The following post contains details from the first and second seasons of Orange Is the New Black. (Don't say we didn't warn you.)

I love my Don Drapers and Walter Whites, but we were long overdue for a Piper Chapman. She's the main character of Orange Is the New Black, a Brooklyn yuppie serving time for crimes committed in her adventurous youth (based on the real-life Piper Kerman, whose memoir inspired the show). Her story is not, at least after two seasons, a tale of redemption.

With nothing but time to face her own darkness, Piper is no longer recognizable as the innocent woman who first entered prison. Antiheroes like Draper, White, and Chapman help us explore the darker side of our humanity at a distance. Through Piper, we step into a society-within-a-society—a low-security women's prison—in which women are forced to come to terms with their literal crimes and the ways they became the women who committed them. Stripped of the ability to slip into roles defined by the men in their lives—girlfriend, mother, wife—the inmates find freedom to face those choices that have led them to prison and the internal strength to figure out how to move forward.

Orange Is the New Black is not for everyone; it comes with all the warnings of a typical premium cable show. Yet, it's a show worth talking about. Its cast is refreshingly diverse, and its nuanced treatments of race and sexuality have given recognizable flesh to complex realities that can all too easily become theoretical. Because the show has done so well at this, its handling of another of society's great dividers—religion—has been such a major disappointment.

In many ways, OITNB is a show about how people delude themselves—not just into committing crimes, but also into the beliefs that shape their understanding of who they are. The axiom "prison breaks you" becomes most powerful as it challenges these inmates' most deeply-held convictions. But for a show that does such a good job of plunging beneath labels and inhabiting so complex realities, it fails to portray faith in a way that is at all recognizable to its lived experience.

The first season built up to a cliffhanger that hinged on the outcome of a violent fight between Piper and her "born-again" rival who, after failing to convert Piper like she boldly proclaimed Jesus promised she would, declares herself an "angel of the Lord" and stabs her. Pennsatucky is a Christian character unlike any other on TV: a meth addict who became an accidental poster child of the pro-life movement when she killed an abortion clinic worker—never mind that it was because she insulted her during her fifth abortion—and embraced her newfound "religion" by spouting off Scripture and declaring herself a faith healer.

Article continues below

There is a single moment where you understand Pennsatucky's faith as connected to actual human emotion; as she basks in the attention and acceptance from the pro-life protestors who rally to support her at her trial, her entire countenance transforms in what could be understood as her moment of "conversion"—but from that moment on she becomes a broadly drawn stereotype. Pennsatucky comes off as a Christian who adopts the guise of faith as a way to empower her own ignorance and assert her power over anything threatening. And there is some biting truth in this—we see countless examples of people abusing religion to gain personal power.

In a post-first-season article on "How 'Orange Is the New Black' Fails on Religion" for The American Conservative, B.D. McClay speculates why a show so careful to craft complex characters would draw such a simplistic caricature:

The show seems aimed at an audience of Piper Chapmans: upper-middle-class, very educated, largely secular. They aren't friends with Pennsatucky; they don't know anybody like her. Pennsatucky might be their waitress, or sell them some snacks at a gas station. But that's about as close as their world and hers will ever come to touching. So it doesn't matter, really, that none of these things about Pennsatucky make sense. They aren't meant to make sense. They're meant to be frightening.

It's a biting critique that rings true of both OITNB and TV portrayals of religious characters in general. Christian characters are often boring prudes à la Ned Flanders on The Simpsons, overly politicized like Sally Langston on Scandal, or a bizarre amalgamation of beliefs and lifestyle choices that make me wonder if the writers have ever met an actual Christian, like Pastor Casey on The Mindy Project. When Christian characters are sincere, they're usually kindly older women, grandmother types, resigned to let the kids have their fun and dole out sage advice as requested. It was frustrating to see this one painful narrative represent Christian faith on OITNB, a show that masters other aspects of the melting pot so well.

Article continues below

Season two's response to the loud "born again" is the older Catholic nun, Sister Jane Ingalls. Where Pennsatucky is loud, ignorant, hateful, and violent, Sister Ingalls is thoughtful, accepted, and respected for her quiet but solid faith. She comes to the forefront of the story at the end of the season, when she joins a prisoner-led hunger strike and quickly becomes consumed by fanatical devotion to the cause.

Through flashbacks it becomes clear that her blinding commitment to political activism, and the public attention and celebrity they brought her, are what landed her in prison in the first place. (She is apparently based on a real-life nun, Sister Ardeth Platte, who "cut a chain link fence surrounding a Minuteman III silo in northern Colorado, then used baby bottles to draw a sign of the cross in their own blood.") Her narcissism lost her the support of her superiors, who eventually asked her to leave the sisterhood.

It's another cynical view of faith, but tempered by the possibility of something more genuine. Sister Jane is seen as a wayward nun who has missed the point; in her first days as a nun she is instructively told by the Mother Superior that "Christ only comes to those humble in their devotion to the Lord," and her life plays out this truth: as she grows addicted to the rush of subversive resistance, she admits that she has never felt God's presence. It's a tragedy, but not one without hope of redemption.

This is where religion has, or could have, real traction on OITNB. Redemption and salvation are more than just abstract spiritual concepts in prison. Most of the inmates long for the day their lives can be different from what they are now and what they were before, and they have run out of places to turn. Grace and mercy are even more deeply felt when there is so much to be forgiven.

Orange Is the New Black has made so much noise because it takes seriously women whose stories we don't often hear—black women, Latina women, older women, poor women, transgender women—and asks us to consider the real human beings behind them who have had to make difficult, often painful choices most of us will never have to make. It's so far mostly missed an opportunity to do the same for Christians, but, like the women in Litchfield prison, it still has time to turn it around.

Posted: