Afterword: Unintended Consequences: Through an Open Door

 

Futurama, King of the Hill, Family Guy, American Dad, and, Yes, South Park

One of The Simpsons’ great contributions to popular culture, albeit both unintended and unanticipated, has been to make it safe for other animated shows to deal with religion in a comic way. Shows such as Futurama, Family Guy, King of the Hill, South Park, and American Dad have all taken advantage of what The Simpsons has made acceptable. Most if not all of these other shows have taken a more harsh, less subtle, and largely unsympathetic approach to faith and organized religion, although there have been exceptions. But some treatments have been exceptionally insightful. One Christmas in the 1990s, for example, Robert Smigel did a short animated film for NBC’s Saturday Night Live that featured a wordless but obviously disapproving Jesus turning televangelist Robert Schuller into a ballerina during a money-raising pitch, and transforming Pat Robertson into a rat midway through an antigay diatribe. On the positive side, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is attempting to revive Davey and Goliath, its 1960s, stop-action animation series with a message, from the creators of Gumby, through a documentary, a new Christmas special, and a witty Mountain Dew commercial. The Davey and Goliath revival, in turn, has sparked a dead-on parody version, Moral Orel, on Cartoon Network’s late night Adult Swim. In one 2007 episode of the determinedly anti-Christian show, a Jewish surgeon, Dr. Chosenberg, is accidentally injured when Moral Orel’s ceramic bobble-head Jesus hits him in the chest. Orel gets him to the hospital but refuses to allow him treatment, saying the holy laceration should be left untreated as an object of miraculous veneration. Some shows on the cable network are truly bizarre. The title character of Assy McGee sings “Ave Maria” out of his naked rear at a karaoke bar. In The Squidbillies, a family says grace, asking for a winning lottery number, but a squid Jesus rejects the prayer, suggesting they try Satan.

Inevitably, there is a downside to this increased portrayal of religion, and some blows are exceedingly low. Religion occasionally provides a tempting and convenient opportunity for creative lassitude—in the form of obvious cheap shots. Characters on Comedy Central’s Freak Show display religious lapel pins or shout unforgiving Bible verses like Leviticus 20:13 (homosexuality) and Romans 1:32 (various evildoers); one character asks a jingoistic country singer named Toby Tritt Greenwood to sing his hit, “If Jesus Was a Gun.” In Freak Show’s very strange two-part season finale in 2006, Judaism—taken over by a corporate conglomerate—conjures up a giant messiah made of countless foreskins, who does battle with an equally large Jesus, who is actually a robot operated by televangelist Pat Robertson.

Another show that comes to mind is Empire Square, a pixilated British import, nominated for England’s equivalent of the Oscar, which began airing on Fuse, the American music video channel, in March 2006. The show had its genesis in a series of animated shorts created by the drummer from the group Blur, Dave Rowntree, and a partner. In the premiere, a burn scar in the form of the Virgin Mary on the series’ lead character is used in a money-making scam and later becomes the object of an erotic fantasy. In another episode, Jesus is referred to as “the gayest superhero ever.” The reaction to this on the part of the usual suspects was predictable. “People tend to fall back on these things when they can’t think of anything else. They think, ‘How can I create attention? Oh, I know, let’s make fun of Jesus,’ ” Kiera McCaffrey, communications director for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, told Catherine Holahan, of the Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, on April 27, 2006. “I think it’s a cheap trick,” she concluded.

In Drawn Together, another show from Comedy Central that recently devoted two episodes to a satire of the rapture and the Left Behind novels, a racist, religious character named Princess Clara mistakes another character for a Jew. “You are getting baptized right now,” she says, pushing him into a backyard swimming pool. He struggles in the water and cries out for help. “You’re a Christian now,” Princess says. “Jesus will be your life preserver.” The scene cuts to a buff, sharply drawn Jesus sitting on the lifeguard stand. But he is not sympathetic. “That Hebe is pretending to drown,” Jesus says. “Those Jews kill me.” Both of the show’s creators, incidentally, are Jewish. The show takes a typically nasty shot at the successful, Christian-oriented VeggieTales series, having the beloved Larry the Cucumber character go berserk, mowing down most of Comedy Central’s main characters in a murderous rampage, shooting some in the head.

In the rest of this chapter we’ll look at how five popular adult cartoon television shows have walked through the door opened by The Simpsons.

1. Futurama. Despite its creative DNA, there is relatively little religion in Matt Groening’s Futurama, The Simpsons’ most direct descendant. Set in the year 3000, it features a layabout young New Yorker named Fry who awakes after a thousand-year, cryogenic sleep and who goes to work with a space delivery system—a shoestring, galactic UPS. In the four seasons that original episodes appeared on Fox (later rerun on Cartoon Network, with new episodes commissioned in 2006), Futurama had only a few episodes focusing on religion, about one each season, with occasional lines and jokes tossed in. For example, wandering around a hotel lobby in search of food during his company’s corporate meeting, Fry walks into a “Bot Mitzvah.” The robot rabbi explains to him that Jews believe Jesus was a real and good robot, but not the Messiah.

Two episodes involve Bender, the loveable reprobate robot, who is Fry’s best friend and coworker. In “Hell Is Other Robots,” Bender becomes addicted to jolts of electricity after a concert by the Beastie Boys, who performed as cryogenically preserved heads. (The episode’s title is an allusion to Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, in which one of the French existentialist’s actors says, “Hell is other people.”) Bender’s addiction lands him in a skid row gutter, where he is accosted by Preacherbot, who speaks in the cadence and dialect of an inner-city, African American pastor. “Wretched sinner unit,” the mechanized minister exhorts him, “the path to robot heaven lies here in the Good Book 3.0.” But Bender is not receptive until days later, when his addiction brings him back to the neighborhood, to the roof of the Temple of Robotology, where he is siphoning more electricity from the congregation’s fluorescent sign.

He stares down into the sanctuary, where Preacherbot—with purple vestments painted on—is in full voice: “I see a lot of fancy robots here today, made of real shiny metal. But that don’t impress the robot devil, no sir!” A deacon standing nearby, in what is called the “Amen corner” in black congregations, supports the squat robot as he preaches. “ ’Cause if you’re a sinner, he’s going to plug his infernal modem in the wall, belching smoke and flame, and he’s going to download you straight to robot hell! So I ask you, who will stand up and be saved?” At this point, Bender falls through the skylight, landing on the floor in front of the pulpit. Taking the accident as divine intervention, Bender tells Preacherbot he wants to be saved.

The next morning, his life transformed by faith, Bender returns to work at the space delivery service singing and wearing a white bow tie. He has to convince the show’s other main characters that his mood is not the result of being high again on excess electricity but rather that he is “whacked out on life.” “My friend,” he continues, “I’ve found religion!” What follows is typical of how the newly saved and freshly converted may first be perceived by their relatives, friends, and coworkers. Even Fry is at first wary. “Is this another scam to get free yarmulkes?” he wonders. But Leela, the voluptuous, one-eyed alien captain, wants to give their mechanical friend the benefit of the doubt. “If this helps Bender clean up his act, I think we should be supportive.” In real life, those close to people who have found faith are often willing to trade off their skepticism of even outlandish theology if it appears to be an effective vehicle for personal transformation.

Also typical is Bender’s response to his friends’ support, which he takes as evidence that they, too, are potential converts. “Then you’ll all come to my exceedingly long, unair-conditioned baptism ceremony?” At the service, the double-edged portrayal of religion—at least organized religion—continues. Beneath a sign that reads, “To sin is to go to hell,” Preacherbot addresses the congregation: “We are gathered here today to deliver Brother Bender from the cold, steel grip of the robot devil to the cold, steel grip of our congregation.” Worshipers jump up in the pews to shout, “Tell it, preacher!” The minister then addresses the robot: “Brother Bender, do you accept the principles of Robotology? On pain of eternal damnation in robot hell?” When Bender agrees, he is dipped in a drum of holy, highly viscous oil, and Preacherbot welds a sign of his new faith to the convert’s chest.

At a dinner celebration with his friends after the ceremony, the freshly anointed Robotologist begins to demonstrate some of the less pleasant characteristics of the newly pious. First, he takes Leela’s hand and assures her, “The old Bender’s gone. He won’t trouble you again.” Then, without consulting his friends, he shreds the wine list, telling the waiter, “No poison for us.” As those around the table begin to eat, the robot stops them, in order to say grace, which can be a touchy moment when people of different faiths— and different degrees of faith—eat together in public. Bender begins the grace, “In the name of all that is good and logical, we give thanks for the chemical energy we are about to absorb,” and drones on with hours of scripture quotations. Bender makes the group even more uncomfortable when he suggests hugs to “tear down some emotional walls.”

At work, Bender’s pushy faith continues to grate on his friends, as he tries to impose his beliefs on them. For example, he affixes a fish sign, enclosing the word “Robot,” to the rear of their ship. When Leela, the vessel’s captain, asks what he is doing, Bender replies, “I’m sanctifying it. That ought to convert a few tailgaters.” The robot’s coworkers have had just about enough. “Bender’s stupid religion is driving me nuts,” Fry says, to which Leela adds, “Amen!” The Professor, Fry’s descendant and the owner of the shipping company, laments, “If only he joined a mainstream religion—like Oprah-ism, or voodoo.” So, as sometimes happens in real life, Bender’s friends conspire to draw him back to his old life, because his new one is making everyone around him miserable. Initially Bender resists, pleading, “Stop tempting me. For once in my life I have inner peace.” Fry is having none of it: “That’s for losers. Come on, sin your heart out.”

Bender quickly reverts to his true nature, succumbing to drinking, smoking, gambling, and cavorting with naughty female robot dancers. Later that night, his hot tub reverie with three fembots is interrupted by a summons from a glowing red trident that draws him to robot hell, where he is greeted by the robot devil, Beelzebot. Carried in a coal car down a long mine shaft, Bender tries to plead his case, without success. “You agreed to this when you joined our religion,” the devil replies, in logic any Southern Baptist would recognize. “You sin, you go to robot hell—for all eternity.” Punishments in the mechanical underworld echo the levels and rationale of Dante’s Inferno. They know of Bender’s sins, the devil tells him, and “we have prepared agonizing and ironic punishment” for each one of them.

Leela and Fry come to their friend’s rescue, discovering an entrance to hell at an abandoned New Jersey theme park, through a defunct ride called “The Inferno.” As Bender is tormented with irritating, up-tempo singing, his friends try to invoke the “Fairness in Hell Act,” apparently drawn up by country recording artist Charlie Daniels in his hit “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” in which anyone who can outplay the devil on a gold fiddle can escape hell. Instead, Leela simply bops the devil with the instrument and the three escape, borne by Bender on improvised wings. The lesson, he concludes, is that “I’ll never be too good or too evil. From now on, I’ll just be me.” Of course, that would seem to contradict the book of Revelation’s admonition not to be lukewarm in faith. According to at least one fan Web site, Groening and series codeveloper David X. Cohen consider “Hell Is Other Robots” to be among Futurama’s four best episodes. Its opening credits contain the disclaimer “Condemned by the space pope.”

The robot devil returned to Futurama the futuristic instrument called a holophoner to woo her. But his efforts are fruitless until he goes back to robot hell, where he trades his hands for the devil’s. With them, he is not only able to play the honophoner but also to compose an opera based on Leela’s life. The devil wants his hands back, and the whole affair dissolves into chaos, although Leela assures Fry that “the beauty was in your heart, not your hands.” In an April 26, 2006, interview with Nathan Rabin for the Onion online magazine’s A.V. Club, Matt Groening was asked about religion on Futurama. “Robot Devil has appeared a number of times,” Rabin observed. “Is there a Robot God to go along with him?” Groening replied, “That’s one of the things we’re probably going to explore in one of the Futurama movies,” one of four planned direct-to-DVD features. “In one of our best episodes, we had a conversation between Bender and what apparently was God, and I think we’re going to explore what was really going on in that conversation.” The episode Groening was referring to was “Godfellas,” which aired in the show’s third season and won a Writer’s Guild award.

As “Godfellas” opens, Bender, asleep in the torpedo tube of his intergalactic delivery ship, is mistakenly launched into space when he and his coworkers come under attack by pirates. The robot ends up adrift, hopelessly out of reach of his friends, when two tiny communities, each living on an asteroid, smash into his chest and his butt. Because of his size, both mistake him for God. The group on his front side does everything it can to please him, including brewing a beer they call “Lordweiser.” Yet everything Bender does to help those who worship him ends in disaster, climaxing in a nuclear exchange between the two colonies, wiping out everyone. “Who would have known playing God can have such terrible consequences?” he asks. The answer—of a sort—comes when the robot encounters a swirling cosmic presence, with blinking multicolored lights. A deep voice from the mass speaks to Bender, who asks if it is a computer. “I am user-friendly,” comes the reply. The robot, being a robot, asks the disembodied voice who built it. “I have always been,” the voice says, cryptically. Asked if it is God, the voice answers, “Possible. I do feel compassion for all living things.” Still, Bender wonders if he is speaking with the remains of a space probe that collided with God. “That seems probable,” the voice acknowledges.

At this point, the dialogue between the robot and the voice takes a much deeper and more theological turn, first on the matter of predestination. It is one of those moments (more frequent in The Simpsons) when the viewer needs to be reminded that this is a cartoon and not a divinity school class. Bender asks if the voice knows what the robot is going to do before he does it. When the voice says yes, Bender asks, “What if I do something different?” In that case, the voice replies blandly, “Then I don’t know that.” The robot begins a different, equally fundamental line of inquiry: prayer. “I bet a lot of people pray to you,” he says. Wearily, the voice replies that they do, “but there are so many, asking so much, after a while you just sort of tune it out.” Bender commiserates on that point, recalling the demise of the tiny colonies and prompting the voice to reassure him, “You were doing well until everyone died.”

For Bender, playing God was a disaster. “It was awful. I tried helping them. But in the end, I couldn’t do them any good. Do you think what I did was wrong?” Here the dialogue takes yet another profound turn, toward the nature of salvation: through grace, good works, or some combination? The voice goes for works. “‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are just words,” it says. “What matters is what you do.” Bender isn’t satisfied. As in a number of human-divine colloquies in the Bible, he wants more from the voice. “Being God isn’t easy,” the voice explains. “If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.” So, back to humor.

The show’s writers understand that there is only so much time in a cartoon comedy for profound musings. So Bender picks up on the metaphor. “Or a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money.” Yes, the voice says, “if you make it look like an electrical thing. When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” Thinking he is out of earshot, Bender says that if he prayed to the voice, he would ask to be sent back to earth and to his friends.

