The Hollywood Film Production Code of the 1930s mandated,
No film or episode in a film should be allowed to throw ridicule on any religious faith honestly maintained. Ministers of religion in their characters of ministers should not be used in comedy, as villains, or as unpleasant persons. The reason for this is not that there are not such ministers of religion, but because the attitude toward them tends to be an attitude toward religion in general. Religion is lowered in the minds of the audience because it lowers their respect for the ministers.
While the code is long gone, the concern remains today. “When clergy are depicted on entertainment programming, their commitment to religion is either ignored completely, or is ridiculed,” according to Jim Trammell, of the University of Georgia. “I am concerned that televised messages could influence false expectations and impressions of religiosity. Audiences whose only models of organized religion or spirituality are those depicted on television are perhaps more likely to assume such models are precise. Further, although spirituality is more closely regarded as a personal experience rather than a social function, the fact that television programs have been shown to influence audiences’ perception of the social norms has particular ramifications for one’s perception of spirituality.” In The Simpsons, organized religion “is rarely depicted as helping to solve spiritual problems at all, another indicator of the inadequacy of the church.”
And at first glance, it may seem that the portrayal of the Reverend Timothy Lovejoy and of Springfield Community Church in The Simpsons do stand the Hollywood Code on its head, to the exact effect feared by early industry censors. Although not a leading character in the series, Lovejoy is a major supporting player, presiding at most of the town’s weddings and funerals and, in one Simpsons comic book, performing an exorcism when Lisa is possessed by the spirit of the pop singer Madonna. His name notwithstanding, this minister does not love joy. Because he is a foil in the series, personifying many of the failings of organized religion and Christian conservatism, he is usually portrayed as a shallow, intolerant, “pandenominational windbag,” in the words of Steve Tompkins, who wrote for the series in the 1990s. As such, Lovejoy is a much less rounded character than the other prominent Christian in the series, Ned Flanders. Like other characters in the series, however, the minister has had an impact on the culture: There is a popular Norwegian rock group called “Reverend Lovejoy.”
Sam Simon, who with Matt Groening and James Brooks shaped the show at its creation, was “very adamant that we not make [Lovejoy] a cartoony, hypocritical preacher,” recalls Al Jean, a longtime writer for the series who became executive producer and “show-runner” in 2001. “He wanted a realistic person who just happened to work as a minister.” Thus, the minister is hypocritical and occasionally venal, but he is not evil or immoral, merely human. Lovejoy has an interior life that includes a troubled family and a hobby—electric trains—and even a sense of humor. In a lighter moment, the minister snaps Homer in the rear with a towel when they end up in the winning locker room after the Super Bowl. He jogs with George Bush when the former president moves to Springfield, and he is the author of a cookbook, Someone’s in the Kitchen with Jesus. Lovejoy mixes socially with his parishioners, and he drinks, but not to excess. He once had idealistic dreams for the ministry until, after decades in the pulpit, he came down with a classic case of preacher burnout. His sermons are boring, and he knows it. For the most part, the pastor provides an example of what a minister should not be.
What is fascinating about Springfield Community’s congregation is the absence of significant internal strife and the overall support it gives its spiritual leader. In every congregation I have covered as a journalist (or been a part of as a member) there has been a “clergy party” and an “anticlergy party.” Often, this division, or other issues such as biblical interpretation or the music of worship, creates factions and divisions and, sometimes, splits. I have come to believe that the reason this occurs so frequently and can lead to so much bitterness and intense infighting is the depth of feeling people have about spiritual matters. I think it may also be a function of the powerlessness people experience in other spheres of their lives: work, home, school, government bureaucracy, and the political system. This is an era of church “shoppers” and church “hoppers.” In their congregations, they can fight as hard as they like and, if things don’t go their way, they can walk away and join another church down the street or around the corner. Regardless of how disappointed people in Springfield are with Lovejoy, they don’t fire him or leave the church.
However, from time to time, parishioners defect from the minister’s flock, usually returning in subsequent episodes. The minister and members alike have voiced concern in recent years about the Episcopal church next door. Lovejoy is worried that its vibrating pews are drawing away worshipers—and they are. The Hibbard family and Carl and Lenny are seen swaying blissfully among the Episcopalians. When a model train wreck at home keeps the Simpsons’ minister from their Christmas service, Homer wonders if Lovejoy is “cheating on us with the Episcopalians . . . with their bright, airy narthex and their flaky Eucharist.” Lovejoy holds a church fund-raiser, featuring a distorting mirror to “see how you’d look in hell” and a halo ring toss game aimed at religious statues. Bart asks why God needs their money. The purpose of the fair, Lovejoy explains, is to raise enough money to build a steeple taller than the one the Episcopalians have.
In another episode, baby Maggie comes down with chicken pox in the middle of a Sunday service, and Marge looks around for Dr. Hibbert. When she can’t find him, Lovejoy explains from the pulpit that the physician’s family “now attends the more boisterous house of worship.” The scene then shifts to the “First A.M.E. Church of Springfield,” where the all-black congregation—including all The Simpsons’ African-American characters, plus boxing promoter Don King—are worshiping in the packed pews. The Simpson family walks in, searching for Dr. Hibbard, and finds the joyous service rocking and swaying. Bart is instantly enthralled, proclaiming, “This is awesome. Black God rules!” Marge apologizes to the congregation for interrupting “while you’re rejoicing.” Even Homer is swept up in the fervor, shouting, “I can walk again!” Given a sharp look by Marge, he explains that his foot had been asleep.
