The Gospel according to The Simpsons, Bigger and Possibly Even Better! Edition

With a New Afterword Exploring South Park, Family Guy, & Other Animated TV Shows

Mark I. Pinsky

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781611644371
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Is there anything holy in Springfield, the home to irascible Bart Simpson and his naive dad Homer, their enthusiastic evangelical neighbor Ned Flanders, the sourpuss minister Rev. Lovejoy, and the dozens of other unique characters who inhabit the phenomenally popular TV show? In this revision of the 2001 bestseller, author Mark Pinsky says yes!

In this entertaining and enlightening book, Pinsky shows how The Simpsons engages issues of religion and morality in a thoughtful, provocative, and genuinely respectful way. With three new chapters and updates to reflect the 2001-2006 seasons, Pinsky has given a thorough facelift to the book that Publishers Weekly called "thoughtful and genuinely entertaining."

The new material includes chapters on Buddhism and gay marriage and an extensive afterword that explores how religion is treated on the animated shows that have followed in the footsteps of The Simpsons: South Park, Family Guy, Futurama, American Dad, and King of the Hill.

One

Divine Imagery: “Perfect Teeth. Nice Smell. A Class Act All the Way.”

God answers all prayers. The problem, ministers say, is that sometimes the answer is “no”—not a thundering denial but often a silence that implies that a request will not be fulfilled, for reasons best known to the Almighty. For Homer Simpson, this conundrum represents an opportunity rather than a reason to question the validity of prayer. In a flashback episode we see him at home, ostensibly thanking God for his life—his marriage, his two children, his job—a constellation in balance that is “absolutely perfect the way it is.” Homer asks that everything be frozen in place. This is impossible, of course, sort of the equivalent of praying for a protective “hedge around him and his household and everything he has,” as the book of Job (1:10) puts it. It is at this point that Homer, at best an imperfect believer, attempts to toy with God. He prays that if the Almighty agrees to keep everything exactly as it is, Homer won’t ask for anything more. Confirmation of the deal, he prays, will come in the form of “absolutely no sign.” There is no sign. In gratitude, Homer presents an offering to God of cookies and milk. Should God want Homer to eat the cookies himself, he asks again for “no sign.” After a pause, Homer utters the benediction, “Thy will be done.”

Homer’s theological sophistry caught the attention of more than one Christian thinker. The incident appears in the opening lines of William A. Dembski’s Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology, a book designated one of the ten best of 1999 by Christianity Today magazine in the category of “Christianity and Culture.” In a chapter titled “Recognizing the Divine Finger,” Dembski argues that something very serious is going on in the dialogue. “What’s the matter with Homer’s prayer? Assuming God is the sovereign ruler of the universe, what is to prevent God from answering Homer’s prayer by providing no sign? Granted, usually when we want God to confirm something, we look for something extraordinary, some sign that leaves no doubt of God’s will. But presumably God could have made it thunder when Homer asked God to freeze everything and God could have made the earth to quake when Homer asked to eat those cookies and milk. Presumably, it is just as easy for God to confirm Homer’s prayer with no sign as to disconfirm it with a sign.”¹

Dembski’s answer is that the flaw in Homer’s reasoning is that the prayer is self-serving. There is asymmetry in “tying a course of action to a sign and tying it to no sign” and of “seeking confirmation through the absence of a sign.” Actually, the series writers may be providing a simpler answer, in the form of an underlying cosmic joke. Homer begins his prayer by brushing off his wife, Marge, who we later learn has been trying to tell him that she is pregnant with their third child, an event guaranteed to turn his life upside down. Even before Homer asks, God has already given him both a sign and an answer (no), if he will only listen.

“Right-wingers complain there’s no God on TV,” The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening said in a 1999 interview in Mother Jones magazine. “Not only do the Simpsons go to church every Sunday and pray; they actually speak to God from time to time. We show Him, and God has five fingers—unlike the Simpsons, who have only four.”² The Simpsons is consistently irreverent toward organized religion’s failings and excesses, as it is with most other institutions of modern life. However, God is not mocked. When The Simpsons characters are faced with crises, they turn to God. He answers their prayers, often instantaneously, and he intervenes in their lives. Mike Scully, the series’ former executive producer, insists that God is not off-limits as a target, although there are considerable challenges. “It’s more difficult to satirize something than to mock it,” he says, and “it’s hard to satirize something you don’t see.”