On earth, the robot’s friends are enlisting religion to help locate Bender. Fry consults the spiritual leader of the First Amalgamated Church, apparently a consolidation of all of the world’s faiths in the third millennium. Fry asks, “Is there anything religion can do to help me find my friend?” Well, the pastor says, “we could join together in prayer.” Right, Fry says, “but is there anything useful we can do?” No, the pastor replies. So Fry and Leela trek to the Monastery of Teshuvah (which, no one explains, is Hebrew for “repentance”) in the high Himalayas, where apparently Buddhist monks are searching for God using a giant radio telescope. When the monks refuse to shift their cosmic search to locate Bender, Fry and Leela lock them up in a laundry room and send their message to Bender themselves. By coincidence, it is the voice in space that hears the message and flings the sleeping Bender earthward. He lands, still glowing from his reentry, in the snow near where his dejected friends are trudging down the mountain. They’re overjoyed, but they show no inclination to climb back to the monastery to unlock the forgotten monks. Fry says, “I’m sure their God will let them out.” But Bender, for all his venality, has not forgotten his conversation with the voice. “You can’t count on God for jack,” he says. “He pretty much told me that himself. If we don’t save those monks, no one will.” Looking down from the cosmos, the voice chuckles, and repeats, “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

2. King of the Hill. I am not a big fan of Fox’s King of the Hill, but that may be because it is so brilliant at what it does: conveying the sad and depressing reality for many who live in the Sunbelt suburbs. Cocreator Mike Judge, a native of Garland, Texas, was also responsible for the much less sophisticated 1990s MTV staple Beavis and Butt-head. In King of the Hill we meet the Hill family, occupants of a tract house in Arlen, Texas: Hank and Peggy, their adolescent son Bobby, and their troubled and sometimes wayward niece Luanne, whose mother is in prison. Hank, who wears thick, square, black glasses, works for a propane supplier; Peggy is a substitute Spanish teacher. Like the Simpsons— and much of middle-class America—the Hills struggle with mixed success just to keep even. Emotionally repressed, their faces are usually pinched and pained, their lips often pursed. Much of Hank’s spare time is taken with drinking beer in the alley with three of his neighborhood buddies, who are lovable losers in one way or another. Infidelity, divorce, and thwarted dreams are distressingly common in their circle.

The Simpsons portrays Southerners through the stereotypical character Cletus Delray, the slack-jawed yokel, and his slatternly, inbred clan, in much the same way as other cartoon comedies written from a New York or Los Angeles perspective. By contrast, King of the Hill does not indulge in such gratuitous cracker-bashing; it is sympathetic and knowing of its culture. The humor is “insider,” much like Comedy Central’s Blue Collar Comedy, or Brad Stine’s sly, evangelical rants. “If Hank Hill votes Republican,” Matt Bai wrote in the June 26, 2005, New York Times Magazine, “it’s because, as a voter who cares about religious and rural values, he probably doesn’t see much choice. But Hank and his neighbors resemble many independent voters, open to proposals that challenge their assumptions about the world, as long as those ideas don’t come from someone who seems to disrespect what they believe.” One fan is North Carolina’s Democratic governor Mike Easley, according to Bai, who said King of the Hill was only the second television comedy “that doesn’t make fun of the South,” after the Andy Griffith Show.

The Hills attend Arlen First Methodist Church, a small congregation with one service on Sundays. Hank’s main concerns regarding worship are not arriving so late that he has to park in the unpaved lot, and getting out in time to watch sports events on television. There are references to religion in King of the Hill, mostly reflecting the characters’ imperfect understanding of Christianity, but not nearly as many episodes built around it as in The Simpsons. For instance, on the road (back) to respectability, Luanne joins a Bible study and a “second virginity” program.

Son Bobby, in one episode, is so impressed by a magician that he decides to do his Sunday school report on Jesus, to his teacher’s pleasure. With all the parents on hand, Bobby comes out in a cape, for a performance—complete with biblical citations—that innocently confuses magic with miracles. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am the Amazing Jesus, son of God and master of prestidigitation! Has this ever happened to you? Your followers want a glass of wine, but all you have is water. Well, if you’re the Amazing Jesus, no problem! Water into wine! It’s a miracle! John 2:11. Thank you. Now you’re going to need something to go with all this wine—maybe some bread. But how are you going to feed all these hungry people with just one slice? No problem, if you’re the Amazing Jesus! Amen! It’s a miracle, ladies and gentlemen! Mark 6:44. Thank you! Now for my next miracle, I’ll need a large wooden cross and a couple of volunteers.” At this point, the presentation ends before blasphemy can be uttered, as Hank and Peggy scream, “No!” Hank is more agreeable when Luanne asks him to play God in her Christian puppet show, “Manger Babies.” Like the Sunbelt as a whole, the Hills’ neighborhood and its ethnic and religious landscape is changing. One neighbor family, the Khans, are immigrants from Laos and nominal Buddhists. They are quick to assimilate many aspects of American culture, including prejudice: the father refers to Hank and his friends as hillbillies. In one episode, monks move into the Khans’ house and believe Bobby Hill is the reincarnation of a lama. The boy becomes interested in the discipline and begins to meditate, to his father’s chagrin. “You can call putting paint on your head anything you want,” Hank tells him, “but we’re Christians and we don’t do that kind of stuff. Why do you think we go to church every Sunday—for fun?” Hank’s knowledge of Judaism is also slight. “Suffering is a part of every religion,” he observes. “The Jews have suffered for thousands of years and I don’t hear them complaining about it.”

Those episodes that do center on religion are typically astute, touching familiar bases for evangelicals and people of other faiths, although there is little or no evidence of the supernatural (except in dreams). Take the issue of women in the pulpit. Female senior pastors can be a very tough sell in the Sunbelt suburbs, even in a mainline denomination like the United Methodist Church. The congregation at Arlen First Methodist, a small, white, wooden church with lots of stained glass windows, is shocked one Sunday morning when Reverend Thomasson announces at the end of a typically short, anecdotal sermon (about being stopped by a state trooper) that he is retiring from the pulpit. Peggy wonders why he would want to retire, since he only works half a day a week. Hank likes the short sermons, which get members home in time to watch major sporting events, like NASCAR races. But Thomasson is not leaving because he has run out of faith or evangelical fervor. He tells them that, after much reflection and soul searching, “I’ve decided that the future of God is on the Internet.” He plans to use his new Web site, CyberRev.com, “to spread the gospel to every online soul in the world.”

Before the people in the pews can regain their composure, the minister invites everyone to a church basement potluck the following Saturday night, which he will host, to welcome the new pastor. Hank leans over to Peggy and confides that “the new guy better like sports,” just as Thomasson announces the name of the new minister—the Reverend Karen Stroup. “A woman?” Hank blurts. Later, in the alley with his buddies, who are also members of the church, the men can talk about nothing but the new pastor. Hank’s friend Dale suggests that the congregation is “the latest victim of the secret lab in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School, where they ordain women surgically.” Hank’s concern is whether he will get home in time to watch the Pebble Beach Pro-Am Golf Tournament the next Sunday. “If this gal’s sermon runs late, . . .” he worries. “You know how women like to talk.”

In the church basement that Saturday evening, Peggy does her best to make the young, single pastor welcome, and urges her son Bobby to do the same. With Hank standing nearby, his wife says (no doubt thinking of herself as well), “Some people cannot accept women in positions of real authority.” Peggy, like several other members, has brought Frito pie to the potluck. Stroup (voiced by Mary Tyler Moore) has prepared her own specialty, lutefisk, the odoriferous Scandinavian fish dish made famous by public radio’s Garrison Keillor, host of A Prairie Home Companion and, like the pastor, a Minnesotan. Stroup does her best to put Hank’s mind at ease about sports—especially the next day’s golf tournament—and confides that she is a big fan of football: “Between God and the Vikings, Sunday’s not my day of rest.” Hank replies, “You might be all right.” With the ice broken, Stroup confides to the Hills that she was worried when she learned she was being assigned to Texas. “A lot of female ministers don’t last too long down here,” she says. Oblivious to what she is saying, Hank responds, “Yeah. It gets pretty hot in the summer.” Peggy and Stroup just look at the clueless man.

While this discussion has been going on, Bobby has taken the dish with the lutefisk under one of the tables and, concealed by the edges of a tablecloth, has consumed the whole thing. Guilt-stricken, he drops the fish-shaped dish into the trash can. Stroup is anxious for Hank to try her delicacy and is crushed to find it has disappeared. When the dish is found, she assumes someone who opposes her appointment has trashed it. She is still angry the next morning when she takes the pulpit. Using a tentatively conciliatory “y’all,” she tells the congregation she is certain they are good, decent people and that she “won’t judge the whole town on the sins of one lost soul”—the person who destroyed her lutefisk. As a gesture of reconciliation, Stroup suggests a Minnesota tradition, that people rise and hug someone near them—another tough sell in some Sunbelt congregations. Hank’s loud-mouthed, archconservative father, Cotton, chooses this inopportune moment to arrive, already incensed at the idea of a woman pastor. Stroup tries to embrace Cotton, but he angrily rejects her, quoting from Corinthians verses traditionally used against women in Christianity. “Women should remain silent in the churches,” he snaps. “They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission.” She tries to protest, but Cotton brushes her aside with the (unintentionally ironic) examples of Billy Graham—whose daughter Anne Graham Lotz is a well-known Bible teacher, despite ill treatment at the hands of fellow Southern Baptists—and Jimmy Swaggart, of all people.

In his seat, Bobby has been feeling the burden of unconfessed sin and, more than that, the digestive upheaval of the previous night’s gluttony, exacerbated when Stroup cites Mark 6:41, from the story of the feeding of the five thousand. The boy flees to the restroom to purge himself in a stall. Cotton follows but is nearly overcome by the resulting foul odor, which he does not realize has been produced by his own grandson. The older man tries without success to neutralize the smell by burning several matches but gives up in frustration. Bobby panics when someone else tries to enter, and he tosses a burnt match into the trash can as he slips out the window. The match is not out, however, and the fire spreads from the trash can to the church, burning it to the ground. Lingering outside to watch in horror, Hank prays that one of his propane tanks was not the cause of the conflagration. The answer comes when officials tell the congregation they suspect arson. Based on the lutefisk incident and Cotton’s outburst, Stroup jumps to the conclusion that the fire was a hate crime. “Someone did this because they don’t want a woman minister,” she declares. “To him I say, ‘You can burn down our church, but you cannot burn down our faith.’ ” Peggy concludes that the motive was to kill Reverend Stroup, and soon an ecumenical prayer service is convened on the site of the smoldering ruins.

Investigators find a wet matchbook from a Houston strip club, turning suspicion to Cotton, who declared at the end of his confrontation with Stroup in the sanctuary that he was heading for the only room in the building where she wasn’t welcome. At first, Cotton denies responsibility, because he is in fact innocent. But later, when Bobby confesses to his parents and grandfather, Cotton takes public responsibility for causing the accident. Stroup forgives him and, as his only penance, orders him to hug everyone in the congregation.

Another example of the show’s perfect pitch with its cultural and religious environment is an episode from 2003 called “Reborn to Be Wild,” which deals with what some call “Extreme Christianity.” As the cliché goes, it could easily have been “ripped from the headlines”—of some of my own Orlando Sentinel stories. I have reported on segments of evangelical Christianity that have taken a dramatic turn toward appropriating and adapting youth culture to their own purpose: rock music, skateboards, tattoos, wild hair, piercing, ripped clothes, and a certain way of talking and style of worship. I have written about locally based ministries as well as national figures, like Luis Palau, who have made this approach their trademark. For them, only the content—which is invariably very conservative theology—is what counts, not the packaging.

While traditional (and, yes, older) Christians see this approach as an act of desperation, in the Sunbelt suburbs it has a constituency. The issue for younger, more innovative evangelicals is how to capitalize on and channel youthful rebellion and alienation. Teens and twentysomethings often feel persecuted and yearn for some way to push back, either individually or with peers. Or, in the extreme, they may turn to a gang to provide unconditional acceptance, as a substitute for a family.

In King of the Hill, the dilemma is illustrated when Hank finds Bobby in his room, where the boy keeps a Bart Simpson doll on the shelf, playing air guitar to heavy metal music while wearing a fake goatee and a dreadlocks wig. Despairing that Bobby is heading in the wrong direction, he takes the boy to see their pastor. She first suggests an “awesome video” to the boy, who snaps back with an obvious reference to VeggieTales, the witty and popular series of Christian-oriented videos for younger children. “If it’s the one about Esau the Eggplant and the Prodigal Cucumber,” he says, “I’ve seen it about a thousand times.” (VeggieTales went into Saturday morning syndication on NBC and Telemundo in the fall of 2006, with much of the religious content edited out.)

The minister instantly recognizes that Bobby is on the other side of adolescence and recommends an after-school youth group at the Arlen Community Center. Naturally the boy resists, as his father drives him up to the center. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” Bobby protests. “It is so uncool!” Hank replies, “You know what is not cool? Hell!” Dressed in a suit and tie, and carrying his Bible, the youngster glumly approaches the front door, where he is in for a surprise.

After some initial skepticism, he is welcomed by a group of very cool looking teens with skateboards, long hair, piercings, and tattoos. Is this the Christian youth group? he asks. Bobby is welcomed to the flock by the extreme Pastor K, a somewhat older version of the others, and later he tells his father how excited he is about the group. He asks if he can invite the teens back to his house and, when Hank agrees, his son says, “Thanks for making me go, Dad.” Hank marvels to his alley friends that his son “just thanked me for making him come to church.” Later, a racket in the alley brings Hank running, to what he assumes is a bunch of rowdy youths using his trash can to elevate a makeshift skateboard ramp. Before he can run them off, Bobby introduces them. “These are my friends from the youth group,” he proudly tells his father. “They’re cool and they’re totally Christian.” One is wearing a tee-shirt that reads, “I broke a rule. I prayed in school.”

Hank is conflicted. He is glad that his son likes the group, but he doesn’t like their attitude. His wife, Peggy, is less troubled. “I’d rather Bobby be in a Christian gang than in one of those murdering gangs.” However, as Bobby throws himself into this flavor of Christianity, his father becomes even more upset. The boy dresses and talks in a way that doesn’t seem particularly religious to his father, exemplified with a tee-shirt that reads “Satan sucks.” Yet Bobby asks to say grace at dinner. “I wanna give a shout-out to the man who makes it all happen,” the boy prays. “Props to you for this most bountiful meal that sits before us. Okay, check it, God, you’ve got the skillz. You represent in these vegetables and in this napkin and in the dirt that grows the grain that makes the garlic breadsticks that are on this table, yes-shizz.” Hank tries to be supportive, but his patience is wearing then. “Okay, Bobby, God appreciates your support, but I’m sure he wouldn’t want the pot roast to get cold. Now let’s wrap it up.” His son agrees: “Sure thing. Thanks, J-Man. Peace.”

At an informal prayer meeting at the park, Pastor K outlines his theology after one of the boys reads a New Testament verse. “To be tight with the Lord, you gotta take your faith to the limit,” he says. “Test all things to find the good.” When Bobby asks him what is good, the minister replies, “Whatever sticks to your spirit, man, whatever God tattoos on your soul. We’re all searching for that eternal ink.” As weird as he may sound to the uninitiated (and unsaved), Pastor K might easily have been based on a minister like Steve Bensinger, who presides over the Come as You Are Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Known as “Pastor Freak,” Bensinger also heads the Christian Tattoo Association, and he has his own personal body art that includes Jesus on the cross and an angel killing a demon. Pastor K, who also has plenty of tattoos, also has an airbrushed painting of the resurrection on the back of his SUV.

Soon Bobby is so committed to his variety of faith he is preaching to his cousin Luanne from the “Extreme Team Bible,” which he has gotten from the youth group. His version of Genesis goes like this: “And then Cain was all like, ‘I ain’t s’posed to be lookin’ out for my bro, yo.’ ” Bobby tells his cousin that Pastor K has written a twenty-two-minute rock song based on the disciples for an upcoming gathering called “Messiahfest,” and that he has asked the boy to back him up. But he is certain that it will take a miracle for Hank to let him go to the festival. And the father is also furious when his son shows him a sketch with his idea for a tattoo featuring Jesus. “Dad,” he explains to the incredulous Hank, “it’s just my way of giving mad respect to the Lord.” Hank decides to go to the park and confront Pastor K directly, demanding that the young minister stop “this garbage you’re teaching my boy” and stay away from his son. The message is not well received. “Dude, you don’t have to act or dress a certain way for God,” Pastor K says. “You can hang with him any way, anywhere. Don’t you think Jesus is here in this half-pipe? . . . What’s more important,” Pastor K replies, “that Bobby’s a Christian—or that he has a proper haircut?”

