Playful, Glad, and Free: Karl Barth and a Theology of Popular Culture

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments A brief holiday memory: As a kid, my favorite Christmas movie for many years was Scrooged. I remember recording it on a timeworn VHS tape and watching it time after time. The scene that sticks with me most is when the Ghost of Christmas Past brings Bill Murray’s character to the realization that his fondest childhood memories were actually memories of things that happened to kids on his favorite TV shows.1 Not only can I relate, I can’t say with complete certainty whether I really watched Scrooged over and over or whether I’m just remembering some kid on TV who did. Raised by a single, working mother and her aging parents, I spent a lot of time with TV. After school, I would go to my room and do homework, with Jack Tripper and those guys from Bosom Buddies keeping me company. Dinner was spent in the living room with my grandpa and with Jim Rockford, Hawkeye Pierce, B. J. Hunnicut (or sometimes Trapper John), and Charles Winchester (or sometimes Frank Burns). Later in the evening, I would move back and forth between the two rooms, catching what I could on two different networks. In my pre-adolescent years, I learned about TV ratings, advertising demographics, and any other information I could get my hands on (historical note: the internet was not yet a thing people had), which might explain my fascination with Scrooged, a movie centered around a TV programming executive for the fictional IBC network. To this day, I still remember the prime-time schedules for particular seasons and nights of the week (for example, 1986 CBS Mondays, 1987 NBC Thursdays, 1988 NBC Saturdays). I can still recite the words to fifty-plus TV theme songs (including, for some reason, a few shows I don’t remember ever even watching!), and as a parent I’ve found that there is a relevant TV theme song for each of life’s challenges. Being raised by two Pentecostal preachers did not inhibit my love of television. While my grandmother would often complain that there was too much sex and profanity on TV, she did not forbid any particular program or complain much about my viewing choices (until we got MTV, that is). No, my Pentecostal grandparents were never afraid of popular culture. At church, my grandma would often take popular songs and adjust the lyrics to turn them into gospel songs. My mom and my aunt would do the same on their piano sheet music, usually with popular love songs of the day (their revised lyrics now calling to mind the writings of medieval and early modern women mystics). ix These kinds of re-appropriations meant that I had to think about popular culture theologically from the start. The result of my immersive television experience was not what some might expect. Seeing on television worlds beyond my own made me want to see them in person, leading to my decision to go to college (which was not a “given” in my working-class neighborhood at that time). My grandma had always hoped I would “do something with my life,” and I like to think that her uncharacteristically liberal attitude toward my consumption of television entertainment was prescient, believing it would inspire me to espouse some higher ambition (I have no idea if this is actually true). The following is the result of a lifetime of theological interest in popular entertainment and a lifetime of “researching” television. Therefore, I would first like to thank my late grandparents and my mom for the reasons mentioned above. I would also like to thank television for being such a steadfast companion. Special thanks to Diff’rent Strokes for teaching me that “everybody’s got a special kind of story / everybody finds a way to shine”2; to Police Squad! for my first exposure to the phrases “existential being” and “anthropomorphic deity”3; to Roseanne for adding the world I knew to the TV landscape; to Seinfeld for convincing me to go to college; to MacGyver for teaching me how to make a defibrillator out of a doormat, two candlesticks, and some third thing that I don’t recall; to Perfect Strangers for its hyper-inspirational theme song; to The Dick van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show (Chicago psychiatrist, not Vermont B&B owner) for no particular reason; and to Better Off Ted, Parks and Recreation, Community, The Walking Dead, Justified, Torchwood, and LOST for...