Reverend Lovejoy is an instantly recognizable and ludicrous character, with his jet-black pompadour and unctuous speaking voice. His office is that of a generic pastor, with painted cinder blocks on one wall and windows on the other. The décor includes a “praying hands” sculpture on the bookshelf and on his desk a set of three swinging, clacking metal balls. Lovejoy is so certain where he is going when he dies that, after a disastrous meal at the Simpsons’, he tells Homer that he will see him in hell—“from heaven.” The pastor’s clerical garb makes it hard to pin down his denomination, probably by the writers’ design, but it is probably somewhere between Presbyterian and Lutheran. His standard preaching attire is a plum shirt and tie, under a white robe with deep purple borders. He has been known to use sunscreen for anointing oil. In informal settings, he wears a black shirt and a white clerical collar, sometimes over black shorts, and once said he was considering pectoral implants. A Simpsons comic book suggests that in hot weather he wears only boxer shorts and garters underneath his robe. Like many of his colleagues, this preacher is both a writer and a broadcaster. His pamphlets include “Hell, It’s Not Just for Christians Anymore” and “Satan’s Boners.” He cohosts a radio call-in show on Sunday nights with a rabbi and a priest, called “Gabbin’ about God,” sponsored by Ace Religious Supply, whose motto is, “If we don’t got it, it ain’t holy.” Once, he invited a Mennonite minister to preach in his pulpit. (Groening’s father was a Mennonite.)
Lovejoy is politically active, mostly on the local level. The minister belongs to two groups, Citizens’ Committee on Moral Hygiene and Citizens for Tamer Television, and is a fixture in most mob scenes. He supports Springfield’s ill-fated monorail but denounces the town’s biosphere as the devil’s playground. In addition to his battered Karmann Ghia, he drives a Book (Burning) Mobile, and in one episode leads a movement to destroy merchandise of the local children’s television show host, Krusty, whom he describes as “the clown prince of corruption.” At Easter, he refers to a chocolate bunny as a graven image. Lovejoy heads a drive to rid the town of its lone burlesque house when he learns that Homer has sent Bart there to work off a debt. Together with Ned Flanders, the preacher calls on the Simpsons to discuss the matter. Homer assumes their purpose is evangelistic. “Everything is about Jesus,” the minister says, except this, which is about what Bart has been up to. Later, Lovejoy is in the crowd bent on destroying the burlesque house where, to his embarrassment, he spots his father in an upstairs window. (The critique of the minister can be even sharper in The Simpsons merchandise than it is in the television series. A CD-ROM called “Virtual Springfield” shows a book of Ukrainian erotica and a metal box labeled “hush money” hidden in the preacher’s lectern.) In a welcoming essay in The Simpsons Guide to Springfield, Lovejoy explains that the town “has a past steeped in faith and faith-related fund-raising activities.”1 This includes its founding by pioneer Jebediah Springfield, who left his home in Maryland with a band of misguided religious zealots in search of a place they called New Sodom, which later took the name of its founder. Newcomers to town are invited by the minister to worship at Springfield Community Church or, if they prefer, at the local Catholic church or synagogue. “A trip to Springfield can be informative, filling and even fun as long as you plan in advance to pacify our vengeful God . . . by attending church at least once while you are here.” They are, however, warned away from local cults, secret societies, and, most of all, “from a small group of people who split off from the Presbyterians to worship an Inanimate Carbon Rod.” One of the religious academies in town is Springfield Christian School, whose motto is “We put the fun in Fundamentalist dogma.”
Springfield Community Church—or the First Church of Springfield, as it is sometimes called—is in many ways a quite successful congregation. The church is Springfield’s central civic institution, second only to the town’s community center. Each Sunday the pews are full. Worshipers represent every economic segment of the community, from Mr. Burns to “Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel.” Children sit with their parents. African Americans, from Dr. Hibbert and his family to Carl, Homer’s coworker at the nuclear power plant, are part of the congregation, as is Dr. Nick Riviera, an immigrant. Even Moe Szyslak, the bartender, who identifies himself as a lifelong snake handler and adherent of Santeria, attends. This is, in part, a plot device, and the lack of ecclesiastical competition may help; Springfield Community appears to be the main Protestant church in town, except for the Episcopalians. Still, many pastors would be happy to look out on such a Sunday morning vista.
The packed and diverse pews notwithstanding, there are serious problems at the church, problems familiar to many mainline churches in America. Worshipers sleep through services, sometimes with their eyes open. They are rarely moved or even involved in the worship experience. While sitting in the church basement, watching a screening of a biblical epic filmed by Flanders in his backyard, Homer’s coworker Carl makes a suggestion to Lovejoy, who is sitting next to him. The minister, Carl says, could take a lesson from Ned and inject “a little razzle-dazzle” into his sermons. The preacher says he already does that, “if by ‘razzle’ you mean ‘piety,’ and by ‘dazzle’ you mean ‘scriptural accuracy.’” Carl turns to his friend Lenny, who is sitting on the other side of him, and pronounces, “What a tool.” The best advice Bart can give to a newcomer is to sit in the back row of the sanctuary. Often, the pastor himself seems to be going through the motions: he hangs a banner at the church’s ice cream social announcing, “A Sundae Service You Can Swallow.” On Super Bowl Sunday, the sanctuary is nearly deserted, despite the sign outside the church reading “Every Sunday is Super Sunday.” The Simpsons “implicitly affirms an America in which institutional religion has lost its position of authority, and where personal expressions of spirituality have come to dominate popular religious culture.”2
At least in respect to its packed, diverse pews, The Simpsons’ mainline church reality is at variance with statistical reality. Why, in what is said to be an era of cynicism and skepticism, do millions of this edgy show’s viewers accept this representation of faithful church attendance in a cartoon? The series’ writers say it is because the faith is consistent with the characters. Faith has always been the belief in things unseen, and in that sense it is irrational.
