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David Chase's HBO dramatic series The Sopranos has moved well beyond niche audience and cult following and landed squarely in the category of Broader Cultural Phenomenon. Newsweeklies find that Tony's (James Gandolfini's) mug can goose circulation; multiple popular guides—including one by TV Guide and another by The New York Times—help latecomers get up to speed with the story four seasons into the game; DVD and VHS compilations of the series sell like crazy. And last week, a story about whether actors from the series would or would not be allowed to march in a Columbus Day parade made front-page news. (Not all Italian Americans, it turns out, are giddy about Tony.)

A slew of recent books seek to cash in on the zeitgeist: The Psychology of the Sopranos, Tony Soprano's America: The Criminal Side of the American Dream, even The Sopranos Family Cookbook. It was therefore more with amusement than shock that I beheld mock-up copies of The Gospel According to Tony Soprano: An Unauthorized Look Into the Souls of TV's Top Mob Boss and His Family (Relevant Books) at this year's Christian Booksellers Association convention.

Nor, once I received the book, was I terribly surprised. Author and Baptist minister Chris Seay spends the introduction and much of the rest of the book explaining why it's not only tolerable for a mature Christian to watch the show, it's positively a good idea. The Sopranos, Seay explains, is "greater than The Godfather," and has managed to hold "the imagination of the world at gunpoint." It may, in Seay's telling, be the best drama of all time!

Seay's book is interesting if for no other reason than that it proves the very Sicilian adage that everybody's got an angle. Seay's particular interest is not in principle objectionable—he wants to use The Sopranos to spread the message and ethics of the Christian faith—but one has to wonder at his vehicle of choice.

On the one hand, The Sopranos is a well written and popular drama. There is humor, but it leavens without dominating. Loved by millions—especially by inhabitants of those supposedly secular "Blue states"—it portrays the lives of a modern New Jersey mob boss and both of his "families"—nuclear and, uh, extended.

Viewers watch Tony Soprano grudgingly spill his guts to his distraught shrink and wrestle with issues of morality, identity, fatherhood, and whether or not his meds are up to snuff. Because of their "lifestyles," the characters regularly deal with issues like the reality of death, where to draw moral lines, and the meaning and purpose of life.

Most of an episode in the second season was spent discussing the existence of hell and what one has to do to land there: not predictable TV fare. Though stereotypes occasionally slip in (e.g., the "bought" priest), religion is handled earnestly as a real, if screwed-up, part of the mobsters' lives. When Carmela Soprano prays for the life of a downed member of Tony's crew she begins by admitting to God that this is the kind of life that they have chosen but begging for mercy anyway. When Tony contemplates quitting the mob, Dylan's "You've Gotta Serve Somebody" warbles in the background.

On the other hand, it's The Sopranos. When a friend learned that I was reviewing a book titled The Gospel According to Tony Soprano, he wondered, "What's that? Do unto others and then split?" Seay & Co. can dismiss such barbs as simplistic, but the barbers have a point. When it comes to evangelization, cultural phenomena are not created equal. Pay It Forward is more likely to be effective than Batman Returns.

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October (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46