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Whew. More than one reader, expecting a book about, well, "Peanuts," surely stopped right there. Even those who waded through the imposing syntax would arrive at the disconcerting substance: for Short, the gospel begins with original sin. Art, including "Peanuts," is thus an end run around sin"disguising the truth in order to get it through the enemy's defenses." Short proceeded to offer a kind of illustrated neo-orthodoxy, correlating Kirkegaard and Lucy, Barth and Snoopy. If he treated the drawings more as sermon illustrations than as art worth interpreting in its own right, the fact that Schulz was a Sunday school teacher seemed to justify a few critical liberties.
The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World's Most Animated Family by Mark I. Pinsky Westminster John Knox, 2001 160 pp. $11.99 
The Gospel According to ESPN: Saints, Saviors, and Sinners edited by Jay Lovinger Hyperion, 2002 256 pp. $26.40 |
The book that revived Westminster John Knox's franchise was Mark Pinsky's 2001 The Gospel According to The Simpsons. The changing face of American religion is summed up in the distance between the two booksand not just the distance from Charlie Brown's puzzled innocence to Bart Simpson's knowing smirk. Where Short was a Christian pastor, Pinsky was a Jewish religion reporter, albeit one who took pains to appreciate the perspective of Christians. (In yet another sign of the times, the foreword for The Simpsons was written by crossover evangelical Tony Campolo.) Pinsky improved markedly on Short as a criticas a reporter without an evangelistic agenda, he simply watched nearly every Simpsons episode and collated the show's religious themes. The book was a hit (though, at 100,000 copies, only one percent of the hit that Peanuts was), propelled by a surprising message: the famously cynical show was infused with religion and even a kind of reluctant reverence.
This time around Westminster John Knox did not miss the marketing moment. Pinsky's new book, Disney, is part of a properly branded series that includes Harry Potter and Tolkien, along with David Dark's forthcoming The Gospel According to America. (Tony Soprano and Dr. Seuss are from other publishers.) Pinsky has once again performed a yeoman's job by sitting through every Disney animated feature, from Snow White to Brother Bear. But this time he is dealing with a massive entertainment company whose "fear of offending and fear of excluding" has rarely produced anything half as interesting as Homer and his brood. So Pinsky is reduced to chronicling just how Disney has bowdlerized various religious (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and cultural (Mulan) sources, still managing to offend many groups along the way.
If Pinsky's struggle to make something out of Disney's milquetoast mythology serves chiefly to remind us that all culture is not created equal, another pitfall for the "gospel according to" formula is inadvertently displayed in Dr. Seuss, a book of repurposed sermons by retired Methodist pastor James W. Kemp. When The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, you may recall from countless bedtime readings, the mischievous impresario stains the children's world pink, a stain that starts in the bathtub and eventually spreads to the snow outdoors. To Kemp, this naturally recalls Isaiah's words about Israel's sin being like scarlet, while Cat Z's serendipitous supply of magical pink-removing "Voom" recalls the atonement: "For Christians," Kemp writes with an apparently straight face, "this Voom is the restoring power that came in Jesus Christ." You can't help feeling that in mobilizing the cartoon in service of the gospel, the cartoon has gotten the upper hand. Are our sins scarlet, or are they pink? Something tells me there's a real difference. Cat Z may bemaybea Christ figure. But Christ is not a Cat Z figure.
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