Things accelerate. In his room, Bobby—now sporting a black-knit, seaman’s watch cap with the letters “WWJD”—is playing a biblical video game with his mother, based on the exodus. Hank storms in and, brushing his wife aside, declares that from now on, Bobby is “going to go to church in a suit and tie like we’ve always done.” He can forget about Pastor K. Again, Peggy tries to reason with her husband. “You are overreacting,” she argues. “These are good Christian kids having good Christian fun.” Then why does the boy look like a burglar, Hank retorts. Then he notices that Bobby has had his ear pierced for a cross earring, which he confiscates. Then he grounds the boy. “You just don’t understand how I feel about Jesus!” Bobby shouts. Despite his actions, Hank is still perplexed, as he confesses to his friends while scraping off the “Believer” bumper sticker the boy has put on his father’s pickup. In the old days, he recalls, they went to rock concerts on Saturday nights and asked forgiveness at church on Sundays. “Now it’s all mixed together.”

Although forbidden by Hank to attend Messiahfest, Bobby goes anyway, pursued by his father. The man is more than a little bewildered by the scene he finds: his son onstage, wearing a tank top reading “Rejoice,” leading a call-and-response chant with the crowd: “Holy! Ghost! Holy! Ghost!” With this, Hank boils over, voicing his antipathy for the music, which is shared by many in real life. “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity better?” he tells Pastor K. “You’re just making rock ’n’ roll worse.” This is too much for the minister. “You people are all alike. You look at us and think we’re freaks.” It’s left to a member of a real contemporary Christian band, Sum 41, voicing the role of Pastor K’s father, to caution the minister to remember the Fifth Commandment and never to come between a boy and his dad.

After the concert, Bobby is still resentful. “When I turn 18,” he tells Hank, “I’m going to do whatever I want for the Lord: tattoos, piercings, you name it.” As gently as he can, the father shows the son a box in his bedroom containing all of his discarded fads and enthusiasms, from beanbag animals to a photo of him in a Ninja Turtle costume. Hank says he just doesn’t want Bobby to burn out on his religious enthusiasm. “I know you think stuff you’re doing now is cool, but in a few years you’re going to think it’s lame. And I don’t want the Lord to end up in this box.”

Pastor Jim Poorman helps run a downtown ministry in Orlando called H2O Church in a converted country-and-western bar and music hall, geared to the “next generation.” A handsome, rugged ice hockey fanatic, he acknowledges his age without apology: “I’m 39, which makes my shin pads older than some of the 20-year-olds on my hockey team.” More amiable than edgy, Poorman welcomes the tattooed and pierced to his congregation, and he doesn’t condemn members for quaffing an occasional beer. I asked him to screen the episode and let me know what he thought. “It was really funny,” he said, “and pretty well written too. I thought it was cool that Bobby’s dad really just wanted him to have a faith that would last. That last scene with the box was well done. Also, I gotta admit I know a guy that reminds me of Pastor K, and he drives me nuts. I can’t have a sentence of communication without him calling me ‘dude,’ ‘bro,’ or ‘chief’ or something—the guy is really annoying. Whenever I try to have a decent conversation with him it’s like I’m talking to a fourteen-year-old with all the jargon, and I just laugh to myself. It’s really quite funny.

“I thought the show did a good job of showing how some of these kids are really just exchanging one subculture for another. True, maybe it’s not as dangerous, but it does miss the point. I have had quite a few conversations with some overzealous college converts on how to communicate with their parents about their faith and how to honor them in light of their newfound excitement. Some have done a great job of telling their parents and living their faith quietly and humbly in front of their folks—not being weird. And in some cases their parents actually have come to faith as a result of their kids’ influence—now that’s pretty wild. I remember one conversation I had with a parent who said, ‘I’m really glad my kid has been hanging out with you. It’s funny, though, he tells me the stuff that you share with him and I think, ‘Man, I’ve been telling him that for years, and yet he thinks you’re a genius and I’m an idiot.’ We laughed about that.”

There is a lot of truth in the episode, Poorman said, although some things were exaggerated for the sake of humor. “Young people need to fall in love with God,” he said, “not fall in love with a new subculture. Each of these tends to produce two very different things. It’s helpful to meet young people where they’re at and try to speak their language—even Jesus did that by using fishing analogies with his fisherman disciples to try to help them understand spiritual concepts. But we need to be who we are too. Authenticity is key, and most kids nowadays are sharp enough to pick up on the goofiness of an adult not being who they are. The cover of a recent issue of the magazine Group, which deals with the youth ministry industry, was titled ‘Busting the “Cool Leader” Myth.’ The ‘extreme’ concept has been so overused that most of us can’t take it anymore. What kids need are just authentic, godly examples to follow and interact with—and that’s ‘extreme’ enough.” Poorman admits, “Some youth pastors may have gone overboard in trying to speak the language of their kids. A little balance might help, because, in reality, living a faithful life unto Christ in today’s culture might not look all that cool or appealing. We need to be careful that it’s not about being cool and living this hyperlife but at times it’s rather mundane and downright difficult. That, I think, will help kids to not burn out and have a more realistic expectation of what it means to live for Christ. The goal is to approach our relationship with God like a marathon, not a sprint, and hopefully not a one-night stand. I do think it’s helpful that kids are aware that you don’t have to become a nerd to be a Christ follower. At the same time, they need to see that there’s no need for them to be ‘cool’ either. Both are missing the point of the gospel: it’s becoming a new person that desires to honor God—and that may not be all that ‘hip’ at times.”

Congregational membership is one of the few broadly based, purely voluntary associations in America: You don’t have to go, and you don’t have to stay. It is a tricky, sometimes volatile mixture of autonomy, affinity, and affection. And sometimes there is also antipathy, up to and including seething resentment—over everything from theology to music to finances to governance. In the suburbs at least, smaller, denominational congregations seem to be losing ground to independent megachurches, just as small retail stores have lost market share to big box and warehouse outlets. Critics say the megachurches are winning the battle because they offer low-impact services that emphasize entertainment at the expense of worship, or that they offer a service model, complete with scores of niche ministries. All of these weighty issues figure in the King of the Hill episode entitled “Church Hopping,” which, along with its corollary, “church shopping,” have become common terms for religious mobility among academics and consultants. The people who wrote this show have clearly spent some time in Sunbelt megachurches.

The Hill family is put out when, after arriving late to Sunday services at Arlen First Methodist Church, they find a new family sitting in “their” spot in “their” pew, where they have been worshiping for twelve years. The interloping family, which includes a baby, declines to move, so the Hills move to the back pew, where Hank cannot find a comfortable sitting position and where the sunlight reflects off the altar cross and directly into his eyes. He is still upset the next day when talking to his buddies about the displacement. “I know God’s up there, and he knows I’m smack dab in the middle of the second pew.” Hank is further miffed that the minister “acted like that new family owned the place.” Inside the house, Hank tells Peggy, “I’m having trouble letting this pew situation go. Maybe I’m being too petty.” His wife assures him he is not; the pew incident is the last straw for her. She has made numerous suggestions for Reverend Stroup to add some pizzazz to the staid, mainline services, all of which the female pastor has rejected. The pastor, Peggy says, has “lost touch with the little things that matter.”

Hank visits the pastor in her study, to plead his case. But Stroup refuses to intervene, telling Hank she wouldn’t do what he is asking, even if she could. “This is God’s house, not mine, not yours. Hank, let it go.” In this situation, Stroup is handicapped less by her harsh Midwestern accent than by her tin ear for Southern sensibilities. Where Peggy wants to go is to a new, five-thousand-member megachurch nearby, the Church of the Rising Son, whose charismatic African American pastor is a former college football quarterback. Members there, she tells Hank, have a whole array of amenities to pamper them—a coffee shop, mini-mart, florist, even a dry cleaner. But Hank, who is still not sure he wants to leave his old church, is put off by the scale of the megachurch, said to be the ninth largest in Texas. “If I wanted to go that route, I could just walk around the mall and think about Jesus.” Instead, at work the next day, Hank casually mentions to his friends that he is thinking about attending a new church. In the Sunbelt, where the evangelical spirit runs high, this is enough to send his coworkers into a feeding frenzy: all want him to try their church. So, in the weeks that follow, they do. In a sequence that spans a good chunk of the Christian spectrum, they attend a shouting, arm-waving Pentecostal service in a tent, a Spanish-language Catholic mass, and a contemporary service whose bland music repels them before they get through the front door.

“I just want a decent, normal church,” Hank says at the dinner table, with his trademark sigh. “Is that too much to ask?” This provides Peggy the opportunity to renew her case for the megachurch, which she insists is their only choice. When he tries to resist, she invokes what in the Sunbelt is the nuclear option. “Fine,” she snaps. “We won’t go to any church. You and I and our son will live the empty, barren lives of secular humanism.” Hank succumbs, and the next Sunday they are in line at the coffee shop on the campus of the megachurch, where they see Reverend Stroup getting coffee and a cruller—free to local clergy. Despite their best efforts, the Hills cannot avoid meeting the minister, and Hank and Peggy admit that they have been “trying out” other churches. Stroup is incredulous. “Is this over the seats? You’ve got to be kidding!” But Peggy is not embarrassed. The minister even rejected her suggestions for an “open mic” sermon on Sunday. “You reap what you sow,” Peggy huffs. The minister is still shaken. “You can’t seriously be thinking of worshiping at this behemoth?” Hank declares that they are leaving Arlen First Methodist and they aren’t coming back. Miffed, Stroup informs them that the new family never seems to miss a Sunday, and they actually sing during worship.

But when the intercom announces that the tram from the parking lot to the sanctuary is about to depart, Hank’s misgivings surface again. “What have I gotten us into?” he wonders. The mall-like interior of the sanctuary lobby—which is a close approximation of numerous megachurches I have attended—intensifies Hank’s doubts. The family is instantly pegged for newcomers by one of the congregation’s official greeters. The man almost overwhelms them with enthusiastic hospitality. While simultaneously filling out a customer satisfaction survey—there are only two choices, “satisfied” and “extremely satisfied”—the greeter volunteers (in too much detail) how the church saved him and his wife from a life of depravity. The situation is rescued when the senior pastor, Rev. Nealey (voiced by rapper Big Boi), rolls up in a golf cart and takes over. Hank explains that they are there because of problems over pew seating at their previous church. Nealey says he understands and starts to show them around, beginning with the sanctuary. Bobby spots three huge, high-definition television screens hanging from the ceiling—not uncommon in large Sunbelt congregations. The minister confides to the boy that the screens are used for services, but during the NFL season they are left on for Dallas Cowboy games, instantly winning him over. Encouraged, Hank says he wants to hurry to get a good seat. When the pastor tells him all seats are assigned, the deal is done. “I think we’ve found a new home,” Hank says, as a heavenly chorus is heard in the background. This, of course, is fantasy. Few if any houses of worship assign seats any more, except perhaps some Jewish temples and synagogues at the High Holidays.

A honeymoon period ensues between the Hill family and the Church of the Rising Son. In the alley, Hank tells his buddies, “I admit I was skeptical at first, but that church really understands the concept of customer service.” Yet it soon becomes apparent that there is a price to be paid for congregational involvement. A megachurch—despite its large staff—has to depend heavily on volunteers to provide the many services it does. Hank is issued a device used by many suburban restaurants, one that hums and lights up when your table is ready. “It’s like being paged by God,” one of Hank’s alley friends observes. Before long, it seems as if the pager is going off and the phone is ringing nonstop. If it’s not a satisfaction survey about last week’s sermon, it’s an invitation to join one of the activities on the church’s apparently 24/7 schedule. Weeknights offer Christian woodworking classes, and afternoons are for men’s rope football, where the team kneels in prayer before calling each play. One Saturday, the Hills spend sixteen hours on the campus, capped by a midnight showing of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

Peggy has volunteered to become Nealey’s secretary and immediately takes charge, organizing the office. At first she is such a success, demanding the same price for Communion wafers that the supplier gives to the Baptists, that the pastor dubs her “a gift straight from heaven.” However, over time Peggy’s overbearing and insensitive enthusiasm begins to drive Pastor Nealey crazy. The last straw is when she takes the microphone with a personal message before his sermon. While Peggy is fulfilled, Hank—like Reverend Nealey—has had enough. The propane salesman misses his home and his friends. So one Sunday, he drops his wife and son off for services, and, on the pretext of needing rest, flees to his house. There he sees Luanne’s hyperrelaxed boyfriend, Lucky, who has declared earlier that he does his praying wherever he is, whatever he is doing. Hank once dismissed this notion as asinine, but now he is not so sure. “I’m fed up with church,” he tells Lucky. “My old one didn’t pay enough attention to me and my new one won’t leave me alone.”

The boyfriend makes a point nearly identical to that made in 2006 by the Christian pollster George Barna. “You need to get in touch with God, not church,” Lucky advises. “I find that sometimes church just gets in the way.” The pair heads to a bar to drink beer and watch football. Hours later, Hank returns home, loaded and unrepentant, declaring he is “done with church. Period.” The megachurch “just keeps coming at you.” Luanne denounces him as an apostate, someone who has abandoned his faith. Peggy treats him as if he has been possessed, enlisting Reverend Nealey for an “intervention.” However, the minister admits that a small church may be where both Hills belong. In the end, he suggests that Hank pray on the matter. That night, tossing and turning, Hank is distraught. Then a solution comes to him and, with a relieved, beatific smile on his face, he says, “Thank you, God.”

Back at First Methodist, Stroup has felt the market pressure of the Hills’ defection and has responded on several fronts. In a nod to customer service, she has designated the last two pews in the sanctuary as a smoking section. On the church sign, the message reads, “No assigned seats in heaven.” Still, she is in a conciliatory mood when Hank comes to visit her in her study before services on Sunday morning. “It seems God thinks I should be here,” he tells her. Relieved, she is magnanimous in victory. “God knows best,” she says. “That’s why he’s God, and he would want me to forgive you and welcome you back.” But Hank is not finished. Gesturing toward the second pew, where the rest of his family is, he adds, “That’s where God wants me to sit.” How could that be? she wants to know. Where is that nice young family? Hank replies that after he informed them of the many amenities offered at the megachurch, including daycare and Bible bingo, they decided to go there. “That place is really good for them,” Hank tells the pastor, “but we like it here.” Back in “his” pew, Hank looks heavenward and declares, “Good to see you again, Lord.”

Although neatly resolved, this episode raises a serious point, albeit subtly, about the pressures on mainline Christianity, whose numbers are declining, while the average age of members bumps fifty. It would only be natural for the pastor of a small, Methodist church, seeing a new, young family in the congregation, to be pleased. But the dilemma for such endangered congregations has always been: How do you expand your base to new, younger members (customers?) without at the same time eroding your older, established base, the faithfully attending members who do the bulk of the volunteering and giving? Most often, this issue manifests itself over the issue of worship style or music rather than seating.