Yet as America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries became a more educated, prosperous, urban, and suburban society, its mainline religious denominations became more rational in their theology. As a result, their religious practices and rituals became more settled, staid, and, in the eyes of many experts, bloodless. There were two significant holdouts to this trend: African American churches and white Pentecostal congregations, both with roots in the working-class and rural South. These groups favored ecstatic and charismatic forms of worship, soul-stirring preaching and lively music, and throughout the century they continued to thrive.
Beginning in the 1960s, middle-class Americans outside these two traditions also began to seek more emotional release and fulfillment in their faith. They yearned to transcend the rational in their worship—to let go, to embrace an identifiably supernatural God. The result was a dramatic growth of invigorated strains of charismatic and evangelical Christianity—often in nondenominational megachurches—that has also proved attractive to a new wave of Third World immigrants to the United States. By the 1990s, some mainline Christian denominations whose memberships were static or declining recognized that they had to adapt to this change in spiritual consciousness or die. One by one, Catholic, Presbyterian, Southern Baptist, and Reform Jewish congregations, among many others, began to reexamine their practices and, where possible, to incorporate more expressive, mystical, and even ecstatic forms of worship, adding healing services, for example.
People continue to attend a mainline church in Springfield the way they do throughout the nation, and for some of the same reasons. “For most Americans, a preeminent benefit of faith is its capacity to improve individual behavior and personal conduct,” according to “For Goodness Sake: Why So Many Want Religion to Play a Greater Role in American Life,” a 2001 study prepared by Public Agenda and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “If more Americans were more religious, people believe crime would go down, families would do a better job raising children, and people would be more likely to help each other.” So when Bart is caught shoplifting a violent video game, Homer asks him, “Haven’t you learned anything from that guy who gives those sermons at church? Captain Whatshisname?”
Most often in the series the debate about whether church is necessary takes place in the Simpsons’ family car on Sundays, including one morning when Bart and Lisa announce they are contemplating converting to paganism. Bart’s use of bad language in raising the question of why he has to go to church causes Marge to snap. “You just answered your own question with that commode mouth,” she says. “Besides, you kids have to learn morals and decency and how to love your fellow man.” How many parents, unsure of their own beliefs and their own moral leadership at home, drag their children to church with the same goal in mind, to “get a little goodness in them,” in Marge’s words?
The First Church of Springfield occupies an open city block near the center of town, on the edge of a run-down industrial and commercial area. It is a low-slung, weather-beaten, brick and stucco building, dominated by a sloped, two-story sanctuary lined with faux stained glass windows. There is a paved parking lot next to the building, surrounded by a chain link fence, where a yellow church bus is parked. The preferred parking spot reserved for the “parishioner of the month” is usually occupied by Ned Flanders’s car. In front of the main entrance of the contemporary structure, which is flanked by boxes of foliage, is a marquee that changes weekly, with black letters on a white background. The sign features a variety of messages, ranging from halfhearted and self-conscious efforts to be hip—“God, the Original Love Connection”—to those more in keeping with the pastor’s view of theology and the role of the church. The more illustrative include: “Sunday, the Miracle of Shame,” “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Salvation,” and “Private Wedding: Please Worship Elsewhere.” Ecumenism? “We Welcome Other Faiths (Just Kidding).”
Frequently, the signs serve to undermine what Lovejoy is saying in the pulpit, in the process highlighting the hypocrisy of the church, the preacher, or organized religion. Take gambling, for example. Lovejoy has gone back and forth on this moral dilemma, which has divided congregations across the country and brought churches into conflict with political leaders. He occasionally denounces gambling from the pulpit, but during one of these sermons the marquee outside the church advertises that the church offers the “Loosest Bingo Cards in Town.” In fact, according to a Simpsons comic book, the bingo committee of the First Church of Springfield has exclusive rights to any gambling activities in the community, except for those operated by Native Americans. Other church signs in the show have promoted the congregation’s Monte Carlo night and a “retreat” to Reno, Nevada. As the pastor explains it, “Once something’s been approved by the government, it’s no longer immoral.”
Inside the church, which is too financially strapped to afford (or too far north to need) air-conditioning, the red-carpeted sanctuary appears to seat 100 to 150 worshipers—typical in size among American churches, according to a 2001 study by the Hartford Institute for Religious Research and Hartford Seminary—with a center aisle dividing the rows of wooden pews. Lovejoy preaches from a lectern in the middle of a wide, otherwise unadorned stage about four steps above the floor. A blue banner with a white dove of peace hangs from the lectern, which is flanked by simple floral arrangements. To the far left of the stage is a pipe organ. The liturgical music is normally traditional, and the organist, Mrs. Feesh, seems to play on automatic pilot. But Springfield Community is not immune to the “music wars” that have swept the nation’s churches, dividing congregations over traditional and contemporary styles of worship.
Bart has strong feelings on the music issue, once burning pages from a hymnal to build a “holy fire” for a Hindu wedding. One Sunday, hoping to enliven the repertoire, he and his friend Milhouse print up a sheet with a new “hymn,” which they distribute to worshipers. “From God’s brain to your mouth,” Bart promises gleefully. “Get them while they’re holy!” The boys title the hymn “In the Garden of Eden” and credit it to “I. Ron Butterfly”—the latter probably a dig at L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The congregation dutifully begins to sing the 1968 rock classic “In A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly, and the church begins to rock with sweaty enthusiasm. Homer nudges Marge, reminding her of how they used to make out to this “hymn.” A beach ball bounces across the pews and, as the soaring, seventeen-minute song ends, tiny flames flicker, and the exhausted Mrs. Feesh collapses onto her keyboard. Lovejoy suddenly realizes that the music sounds a lot like rock and roll. After the service he punishes Bart by making him clean the organ pipes “that you have befouled by your popular music.” Yet even the minister succumbs to the power of contemporary music, inviting both a Christian rock group and a barbershop quartet (which included Homer) to perform during services.
Springfield Community is a full-service church, like many in America. There is a Sunday school for children, where young people ask questions like why God causes train wrecks and where an exasperated teacher can ask, in response, “Is a little blind faith too much to ask?” Bart has been expelled and, before he is readmitted, he is frisked for weapons. His teacher admits that the Bible teaches forgiveness, but she asks why he wants to return. While he was gone, she reminds him, “You were happy, we were happy, everybody was happy—particularly the hamster.”
The church offers everything from groups dealing with alcohol abuse, Alzheimer’s, and marriage counseling, to picnics and a weekly waffle breakfast. There is a thrift shop whose motto is “Nobody Beats the Rev,” where the volunteer clerk, Principal Skinner’s cranky mother Agnes, is quick to tell Bart, “Buy something or get out.” In some of these settings, Lovejoy is portrayed as callous and judgmental in ways ministers are not supposed to be. After being tossed out of the house for a typical act of boorishness, Homer figures he has a natural ally in the minister. “Reverend Lovejoy will make Marge take me back,” he confides to Bart. “He has to push the sanctity of marriage or his God will punish him.” Not necessarily. On this occasion and again at a marriage retreat, Lovejoy suggests Marge divorce Homer rather than attempting to salvage their union. When Homer confesses at a church-sponsored alcohol abuse meeting that he was so desperate for beer that he “ate the dirt under the bleachers” at a football stadium, Lovejoy replies, “I cast thee out!” Lovejoy visits area prisons to minister to inmates, albeit in his own misanthropic way. Attempting to comfort a death-row inmate about to be executed, who complains that his last meal was filched, the preacher says, “Well, if that’s the worst thing to happen to you today, consider yourself lucky.”
Like other major characters, Lovejoy has had crises of faith, large and small. Some he overcomes and some he does not. Approaching a pricey new toll booth, the minister’s wife worries that they might not have enough money. Lovejoy reaches into the collection basket and tells her, “This one’s on Jesus.” Suddenly the dashboard Jesus looks sad, so the preacher turns him to face away, saying, “Be cool for once.” He reacts differently in the face of incipient disaster. A hoax involving a fake angel convinces the pastor and all of Springfield that the Day of Reckoning has come, prompting him to don his robe and urge people to be calm but also to be afraid. When Homer forgets to reprogram the computer at his nuclear power plant for Y2K turnover, he causes a universal meltdown that seems to end the world: People go to church, where Lovejoy tells them that judgment day has arrived but that it is not too late to repent of their sins, in particular the wearing of “miniskirts and Beatle boots.” In another episode, as a comet approaches Springfield, Homer admits that “it’s times like this I wish I were a religious man.” The next shot is of Lovejoy, ostensibly the man of God, running down the street in a frenzy, shouting, “It’s over, people! We don’t have a prayer!” Yet when a caller to his radio show asks whether, with all the suffering and injustice in the world, he ever wonders if God really exists, the minister answers with a simple “No.”
The church, in the minister’s eyes, is synonymous with sacrament, and he is threatened when the two are separated. In a vision of her future, Lisa’s wedding is suddenly called off, and Lovejoy tells her that “it never would have happened if the wedding had been inside the church with God instead of out here in the showiness of nature.”
There have been at least three more serious challenges to his role in the community, and, significantly, each represents a major challenge facing mainline denominations: cults, New Age beliefs, and Pentecostalism.
1. The cult. Passing through the Springfield Airport one day, Homer falls into the clutches of a cult called the “Movementarians,” who invite him to a free weekend at a local resort. The group believes a great spaceship will transport them to a cosmic paradise called “Blisstonia,” which is reminiscent of the “Heaven’s Gate” cult, whose Southern California members committed mass suicide as they waited to be transported to outer space. With their veneration of a great, all-knowing leader, the Movementarians also bear some resemblance to Scientology, the fashionable cult in Hollywood founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Like them, the Springfield cult’s sacred writings include texts such as “Arithmetic the Leader’s Way” and “Science for Leader Lovers,” and, like the Scientologists, their deadliest weapons against critics are their lawyers.