Characters in the series are admittedly a little hazy on the essence of the Almighty and His plan for humanity. When a character declares Homer a god, Homer corrects him, saying, “God has a white beard and invented The Da Vinci Code.” In another episode Homer mistakes a waffle stuck to his ceiling for God, and then compounds the error by eating the waffle and mocking Communion by describing the taste as “sacrelicious.” “I don’t know who or what God is exactly,” says Lisa to her brother Bart. “All I know is, he’s a force more powerful than Mom and Dad put together.” Bart thinks the tooth fairy is God’s daughter. In an attempt to con the neighbor boys, evangelical Christians Rod and Todd Flanders, Bart impersonates the voice of God. Mother Marge, the most faithful member of the family, believes that when she sings “You Light Up My Life,” she is singing about God. And the sign outside Springfield Community Church offers multiple views, from “God, the Original Love Connection” to “God Welcomes His Victims.” Another asks, “Is God Patriotic Enough?” Outside a downtown Springfield homeless shelter, yet another reads, “We Add God to Your Misery.”

Predestination makes an appearance from time to time, where God’s plan is used sometimes as an excuse, sometimes as an explanation. “Until this moment,” says Bart, poised to buy a rare issue of Radioactive Man, “I never knew why God put me on this earth. But now I know . . . to buy that comic book.” Informed that his house is teetering on its foundation, Homer says the situation is simply “all part of God’s plan,” and when he causes a traffic accident, he shouts, “Act of God, not my fault!” After a giant sturgeon falls to Earth from a Russian spacecraft and crashes onto his car hood, Homer complains, “God conned me out of sixty-five hundred dollars in car repairs.” Criticized for using bad language, he says, “Maybe I curse a little, but that’s the way God made me and I’m too old to stop now.” Homer does a dance on top of a baseball dugout during a game, to the delight of the crowd. “We all have a calling, a reason the Almighty put us on earth, and yours might be to dance on dugouts,” says Marge. Lisa equates her family’s weekly menu with predestination: “Friday night. Pork chops. From cradle to grave, etched in stone in God’s library somewhere in heaven.”

It is Homer, however, who has the most personal relationship with God. Denounced by some as a simple-minded pagan, he is much more than that. According to the book God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture,

Homer fulfills the role of the American spiritual wanderer. Though linked culturally (if unsteadily and unenthusiastically) to biblical tradition, he regularly engages a mosaic of other traditions, mythologies, and moral codes. In the face of these ever-shifting layers of meaning, he stumbles along, making the most of his limited understanding of their complexities. His comic antics remind us that the making of meaning (religious or otherwise) is ever an unfinished business, and that humor and irony go a long way toward sweetening and sustaining the endeavor.³

In their spiritual searching, neither Bart nor Homer is shy about going directly to the source and asking God for help in his daily life. When Bart sees a copy machine in the library with 199 free copies on it, he asks God for a sign. His pants fall down, so he makes 199 copies of his butt, which he later inserts in the church bulletin. Uncertain how to help his gifted daughter Lisa, Homer asks for a sign from God. Suddenly he sees a storekeeper putting a sign in his window, “Musical Instruments: The Way to Encourage a Gifted Child,” that answers his question exactly, beginning her saxophone career. Over the years that the series has run, Homer has gone back and forth about God’s fundamental nature: “He’s always happy. No wait, He’s always mad.” Homer is not alone in this confusion. The Jewish philosopher and theo-lo gian Abraham J. Heschel, in his study of the prophet Amos, noted this stark duality of God. On one hand, he is “the Deity of stern, mechanical justice.” On the other, he is the God who overlooks and forgives a faithless Israel.⁴ So maybe The Simpsons’ writers are after more than a cheap laugh.