Few megachurch pastors have as sure a feel for what worshipers are looking for as Joel C. Hunter, minister of Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, a thriving congregation of eight thousand that met for many years in a converted roller skating rink. An author and a radio broadcaster, Hunter, who preaches half a dozen times a weekend, is part of a generation of younger evangelical leaders who are conservative but not captives of the Republican Party on every social issue, especially the environment. When I first screened this episode of King of the Hill, I immediately thought of him and asked him to view it. As I suspected, he did not find it threatening or demeaning.

“This King of the Hill episode rightly portrays that the challenge of American religious institutions is not merely mobility but consumerism,” he said. “I once was talking with a rabbi about the fears that religious leaders have about their members being converted to another faith. He quipped, ‘My main competition is not Christianity; my competition is the mall!’ Amen. The Hills are looking for the church that offers them the best deal. Maybe the smaller church gives them more fellowship and less pressure; maybe the larger church gives them more program choices and places to get involved. But where does spiritual growth in their relationship with God figure into the picture? The churches are being evaluated, the attendees are being recruited, but God is a third party in the interchange. Both pastors are trying to do their best, but their church worlds, like shops in a mall, offer different experiences that must be useful to the religious consumer but not too intrusive. The voluntary church in America is largely thriving while the government-supported ones in Europe are dying, yet are the people who attend becoming more selfless servants like Jesus?”

3. Family Guy. By a wide margin, Family Guy is one of the meanest and coarsest animated comedies on network television (even for Fox), which is why I am baffled that it has become a favorite of my daughter Liza—who is neither of those things— and her teenage friends. Still, it is undeniably clever and often extremely funny, and, despite my objections to its cruelty and viciousness, I find myself laughing when I watch it. Although structured like The Simpsons, it has few if any of its predecessor’s redeeming qualities. Family Guy aired on Fox for three seasons, beginning in 1999, before it was cancelled in 2002. But strong ratings for reruns on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, coupled with the sale of millions of DVDs, brought it back to Fox in 2005 with all new episodes. Like the other animated shows, it makes occasional use of religion for story lines. In a 2007 episode, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are mysteriously left behind in the rapture. Since they recall hating all the right people, they are puzzled and frustrated, which leads to a heated make-out session between the men—verifying a number of suspicions about homophobia in the religious right that predate the Ted Haggard revelations.

The title character, Peter Griffin, is the grossly fat, buffoonish father, who comes from a working-class, Irish Catholic background. He works factory and fishing jobs in and around his hometown of Quahog, Rhode Island, when he is not unemployed. His wife, Lois, the daughter of wealthy, Protestant parents, is a piano teacher, sweet but with a libidinous past. Their lower-middle-class household—they can afford only one car—includes a doltish adolescent son, Chris; a precocious but insecure teenage daughter, Meg; an infant named Stewie who speaks with a mannered English accent; and a sophisticated talking dog named Brian, who is an alcoholic. The show’s structure includes flashbacks and asides that have nothing to do with the main plot of the episode. In an August 17, 2004, interview with the Web site IGN, series creator Seth MacFarlane was asked if there were any scenes cut from the show he wouldn’t ever want to see restored. “Yeah, there was one,” MacFarlane said. “Actually, I wonder if we should put that into a current script. It was ‘The Last Supper,’ and it’s Jesus saying, ‘Drink this, all of you, for this is my blood . . .’ and the Apostles all do this huge spit take. That sequence was cut.” Some of the show’s Catholic comedy that survived the censors is particularly savage— blasphemy by any definition. In one episode, Peter mocks Holy Communion at the altar rail, suggesting to the priests that Jesus was drunk at the time of crucifixion, since his blood was now wine. One reason the show has not attracted criticism may have to do with the clergy sex abuse scandals, McFarlane surmised. “Since the Catholic Church has been having the troubles it’s had, I’ve been hearing that they’ve been a little less quick to open their mouths to criticize. Because it’s just a little hypocritical.”

Jesus appears in other episode flashbacks, as an adolescent who can’t get along with Joseph, and, later, performing a seaside singing act for his followers. In yet another, he is an adult appearing in the back of a pickup truck in a compromising position with a farmer’s wife, whereupon the husband confronts him with a shotgun. This image of Jesus—usually a young, bearded white man—is not entirely consistent. When baby Stewie is sucked through the television by poltergeists, he returns from the other side to report that he has seen Jesus, who turns out to be Chinese. His last name is Hong, rather than Christ. A sequence cut from another broadcast has Jesus playing golf in a foursome. When he misses a putt, which would have been his third birdie, the ball backs up into the cup, miraculously. He also appears as a disco dancer and a cheering sports fan with a large foam hand, as well as a passenger on a spaceship with aliens when an accidental nuclear exchange devastates the earth. Once, Lois imagines what Jesus would have been like—a dissolute, ill-tempered father of a poor family—if he had given up on his dream. In a modern version of the second coming, a diminutive Jesus has to explain to a crowd in a park that people were much smaller in biblical times.

And Jesus is not alone in heaven. When Peter thanks him for bestowing an act of good fortune, Jesus starts to explain that credit should actually go to Vishnu, but the blue-skinned, four-armed Hindu deity shushes him.

The Bible also figures in plots. Peter acknowledges that he is unfamiliar with the scriptures, because they take “way too long to read.” He is always ready to step forward at a funeral and misrepresent Jesus’ biblical message. Pressed by his devout father to name his favorite book of the Bible, Peter says, “That one where Jesus swallows the puzzle piece and the man in the big yellow hat has to take him to the hospital,” a reference to the children’s book Curious George. Peter is not alone in his fractured understanding of Christianity. One young, Republican character proclaims, “Jesus created this country to destroy nonbelievers and brown people.”

God the Father is not exempt from gratuitous gibes, including those of a rude and sexual nature. In one episode, a white-bearded, white-robed Creator sets off the universe’s Big Bang creation with flatulence. In other episodes, God, sometime accompanied by Jesus in a Cadillac Escalade, uses his supernatural powers to pick up women at the bar and the bowling alley. In heaven, God is shown being forced to use a condom in bed by a woman he is with—despite pleas that it is his birthday. In the garden of Eden, God cautions Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge. When Adam asks if they can at least sit under it, God looks over his shoulder at a pile of Playboy and Penthouse magazines at the tree’s base and says that wouldn’t be such a good idea.

Occasionally, God plays a more traditional role in the series. Peter pretends his son Chris is dying in order to get an organization like the Make-a-Wish Foundation to put a favorite television show back on the air. Then, to extricate himself from the situation, Peter pretends he has the power of miraculous healing, which in turn leads people to worship him as a god. For violating the First Commandment, the real God smites the Griffin household with biblical plagues until Peter begs for forgiveness. An angel informs God, who is sitting at his desk in heaven, that the message has been received, and the plagues are called off. Peter also provokes God’s wrath for relatively minor infractions, in one case for thinking a wind-blown shopping bag is more marvelous than the human circulatory system. Peter prays for God to let his son win a Youth Scout soap box derby, with the opposite result. Baby Stewie prays to God—to stay out of Brian’s way as he begins an army basic training obstacle course. Stumbling into success with the New England Patriots, Peter looks into the TV camera and thanks God for his success, but also for the Devil, for giving God something to do—an interesting theological point. He even blames the Trix rabbit for trying to “steal Easter from Jesus.” In several other episodes, Death, complete with black robe and scythe, plays a central role. Hitler, Al Capone, and John Wilkes Booth play cards in hell, along with Superman, who got there for killing a hooker in a fit of rage.

Current controversies also pop up, as when parent protests drive Lois from the sex education class she has volunteered to teach at James Woods High, the public school her children attend. Lois is replaced with a hip-talking youth pastor from First Evangelical Church, who pushes his “abstinence only” line by glibly giving the kids patently false and misleading information. He tells them that condoms have a “one hundred percent failure rate,” and that sex is “bad, immoral, and wrong.” Taking aim at another religious target, Peter rips Christian recording artist Amy Grant’s NBC-TV reality show, Three Wishes, for being exploitative of a terminally ill child.

Religious differences between Peter and Lois are at the center of two episodes, each occasioned by visits from Peter’s bigoted father, Francis. In the first, the elder Griffin set the tone of his relationship with Lois at the young couple’s wedding when he added to the bumper sticker reading “Just Married” the words “to a Protestant Whore.” After sixty years working at the Pawtucket Mill, Francis is forced to retire, a psychologically crippling experience for a man who lived to work, even at the expense of his relationship with his family and especially with his son. Still, Peter feels obligated to drag his family to Francis’s retirement dinner, since Peter’s mother is on what he calls a “mission trip” to Las Vegas. The children wonder why Francis never visits them, and Lois explains, “Your grandfather has never been comfortable with the fact that I’m not Catholic.” Francis’s religion, like his work, has been a big part of the man’s life. After being presented with a gold watch by his boss, the retiree tells his coworkers that at mass earlier that morning it occurred to him that he might not be seeing any of their faces again. “I just want to say that Jesus loves you. But in my eyes, you’re a bunch of sinners and slackers who force a hard-working old man to retire. So you can take this shiny watch and shove it.”

Driving home from the dinner, Peter tells his father, who is sitting next to him in the front seat, that he wants the old man to stay with them. Francis says he doesn’t want to be a bother, but immediately makes plain how difficult the arrangement is going to be. He tells Peter that it’s a pity that he couldn’t have found himself a nice Catholic girl. Lois pipes up from the back seat that her father-in-law must be embarrassed, forgetting that she is in the back seat—but he is clearly not. The best Francis can do is to acknowledge that, her religious failing notwithstanding, Lois is a good woman. “Perhaps you won’t burn in hell after all. Maybe you’ll just go to purgatory with all the unbaptized babies.” Instead of coming to his wife’s defense at the insult, Peter tries to be a peacemaker, or perhaps an enabler. “There you go, Lois,” he says. “You love kids.” At the Griffin home, Francis makes his presence—and his religious views—felt. The old man’s idea of an appropriate bedtime story for Stewie concludes, “So God cast the pagans and sinners into the fiery bowels of hell, where their flesh burned in agony forever and ever. The end.” As Francis explains to Peter and Lois, “Children love a bedtime story from the Bible.” Next he drags the whole family to 5 a.m. mass, which Lois gamely notes afterward was a lovely service. That is only the beginning. When Chris goes to the bathroom, Francis falsely accuses him of masturbating and tells him never to do it again. The boy misunderstands him and takes the admonition to be against future bowel movements. Francis calls Meg a “harlot” when she tells him she held hands with the boy next door—who has an Irish name, at that—and predicts that God will give her leprosy, causing the offending hand to fall off. Not even innocuous television viewing is exempt from the old man’s wrath. He switches off an old Dick Van Dyke Show, telling family members how the episode ends: “Laura burns the roast and God kills her for parading her buns around in those pants.”

Peter makes another desperate attempt to reconnect with his father, this time with a baseball game at Boston’s Fenway Park, but the evening goes awry. With nothing working, Peter fantasizes going into business with his father manufacturing Virgin Mary shrines out of old bathtubs. A tour of the toy factory where Peter works presents a more realistic opportunity, and Peter asks his boss to hire Francis despite his age. The best argument Peter can make is that his father always put work ahead of everything—his wife, his health, even his own son. “Especially his own son,” Francis chimes in for wounding emphasis. While the boss is thinking it over, the old man does so much work on the assembly line that he makes Francis the foreman. Peter is overjoyed at the prospect of working side by side with his father, after all the years of neglect. And to top it off, Francis is even grateful to Peter, and says so. “This is truly a miracle,” he says, also giving thanks to Jesus for giving him a purpose in life again. Then he reverts to his mean-spirited personality, ordering his son and his friends immediately back to work.

As at the Griffin home, Francis’s work ethic and religiosity soon take their toll at the factory. The new foreman turns the break room into a chapel, declaring both breaks and lunch to be sins. A coworker complains that, even while working triple shifts, he was not named Employee of the Week since his competition for the honor is Jesus, shown in an illuminated shrine. But Peter insists to Lois that he and his father have never been closer.

Coworkers at the factory see things differently. They ask Peter to go to his father with their complaint that work is no longer fun. When he does, Francis dismisses their concerns. “That’s Satan talk! You’re a failure as a worker and as a father!” Finally losing his temper at the insult, Peter says that, while he may not be perfect, “At least I love my kids enough not to spend every minute of the day working! I’m a damn good father, and that’s more than I can say about you!” Francis is stunned, but not too stunned to fire his son on the spot. At home, Lois tells her father-in-law he needs to sort things out with Peter. But Francis insists that Peter needs to go to confession “to beg forgiveness for all his failings!” While Peter is crushed, a long-shot opportunity presents itself in the form of a visit to Boston by the pope.

The pontiff, looking more like John XXIII than John Paul II, arrives aboard Blessed Virgin Airlines. Without success, Peter tries to get an audience with the pope by dressing up as a bellboy. Then he lucks into an opportunity to drive the Popemobile and drives off with the pontiff to his home in Rhode Island. Peter wants the pope, arguably the only human his father respects— “God’s go-to guy”—to intervene in their relationship. The pope meets Peter’s family and assures Peter that he appears to be a good father, but suggests that the son needs to speak with Francis directly to resolve the matter. Still insecure, Peter says he needs the pope to come to the factory with him for backup. Francis is in the midst of denouncing the workers as “slothful sinners” when the visitors arrive. He kneels and crosses himself before the bishop of Rome. The pope pays Francis a compliment, calling him worthy because he has raised a fine son. Peter’s “zest for life is an affirmation of God’s great love within us all,” the pontiff tells the old man. Cantankerous as ever, Francis accuses the pope of going soft. “Even a tambourine-shaking Baptist could tell this boy’s no good!” he snaps. Thinking the man is calling him a liar, the pope threatens to excommunicate him, before Peter separates the two strong-willed men. “I have never met such an infuriating man!” the pontiff tells Peter. “You must have the patience of a saint.” Peter, ever needy, doesn’t see it that way. “Well, he’s my dad. And I just want him to love me.” Now it is Francis’s turn to be stunned. He loves his son with all his heart, he explains—he just doesn’t like him or anything about him.

For many, that is probably a distinction without a difference, yet for Peter, desperate for any crumb of affection from his father, it is something. He too admits he doesn’t really like his father. The pope puts his imprimatur on the resolution. God says you must honor your father, the pontiff says. “He never said anything about liking him.” Peter is liberated. “Well, in that case, Dad, I’m gonna eat meat on Fridays, play golf on Sundays, laugh at Jewish comedians, and yes, sleep with my Protestant wife,” he says, adding that neither he nor Lois will enjoy it. Francis rehires Peter and takes a job as a hostile roadie with the pope’s tour. Danny White, the episode’s writer, was raised Catholic and, on the DVD commentary, notes that he doesn’t think the episode was ever seen by his relatives or by “a series of nuns who battered me senseless.”

Judaism is squarely in the sights of an episode called “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein.” At the Drunken Clam bar, Peter complains to his neighbors that Lois thinks he is bad with money. Most recently, he has just been conned out of two hundred dollars—her emergency fund—by a fast-talking door-to-door salesman who hustled him for volcano insurance. His pals think Lois may be right. Friends Cleveland and Quagmire have had much better luck with money, thanks to a Jewish accountant and a Jewish stockbroker, respectively. Peter concludes, “I need a Jewish guy to handle my money,” later that night launching into a production number entitled “When You Wish Upon a Jew.” Peter sings that he needs a Jew “to teach me how to whine and do my taxes.” The song has a slightly different melody, but it is a clear take on “When You Wish Upon a Star,” from Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, in both words and images. Like the Italian woodcarver Geppetto, Peter kneels by his window, hands folded, and looks skyward. The stars form appropriate constellations: a Star of David and a menorah. As he sings, Peter is ferried across the sky by an extraterrestrial vehicle in the shape of a dreidel. He is awakened the next morning by a knock at the door. A stranger named Max Weinstein tells him his car has broken down in front of the house and he needs to use the phone. Peter’s prayer has been answered.