Other members of the Springfield community are caught up in the cult, including the entire Simpson family. “When I join an underground cult, I expect some support from my family,” Homer tells them. Marge, one of the show’s strongest Christian believers, resists joining, but Bart volunteers that the cult and church are pretty much the same thing; the cult simply offers a different place to be bored on Sundays and does nothing to change their daily lives. This is yet another attack on the mainline worship experience, except that the seductive nature of many cults is that they offer much more of an emotional connection than traditional Judeo-Christian denominations—even if it is counterfeit and manipulative.
At the cult’s wooded compound, Springfield’s gullible residents are subjected to real cult practices, including hypnotic repetitions of chants, six-hour meetings glorifying the leader, and attack therapy sessions. Marge is not taken in and makes a daring escape.
Naturally, she goes to the church and the minister for help. She finds Lovejoy, his congregation shrunk to a handful who have resisted the cult, denouncing the Movementarians from the pulpit. Typically and inadvertently, he undercuts the denunciation by highlighting the similarities between “legitimate religion” and cults. “This so-called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools,” Lovejoy says. “Let us say the Lord’s Prayer forty times, but first, let’s pass the collection plate.” The collection is so meager that the minister considers setting fire to the church (“again”) to collect the insurance money.
Lovejoy agrees to join Ned Flanders and Willie, the elementary school’s strong-willed janitor, to kidnap and deprogram Simpson family members from the cult’s compound. After the minister’s attempts to subdue Homer with a baseball bat lead to no discernible effect, Lovejoy becomes convinced that the devil has given Homer superhuman strength. The janitor seizes the bat from the minister, dismissing him as a “noodle-armed choirboy.” In the Flanderses’ basement, where the family is taken, Homer is so resistant to traditional forms of deprogramming that the minister resorts to a more basic approach. He tells Homer that “our commandments” require him to accept a glass of beer, which has been forbidden by the cult. Freed by the taste of forbidden beer, Homer returns to the compound to denounce the cult, causing Lovejoy to shout, “Hallelujah!” The sudden appearance of the cult’s leader, hovering in what appears to be a giant spaceship, shakes the minister’s faith. Lovejoy panics at the sight, believing that the cult is “the real deal.” He rips off his clerical collar, throws it on the ground, and stamps on it. Just as suddenly, the spaceship comes apart and is exposed as a fake, leaving the leader to flee in what turns out to be an ultralight helicopter that uses his followers’ bulging moneybags for ballast. Lovejoy realizes he has abandoned his religion too soon, muttering that he should have stuck with the Promise Keepers, the evangelical men’s movement famous for stadium and coliseum rallies. Flanders notices the minister’s collar on the ground and asks Lovejoy if it is his. Embarrassed, the minister retrieves it lovingly, wondering aloud how it got there.
2. New Age. Brad Goodman, a self-help guru and infomercial star whose psychobabble videotape has helped ease communication in the Simpson household, comes to Springfield to host one of his “Inner Child” seminars. Most of the community turns out, including the Simpsons. Bart’s wisecracks get him called to the stage, where Goodman lauds the boy as an example of healthy, unrepressed behavior. He hails Bart’s dictum, “I do what I feel like,” as a perfect expression of the permissive, situational ethic. The town’s residents are urged to act the same way, leading Bart to believe that this advice has turned him into a god. Even Christians like the Flanders family and Lovejoy are caught up in Goodman’s feel-good hysteria. The minister preaches a sermon entitled “Be Like Unto the Boy,” complete with readings from the “Book of Bart.” (How familiar must this seem to church members who have seen their pastors embrace one fashionable therapy or another?) A “Do What You Feel” festival dissolves into anarchy, however, with two women dressed in togas holding aloft a gold statue of Goodman. “God is angry,” Lovejoy decides. “We’ve made a false idol of this Brad Goodman.”
3. Pentecostalism and charismatic worship. A college reunion prank gone awry leaves Homer with a bucket filled with superglue stuck on the top half of his head. Bart drills holes through the metal so his father can still drive, but the car skids off a rural road and through a cornfield, ending up at the “Brother Faith Revival.” The service is exhilarating, an old-fashioned tent revival complete with folding chairs, sawdust on the floor, and a cross illuminated by an outline of light bulbs. Dressed in dazzling white, Brother Faith and his evangelical ministry are African Americans who take exuberant joy in worship. They sing and they dance and they exalt the Holy Spirit, urging worshipers to check out John 2:11, where Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. Brother Faith is not a fake and, as Bart observes, “he dances better than Jesus himself!”
Once, in the rural South, faith healers were said to put a sign outside their tents reading “no broken bones”—for obvious reasons. Brother Faith is not so intimidated, and he successfully lays hands on the dislocated elbow of Cletus, the hillbilly, and shouts, “the power of faith compels you—heal! Take that, Satan!” Next up is the bucket on Homer’s head, but this time Brother Faith cannot perform the miracle by himself, so he asks for a “holy helper.” Bart, of all people, is chosen. Sure enough, with Brother Faith’s help, they remove the bucket from Homer’s head. After the revival, as Brother Faith is packing up his snakes, Bart asks how he really got the bucket off Homer’s head. The evangelist explains that the power came from God, who gave some of the power to Bart. “Really,” the boy says, “I would think he would want to limit my power.” Brother Faith assures him that he too was a hell-raiser as a child until he saw the light and changed his wicked ways. He recommends the same choice for Bart. At first, the boy declines what is clearly a profound invitation, using the logic of many other pragmatic nonbelievers: “I think I’ll go for the life of sin, followed by a presto change-o deathbed repentance.” That is not “God’s angle,” Brother Faith says, suggesting, typically for the show, salvation through good works, rather than through grace. “Why not spend your life helping people instead? Then you’re also covered in case of sudden death.”
