If you excise the jokes, The Simpsons is a tragedy of operatic proportions—repeated failures and frustrations, punctuated by the occasional, wacky, life-affirming reprieve that returns everything to the status quo. And, like any comedy aimed at a mass audience, it is at its roots doggedly conservative. Leon Trotsky, one of the fathers of Russia’s Bolshevik uprising, used to characterize a political movement he opposed as being “left in form, right in essence,” which is to say that his opponents were revolutionary in appearance but reactionary in nature. With The Simpsons, I think it may be a similar case: cloaking the show’s sacred essence in the guise of profane storytelling, although there is no evidence that this is a result of any conscious, consistent effort on the part of the show’s writers and producers. Longtime writer George Meyer argued just the opposite in a My Generation magazine article. “It’s like a Trojan horse that gets past people’s radar because it’s superficially conservative,” he said. “The show’s subtext, however, is completely subversive and wild.”
Whether the series, once considered so antiauthoritarian, is subversive or supportive of faith is largely in the eye of the beholder. Some Christians remain resolutely unconvinced of its value. The Reverend Francis Chan of the evangelical Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley, California, told the Ventura County Star in 1999 that he once found the show funny, but gave it up. “It portrays Christians as being out of touch with reality. It makes anyone who follows God look like a fool.”1
The Reverend Clark Whitten, former pastor of Calvary Assembly of God in Winter Park, Florida, one of the largest Pentecostal churches in that area, tries not to miss a single Sunday night episode. “It’s life, it’s hilarious, and it’s so insightful into the culture,” he said. The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, called The Simpsons “a positive example to children” and a show with “a strong sense of family values.” In June 2004, a spokesman for Williams told the BBC that the head of the Church of England would “look very seriously” at any invitation from the show’s producers to appear as a character, as Prime Minister Tony Blair did.
In his study of religion in the television series, Jim Trammell of the University of Georgia arrived at a similar conclusion. “Despite the church’s depicted irrelevance, despite the depicted wrath of God and the likeable character of the Devil, despite the disrespected devoted neighbors, despite the inadequate minister, despite even the insignificance of spirituality upon one’s behaviors, the Simpson family, the show’s heroes and representatives of the American family, remain committed to their religion.”
Some atheists think The Simpsons is so proreligion that it’s more like a Sunday school lesson than a sitcom. In a 1995 atheists’ Internet discussion group, one member wrote, “The central message of the show, I’ve noticed, is that only the good people are religious and that those who are not are immoral. Some episodes really hammer the point home. And the true religious fanatics in that show are portrayed as the most moral, ethical people around. I stopped watching in disgust a long time ago.” Like the Christians, even the atheists are split on the series. “It’s a great show,” said George H. Smith, author of Why Atheism? and Atheism: The Case against God. “I think there’s a good balance” on religion, he said. “It’s a remarkably well-done show.”
This appraisal has not escaped the attention of a growing number of commentators who argue that the show is far more conservative and supportive of traditional faith and family values than you would think. “What I do appreciate about The Simpsons is that evil often—if not always—is punished with consequences,” said Robert Knight, former director of cultural studies for the Washington, DC-based Family Research Council and author of The Age of Consent: The Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture. “The Simpsons function in a moral universe and, while the show seems to make fun of moral standards, it often upholds those same standards in a backhanded way.”
“The show provides elements of continuity that make The Simpsons more traditional than may first appear,” according to Paul A. Cantor, writing in the December 1999 issue of the journal Political Theory. “The show’s creators have been generally evenhanded over the years in making fun of both [political] parties, and of both the Right and the Left,” providing something to both liberals and conservatives. In essence, Cantor argues that “The Simpsons seems to offer a kind of intellectual defense of the common man against intellectuals, which helps explain its popularity and broad appeal.”2
Take, for example, the characters’ hometown of Springfield. Cantor argued in his award-winning paper for the American Political Science Association that, while the show makes fun of small-town life, “it simultaneously celebrates the virtues of the traditional American small town. . . . The Simpsons is profoundly anachronistic in the way it harks back to an earlier age when Americans felt more in contact with their governing institutions and family life was solidly anchored in a larger but still local community.”
