A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz by Stephen J. Lind (review)

Over fifty years ago Robert Short published the influential and bestselling Gospel According to Peanuts (1964) in an attempt to distil spiritual insights from the work of cartoonist Charles Schulz. Known to his friends as “Sparky,” the cartoonist was one of the most important figures in American popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, David Michaelis included significant coverage of Schulz’s religious faith in his critically acclaimed Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (2007).

In A Charlie Brown Religion, Stephen J. Lind, assistant professor of business communication at Washington and Lee University, has taken a deeper and more comprehensive look at Schulz’s personal faith journey, in the process systematically documenting the significant place of spiritual themes and biblical references in the cartoonist’s work and life.

The first chapters (“Church Pillars,” “Land of Promise”) describe Sparky’s early conversion to evangelical Christian faith and involvement in the Church of God in the 1950s, then moves to his deep personal Bible study as an adult Sunday School teacher at a Methodist church in California in the 1960s. The last chapters (“Secular Humanist,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer”) focus on the artist’s changing religious views from the 1970s and until his death in early 2000. In between are fascinating chapters that unpack the theology of The Great Pumpkin, demonstrate the importance of religious values to the artist, and explain the uproar over the use of scripture in A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965).

The book serves as a valuable spiritual biography of “Sparky” Schulz, a careful technical analysis of how religious themes and terminology are employed within the strip, and a needed corrective to other biographical works on Schulz. The result is a clarifying addition to Schulz biographical scholarship and an insightful contribution to the understanding of the semiotics of Peanuts in terms of religious content.

Lind has carefully laid the foundation for future researchers by employing a rigorous coding procedure for all 17,897 Peanuts strips and the seventy-five television specials to identify religious content. Through this process he has arguably been able to separate out meaningful from casual religious references in the artist’s work, bringing a needed corrective to prior interpretations such as Lindsey & Hereen (1992), which tend to confuse the tangential references with the substantive. Lind’s work here is foundational and will inform future research in this area.

As a result of this coding process, Lind also documents the significant role that biblical texts and religious references play in Peanuts. In terms of reoccurring motifs, over the five-decade run of the strip, Lind found over 560 strips had a religious reference or meaning. When one compares this to the 412 iconic strips portraying Snoopy as a World War I flying ace, and only 61 strips of Lucy pulling the football on Charlie Brown, the substantial place of religious ideas in Schulz’s work is clear.

An area of ongoing interest in Schulz’s biography is his shift from evangelical churchman and Billy Graham supporter in the 1950s to the mid-1960s to gradually calling himself a “secular humanist” by the early 1980s. Lind uses detailed insights from new sources such as a careful reading of the marginal notes made by Schulz in his personal Bible, personal notes he made in his commentaries, Peanuts strip content, and the artist’s correspondence with family members to develop a nuanced view of how his spiritual views evolved across his lifespan. Lind argues persuasively that Schulz had elements of faith and scepticism blended in various proportion at different times in his life, and even at the last retained a heartfelt affection for the evangelical faith that he had once embraced.

Lind’s treatment provides a counterpoint to both atheists who have misread Schulz’s ambiguous claims of secularist faith (Schulz clearly believed in some version...