Without question, this is also a jealous God that does not like to be challenged. Montgomery Burns, the richest man in Springfield and Homer’s boss at the nuclear power plant, fancies himself divine when a cult sweeps the town. Likening himself to “The New God,” he tells workers at the nuclear plant, “You may now praise me as the almighty”—whereupon his robe catches on fire and he is left standing naked before the people. Homer falls into a similar trap when he finds a six-foot Tiki statue in the trash, sets it up in his backyard, and runs a gas line to the idol so it can spew flames. “Can your god do that?” he asks Ned Flanders, the evangelical next door. Actually, his neighbor replies, “we worship the same God.” Not so, says Homer, yelling “I am your god now!” as the Tiki drops from his hands and sets the yard afire. In another episode, Homer and a friend engage in a vicious competition for snowplow customers, one so intense that Homer uses an opportunity to read the Bible from the pulpit during Sunday service to plug his plowing service. After reconciling with his competitor, Homer proclaims, “When two best friends work together, not even God can stop them.” The words “Oh, no?” then appear large in the sky, and the rays of sunshine instantly melt the accumulated snow. Sometimes fire and sometimes ice, but the result is the same.

Homer is never entirely certain of God’s love, which he tests repeatedly. Driving the family car during a Halloween fantasy sequence, he flees a zombie—the undead Ned Flanders. “Dear God,” he cries, “it’s Homer. If you really love me, you’ll save me now,” after which, he runs out of gas. In a Christmas episode, Homer is horrified to discover the family’s gifts and tree missing on Christmas morning, and he reaches an inescapable conclusion: “Kids, God hates us!”

In another episode, he struggles to express God’s universality: “You’re everywhere. You’re omnivorous.” He’s also somewhat confused about God’s sense of self and what he does when not conversing with Homer. “I feel this incredible surge of power,” Homer says in one episode, “like God must feel when he’s holding a gun.” In another, after shaking up Springfield with revelations on his personal Web site, he believes he has changed the world: “Now I know how God feels.” At the other end of the spectrum, in an annual Halloween fantasy episode, God is sucked into a black hole.

On a Pacific island, where he finds himself an accidental missionary, Homer is asked why an all-powerful Lord cares how or even whether he is worshiped. The question, profound and serious, is answered on this occasion with a disappointingly superficial quip. “It’s because God is powerful, but insecure,” Homer replies, “like Barbra Streisand before James Brolin.” Homer is on even shakier ground when he tries to explain God and heaven to the islanders. After overseeing construction of a primitive church, he explains why church bells have to be rung. “God’s palace is way up on the moon. So if you want him to hear us, you have to crank up the volume.”

Embroiled in an escalating feud with George H. W. Bush when the former president moves into the neighborhood, Homer asks himself, “What would God do in this situation?” The next scene shows Bart carrying a box of locusts. In another episode, after watching a biblical epic about Noah on television, Bart gets carried away, telling Homer that God is cool because he is so “in-your-face!” Homer agrees, sort of, saying that God is his favorite “fictional character.” After being accidentally hit in the face with an ice cream cone while on a hunger strike in another episode, he snaps, “Nice try, God, but Homer Simpson doesn’t give in to temptation that easily.” For his part, the Almighty is not without a sense of humor, at least where Homer is concerned. He leaves Homer a note reading, “IOU one brain, God.”

Like many biblical figures and religious mystics through the ages, Homer has his most intense encounters with the Divine while dreaming. A vivid and extended example of this takes place in the 1992 episode “Homer the Heretic,” written by George Meyer, long a guiding force in the series. The episode is used in college and seminary classes on religion and popular culture around the country. On a cold Sunday morning, Homer splits his pants as he dresses for church, so he decides not to go. Again, he offers what he takes as a clever, if familiar, theological justification: What’s the big deal about going to some building on Sunday, he asks his wife. “Isn’t God everywhere?” What he is asking is, How does God want to be worshiped? It is a question people of most cultures have been asking for thousands of years. Homer believes that if God wanted people to worship him for an hour a week, he should have made the week an hour longer.

At Springfield Community Church, where the furnace has broken, the other members of the Simpson family shiver, warmed only by Reverend Lovejoy’s sermon promising hell’s fire and brimstone. Meanwhile, Homer luxuriates in a hot shower and a warm house, with loud music and fattening food. Thus, the dichotomy is established: The faithful suffer for their belief, while the prodigal father enjoys the sybaritic life. As if the point is not made well enough, the contrast deepens. Together with the rest of the congregation, Marge and the children are stuck in church after the service, since the doors have frozen shut, and are forced to listen to the minister fill time by reading from the bulletin. At home, Homer wins a radio trivia contest, then watches an exciting football game on television and even finds a penny on the floor. After the congregation is finally able to leave the building, Marge’s car won’t start, leaving the family cold and stranded. When his family finally trudges in with their tales of woe, Homer proclaims that he has been having a wonderful day, perhaps the best of his life. Based on his analysis of divine favor, he decides never to go to church again. Marge can’t believe that her husband intends to give up his faith. At first, he denies that is his intention, but then he admits it.