In his essay, Cantor suggested that an even more telling analysis would focus on the family. “The Simpsons shows the family as part of a larger community and in effect affirms the kind of community that can sustain the family. . . . For all its slapstick nature and its mocking of certain aspects of family life, The Simpsons has an affirmative side and ends up celebrating the nuclear family as an institution. . . . Though it strikes many people as trying to subvert the American family or to undermine its authority, in fact, it reminds us that antiauthoritarianism is itself an American tradition and that family authority has always been problematic in democratic America. What makes The Simpsons so interesting is the way it combines traditionalism and antitraditionalism. It continually makes fun of the traditional American family. But it continually offers an enduring image of the nuclear family in the very act of satirizing it. Many of the traditional values of the American family survive this satire, above all the value of the nuclear family itself.” Jonah Goldberg reinforced Cantor’s take on the series in an article in the National Review. Many conservatives share a negative view of The Simpsons, based on the controversies generated in the first few seasons, he wrote. “That’s regrettable, because it’s possibly the most intelligent, funny and even politically satisfying TV show ever.” In contrast to previous sitcom hits, which he said were “invariably and predictably liberal,” The Simpsons “is never predictable; and its satire spares nothing and no one. . . . This even-handedness is noteworthy. Against the backdrop of conventional sitcoms, it makes The Simpsons damn near reactionary; if 50 percent of the jokes are aimed leftward, that’s 49.5 percent more than we usually get.” Yes, Goldberg acknowledged, “Christian fundamentalism get[s] the full treatment,” but the satire “is aimed at all of society’s false pieties. . . . What should dismay liberals about this is that so many of today’s pieties are constructs of the Left. . . . Some important pretensions are being punctured here— but not the usual ones.”3 Targets include liberal Democrats, environmentalism, gun control, and ’60s radical sellouts.
Even The Plain Truth, a nondenominational magazine affiliated with the Worldwide Church of God, took favorable note of The Simpsons in a lengthy article by Barbara Curtis in the January/ February 2001 issue of the evangelical magazine. Under the headline, “Are the Simpsons ‘Okily Dokily’?” Curtis answered vigorously in the affirmative. The show was “long-forbidden fare in many Christian homes,” she wrote, including her own. “Like most good Christians, I refused to give them the time of day.” After giving the show a chance, however, “I was impressed with the grace abounding in the characters’ relationships, as well as the intelligence and wit of the writing. . . . There is no other show in TV land that so acknowledges the immediacy of God and the effectiveness of prayer. Peel away the laughter, and you will find The Simpsons have a strong foundation in love and faithfulness.”4
The show’s potshots at Christians and their church did not offend Curtis. “When it comes to exposing human foibles, The Simpsons is an equal opportunity employer. . . . I’m glad I’m not alone in finding the Christian highlights hilarious. Our weaknesses are, after all, our weaknesses. We all know Neds and Maudes and Reverend Lovejoys—may even be them from time to time ourselves. Perhaps the greatest weakness of all is to take oneself too seriously.”
If these conservative commentators are correct, how did this happen, and why? Televangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, who told me he much preferred Touched by an Angel to The Simpsons, suggested that the Great Man Theory of History might explain why the Fox show has turned so positive on faith. “I was somewhat appalled at what I saw of The Simpsons initially, and I am frankly not an aficionado of The Simpsons. I know Rupert Murdoch, and Rupert’s a pretty good guy, and it may be that he has allowed some of these good things to come through in this cartoon. I am delighted if I could see any type of family values being shown in that show.”
