like ‘The Apostle’” is like saying “more movies should be like ‘Citizen Kane’”. Ain’t gonna happen! A bad version of “The Apostle” would be very bad indeed. Also, it’s a very heavy subject, and the market can only handle so many at a time.
**Five
**
First, Neurotik’s right. Anti-Satan isn’t pro-Christ, especially when Satan’s reduced to a horror movie villian. Secondly [nitpick] “Reosemary’s Baby” wasn’t really about Satanism, it was about the fears and uncertainties of a pregnant woman, the fact taht she was carrying the antichrist was just a metaphor. Or something. I didn’t particularly like that movie. [/nitpick]
Here’s my paper, as written. The first paragraph is the original question. Sources, of course, are at the end.
Cervaise wrote:
And don’t forget In God We Tru$t, a thoroughly forgettable movie released in 1980, starring Richard Pryor as a con artist, Marty Feldman as a celibate monk led into temptation, and Andy Kaufman as Armageddon T. Thunderbird, televangelist extraordinaire. The IMDB doesn’t have box office information on this movie, but I can’t imagine it being a smash hit.
Thanks, tracer, I forgot that one.
And as long as we’re being fair in our analysis of how the entertainment media treat entire classes of people through stereotype and generalization, why don’t we look at scientists? After all, if there’s a big conspiracy to knock down Christianity, then it’s the godless scientists who should be shown as the heroes, right?
So let’s make a list of movies where the scientist is clearly, distinctly the hero, using scientific methodology only. Then let’s set that list up against all the movies where the scientist(s) is/are:[ul][li]an evil mastermind bent on world domination; or[]not evil, but arrogant, inadvertently creating a disaster through sheer hubris; or[]well-meaning, but unable to make a breakthrough unless/until he/she embraces intuition and/or faith (e.g., Contact)[/ul]Seems to me, just off the top of my head, that the first list, where the scientist is inarguably the hero, will be dwarfed by the set of movies in which the scientist is evil, wrong, or incomplete.[/li]
The so-called “atheist conspiracy” takes another punch in the kidneys…
Finally got a chance to organize those cites I wanted to show Foggie.
Here are the newspaper cites showing what Represenative Barr thinks about Wiccans.
This is Rep. Barr’s homepage from the House of Represenatives. I haven’t found a quote that he’s say explicitly he’s Christian, but his membership in several conservative Christian organizations seems to prove it.
Regarding the Christian Coalition; while the quotes here are from an “anti-Pat Robertson” site, I think it drives the point home. Pat and his ilk aren’t simply trying to influence the government, they want to take over and run it from a purely Christian viewpoint. Here’s the site.
These two newspaper articles are about the recent passage of “defense of marriage” acts in California and Oklahoma and point out that the RCC and LDS contributed significantly to the campaign on these issues.
The point here is that Christians wield significant political clout in this country. They can motivate voters and influence elections. Some of them have plans to put their members in key government positions to advance their own agenda, while deny other groups the same. Some also attempt to deny some minority religions the right to practice their faith openly.
These actions are not from some persecuted minority. These are the actions of an organization that can wield significant clout when it wants to.
Hi genie, thanks very much for posting your paper! I enjoyed it and thought it was very well written. I do understand the difficulties of the space and time constraints, and I think you made quite a good case. Naturally, the space and time constraints do impact the argument somewhat. I’m still a little dubious about such remarks as “YA authors have for years been reluctant to show faith as an ordinary part of American life” and “When religion or religious people are depicted in YA books, they are overwhelmingly negative portrayals” and “the overwhelming majority of YA books are either deeply suspicious of religion, or ignore it altogether”, while the specific YA books from the last twenty years that you explicitly identify (or list in your bibliography) as fitting this description are only four in number. Meanwhile, three other YA authors are mentioned approvingly as having “written positive portrayals of Christianity and religious feeling.” That still doesn’t look to me like an overwhelming proportion of “anti-religious” or “areligious” as opposed to “pro-religious” books. I quite accept that there are doubtless lots more books in the anti- or a- religious category that you didn’t have time to find or space to mention, but I think we would still need to see a really thorough survey of the literature before we drew broad conclusions about the trend.
OSC never said that SF characters should be Protestant. He just said that there should be some mention of religion in a book that claims to have invented another culture, futuristic or not. Even in out supposedly rationalistic modern society, many people believe in religion or answer needs to believe in something higher with belief in aliens or angels or whatnot. I find it hard to believe that human culture will ever rid itself of the need to worship someone or something, and SF/fantasy should address that somehow.
Yeah, but many SF/F authors don’t find it hard to believe. That was my point, that we’re dealing here with a section of the population that is much more slanted than the mainstream towards a rationalist/materialist/areligious outlook, and so you would expect to see that color the books. While I’m still not convinced that that’s necessarily true for the YA genre, I think the tendency is pretty clearly marked in SF/F.
It usually doesn’t, and the invented culture winds up being much more 20th century American because of it. (You can always tell in what decade an SF story was written because of the attitudes–in the 50’s stories, women are always 50’s women.
Very true!
*20-30 years from now, I think you will be able to spot a 90’s story by the large cultural holes left by the author’s avoidance of religion.) *
Hmm, I think you’ll have a hard time telling it from a 30’s or 40’s or 50’s or 60’s or 70’s or 80’s SF story based on that criterion. As I pointed out, SF has always had more than its share of rejection and rebellion against mainstream culture: why would most authors go to the trouble of inventing a whole new world unless they were trying to get away from the limitations of the current one? You won’t find a whole lot of embracing of religion in most SF stories prior to the nineties, IMHO.
Sure. Mysteries have always had more than their share of religious figures, especially Catholics, which are traditionally associated with mystery and gothism (is that a word?) in our WASP culture. But those are all adult authors.
Right, that’s what I was talking about. Sorry, guess I should have made it clearer. When I switched over to discussing OSC’s comments, I was addressing the subjects that he was addressing, namely, religion in general adult fiction and its subgenres. It’s his sweeping generalizations on those subjects that I condemn as trivially refutable nonsense; I wasn’t focused on the YA lit phenomenon at that point.
I never expected to see Christian themes in my reading material, except in books published by religious presses. When I started looking around, I realized that while YA lit has made huge efforts to integrate every lifestyle and ethnicity, it has studiously ignored portraying religion. Obviously, overtly religious material is appropriately published by the religious presses, but I think it would be entirely fitting for mainstream authors to show their characters as attending church, Bible study, or youth group as , or wondering about how God fits into their lives or whether religion can answer any their needs, as so many real life teens do.
Well, again, we’d have to see a thorough overview of the literature to know for certain. But I suppose it may well be the case. I do think that overall, there’s a great deal of tension and mistrust in our society across the divide between devoutly religious Christians and those closer to the privately-believing-or-doubting-or-disbelieving end of the spectrum. I can easily see how the two groups might just prefer to avoid dealing with each other as book characters, except as easy-to-handle stereotypes. I wonder, are there efforts made in Christian YA lit to portray non-Christians, doubters or disbelievers in a positive light? Are there any friendly Muslim or atheist or Wiccan families who live up the street from the Christian protagonists who are accepted as folks who are different but basically good? If so, I do think it might be a little churlish of more secular authors not to extend the hand of ecumenical acceptance in return.