Back at Springfield Community Church that Sunday morning, Bart is exposed to his usual brand of Christian worship. Lovejoy drones on with a typical sermon, “Life in Hell”—which is also the title of Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening’s counterculture comic strip. The minister takes as his text Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which he manages to convey as a chain letter gone wrong, until he notices that Bart is squirming in his seat. Foolishly, he asks the boy if he is bored, and Bart answers honestly that he is. “I’m doing the best with the material I have,” the minister says, referring to the Bible, although he might just as well be referring to traditional theology and worship. Thinking back on his recent experience in Brother Faith’s tent, Bart says that church can be fun, a notion that seems so patently absurd to the rest of the congregation—including the faithful Flanders family—that they burst out laughing. “No, really,” he says. “It can be a party, with clowns and lasers and miracles. A real preacher knows how to bring the Bible alive, through music and dancing.” Bart’s monologue is about as trenchant a critique of mainline Protestantism as one is likely to hear in the mass media. Is worship about substance or simply style? Perhaps he’s just talking about “seeker-friendly” congregations like Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago.
Thinking over Brother Faith’s advice, Bart decides to give religious revival a try—in a big way—by becoming a backyard evangelist, complete with a cape, a plan to work miracles, and a distinctive exhortation: “Satan, eat my shorts!” Using an exterminator’s tent, he starts drawing big crowds, most from Springfield Community. Back at the church, only the faithful Flanderses are in the pew. Lovejoy wonders whether it might be time to “fight razzle with dazzle,” but the best he can do is a fractured electric guitar version of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” It is, alas, hopeless.
For Lovejoy, the most poignant crises come from within his home—where a copy of The Last Supper hangs prominently—and from within his congregation. His family life is a trial. Helen, his sharp-faced wife, is portrayed as a judgmental, antisexual shrew, much like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady on Saturday Night Live. She describes Michelangelo’s statue of David as “filth” because “it graphically portrays parts of the human body, which, practical as they may be, are evil.” (Far-fetched? In 2001, people in the small, central Florida town of Lake Alfred demanded that a replica of the masterpiece displayed outside a shop in the business district be draped.) Bart’s use of the term “butt” causes her to cover her ears. She is also, as her husband acknowledges, an incurable gossip. After falsely maligning Marge, she pledges, “From now on, I’ll use my gossip for good instead of evil.” Every Sunday she can be found outside the church with her husband, dutifully greeting parishioners.
The couple’s fifth-grade daughter, Jessica, is a classic PK (preacher’s kid). While characteristically overdrawn, her story is likely to strike familiar chords among other clergy parents and children. Bart hears the girl, who has just arrived from boarding school, read the scripture one Sunday morning and is instantly smitten. Thinking it is the best way to come on to a minister’s daughter, he tries a new persona, a good boy, although it is an awkward fit. “I don’t think God’s words have ever sounded so plausible,” he says after the service. Lisa tells her brother that his chances with Jessica are slight, since “she’s a sweet, kind reverend’s daughter, and you’re the devil’s cabana boy.”
Things are not always what they seem. Jessica, who now attends Springfield Elementary, takes pity on Bart when he earns three months’ detention and invites him to the Lovejoy house for dinner. The meal is not a success. Bart’s efforts to come across as a model of good behavior unravel and, in the midst of an off-color joke, the minister tosses him out the door by his ear. Outside, however, a surprise awaits. Telling her father she is going to her room to pray, Jessica slips out and catches up to her suitor. She tells him that he’s bad, and she likes him for it. Bart says that she is his ideal first girlfriend—smart, beautiful, and a liar. They share a kiss—and a minor crime spree of vandalism and antisocial behavior.
Yet Bart is soon shocked and unsettled to learn that he is outclassed by the amoral Jessica, and with Lisa’s encouragement he determines to break off the relationship at the next opportunity. That comes at church on Sunday, where the sermon topic is “Evil Women in History, from Jezebel to Janet Reno.” Bart sits next to Jessica and tells her he wants to stop seeing her because “you’re turning me into a criminal when all I want to be is a petty thug.” The minister’s daughter agrees to change her ways—as she is slipping the collection money into her purse. She allows Bart to be blamed for the theft, telling him later that no one will believe that “the sweet, perfect minister’s daughter” would do such a thing. Lisa comes to her brother’s rescue the next Sunday at church and exposes Jessica as the thief.
Despite the discovery of the collection money under his daughter’s bed, Lovejoy cannot accept the truth, and claims that Bart framed his daughter. This is too much, even for Jessica. The theft, she tells her father, was a classic cry for attention. She reminds the disbelieving pastor that she was expelled from boarding school for stealing from the school chapel’s collection, for fighting, and for building a pipe bomb and exploding the toilets. Lovejoy will not hear this—literally—and sings “Bringing in the Sheaves” to drown out his daughter’s confession. “Come on, Dad!” she pleads. “Pay attention to me!” Sometimes comedy isn’t pretty. The only response the minister can muster to punish the wayward girl, who is no demon seed, is by making her scrub the church steps, which she cons the ever-gullible Bart into doing for her. Still, in a later episode, Lovejoy is seen building a battlebot with his daughter, one with a cross on top.