Homer’s decision to abandon church provokes a full-blown theological debate in the Simpson household, with Bart supporting his father’s choice with call-and-response evangelical fervor. In his defense, Homer offers a corollary to the “one true faith” argument for abandoning worship: “What if we picked the wrong religion?” he asks. “Every week we’re just making God madder and madder.” That question, undermining as it is to more than one denomination, cannot remain unanswered. Before going to sleep that night, Marge kneels by her bed and prays for Homer to see the error of his ways, as he drifts off to sleep.

As so often in The Simpsons, God hears and answers. God comes to Homer in his dream, and provides as dramatic and direct an answer as can be imagined. Sitting on his couch, watching television, Homer feels the house begin to shake. A beam of light shines through the clouds and a large hand—with five realistic fingers— removes the roof. God is standing in the Simpsons’ living room. In deference to several faiths, God’s countenance is not shown. He is seen from the flowing beard down, wearing a robe and, it appears, Birkenstock sandals. At first, God is in no mood for pleas-antries: “Thou hast forsaken my church!” he thunders.

Homer is frightened, but is nothing if not quick on his feet: “I’m not a bad guy! I work hard and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I’m going to hell? . . . I figure I should try to live right and worship you in my own way.” God seems won over, acknowledging that Homer has a point as God pets the family cat. God agrees with Homer’s complaints about Reverend Lovejoy’s sermons. Because the minister displeases him, the Almighty will give him a canker sore. Here, truly, is God alive in the world. God agrees to let Homer worship him in his own way and departs, explaining that he has to appear in a tortilla in Mexico. Is this a dig at believers who report seeing religious visions in unlikely places? Clearly not, because God says he will actually be present in the tortilla.

After waking, Homer dives wholeheartedly into his new religion, donning a monk’s robe and a mien of inner peace. In the manner of Saint Francis of Assisi, he attracts backyard birds and squirrels. Naturally, he decides his new religion needs holidays— what would a religion be without holidays? From the neighborhood bar, Moe’s Tavern, Homer calls the nuclear power plant where he works to inform his employer that he will be out for a religious holiday. Asked the name of the holiday, he spies a sign on the wall of the bar and replies, “the Feast of Maximum Occupancy.” Homer invites Moe to join his new religion, pointing out that it has the advantages of no hell and no kneeling. The bartender, a self-professed lifelong “snake handler,” declines.

Lisa cautions against her father’s apparent blasphemy, but Homer explains that he is covered. In his own variation of Pascal’s wager, he says that if he is wrong he can always recant on his deathbed. Lisa does not remind him that this strategy may contain a fatal flaw, in light of the biblical warning that “no man knows when his hour will come” (Eccl. 9:12). Marge takes a more assertive approach to saving her husband from perdition by inviting Reverend Lovejoy to dinner. At the table, Homer de scribes to Bart how God appeared to him in the dream: “Perfect teeth. Nice smell. A class act, all the way.” Under divine instructions, Homer tells the minister, he is seeking a new religious path. Lovejoy quotes Matthew 7:26 about the foolish man who built his house on sand. Homer replies with a bogus verse from Matthew, plucked out of the air, which is completely irrelevant.

How silly is Marge’s concern with her husband’s apparent loss of faith? Not silly at all, to judge from the numerous books, television, and radio shows that discuss the dilemma of spouses with different religions or different levels of religious commitment— what Christians call “unequally yoked.” Homer’s decision to abandon the church, and his persistence in this course, continue to have serious repercussions within his family. His wife makes an argument familiar to many households with divided beliefs: She has an obligation to raise the children with moral values, and church is a part of that obligation. Exasperated, Marge tells the children that Homer is wicked, and warns her husband not to force her to choose between him and God, because he will lose. At church the next Sunday, the sign out front reads “When Homer Met Satan.” Inside, Reverend Lovejoy—who...