I don’t watch much TV. I am not a Luddite and watch movies from time to time and have a Netflix account. It is just that sitcoms rarely have held any interest for me. I do not have cable and the only thing I miss is the occasional sporting event. But there was a new sitcom that grabbed my attention and I actually intentionally watched the pilot in order to better understand what our culture (or at least some in our culture) think about Christians. It was originally entitled “Good Christian _______es” but was changed after much controversy to “Good Christian Belles” and is now just called “GCB”.
I was not at all surprised by the content. The main character is an irreligious woman who has lost everything and ends up moving back home with her mother in order to restart her life with her two children. But she doesn’t just go back to mother’s house, but finds that she has also gone home to the town where a group of angry, vengeful women have been longing for the day to get even with her for all the pain and insult she caused them in high school. Of course everyone in this sitcom attends church . . . from the gay husband who is hiding this from his wife, to the malicious and vindictive, scripture quoting ring-leader whose sole purpose is to make our main character’s life miserable.
Hypocrisy abounds and the show is based on the expectation that Christians are really no different than the rest of society and maybe even worse! So my purpose in this blog is not to give you a run down on the show, but to actually ask a deeper question to those out there who have a relationship with Jesus Christ. How do you think the world has come to this conclusion about the Christian faith? How did the people to whom Jesus said, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” come to be caricatured in society as those most unloving and vengeful?
I cannot help but think that there is at least a kernel of reality in “GCB”. There will always be religious people doing religious things for religious reasons. And by doing religious things for religious reasons, they can equally do irreligious things for irreligious reasons just as easily. As a matter of fact, I believe that rejecting the line between sacred and secular in the life of a follower of Christ is a primary step in the direction of avoiding a hypocritical life. If I give Christ my entire life, then I am not just His on Sunday mornings, but I am His as I interact with my coworkers on Monday morning. I am his when I greet my family after a long hard day. I am His when I plop down in front of the TV. And I am His when . . . (you get the point.)
GCB points out a reality in the Christian faith. There will always be those who say that they are following Christ because they go to a church . . . and then they will live like the devil the other 167 hours of the week. GCB is a painful show that I cannot recommend in the least for it relentless attack on Christianity. But the Christianity it is attacking is nothing that I recognize from Scripture and from that standpoint I agree with the show. But what many see as humor I find a cause for deep grieving.