Theft apart, finances are an ongoing problem at Springfield Community Church. The minister preaches tithing on the gross—not the net—and when the offering is insufficient, he is not shy about sending the long-handled pole and woven wooden basket around again. He urges members to give as if the person next to them is watching, and threatens them with an audit. Lovejoy claims his salary is so low (perhaps taxed by his daughter’s private school tuition) that he has to borrow his Bible from the library. He implies that his meager collections inspired him to set a fire in the sanctuary in order to collect the insurance and that, unless things improve, he is contemplating doing it again. On the plus side, he does take care to tally the offering with the door to his office open, using a change counter (rather than a bill counter). The congregation is so desperate for funds it accepts ads for the church bulletin from Fat Tony, the local crime boss.
A deeper problem for the church is Lovejoy’s sense of mission. The newly minted minister arrived in Springfield in the 1970s, driving a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia and listening to the Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just All Right” on the radio. With the 1960s over, Lovejoy felt he was in his element, living in a time when “people were once again ready to feel bad about themselves.” He called parishioners like Ned Flanders “brother” and invited them to “rap” with him. But by the 1980s he stopped caring and found that, given the atmosphere of the time, no one noticed.
A mere ten years later, Marge notices. Concerned about her family’s dogged resistance to attend church and the pastor’s failure to meet the spiritual needs of the congregation—mostly in the form of widespread sleeping during service—she goes to visit the pastor. “Sermons about ‘constancy’ and ‘prudissitude’ are all well and good,” she says, “but the church could be doing so much more to reach out to people.” Church, she says, “shouldn’t be a chore. It should help you in your daily life.” Lovejoy replies that Marge is naïve and idealistic, just as he was when he began his ministry, and that his failures have worn him down. She tells him he shouldn’t let a few bad experiences sour him on helping people; he insists he should. But, stung by the criticism of his service to the congregation, he challenges Marge to volunteer and—admitting she is motivated in part by guilt—she agrees.
Marge starts her church work by cleaning up, sweeping the aisles and putting the collection plates in the dishwasher. At first, Lovejoy is grateful for the help, thanking Marge for giving him more time to study and enabling him to discover “a form of shame that has gone unused for seven hundred years.” He asks her to answer the church’s advice line, which brings her more unsettling news about the pastor. As the “Listen Lady,” she learns from Moe, the bartender, that Lovejoy was not encouraging when he called earlier with a problem. With her compassion, common sense, and often-demonstrated commitment to Christian charity, she soon becomes a more and more popular counselor than the preacher. People praise her during Lovejoy’s sermons and brush past the minister to speak with her after services. Marge starts to call the pastor “Tim,” and treats him like a secretary. Lovejoy sinks deeper into despair. “I am a shepherd without a flock,” he prays. “What have I done to lose them?”
The minister preaches that “the Lord will hear your lamentations and give solace to your spirit,” and God soon gives evidence that he has heard Lovejoy’s own lamentations. Help comes in the form of the saints pictured in the church’s stained glass windows (who are imaginatively if improbably named), who come alive and suggest some answers. Thinking the voices are those of disrespectful parishioners, Lovejoy asks, “Could we please not yell out things in church?” The saints respond in kind. They ask what the minister has done to keep his flock, telling him he must inspire their hearts with his bravery. He interrupts and says he has recarpeted the vestibule, which one of the saints calls “the lamest reply I’ve ever heard. . . . You’re just lucky God isn’t here.” Hmm. The pastor’s devastation is nearly complete.
Marge receives a call on the advice line from Helen Lovejoy, herself despondent, asking for advice to perk up her husband, who has sadly retreated to his basement where he runs his electric train set. Marge suggests that he will bounce back after a few days off. When he returns to church, he finds that the Listen Lady is over her head with a problem. Ned Flanders has been abducted from work by a group of thugs and abandoned in a pit of carnivorous baboons at the Springfield Zoo. Lovejoy races to the scene and, making use of his model railroading expertise on the zoo’s kiddie train, engineers a heroic, acrobatic rescue of his most faithful parishioner. “Say your prayers, you heathen baboons!” he says, fighting off a counterattack. Flanders thanks his pastor effusively, but Lovejoy passes the credit to Marge, who “taught me there’s more to being a minister than not caring about people.” The congregation is enthralled as their pastor recounts the rescue in his Sunday sermon, cribbing liberally from “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” As he reaches the climax of his story, Homer exclaims, “That’s religion!”
Absent such dramatic tales, Lovejoy’s sermons are a major, ongoing issue, for him and the congregation. Typically, his message is along the lines of, “May we burn in foul smelling fire forever and ever,” seasoned with a regular plug for his radio show. Jarred awake during one of the minister’s eulogies, Homer shouts, “Change the channel, Marge!” Lovejoy’s main complaint from the pulpit, one not unfamiliar in some mainline denominations, is that his parishioners are smug. “Today’s Christian thinks he doesn’t need God. He thinks he’s got it made. He’s got his hi-fi, his boob tube, and his instant pizza pie.” The scripture passages he uses, when not mangled for comic effect, tend to be obscure, arcane, bloody, or simply meaningless selections from the Old Testament, or depressing readings from Lamentations. To wake people, he sometimes resorts to desperate measures, including sound effects like ambulance sirens and bird calls, and even his own rendition of the song “The Entertainer.” Once he offers a baby-sitting discount for anyone who can recall the theme of the sermon he had just finished preaching, but the congregation stares blankly and no one responds with the correct answer: “Love.” A sermon about the Samaritan woman at the well, inexplicably advertised out front as “Something about the Virgin Mary,” is disrupted when Homer revs a newly won Harley outside the church. Lovejoy gives up, saying “What the heck,” and dismisses the congregation, who cheer and stream out of the sanctuary. Homer’s excited reaction to another sermon turns out to be a response to the football game he has been listening to with earphones. He admits to the pastor that when he is not sleeping during the sermon he is mentally undressing the female parishioners. Sometimes he even eats. “If God didn’t want us to eat in church,” he says, “he would’ve made gluttony a sin.”