In fact, the opposite appears to be the case. Murdoch, an outspoken conservative and owner of Fox who bankrolls the Weekly Standard magazine and the Fox News Network, has taken a hands-off position with the show, which takes frequent potshots at him and his network. Characters on The Simpsons repeatedly call Fox’s programming cheesy, while at the same time taking credit—accurately—for playing a critical role in its financial survival in the early years of the upstart network’s existence. The autocratic media mogul has also endured personal criticism from The Simpsons on numerous occasions, and Murdoch’s good grace has even included voicing dialogue for the unsympathetic caricature of himself on one episode. This self-parody is probably an example of what the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance.” Since Fox and its parent company have fattened on worldwide syndication deals for The Simpsons and license fees on more than a billion dollars worth of series-related merchandise, it is literally a case of Murdoch laughing all the way to the bank. “As a commercial program,” writes Jim Trammell of the University of Georgia, The Simpsons simply “follows an entertainment and capitalistic ideology.”
There may be another incidental, economic reason for the show’s conservative bent and the relatively prominent role played by religion in it: production costs. Harry Shearer, the gifted writer and actor who provides the voice of Ned Flanders, Reverend Lovejoy, and many other characters, offered this explanation. He told me that, in his opinion, “the richness of the religious universe of the show is, I think, a largely accidental byproduct of the fact that, because it’s an animated show, the creators decided to fill it with—for television—an unusual number of secondary characters. It’s these characters—Ned, Lovejoy, Krusty—who would be economically impossible in a live-action show, whose stories led the writers into normally uncharted territory for sitcoms. So, yes, I’m saying follow the money.”
There are other ways to follow the money. In his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Most social scientists agree that if Marx were writing today he would substitute the word “television” for the word “religion.” An article by Associated Press writer Todd Lewan, “How the Talking Box Changed a Village,” in the March 2001 issue of Catholic Digest examined the impact of television on one of America’s most remote communities. The Alaskan village was home to ninety-six members of the Gwich’in people in 1980, when television was introduced there. Until then, the native peoples lived as their ancestors had, their lives circumscribed by the hunt for caribou and telling stories about their culture. Two decades later, Lewan reported, every cabin had at least one television, consumerism had invaded the village, and storytelling was nearly extinct: “Old legends told around campfires could not hold [the children] when Bart Simpson was talking.”
Television, what Homer calls his “teacher, mother, secret lover,” has transformed Homer’s own family into a consumer unit. “They’re creatures of consumption and envy, laziness and opportunity, stubbornness and redemption,” Matt Groening said in a 1998 talk at the Museum of Television and Radio University Satellite Seminar Series. “They’re just like the rest of us. Only exaggerated.” His television family is “utterly addicted to TV,” and the series is “about watching TV,” he told the students. Or, as the authors of Watching What We Watch: Prime-Time Television through the Lens of Faith put it: “The message is that the great American viewing public is now watching a show about themselves, in front of their own television hearth.”5
As Clay Steinman, professor of communication studies at Macalester College, noted, most people watch television commercials along with any programs, though this can be defeated by zapping or muting or buying or renting DVDs. Thus, the meanings of the programs are intertwined with those of the commercials embedded within them. Indeed, this is what advertisers hope: that the products advertised will gain value by their association with elements of their adjoining programs. “Advertisers are aware that men aged 18–49 make up 40 percent of the audience of The Simpsons,” writes William D. Romanowski, in Eyes Wide Open: Looking for GOD in Popular Culture.
In Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture, Steinman and his coauthors, Mike Budd and Steve Craig, argue that a telling way to analyze shows like The Simpsons is to look at the advertisers and their target audiences. Using this criterion, could any program that counted among its regular advertisers in the 2000–2001 season the U.S. Army, the Air Force, and Old Navy clothing be considered subversive of traditional religious values? “Except for certain shows intended for specific, smaller audiences, ‘Don’t offend’ remains the slogan of the age as far as desired viewers are concerned,” Steinman and his coauthors wrote. “That means don’t challenge any desirable sector of the audience, don’t question conventional wisdom, don’t risk driving anyone you want away.”6
In a backhanded way, Andrea Alstrup, corporate vice president for advertising for Johnson & Johnson, which spends $600 million a year in television commercials, confirmed Steinman’s analysis in a June 1998 speech to three hundred advertising executives at a luncheon meeting of the Advertising Women of New York. “Do we really need to continue to support with our advertising a constant barrage of media that appeals to the lowest common denominator of values?” Alstrup asked, according to the March 2001 issue of Brill’s Content.