The first order of business is for Peter to get Max, who turns out to be an accountant, to help him get his volcano insurance money back. Max tries to flee, but his host chases him down, and the accountant successfully recovers the money—and balances the Griffins’ checkbook. In return, Max is invited to have dinner with the family. He takes one look at Lois’s marshmallow and fish casserole and begs off, allowing Lois to assume it is because he observes Jewish dietary laws. When Max offers to help Chris with his homework, Peter marvels at his skill and generosity: “My God! Is there nothing you people can’t do? I mean, other than manual labor.” Lois chides her husband for the last remark, calling it a ridiculous stereotype and, for proof, noting that the Jews built the pyramids.

Asked to join the Griffins for a board game, Max begs off because it is Friday night and he wants to go to temple for services. Soon they are all seen entering the synagogue, as Lois thanks the accountant for inviting them. “Your husband’s got a good heart, but his views on Judaism are a little misguided,” Max confides. At first, Peter worries that, as a product of Catholic schools, he shouldn’t be attending a Jewish service. (Instantly, as he enters the sanctuary, an alarm goes off at the secret headquarters of an international order of nuns dedicated to corralling wayward Catholics.) Peter is impressed with the people in the congregation he recognizes: the principal of Meg’s school; Bill Nye, the Science Guy; and half of singer Lenny Kravitz, who is half Jewish. Despite an understandable faux pas or two, the evening is a success. “That was so nice,” Lois says. “A good sermon and such beautiful songs.” Typically, Peter confuses the service with a performance of Fiddler on the Roof he once attended, starring William Shatner. Max thanks Peter for his hospitality and tells him he has faith that his son Chris “will grow up to be a real mensch,” a Yiddish term for a well-mannered person.

Peter is inspired by his personal encounter with Jews and Judaism. (This is a little odd, since a regular character in the show, Mort the druggist, is Jewish.) Peter tells Lois he has hit on a plan to make Chris smart: make him a Jew. His wife tries to point out the fallacy of this approach, to no avail. Off go father and son to the synagogue to discuss conversion with the rabbi, who quickly disabuses them. “I appreciate your interest,” the clergyman tells them, “but Judaism takes a serious commitment.” The rabbi points to a boy nearby studying for his bar mitzvah the coming Saturday. Peter wants a bar mitzvah for Chris and asks the rabbi how much it would cost to buy one, since his son is clearly unable to study for it. The rabbi disappears, so Peter heads for Las Vegas, the only place in America he can think of “where you can take a solemn, ritual ceremony that begins a lifetime commitment and blow through it in about twenty minutes.” They drive to the Vegas strip where, next to wedding chapels, they find a quickie bar mitzvah chapel. While waiting their turn in the pews as Rabbi Copperfield, a magician, runs through the ceremonies, Peter tells Chris, “In a few minutes, you’ll become a smart, successful Jewish man.” Somehow the boy has received some training, because soon Chris is chanting the Hebrew blessing over the Torah scroll—accurately—when Lois arrives. She interrupts the ceremony, calling it a travesty, because her son is doing it for the wrong reasons. The family flees the chapel, jumping into a passing bus, where Peter apologizes to his wife for the fiasco. Lois tells him Chris will do just fine without a conversion or a bar mitzvah. “I have faith in him, the way I have faith in you,” she tells her husband. “Besides, a person’s religion is no guarantee of success.” Chris agrees, chiming in, in Yiddish, “Zoh zine mit glick”—everything will be okay.

In a DVD commentary, series creator Seth MacFarlane says the episode grew out of his experience as a gentile in the entertainment business whose many Jewish friends would not let him shop without their assistance. He decided to take this habit to absurdity, thinking it would be “funny to take that to the insane level where Peter just feels that somehow his life will be improved if he has a Jewish guy with him at all times.” This innocuous genesis did not save the episode from being banned from broadcast by Fox, whose executives cited its problematic content. Yet after the series’ initial cancellation, the episode was subsequently broadcast twice on cable, on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim segment, without generating significant controversy. The cast performed the same episode live on July 23 and 24, 2004, at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, also without incident. Finally, on December 10, 2004, Fox aired the episode as part of its holiday package, with one change. In the original version of the song “I Need a Jew,” Peter sings, “Even though they killed our Lord.” In the edited version, the line becomes “I don’t think they killed our Lord.”

When the season three DVD was released, before the airings on Cartoon Network, the writers and producers, as well as MacFarlane, were still angry about the Fox decision. In their commentary, they agreed it was an “abomination” that the episode was censored and that certain Fox executives were cowards. Nothing similar happened on the many occasions when the show bashed Catholics, they noted. “This thing got me so angry, and it is so disgusting,” says the writer of the episode, Ricky Blitt, who is Jewish. MacFarlane chimes in that special care was taken with the script by the show’s writers, about 70 percent of whom are Jewish. Far more offensive gags that crossed the line were cut, and the final script was sent for review to two rabbis, whom MacFarlane does not identify. One wrote back to say, “Peter learns the right lesson in the end. It’s fine. We don’t have any problem with it.”

4. American Dad. If Family Guy, as many have charged, is a blatant Simpsons ripoff, then American Dad is a copy of a copy. From the creator of Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane, American Dad is the story of Stan Smith, a pompous, blustery Central Intelligence Agency officer with a Jay Leno jaw, living in the Northern Virginia suburb of Langley with his family, which includes his ditzy, wearily devoted wife Francine; loose and liberal teenage daughter Hayley; nerdy, adolescent son Steve; a German-speaking goldfish; and a talking alien, Roger.

From the pilot episode, which aired after the Super Bowl in January 2005, religion has popped up on American Dad. When Stan mistakenly shoots a mangy, flea-bitten dog he brings home for a pet, the family conducts a funeral service and burial on the lawn, at which the father prays that God will take the animal to heaven. Also in the episode, God makes a personal appearance. The Smith family watches the CBS Evening News as Bob Schieffer announces an extraordinary development: God has placed a call to George W. Bush in the Oval Office. Bearded and seated on a throne among the clouds, God asks the president for a “big favor.” Isn’t there some way Bush could “play down our relationship a little more in your public addresses?” he asks. The chief executive, characteristically, is a little befuddled, asking what God means. Oh, the Lord says, like claiming he was the divine choice to be president. “That would be an example of something to keep to yourself, just to distance yourself from me a little more,” God says. Bush is in the process of acceding when another call comes in on God’s phone. Because it is Dick Cheney, the Lord has to break off with Bush, greeting the vice president with a deferential, “Yes, sir.”

On the DVD commentary, one of the writers recalled that some of the dialogue between Bush and God had to be trimmed to get it past the network, but the concern was the anti-Bush tone, rather than any concern with blasphemy. In a recent season, after Stan is transferred to the Middle East, God also appears to young Steve as the boy wanders lost in the desert. God leads him to an oasis, assuming the form of the actress Angelina Jolie. God explains that she has taken this form since it was most likely to appeal to the delirious boy. The two-episode story line has Stan becoming a Muslim and taking a second wife, providing an opportunity for some jabs at the way women are treated under Islam, at least as it is practiced in Saudi Arabia. In another episode, Stan opposes his son’s learning about sex education from “God-killing tree huggers” at public school. Instead, he instructs Steve to avoid premarital sex or “angels will kill you.” Stan then launches a crusade to cleanse the television of sexuality in the role of a bearded, Christian TV folksinger.

Traditionally and historically, the CIA has had a strong WASP overlay. The first agents and analysts were typically Yale-educated white males who were members of the Episcopal Church. Thus, it is totally in character when Stan’s competition with a neighbor escalates from a race to a shady parking place in the church parking lot to a contest to become deacon. (In a direct lift from The Simpsons, the sign in front of the First Episcopal Church provides an opportunity for a number of gags throughout the episode: “Restrooms for Christians Only” and “The Bible: The Real Powerbook.”) Initially, Stan is so anxious to leave for church that he carries Francine from the bedroom, not giving her time to put on her bra. When she protests, he tells her to keep her arms crossed, so “Jesus won’t see ’em.”

After losing the parking space to the neighbor, Chuck White, and his perfect family, Stan listens grumpily to the weary priest’s sermon. The text is Galatians 5:14: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is nothing less than “the most important lesson God wants you to learn,” the priest tells the congregation. Suddenly the minister cuts short the sermon when his fishing buddies pull up to the front door of the church. Condensing his message as he dons his fishing gear in the pulpit, the priest says, “God is, uh, good. Devil’s bad.” On the way out, he asks the deacon to wrap up the service, whereupon the lay leader chokes to death on a Communion wafer—as the congregation watches helplessly. This delays the priest from his outing, causing him to complain that now the congregation needs a new deacon. Stan scoffs, “Long hours, no pay, whiny churchgoers—you’d have to be an idiot to volunteer for that position.” Yet as soon as neighbor Chuck volunteers, so does Stan, requiring an election the following Sunday.

When the Smiths return home, the alien Roger asks how church was. Daughter Hayley replies, “Waste of time.” Son Steve, still unspoiled (and enamored with Chuck White’s daughter), says, “Love has a face.” Stan begins planning his campaign for deacon, but his motive is naked envy, the opposite of the sermon’s text to love your neighbor. The contest is important because Chuck White, he explains in a blithely hurtful way to Francine, has a better house, a bigger paycheck, and a nicer wife and family. Since the Whites have offered their home for the previous deacon’s postfuneral potluck, the Smiths must arrive with the perfect dish—Francine’s potato salad.

A particularly bizarre series of plot twists follow. Roger, who is a hermaphrodite and in the middle of an asexual reproductive cycle, eats all the potato salad and has to make a late-night substitute. Without mayonnaise, he resorts to his alien breast milk, without informing the Smiths. The adulterated potato salad is a huge hit among the parishioners, and Stan’s prospects soar. But the congregation members crave more, so Roger has to be force-fed and milked to provide enough of the secret ingredient. Exhausted, the alien passes out in the Smith living room and has to be resuscitated by young Steve, who has just learned CPR. But in giving the creature mouth-to-mouth, he ingests an alien egg and becomes pregnant. Stan has another problem besides his pregnant son: he is afraid someone will learn the secret of the potato salad. So he calls on White House advisor Karl Rove, who arrives at the home in the form of the Angel of Death, although Hayley recognizes him as “the amoral puppet master behind George Bush.”

The next Sunday, election day at church, the priest is recounting in his sermon a miracle he experienced personally: God turned around an NFL game he had bet on, enabling him to beat the spread in the closing minutes and buy a new car. Stan wins the election, declaring himself “the chosen one” and mooning his rival in the adjoining pew. However, his triumph is short-lived. First, Stan drives Steve to Mexico (“God’s blind spot”) for an abortion but then changes his mind and decides to support his son’s desire to have the child. Knowing his choice will ruin him at church, the following Sunday he renounces his deacon’s position before the congregation, claiming he is possessed by the devil. Steve’s pregnancy is inadvertently transferred to Chuck White’s gymnast daughter when she, in turn, kisses the boy. As nonsensical as the plot is, it still drew criticism from the conservative organization Parents Television Council, which named it the “Worst TV Show of the Week” on its Web site. Reviewer Caroline Schulenburg called it sacrilegious, adding, “‘Deacon Stan, Jesus Man’ attempted to satirize church politics and conservative views on abortion but failed.” (In another episode, in the finest Fox News tradition, Stan does battle against secular nonbelievers in the bogus “War against Christmas.”)

For all its scrutiny, the watchdog group overlooked a potentially more controversial undertone, namely, the strong gay subtext running through this episode. Like some other mainline Protestant denominations, the Episcopal Church is tearing itself apart over the issue of homosexuality: whether the venerable denomination should allow the ordination of noncelibate gay clergy and the consecration of openly gay bishops, and whether to bless same-sex unions. These issues are not directly addressed in this episode of American Dad, but they are certainly alluded to. The deacon who chokes to death is obviously gay, with a partner who mourns him, if churlishly. At the postfuneral potluck at the Whites’ home, Chuck approaches another gay couple in his living room and suggestively tells the men that he would do anything to be elected deacon, as they look at each other quizzically. (In another episode, Log Cabin Republicans sing that it is possible to be gay and still have “good, old-fashioned Christian morals,” as they kneel around a life-sized crucifix.

5. South Park. Much like my encounters with The Simpsons, Disney’s animated features, and Family Guy, I discovered South Park in the early 2000s through my children. Now teenagers, they have considerably more latitude in choosing their weekend and vacation television viewing than when I began the first edition of this book. But what I gave up in parental control I made up for in walk-by derogatory commentary on their choices—like South Park. Passing through our living room, hearing bad language coming from the television voiced by crudely animated children, I would regularly disparage the cartoon show. Finally, my son Asher suggested I slow down and take another look. The show, he insisted, contained a good deal of religion and, yes, morality. I took his advice and learned, as happens from time to time, that he was right.

No animated show has dashed through the door to religion opened by The Simpsons with more gusto, or to greater effect and controversy, than Comedy Central’s long-running hit. With the help of a full-length movie in 1999 that grossed more than $52 million at the U.S. box office, South Park is firmly ensconced in American popular culture, although with a far smaller audience than The Simpsons. New episodes of South Park, one of Comedy Central’s highest-rated programs, continue to draw nearly 3.5 million viewers per week, most of them teenage boys and young men. South Park’s characters and creators have landed on magazine covers and are the subject of hundreds of Web sites. While it can be distasteful in the extreme, the show is especially popular with the 18–34 demographic coveted by advertisers. In 2005, the show extended its reach beyond cable, to syndication on broadcast stations, reaching an estimated 85 percent of the country, including forty-eight of the nation’s top fifty markets. However, some of the episodes based on religion were considered so offensive to believers that they could not be edited for broadcast.

Before each episode, producers give fair, if absurd, warning: a disclaimer cautions that, due to offensive language and content, the show “should not be viewed by anyone.” Pint-sized and potty-mouthed, South Park’s main characters are four fast-talking children in the third and fourth grade in the fictional Rocky Mountain town of South Park. Visually, Stan, Kyle, Eric, and Kenny are reminiscent of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts gang, with round, oversized heads and short bodies. (In one of their Christmas specials, South Park characters recite from the Gospel of Luke, just as Charlie Brown does in the Peanuts annual holiday television special.) But for the most part, the South Park quartet is nasty, naughty, and nihilistic. In one episode of The Simpsons, Marge finds Bart and his friends watching South Park but makes them turn it off because the Comedy Central show is not “life affirming.” Sometimes the dialogue that emerges from the South Park quartet’s vile little bodies is almost impossible to listen to. And often the imagery is worse. There is a creepy—if age appropriate—preoccupation with feces. And nothing is off limits for humor, from cancer to children with severe physical and mental disabilities.