Kenneth Briggs, former religion reporter for the New York Times and a longtime Simpsons fan, sympathizes with the pastor: “When you look out at that congregation you get some sense of how difficult it would be to focus that lot on anything.” Lovejoy, he said, personifies “the wounded servant. He’s not a buffoon.” Yet, with a straight face, Lovejoy can tell Bart and Lisa, whom he mistakenly believes are thinking about converting to Judaism, not to make a rash decision, since “the church is changing to meet the needs of today’s young Christians.” Not this church, however.
Beyond Springfield’s congregation and its minister, organized religion in general is a target of many of The Simpsons’ heartiest satiric wallops. “The Simpsons implicitly affirms an America in which institutional religion has lost its position of authority,” according to the book God in the Details, “and where personal expressions have come to dominate popular religious culture.”3
Mr. Burns, the town’s richest man and its most sinister character, warns children at the elementary school in a motivational talk that religion is one of the “demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. When opportunity knocks . . . you don’t want to be sitting in some phoney-baloney church or synagogue.” Bart, taken by his parents to a military school, desperately pleads to be taken home. “I’ll do anything!” he says, echoing many recently indicted felons. “I’ll find religion!” Before one of the annual Halloween specials, Homer cautions “some crybabies out there—religious types mostly—who might be offended” by the segments to come. The best thing about watching Sunday football on television, he says in another episode, is that it “gets rid of the unpleasant aftertaste of church.” Marge tells her husband that “Church shouldn’t be a chore. It should help you in your daily life.” Well, Homer replies, “It should, but it doesn’t.” Lisa likes the time right after Sunday service because it represents the longest period before she has to return to church.
The targets are not confined to residents of Springfield or to the series’ main narrative. Norman Vincent Peale’s birthplace is destroyed in one throwaway sequence. In another, while Homer is dangling naked from a hot air balloon, he drags his rear end along the soaring glass steeple of a church in plain view of the congregation. The building is very reminiscent of the Reverend Robert Schuller’s megachurch in Orange County, California. “Now, let us thank the Lord for this magnificent Crystal Cathedral, which allows us to look upon his wondrous creation,” the minister prays, as Homer slowly slides by. “Now quickly!” the pastor says, suddenly changing course. “Gaze down at God’s fabulous parquet floor. Eyes on the floor . . . still on the floor . . . always on God’s floor.”
Bart and his friend Milhouse find a copy of Mad magazine (in many ways a forerunner of The Simpsons’ brand of humor) with a folding page designed as a riddle. The puzzle asks, “What do televangelists worship most?” Bart—for once the innocent, or at least the straight, man—says God, and his friend guesses Jesus; when folded properly, the answer is money. The boy’s grandfather, Abe Simpson, justifies their attempt to defraud residents of the local retirement home by telling Bart that if they don’t take the old folks’ money, “they’ll just send it to some televangelist.”
The Western missionary experience is the subject of an episode in which Homer, trying to avoid paying a prank pledge to public television, flees aboard a Christian relief flight to a small island in the South Pacific. Ill-prepared to be a missionary, he is assured by his bright-eyed and clean-cut predecessors as they depart that they have already made a good start by ridiculing the islanders’ beliefs, teaching them some English, and giving them the “gift of shame.” After distributing Bibles, Homer’s next contributions to their cultural devastation are alcohol and casino gambling, to predictable effect. As “God’s messenger,” he also provides his own admittedly distorted view of Judeo-Christian faith, although he is stumped when a question that recurs in The Simpsons is asked by one of the islanders: If God is all-powerful, why does he care if he is worshiped? When the islanders balk at Homer’s suggestion that they build a chapel, he snaps, “Either grab a stone or go to hell.” Pleased with their work, Homer says, “Now I may not know that much about God, but I have to say we built an awfully nice cage for him.” With the church built, the islanders discuss how often they must attend services to avoid going to hell. Every Sunday for the rest of their lives, one says, while another laughs and asks for a serious answer. Clearly, this is an overdrawn portrait of the Christian missionary experience. Yet for anyone who has studied the experience of, say, eighteenth-century Franciscans in California or American Protestants in Hawaii in the nineteenth century, this episode includes painfully recognizable elements.
Reverend Lovejoy and the First Church of Springfield must be doing something right. Knowing the failures and weaknesses of the man and the institution does not keep people from returning week after week for solace and inspiration and calling when they are in trouble. Like Woody Allen’s definition of a second marriage, it is the triumph of hope over experience. Kenneth Briggs, who teaches at Lafayette University, defends The Simpsons’ overall treatment of Christianity. “I don’t see anybody taking any cheap shots. It gives mainline Protestants a fair shake,” he told me. “That group is almost constantly maligned or ignored. It’s easy to ignore them. This one does give them a fair shake.”