Of course, strictly speaking, every episode of The Simpsons can be seen as a twenty-two-minute commercial for the show’s vast and durable array of licensed merchandise. And the broadcasters don’t care how critical viewers are, as long as they continue to watch and see the ads. Clearly, members of the Simpson family spend many more hours worshiping together before the altar of their screen than they do in the pews of their church. In that, they are like most people in the United States, and increasing numbers throughout the world. “To the extent that people take The Simpsons as being about real people or being magical or godly,” Steinman told me, “they are engaging in contemporary forms of idol—or idle—worship.”
Politically, in The Simpsons’ portrayal of nuclear plant owner Montgomery Burns and others of great wealth and power, “it would appear that the ultimate antagonist is really the competitive, materialistic nature of American capitalism,” according to Watching What We Watch. Lenny and Carl, two stalwarts of the working class at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, have long been rumored to have been named for Lenin and Marx. The show articulates “a vision critical of the unjust distribution of power in America. .. . The Simpsons can continue to skewer the evils of society while not seeming too dangerous.”7 The key word here, I think, is “appear.” The Simpsons only seems to question conventional wisdom and values. For me, the consistent message of The Simpsons is this: if you are part of the American working class, your family—and to a lesser extent your faith—are the only reliable defenses against the vagaries of modern life. (For some, “modern life” may mean carpooling, office politics, making ends meet, or anxieties about raising kids in a risky world; for others, it is a convenient euphemism for globalized capitalism.) Or, as the authors of Watching What We Watch put it, “The only thing that really matters in life is having a supportive family.” As always, Homer says it best: “I guess I’ll have to give up my hopes and dreams, and settle for being a decent husband and father.”
In this context, religion serves as a palliative, comforting characters in their social futility. “The Simpsons represents both a model of and a model for contemporary American society, not only because it reveals contemporary attitudes about religious institutions, morality and spirituality, but also because it functions in the time-honored way of religious satirists,” observed the authors of God in the Details.8 “Traditionally, religions have employed humor and satire to bring people together and dissolve their differences,” Joseph Bastien wrote in the Encyclopedia of Religion.9
The Simpsons’ gospel is not the fighting faith of the Old Testament prophets or of the confrontational Jesus, both of which sought to rock the boat of unrighteous comfort. At the same time, The Simpsons’ theology is not one that takes joy in acceptance. Marge, Ned, Lovejoy, and other believers in the series are not like those collaborationist ministers of the early twentieth century who were accused by radicals of preaching “pie in the sky, bye and bye.” Their faith is a bulwark, a highly meaningful and relevant refuge. And, as it is for many of us, faith is a last resort against the pressures of the ever faster pace and power of the global market, personal and natural disasters, or whatever significant stresses one might face.
“The question arises as to whether the satirical tenor of the show actually causes viewers to look critically at their culture and their own lives,” according to Watching What We Watch. “Are audience members likely to agree with the overall message of the series about the importance of having a supportive—if ‘dysfunctional’—family to shield individuals from the oppressive forces of society? If so, are we likely to react by trying to change alienating social institutions along more humane and egalitarian lines?”
John Heeren puts the question another way in The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’Oh! of Homer. “Does The Simpsons use its humor to promote a moral agenda?” His conclusion is also different: “The Simpsons does not promote anything, because its humor works by putting forward positions in order to undercut them. Furthermore, this process of undercutting runs so deeply that we cannot regard the show as merely cynical; it manages to undercut its cynicism too.”10 Steve Tompkins, the former Simpsons writer, made that same point to me, explaining the tortuous and sometimes frustrating process by which positive messages regarding religion ultimately make it into the show.