For more than a decade, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have simultaneously embraced and pummeled religion. While still in college in Colorado, the pair’s first effort involved a short film in which Jesus used his halo to decapitate Frosty the Snowman, who was a serial killer. Today, South Park is one of the most cosmological shows on the small screen, where the philosophical nature of the universe is examined and a place where occasionally scatology meets eschatology. Religion appears in the show in many manifestations, some predictable and some unlikely. When characters—even the most unsympathetic—are in desperate need, they cry out to God for help or go to Jesus for advice (although not as frequently as they do to their school’s cafeteria chef). When South Park residents begin to spontaneously combust, their first reaction is, “God must be angry with us.” Infrequently, but occasionally, characters believe they have visions from God. Eric Cartman is the meanest of the crew and their foil, a misanthropic anti-Semite being raised by his sweet, promiscuous, single mother (in a home where crucifixes are prominently displayed). He believes he has a revelation that God wants him to form a boy band and earn ten million dollars.

Woven through the narratives are fundamental questions about faith, often going deeper and far beyond The Simpsons. Like its Fox predecessor, South Park has dealt with the nature and purpose of God, the role of prayer, salvation, hell, Jewish identity, cults, euthanasia, and the Christian missionary experience. But the Comedy Central show has also taken on religious broadcasting, Mormonism, the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, anti-Semitism, spiritualism, and contemporary Christian music. An episode about teaching evolution at South Park Elementary despite the protests of religious parents features the biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, who argues his case for atheism. Another episode has Saddam Hussein in hell, taking the devil as his lover. There is also ecumenical syncretism in South Park: Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith are all Jesus’ friends and allies in combating evil. God their father, who says he is a Buddhist, appears as a cat with the head of a hippopotamus. “Every religion has their own version of God, and none of them makes sense,” Stone explained in one DVD commentary. In a 1998 interview with the Jewish Exponent weekly newspaper, Stone, a self-described “agnostic Jew,” offered a simple rationale for including so much theology in South Park: “Religion is funny.”

During a lengthy telephone interview from the show’s Los Angeles office, Stone told me that, at first, he and his partner were surprised to be asked about the show’s religious content. “We never really thought about it until someone pointed it out,” he says. “The real question is, ‘Why is there so little religion everywhere else on television?’ I don’t know why. South Park carved out a niche there. Because we’re on cable, and we already have a reputation for being outrageous, we can do stuff you can’t do on shows like Friends. We’re allowed to go places with religion that a lot of network shows are not. They think they’re going to offend people. The only interest the shows that do deal with religion have is to slam it or rob its symbols, to pillage it.”

South Park’s writing staff took a different view. “Matt and Trey’s approach is to go where nobody else will go, to areas that people are afraid to touch,” said Anne Garefino, the show’s executive producer, a product of Catholic schools and still a regular Sunday mass goer. “In writers’ meetings, we spend 50–75 percent of our time talking about religious themes. You can’t poke fun at something unless you have a serious understanding of what it is,” she told me in an interview. This fascination with faith has not escaped the attention of perceptive fans and cultural critics. The show is “perhaps the most striking example of the peculiar places in which the media-consuming public is offered a chance to meet God,” according to Gerry Bowler, a religion researcher and historian who was among the first to write about religious content in The Simpsons. In an essay for the Canadian Web journal ChristianWeek.org, he wrote, “Surprisingly, it is the foul-mouthed South Park where the theology is impeccable—a treacherous devil, an unconquerable Jesus, a fickle and greedy public, quick to desert God.”

Other academic literature supports this view. In her 2002 honors thesis at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, based on the show’s first five seasons, Janet Pantland found that South Park’s approach to religion is roughly similar to that described earlier in this book to The Simpsons:

Religion in South Park is about economy: the people give and believe only as long as they are on the winning side and therefore guaranteed of getting something back. . . . It simply allows religion (or aspects of religion) to be critically evaluated in the same way that other facets of society are evaluated.

South Park does not teach us about or promote religions, nor does it try to destroy religion. In South Park, the poke is always at religious institutions and our expectations of religion, not at the spiritual heart of religion itself. Both God and Jesus are portrayed as loving and wise. . . . It is religious expectations and institutions—rather than genuine religious experiences—that bear the brunt of South Park’s scathing satire.

Jesus. Jesus is not just a resident of South Park; he is a character who appears frequently. His most famous segment was a boxing match with Satan, prompted by a playground spat with the Prince of Darkness’s son, Damien, and televised as a pay-per-view event. (Jesus is so overmatched that he triumphs only because the devil takes a dive, having bet against himself. The match has spawned popular tee-shirts and even action figures.) As host of a local, public access talk show, the Nazarene is portrayed as more of a flawed superhero than a savior. But there he is, flying around in the opening credits and taking center stage in more than a dozen episodes. Jesus came to live in South Park almost as an afterthought, Stone told me. Originally, the town’s agents of supernatural intervention were to be aliens from outer space. But the X Files had become popular, and Stone and Parker did not want it to seem like their show was a satire of the live-action hit. Jesus of South Park often admits that he doesn’t have all the answers, and sometimes he simply declines to intervene in the world, as when the local elementary school’s football team was being shut out by a rival. And, like his biblical counterpart, he can be short-tempered.

Parker and Stone’s college film led to a brief promotional video that in turn led to the series. In the college film, which the pair turned into a video Christmas card, Jesus gets into a swearing, kung fu fight with Santa Claus in a mall over the true meaning of Christmas (correct answer: presents). Another Christmas episode in the series called “Red Sleigh Down” features Jesus shooting his way into Baghdad to rescue Santa, who was kidnapped by Saddam Hussein. In the attack, Jesus takes an apparently fatal bullet in order to save Santa, who later tells the assembled South Park citizens that, in the future, Christmas will commemorate “a brave man named Jesus” who died for them. The cable TV phone-in show on South Park’s public access channel is called Jesus and Pals—the house band is called “The Disciples”—and the host’s unique abilities enable him to know callers’ names before they identify themselves. When one caller asks “how the hell” he already knew his name, Jesus snaps, “Well, maybe it’s because I’m the Son of God, brainiac!” Yet Jesus’ powers are sometimes limited. When South Park is threatened with destruction by a monstrous, mechanical Barbra Streisand on the rampage, and one resident cries out for God’s help, it is Robert Smith of the rock group the Cure who comes to the town’s rescue. Even Jesus hails him as “our savior.” “Jesus is open season,” Stone told a meeting of a television critics association in Hollywood in July 2006.

This portrayal has set some Christians on edge. “As Christians, when they take the character of Christ and make him into a cartoon character and have him do and say things that are totally out of his character, that’s a very flippant attitude to take toward a person millions of Americans believe to be the Son of God,” said Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association (AFA), based in Tupelo, Mississippi. “They depend on humor being degenerate.” His group has crusaded against South Park, taking credit for driving off advertisers Geico, Best Buy, Footlocker, and Finish Line, as well as for convincing JC Penney to stop carrying the show’s merchandise. “I wish they would lose all their sponsors,” Wildmon told me in an interview. “That show does not deserve to be sponsored by reputable companies.” In the past, Wildmon and his organization denounced the show as “crude,” “sacrilegious” and “despicable.” And that was before yet another Christmas episode that featured a warm, woodland tableau of cuddly creatures surrounding a creche, all paying homage to a baby antichrist.

Over the years, Wildmon has had plenty of company. Conservative media pundit L. Brent Bozell III called South Park a “curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit” in a column posted on the Parents Television Council Web site. The movie version, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, was denounced as coming “straight from the smoking pits of hell” by Thomas A. Carder, on the Web site of the Childcare Action Project. “This extraordinarily vulgar, vile, and repugnant movie [is] sinematic [sic] cyanide,” designed “to promote licentious belittlement of wholesome life,” Carter wrote. “Some of the scenes in South Park reminded me so much of the image of demons screeching and dancing around a boiling cauldron as Satan gleefully looks on from the background, as the demons pitch soul after soul into the boiling cauldron.”

Many fans were not dissuaded by such attacks. Jesus is often put in situations that are “wrong and funny at the same time,” said Teddy Dover of Longwood, Florida. “I can’t think of any other show on television that uses religion so consistently and so blatantly.” In South Park, Jesus’ advice is occasionally categorical: “Cheating is lying and lying is wrong, no matter what the circumstance.” Yet he refuses to take a stand on some thorny issues, such as homosexuality or assisted suicide, which he says he wouldn’t touch “with a sixty-foot pole.” Alone one Christmas, he sits before a cake with candles, singing, “Happy birthday to me.” Jesus, who addresses God as “Dad,” also has his lighter moments. While singing in a local nightclub, he twirls his halo on his finger. Perhaps because it is so over-the-top in its mocking of religion, like Monty Python’s Life of Brian, South Park has largely escaped criticism from evangelicals, apart from Wildmon’s group and a few Christian Web sites.

Parker, a Monty Python fan, is not surprised that Jesus’ portrayal has not provoked a backlash from Christians. In South Park, he explained at a television critics’ press conference in Pasadena in January 1998, “Jesus is a great guy.” Stone acknowledged that the two writers bring a “humanistic approach to Jesus. He’s a regular guy. But he’s a very good regular guy.” In several episodes, Parker added, “he’s the hero and he tries to have other people follow him, so I don’t know what they have to protest about.”

Louis Giovino, a spokesman for the conservative, New York–based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, has some suggestions. Giovino told National Public Radio that South Park made Life of Brian “look like a playground.” The animated series “is very vicious in its satire toward most religions.” Other Catholic observers disagreed. “In the midst of all this gross-out, puerile humor are flashes of insight into the religious condition,” said Father James Martin, associate editor and culture critic of America magazine, the national Catholic weekly, and author of My Life with the Saints. “In a way it’s very subversive because it leads people through one door—humor—and leads them out another,” to a serious consideration of faith and theology.

As Martin suggests, Jesus also makes some profound theological points in the show. People in South Park are concerned that the world might end at the turn of the millennium, so they pray for revelation and assurance from God the Father, who doesn’t respond immediately. “God can’t answer every prayer and suddenly give you everything you want,” Jesus explains to the waiting, restive crowd. “That takes all the living out of life. . . . If God answered all our prayers, there’d be nothing left for us to do ourselves. Life is about problems and overcoming those problems and growing and learning from obstacles. If God just fixed everything for us, there’d be no point in our existence. . . . Yea! Believe in me and ye shall find peace.” Alas, that is not what the crowd has come to hear. “We’ve heard that crap for about two thousand years now!” a character shouts. “We wanna hear something new.”

Sometimes what they hear is troubling. Kenny McCormick, the smallest of the South Park quartet, is a poor, forlorn boy whose dialogue is largely unintelligible, since he is usually muffled inside a hooded red parka. And in most episodes Kenny is killed—often horribly—only to reappear (resurrected?) without explanation the next week. Kenny’s regular comings and goings provided an opportunity for South Park to deal with the controversial case of Terri Schiavo. In the episode, Kenny, like the Florida woman, is in a persistent vegetative state, being fed through a tube, with the last page of his living will missing. The doctor tells his parents, “Kenny is the same as he ever was. It’s just that now he’s more like a tomato.” The boy’s fate turns into a national media circus. Two angels insist that “God intended Kenny to die” and not to be “kept alive artificially,” but only because the boy’s spirit (and video game skills) are needed to help defend heaven from an invasion from hell. For the same reason, Satan needs Kenny kept alive—to keep him out of the cosmic fray. One of the Prince of Darkness’s minions recommends that, in times like this, the devil should “do what we always do—use the Republicans.” So the hellish emissary does just that, whispering into the ear of a posturing GOP congressman (“Removing the feeding tube is murder”) on the steps of the Capitol. Kenny is finally permitted to expire when the last page of his will is found. In it he has written, “If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please for the love of God don’t ever show me in that condition on national television.” In an interview with the New York Times, Stone said, “There’s kind of nothing funny about the Terri Schiavo thing—so that’s why we did it.” Like everyone else, he added, the show’s creators “found the whole thing fascinating. That show, and humor in general, is how we work it out.” On other occasions, what South Park residents and viewers get is a very jaundiced, if not heretical, view of God. In an episode dealing with the life-saving uses of stem cells, Stan asks the lovable cafeteria chef, Jerome McElroy, voiced by soul singer Isaac Hayes, why God would let Kenny die. “Why?” Stan says. “Kenny’s my friend. Why can’t God take someone else’s friend?” As soothing piano music plays, Chef replies, in an equally soothing voice: “Stan, sometimes God takes those closest to us because it makes him feel better about himself. He is a very vengeful God, Stan. He’s all pissed off about something we did thousands of years ago. He just can’t get over it, so he doesn’t care who he takes. Children, puppies, it don’t matter to him, so long as it makes us sad. Do you understand?” Stan is puzzled. If that is true, he asks, “Why does God give us anything to start with?” Well, Chef explains, “look at it this way. If you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop. Then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then you would have nothin’ to cry about. That’s like God, who gives us life and love and help just so that he can tear it all away and make us cry, so he can drink the sweet milk of our tears. You see, it’s our tears, Stan, that give God his great power.”

Catholics. Apparently, with the exception of a small Jewish community and the occasional Mormon family, everyone in South Park is Catholic and attends one, unnamed church. That congregation is led by a priest, Father Maxi (probably a play on Maxi Priest, the reggae singer), with the assistance of a sensitive nun, Sister Anne, whose order is called the Bleeding Eyes of Jesus. After nine people are mowed down by an elderly driver at South Park’s farmers’ market, the priest presides over a community memorial service at the site of the tragedy. “It is sometimes hard in times like these to understand God’s way,” he tells the crowd. “Why would he allow nine innocent people to be run down in the prime of their lives by a senior citizen who perhaps shouldn’t be driving? It is then that we must understand God’s sense of humor is very different from our own. . . . God needs complex irony, subtle farcical twists that seem macabre to you and me. All that we can hope for is that God got his good laugh and a tragedy such as this will never happen again”—which, of course, it immediately does.

Maxi is a narrow-minded theologian who denounces Halloween and preaches eternal damnation for a boy with cerebral palsy because he is unable to intelligibly confess his sins. (If the latter seems far-fetched, it isn’t. In 2004, the first Holy Communion of eight-year-old Haley Waldman was revoked by the Catholic Diocese of Trenton, New Jersey. Bishop John Smith, citing a Vatican precedent set by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said it was improper for the girl, who suffers from a rare digestive disorder that makes her allergic to wheat, to be served a rice wafer.) Maxi also condemns anyone who does not accept Jesus and profess Christian faith through Catholic doctrine, like the boys’ friend Kyle Broflovski, who is Jewish. “The Jews crucified our Savior!” the priest says. “I mean, if you don’t go to hell for crucifying the Savior, then what the hell do you go to hell for?” Sister Anne disagrees, at least with regard to the Jews, and phones the pope for support—without success.

But even the venal Father Maxi—who secretly bets on Satan in his fight with Jesus—has his limits. In an episode devoted entirely to the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, he condemns his fellow priests and bishops for not repenting and for steadfastly refusing to renounce their sinful actions. Maxi carries his case to the Vatican, where his luck is no better. “You forgot what being a Catholic is all about,” he tells the Curia and assembled cardinals and bishops in a televised address. “People are losing faith because they don’t see how what you’ve turned religion into applies to them. . . . Look, I’m proud to be a Catholic, but I’m a Catholic in the real world. It’s time for you all to do that too. It’s time for change.” Stone said there was a good deal of anger involved in writing this episode, that everyone on the staff was appalled by the sex scandal and the church’s response to it. (That anger has not abated. In 2006, church leaders were shown in one episode dancing with naked boys at Satan’s Halloween party in Los Angeles.) Father Martin, of America magazine, who had not seen this particular episode, said some material in the series “is extremely hostile and I find it offensive, but that goes with the nature of satire. It’s not surprising that they take pot shots at the Catholics—everyone else has.”

The Catholic League’s founder, William Donohue, did not agree, and predictably tried to spin his criticism of the episode in a way that supported his view of the scandal. He wrote, “The way Stone and Parker have decided to approach the subject shows cowardice, not courage. . . . The scandal in the Church is not about priests having sex with prepubescent boys. It is about priests having sex with post-pubescent young men. . . . If Stone and Parker really had guts, they would do a show on gay priests. But of course, like so many intellectually dishonest elites in our society, they will go to any lengths to protect homosexuals.”

While the Catholic League failed in its effort to keep Comedy Central from airing the clergy pedophile episode again in reruns and in syndication, the group had better luck in December 2005 when Parker and Stone made a more direct and less evenhanded attack on the church. On December 7, the day before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, South Park aired a season finale called “Bloody Mary.” In it, a statue of the Virgin in a town near South Park is reported to be bleeding from the rectum, to miraculous, healing effect to those who are anointed. At first a cardinal verifies the miracle, and Stan’s father, Randy, is cured of alcoholism when a priest makes the sign of the cross on his forehead in the blood. But later, the new pope, Benedict XVI, arrives to inspect the statue and determines that the statue is menstruating and thus is not miraculous. (A parallel, interwoven plot denigrates the Alcoholics Anonymous organization’s reliance on a “higher power.”)

This time, the outrage was explosive. Donohue and other representatives were all over the media with their condemnations. “I don’t mind some fun being poked at the Catholic Church,” Donohue told Rolling Stone magazine, somewhat disingenuously, in light of his previous attacks on the show. “But this was simply vulgar.” Another League spokesperson, Keira McCaffrey, told the Boston Herald, “We realize appealing to Comedy Central on a moral basis isn’t going to get us anywhere.” Nonetheless, the League demanded an apology, and the episode was removed from rebroadcast and any future DVDs. The League also called on former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano Jr., a member of the board of Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, to condemn the episode. A practicing Catholic himself, Califano screened the episode and then released a statement that called it an “appalling and disgusting portrayal of the Virgin Mary. It is particularly troubling to me as a Roman Catholic that the segment has run on the eve and day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day for Roman Catholics.”

Why did South Park persist in its attacks on the Catholic Church? “People think that they can get away with it because Christians don’t protest violently,” McCaffrey told the Hackensack (New Jersey) Record. “We are not taking to the streets with violent signs; we are simply speaking up against disgusting things and making people aware of them and what the media is putting out there.” She acknowledged that the League’s previous letter-writing campaigns had limited impact. But this time the controversy lasted a month and spread halfway around the world. “On the face of it, it is a scurrilous attempt to lampoon Mary the mother of Jesus,” Lyndsay Freer, communications director for New Zealand’s Catholic diocese, told the New Zealand Herald. “It is completely unacceptable that any broadcaster can claim the right to lampoon one who is so deeply loved and esteemed,” Freer said, explaining the diocese’s demand that the episode not be aired and that advertisers boycott the network. The network aired the episode anyway, reaching an audience six times its normal size, but later apologized, thereby having it both ways. In the United States, Comedy Central announced that it would pull the episode from its second scheduled December 28 airing, but only because of the holiday season. Explaining its actions in an e-mail, Comedy Central wrote, “As satirists, we believe that it is our First Amendment right to poke fun at any and all people, groups, organizations and religions, and we will continue to defend that right.”

The Catholic League did not get much help from Protestants over the “Bloody Mary” episode. Hall Poe, a professor of faith and culture at Union University, a Christian university in Tennessee, explained to the Hackensack Record that many Protestants are less offended by such images of the Virgin. “It is a normal thing for people to be insensitive to others,” Poe told the paper. “It is normal but it is not good . . . [since] Mary has not done anything to deserve that kind of abuse.” Still, he added, “if you are coming at it from a perspective purely of faith, then you know God will take care of these things.”

Pentecostals and evangelicals also have taken some lumps of their own in the show. Cynically, Eric decides to form a Christian rock group just to cash in on a trend: “All we have to do is sing songs about how much we love Jesus, and all the Christians will buy our crap.” Pat Robertson and his 700 Club and sanctimonious missionaries in Africa are ripped to shreds in one episode. They do a dead-on impression of Robertson, in particular his avuncular and never-ending begging on what they call the CBC’s 600 Club. The South Park kids and their starving Ethiopian friend return from an alien planet and report that it is the ideal destination to relocate his tribe. A white missionary asks, “Have people on the planet heard the word of Christ?” “No,” Eric answers, “It’s perfect.”

In another episode, Eric reacts to the discovery of Father Maxi having sex with a married woman in the confessional by starting his own church for South Park’s kids. As his equally outraged friend Stan says of the priest, “If this guy is going to hell, who’s going to save us?” Eric’s first vision is to build a glass-walled megachurch, virtually identical to Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. Then, watching religious television while working on his sermon, the boy is inspired to become a faith healer. His preaching is a direct lift from crusades conducted by evangelists like Benny Hinn, including domino-like smack downs of those in need of healing. His antics draw everyone away from the Catholic church to his swinging and swaying congregation. Ultimately, Eric is exposed as a money-grubbing fraud—by his friends and by Sister Anne, with a lot of help from Jesus himself. Before banishing him to Mexico for his sins, Jesus explains, “God doesn’t want you to spend all your time being afraid of hell, or praising his name. God wants you to spend your time helping others and living a good, happy life. That’s how you live for him.”

Yet for all his cynicism and venality, Eric, too, is a believer—at least in desperation. When his friends decide that he is such a pain they will totally ignore him, Eric believes he has died and become a living ghost. “How could my own God forsake me?” he asks. He concludes that his spirit is trapped on earth, blocked from going to heaven because of some unforgiven sins. In his eyes, this is a gross injustice. God forgave the Jews, Eric reasons, so why not him? This is important because of what Eric believes awaits him in heaven: “eternal bliss, divine rest, and ten thousand dollars.” He breaks into a musical number, crooning, “Jesus wants me to have a clean slate.” Roping in his gullible, insecure friend Butters to help him, Eric goes to everyone he has offended in life to ask their forgiveness and to atone for his sins. Instead of going to heaven, Eric learns he has been duped by his friends. Of course, he is more in character when he misuses his faith. As a power-mad school hall monitor, he tells bullied offenders to “go with Christ” to mend their ways.

Mormons. Growing up in Colorado, both Stone and Parker developed a strong interest in Mormons and the religion’s charismatic prophet, Joseph Smith. “My first three girlfriends were Mormons,” Parker told USA Today on January 20, 1998. “I was always sort of infatuated with their religion.” Stone told me much the same thing in our telephone interview. In a DVD commentary, Stone notes that his best friend in sixth grade was a Canadian Mormon, and one summer he spent a week at camp with the boy’s family at a Mormon retreat at Lake Powell in Utah. “That’s where I learned everything about Mormons,” Stone says. This interest and infatuation was not on display in 1998 when Parker directed and costarred in the live-action comedy Orgazmo, screened at the Sundance Festival, which spoofed the porn industry. In the million-dollar production, Parker plays a naive Mormon missionary in Hollywood who stumbles into the leading role in a porn movie in an effort to raise money for his upcoming wedding. In one scene, as the title character, the missionary declares, “I’m not a superhero—I’m a latter-day saint.”

But in South Park, in the years that followed, the show included Joseph Smith in its episode about “Super Best Friends,” putting the Mormon founder on a par with Jesus, Moses, and Buddha. When South Park residents build a ladder to heaven and are given a look, the only people there are Mormons. “Boy, did we guess wrong!” one of the visitors exclaims. And from time to time, Mormon missionaries pop up in various episodes. But in the show’s seventh season, Parker and Stone turned their full attention to the faith in an episode entitled “All about Mormons.” In it, a Mormon family named Harrison moves to South Park from Utah, and their young son, Gary (voiced by one of the show’s writers, Kyle McCulloch, himself a Mormon), wants to be friends with Stan. What unfolds is a remarkable portrait of the history and modern practice of Mormonism, a mixture of a lot of ridicule and a modicum of grudging respect. The historical sections are punctuated by an off-camera chorus, which sings, either “dum, dum, dum, dum,” or, more likely, “dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.” Gary’s family is unfailingly positive, supportive, and happy, especially during the weekly “Family Home Evenings,” when the television is turned off and Mormons sing, talk, pray, and play games. This kind of experience leaves Stan ambivalent: first he is hostile, then admiring, and finally skeptical.

The Harrisons are so sincerely loving that Stan’s father, Randy—initially outraged by his son’s interest in what he believes is a cult—decides the whole Marsh family should become Mormons, even though the Harrisons do not push their faith on their neighbors. “They’re real nice people” who love each other, Randy explains to his wife, “so there must be something to their religion.” Stan ultimately rebels at the conversion. He maintains that to accept Mormon theology is to choose faith over logic: “If you’re gonna say things that have been proven wrong, like that the first man and woman lived in Missouri and that the Native Americans came from Jerusalem, then you’d better have something to back it up.” Likewise the Book of Mormon’s account of sacred writings Smith found on gold plates buried in Upstate New York: “All you’ve got are a bunch of stories about some [expletive] who read plates nobody ever saw out of a hat and then couldn’t do it again when the translations were hidden!” Even Stan’s denunciation does not offend the cheerful and unshakably positive Harrisons, who say it’s fine if Stan doesn’t share their beliefs. “Oh, stop it!” Stan shouts in frustration. “That’s another thing! Why do you have to be so freakin’ nice all the time? It isn’t normal! You just weasel people into your way of thinking by acting like the happiest family in the world and being so nice to everyone that you just blindside dumb people like my dad!”

The episode concludes not with the traditional “lesson” voiced by Stan or Kyle, but with a clear-eyed plea for tolerance from Gary, who is cruelly rejected by the other kids. “Maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith made it all up,” Gary says. “But I have a great life and a great family and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that.” The faith’s history and theology are irrelevant, he says, and he doesn’t care. “What the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice, and helping people.” Adding a very vivid insult, Eric—Gary’s chief tormentor—declares him cool.

Interestingly, at the time it was broadcast this episode drew no significant official criticism from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As the “All about Mormons” article on the Wikipedia Web site points out, Parker and Stone avoided the cheapest shot of all: there is no mention of polygamy, a discarded Mormon practice that has dogged the faith for more than a century. Years after the episode aired, it was still an object of interest to thoughtful and image-conscious Mormons. In August 2006 I was part of a panel on religion and popular culture in Salt Lake City sponsored by the liberal Sunstone Foundation. About 150 people watched the complete episode and listened to an academic presentation on the subject by Dennis Potter, assistant professor of religious studies and Mormon studies coordinator at the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley State College. Reading from a paper entitled “The Americanization of Mormonism Reflected in South Park,” Potter asserted, “In telling the story of the founding of the religion, the South Park authors make it clear that the theology is rather unbelievable,” in that they neglect the ways in which it mirrors the miraculous theology of Christianity. At the same time, he told the symposium, “it is clear that the authors embrace the Mormon lifestyle as an idealization of the perfect American lifestyle. The authors are not making fun of the perfection of the Mormons and so it is not anti-Mormon by being a mockery of Mormon life. They embrace the perfection of this lifestyle. However, the authors think that the theology is crazy.”

Parker and Stone defend their portrayal of Mormonism in the episode’s DVD commentary. “There were a lot of Mormons in Colorado—I guess because it’s so close to Utah—where I grew up,” Parker says. “My ex-girlfriend in high school was Mormon, and I had to go to her family’s house for Family Home Evening a few times. . . . I’d always sort of said basically every Mormon I know is a really good person and really nice. And I can’t really rip on them because it’s obviously working because they’re good people and nice people. . . . The hardest thing about this episode was that we were doing stuff and saying, ‘Here’s what Mormons think and here is the Mormon religion,’ but everyone thought we were just making stuff up to be funny. But we’re not. We’re not making stuff up in this show.”

Matt agreed. “A lot of people, especially like the younger audience, they never loved the more political or religious shows much. . . . The younger audience is like, well, that wasn’t that funny, you know. Because they just didn’t get it. But the people who thought this episode was really funny were Mormons, because they knew all this stuff and were told this stuff from the time they were little. And seeing this stuff animated just helped kind of showing them how dumb all this stuff is.”

Jews. Kyle, who is Jewish, is frequently ambivalent about his faith and is often the target of crude, anti-Semitic taunts from Eric. When a whiny, complaining cousin from Connecticut comes to stay with him, Kyle is so embarrassed by the boy’s stereotypical behavior that he feels he is in danger of becoming a self-hating Jew. Yet in another episode, Kyle enters a Hasidic yeshiva in New York—“The Jewleeard School”—to please his grandmother’s spirit. He flees home with his brother Ike to save the adopted toddler from his scheduled circumcision, which he confuses with more drastic surgery. In another episode, confused when Father Maxi tells him that, as a Jew, he is doomed to an afterlife in the lake of fire, the boy is set straight by his parents. First, his mother tells him that Jews don’t share the Catholic view of hell. Their faith, his father, Gerald, a lawyer, explains, “is all about being a good person now. You see, Christians use hell as a way of scaring people into believing what they believe. But to believe in something just because you’re scared of the consequences if you don’t is no reason to believe in something.”

In another episode, Kyle brings Kenny, a Christian, to a “Jew Scouts” camp in the woods, for a celebration called “Jewbilee.” Coached by Kyle’s family on the drive, Kenny has to pretend to be Jewish, but is discovered and expelled from the camp. The convoluted plot involves a meeting of Jewish elders in one of the cabins—likely a reference to the anti-Semitic canard The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a scene in the show in which fractured Hebrew is spoken. Later, the elders and the scouts sit around the fire, worshiping Moses and conjuring up his image. “All debts forgiven and all slaves freed,” Moses intones, as everyone else sings “Kumbaya.” In the end, Kenny foils a plot to destroy the world’s Jews. “You know,” says Kyle, “it’s fine to have your own beliefs and your own traditions. But as soon as you start excluding people from your ways, only because of their race, you become a separatist,” which he denigrates in a typically rude way. Kyle even questions the existence of God, to the point of renouncing his faith, when his tormenter Eric inherits a million dollars from his grandmother while Kyle gets a hemorrhoid. His parents’ account of the book of Job, at his bedside, only exacerbates his feelings.

In August 2004, South Park released a DVD featuring three recent episodes dealing with faith, including their satire of The Passion of the Christ, mischievously timed to coincide with the DVD release of Mel Gibson’s controversial blockbuster. An accompanying press release boasted that South Park “is one of the few shows to explore different religious themes in an intelligent and boldly irreverent way.” Talk about understatement. The Passion episode, which originally aired while the film was still in theaters, was irresistible to the Gibson movie’s critics. “Combining pop culture with that religiosity—there’s great comedy there,” Stone told the Los Angeles Times. Much of the episode, called “The Passion of the Jew,” deals with the film’s impact, stoking Eric’s anti-Semitism and Kyle’s Jewish guilt. After seeing the movie, Eric is inspired to organize a Nazi-like pogrom against the town’s Jews, and Kyle demands that his congregation apologize for deicide. The episode also portrays Gibson as certifiably insane, less absurd in light of his 2006 drunk driving arrest and diatribe. In one scene he is shown playing the banjo in his underpants, singing “Jesus, How I Love You.” However, the conclusion of the episode was anything but absurd. Stan says, “If you want to be Christian, that’s cool, but you should follow what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed. Focusing on how he got killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad results.” People in the crowd agree. “We shouldn’t focus our faith on the torture and execution of Christ,” says one. “We shouldn’t rely on violence to inspire faith,” another agrees.