Given the world we live in, and the economic system we live under, The Simpsons is about as trenchant, as life-affirming, as socially critical a prime-time situation comedy as we can reasonably expect on a major, commercial television network. So, what impact does television, in particular a show like The Simpsons, have on tens of millions of viewers? That question remains open. The Rev. Donald Wildmon, head of the ultra-conservative American Family Association, based in Tupelo, Miss., believes it is considerable. “You may think that Billy Graham is the leading evangelist in America, but he’s not. The leading evangelists in America are those people who make the TV programs.” Graham himself has written that “television is the most powerful communication ever devised by man.” But communications scholar Quentin Schultze of Calvin College disagrees. “Research clearly documents the ineffectiveness of electronic media as agents of religious conversion, yet the popular mythology holds that spiritual battles can be won electronically.” Does the favorable portrayal of God, faith, and, to some extent, religion in The Simpsons have any lasting effect? What is the message the show’s writers and producers—non-Christians and nonbelievers, in the main—want to convey? There is a clear contrast between The Simpsons’ writers and producers and one of the best-known and intentional purveyors of moral values and religious faith in popular culture. The late Charles Schulz used his Peanuts characters to communicate his gentle, New Testament faith, along with a darker undercurrent of life’s unfairness, from the Old Testament’s book of Job. I asked Robert Short—author of the best-selling The Gospel according to Peanuts and a pioneer in the study of religion and popular culture—what he thought. In the lectures he gives around the country, often to church groups, he said, “The Simpsons always comes up. People seem very impressed with it, with what they find in The Simpsons. They look at it as the same kind of thing as Peanuts, in another medium. They know The Simpsons, and they are convinced it is on their side.” The people he meets, Short said, believe that the show’s writers are more fond of Christian faith and Christianity than they are critical. They feel that the writers seem to be saying that they have no quarrel with the basics of religion, that they “support it in a very subtle way and Christian viewers are appreciative of that, but not surprised.” They sense “a genuine admiration and respect.” And what about viewers who don’t come to Short’s church lectures, namely, the legion of the unchurched? If, as some researchers and many observers have suggested, television can inure impressionable minds to violence through repetition, might not the same hold true for repeated and positive portrayals of faith in The Simpsons? Granted, it is just one show, but it is one with millions of devoted adolescent and teen fans who watch the episodes over and over. In this way, Short believes The Simpsons can have an impact in the postmodern world.
“It’s amazing how God can speak in these out-of-the-way places,” Short said. “He can be very deliberate in using a medium like The Simpsons. It’s the shock of the surprise: The arts get under our skin far more effectively than direct discourse, far more effectively than a sermon. People don’t even realize what has been said to them. They like what they hear and see. It makes a deep impression on them. It’s a form of indirect communication. Even someone who is a hard case, an agnostic, is probably going to be impressed with the way Christianity is portrayed. It can be cool to find great values there.”
The movie industry—television’s older sibling—has always been fascinated by its younger rival for a mass audience and by TV’s impact on society. One such examination, The Truman Show, posits a ratings hit “reality” series about a totally artificial environment in which everyone except the program’s title character, played by Jim Carrey, is in on the conceit. The show’s advertisements promise “No Scripts . . . No Cue Cards . . . It’s Genuine . . . It’s a life.” At the film’s conclusion, the unsuspecting Truman finally punctures his television-created environment. Just as Truman is poised to escape, the show’s developer and director introduces himself: “I am the Creator,” he explains, “of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.”
Matt Groening probably wouldn’t put it exactly that way. In its animated, absurdist form, The Simpsons is about as removed from “reality” television as one could imagine. “We try to put real human emotion into it,” he told one interviewer. “Most other cartoons, except the Disney films, don’t seem to do that. They are just about surface emotion. The [Simpsons] has a rubber-band reality. We stretch it way out into the far reaches of human folly, and it snaps back to relative sanity.” So, in essence, while not at all dangerous or threatening to the status quo, it is a sweet, funny show about a family as “real” as the faith lives of many Americans. It is a show that does in fact give hope and joy and, yes, inspiration to millions. But mostly, as my wife reminds me, it’s funny. And as Homer says, “it’s funny ’cause it’s true.”