The South Park Gospel. The sermonette at the end of The Passion parody is typical of prime-time cartoon convention. For about twenty-six minutes on most South Park episodes, every subject on earth is fair game for ruthless lampooning. Then just before the final credits comes a two- or three-sentence moral lesson, usually voiced directly to the audience by Stan or Kyle, the voices of Christian and Jewish reason, respectively. These messages seem almost out of context and character, preceded by the words, “I think the lesson here is . . . ,” or, “You know, I learned something today.” They range from sincere to saccharine, although they are sometimes undercut with irony, what resentful comedy writers call “the take-back.” After rejecting his baby brother Ike because he is both adopted and Canadian, Kyle observes, “Having a little brother is a special thing.” In the episode dealing with Ike’s belated circumcision, Kyle says, “Family isn’t about whose blood you have. It’s about who you care about.” Or the mad scientist whose cloning experiment has gone hideously and hilariously awry concludes, “Perhaps we shouldn’t be toying with God’s creations. Perhaps we should leave nature alone.” Some contemporary animators resent this convention. Stone told me he and Parker based these sometimes-didactic closing messages on early animated films for children. The lesson, he insists, is “not preachy, but it deals with ethics and morals, because that’s where comedy comes from. It gives the show coherence.”

In the end, the South Park gospel is simple, the watered-down antithesis of evangelical Protestant belief in salvation through grace, rather than through works: be a good person, be nice to others, try your best, and don’t worry too much about the hereafter. As Butters puts it when Stan makes a fruitless effort in a good cause, “You gave it your best shot, and that’s all Jesus asks of you.” Or as Randy, Stan’s dad, says in another episode, “The only heaven we can hope for is one here on earth, now. We should stop waiting to get into heaven, and start trying to create it.” When the kids fail to build their own ladder to heaven, Stan says, “We think heaven is not a place you get to. Maybe heaven is just an idea, a frame of mind. . . . Maybe heaven is this moment right now.”

At times, however, South Park characters can sound like angry, Old Testament prophets. One perceptive young girl, Wendy Testaburger, observes that “lewdness and shallowness are being exalted” by the celebrity culture. In a tirade worthy of the prophet Jeremiah, her father shouts, “Women are being marketed to by corrupt, moralless corporations.” Fathers and mothers are allowing their preteen daughters to be sexualized by a stupid, superficial celebrity like Paris Hilton and her pop diva contemporaries, he says. Even the series degenerate, Mr. Slave, is outraged: “Parents, if you don’t teach your children that people like Paris Hilton are to be despised, where are they going to learn it? You have to be the ones to make sure your daughters aren’t looking up to the wrong people.” No one was more surprised to hear this pulpit-worthy denunciation than Donald Wildmon, of the American Family Association, when I read it to him. “Preaching by South Park?” he said. “That doesn’t sound right. That’s strange.”

But it is not so strange, in light of Janet Pantland’s academic paper for the University of South Africa on South Park’s first five seasons. The show, she wrote, essentially tears down our pre-programmed answers and reactions, forcing us to re-evaluate religious issues. For many people religion has become habit. We have the right answers to the right questions, we know what to do and when to do it, but we do not actually live religion. South Park questions our pat answers. It does not say they are wrong, it just forces us to actually think about them while we are reciting them. It takes away our religious crutches, forcing a radical examination of our own religious lives. If your own religious faith and moral principles are firm, it can be refreshingly unlimited, revealing and perceptive.

 

Scientology and Tom Cruise. Two high-profile controversies in the 2005–2006 season involving religion returned the show to the headlines. South Park’s reputation has always been that of an equal opportunity offender. The producers “pretty much go after every religion—Christians, Jews, Mormons,” said one fan, Jeremy Smith, of Winter Park, Florida. “It’s typical comedy; they don’t care about offending anybody.” In the fall of 2005, the show took on Scientology and its most visible proponent, Tom Cruise. When they did, the show’s writers and its creators went into overdrive. Stan Marsh is mistaken by Scientologists for the reincarnation of the religion’s founder, the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and the boy is given a behind-the-scenes look at the spiritual path made famous by Hollywood celebrities. For the next twenty minutes, the religion is described as a “global scam” and ripped to shreds. Objects of ridicule include Scientology’s complex, cosmic cartoon origins involving an evil, alien lord in a galaxy far away, and disembodied, wandering souls frozen and dropped into volcanoes, according to the South Park montage. Another target is the religion’s money-grubbing levels of enlightenment. Not a single redeeming aspect of the faith—whose adherents include Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson’s voice)—was presented. For a time, the words “This is what Scientologists actually believe” appeared on screen. Cruise is presented as being made so insecure by Stan’s comment that he is a mediocre actor that he takes refuge in the boy’s closet and refuses to come out. Thus, the refrain throughout the remainder of the episode is, “Tom Cruise, come out of the closet,” clearly a reference to speculation about Cruise’s sexual orientation. The last lines of the episode, repeated three times, are a challenge from Stan to Cruise and the Scientologists: “I’m not scared of you. Sue me!”

Initially, the episode was “no problem at all” for Comedy Central or its attorneys, according to Stone, who recounted the history at a July 13, 2006, press conference with television critics in Hollywood. “We were actually really surprised. We kind of avoided it for a long time because of Scientology’s reputation for taking you to court. And when we ran the idea past Comedy Central, the lawyers, at least, they said, ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’ So getting it on the air wasn’t really a big deal.” But Stone acknowledged that its helter-skelter production schedule, turning an episode around in a week, worked in their favor. “If the show sat on the shelf, so to speak, for a couple of months before it went on the air, I don’t think it would ever have made it to the air.”

When the episode was broadcast, it turned out to be a very big deal for Cruise. The reaction of the notoriously thin-skinned actor and his notoriously litigious religion was predictable—if largely delayed. Initially, they succeeded in blocking the episode from being aired in England. Then, in early 2006, the week it was set to rerun in the United States, longtime cast member Isaac Hayes, who plays the wise if lascivious cafeteria chef (with a taste for group sex), resigned from the cast. “There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins,” said Hayes, who was raised as a Baptist but is a practicing and outspoken Scientologist. “Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored.” Parker and Stone, no shrinking violets, shot back. “In ten years and over 150 episodes of South Park, Isaac never had a problem with the show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons or Jews,” Stone said in a statement issued by Comedy Central. “He got a sudden case of religious sensitivity when it was his religion featured on the show.” Still, Stone added, “of course we will release Isaac from his contract, and we wish him well.” Later Stone told the Associated Press that he and Parker “never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me that is where intolerance and bigotry begin. . . .This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology. . . . He has no problem—and he’s cashed plenty of checks—with our show making fun of Christians.”

Parker told the Web site ContactMusic.com that for years he and Stone avoided the subject of Scientology to avoid offending Hayes. “To be honest,” he said in the interview, “what kept us from doing it before was Isaac Hayes. We knew he was a Scientologist and he’s an awesome guy. We’re like, ‘Let’s just avoid that for now.’ ” Ultimately, Parker said, “we just had to tell Isaac, ‘Dude, we totally love working with you, and this is nothing personal, it’s just we’re South Park, and if we don’t do this, we’re belittling everything else we’ve ripped on.’ ” At the July critics’ press conference in Hollywood, Stone added that Hayes came to them after the episode aired in November, for a two-hour meeting: “He asked us to pull the episode off the air, to go to the network and pull the episode off the air, don’t ever have it made into DVDs.” Parker, at the same press conference, said, “We knew what might happen when we made the episode. But we didn’t want to be hypocrites. We always say, ‘Hey, it’s all okay to make fun of, or none of it is. Everything has got to be okay.”

To be fair, no other religion sniped at previously on South Park received the unrelenting negative treatment meted out to Scientology in the episode. And in fact, Parker’s comments notwithstanding, this was actually the second time South Park had taken a shot at the religion. The precursor came in a July 4, 2001, episode called “Super Best Friends,” in which the boys’ fascination with the magician David Blaine draws them into a cult—“Blainetology”—based on the celebrity and his best-selling book. In the end, the spell is broken, and Stan declares that cults are bad: “They promise you hope, happiness, and maybe even an afterlife, but in return they demand you pay money. Any religion that requires you to pay money to move up and learn its tenets is wrong.” Does that sound familiar?

Regardless, the 2006 battle escalated, as some with longtime grievances against South Park joined in. “I’m glad Mr. Hayes is finally recognizing South Park’s bigotry and intolerance toward religion, and hope it is not just because his own beliefs were attacked on the show. Christians have been outraged with the show’s handling of their faith, especially Trey Parker’s portrayal of Jesus Christ, since day one,” said Focus on the Family’s Bob Waliszewski. “However, comments by Matt Stone raise an important question. Why has it become acceptable in Hollywood to completely skewer the Christian faith, but many other religions are considered taboo? Hayes’s current opinion of the show as out of bounds is entirely accurate, and he should be commended for seeing it as such, despite the amount of time it took for him to come to this conclusion. Hopefully, this decision will go a long way to getting this trash pulled from the tube once and for all.”

On March 15, 2006, the night of the scheduled rerun, the Scientology episode did not air. Without explanation, another episode was run, this one showcasing the libidinous side of Chef’s character, as well as some scatological material. Speculation about that decision, in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and widely on the Internet, shone a spotlight on the corporate media culture. Cruise, it was alleged, threatened to withhold publicity support for Mission: Impossible 3, for which Paramount Studios had high hopes for the summer. Comedy Central’s parent, Viacom, is also the corporate parent of Paramount. Cruise, Paramount, and Viacom all refuted these conspiracy theories. (Viacom severed its relationship with Cruise in August 2006.) At first, Comedy Central spokesmen said that Parker and Stone would have no further comment on the controversy. Of course, the PR people were dreaming. Employing the jargon of Scientology, Parker and Stone issued a statement to the entertainment newspaper Daily Variety: “So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu.” citing the evil galactic figure in Scientology. The South Park creators signed the statement “Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants to the dark lord Xenu.”

In the end, it’s difficult to say how much of this was a Tom Cruise issue and how much was a Scientology issue. However, this much is clear. What the South Park gang failed to realize is that America’s unassailable religion is corporatism and its unholy son, synergy. The commandment that is inviolable is: Thou shalt not jeopardize the commercial prospects of another business unit. As Stan Marsh might say, “I think the lesson here is that a minor profit center, like a single cable series, is no match for a major profit center like a movie studio with a potential summer blockbuster.” But if this skirmish was lost, the war between the South Park boys and Scientology—not to mention Comedy Central censors and the religious community at large—was just getting into gear. After making their blustering threat, Stone told Rolling Stone, they were in a corner. “Now we have to answer in some way,” he said. “We just haven’t figured out how.” It didn’t take long. “We were like, ‘Okay, game on,’ ” Parker told the Hollywood press conference. As Parker, Stone, and their creative crew readied the next salvo, one could easily imagine the conversation between the show’s creators, on the one hand, and the lawyers and standards and practices people from Comedy Central, on the other: Are you guys going to use the word “Scientology” in the episode? No. Are you going to mention Tom Cruise or any other celebrity? No. Okay boys, then do your worst.

Their worst turned out to be exquisite revenge. The following week’s episode, using previously recorded and reedited dialogue from Hayes, had Chef brainwashed by a group called the “Super Adventure Club,” clearly a stand-in for Scientology. The “adventurers” lionize their founder, a deceased author; use a mind-numbing device that obviously represents the Scientologists’ infamous E-meter; and adhere to a weird cosmic theory that justifies their central tenet: child molestation. During the explanation of their theology, words appear on the screen, explaining, “This is actually what the Super Adventure Club believes,” just as they did in the original Scientology episode. Under the spell of this cult of predatory pedophiles, Chef makes a series of grotesque, explicit propositions and invitations to his beloved but bewildered young friends at school. In vain, the South Park kids try to extricate their friend from the “fruity little club” that has stolen him away. In the end, the Hayes character is struck by lightning, set afire, dropped down a ravine, impaled on a tree branch, and ripped apart by wild animals. Later, members of the club reanimate him into a child-molesting version of Darth Vader.

Islam. Perversely, Parker and Stone seemed miffed when in February 2006 a dozen cartoons in a Danish newspaper making fun of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, which were widely reprinted in Europe, set off worldwide riots in the Islamic world and Europe. Seeing the demonstrations while channel surfing, Stone leaped to an obvious—if incorrect—conclusion. He told Rolling Stone magazine, “I was like, ‘Oh, [expletive], look what we did! We have to get on the phone to a lawyer!’ ” Years earlier, the Prophet appeared for the first time in a South Park episode called “Super Best Friends,” a wacky paean to ecumenism. Together with Moses, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Joseph Smith, Muhammad had superpowers—in his case the ability to shoot fire from his hands, incinerating cultists, and to turn himself into a badger. The Prophet explained that the religious figures were joined by “the desire to fight for justice.” The reaction at the time from the Muslim world? Nothing. The episode is rotated through the normal syndication schedule and appeared on a subsequent DVD, without protest or controversy. “We had an animated Muhammad five years ago,” Parker told Time magazine on March 13, 2006. “But people say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s just South Park.’ ” A key difference, of course, was that the Danish cartoons were critical of Muhammad, while the portrayal in South Park was benign, if not positive. It still rankled, Stone told Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘Danish cartoons? That’s our competition? The [expletive] Danish?’”

Perhaps emboldened by a recent Peabody Award, Parker and Stone proceeded to pick their biggest fight to date, making up for lost time on the subject of Islam. In a two-part story line, South Park presented the controversy over Muhammad’s image in the form of a show-within-a-show. In this case, it was centered on an episode of Fox’s Family Guy, a series that the Eric character—like Stone, Parker, and other animators around Hollywood—apparently loathes. (“The day that episode aired,” Parker told television critics in Hollywood in July 2006, “we got flowers from The Simpsons. . .. We got calls from King of the Hill saying we were doing God’s work.”) In the South Park episode, a rumor circulates that Family Guy is about to broadcast a show that includes the image of Muhammad, which South Park residents are convinced will result in a Muslim attack on their town. In a sensitivity session on Islam the next day, Mr. Garrison, the boys’ teacher, explains that the reasons Muslim men hate Americans is that they live in sand and are sexually deprived by their religion. Kyle is not convinced that the threat is realistic. “Come on, people,” he says. “Do you really think anybody is going to be that pissed off about a cartoon?”

Nonetheless, rather than defending free speech and expression, town residents resolve to avoid any retribution by literally burying their heads in the sand, albeit with snorkels, to demonstrate their sensitivity. While there is a reprieve when Fox blocks out the controversial image in the first Family Guy episode-within-the-episode, the network president then announces that he is powerless to prevent Family Guy’s writers from allowing the Prophet’s image to appear in the second episode. Kyle goes to Hollywood, where, with the assistance of a crudely drawn Bart Simpson, he persuades the network to allow the image to appear. When it comes to satire, Kyle says, “if you don’t show Muhammad, then you’ve made a distinction between what is OK to poke fun at and what isn’t. Either it’s all OK, or none of it is. Do the right thing.” While in the fictional South Park episode Fox executives are ultimately persuaded to show the image, Comedy Central’s real counterparts were not. Instead, the night of the broadcast the screen went black with the words, “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network.” Without elaboration, Comedy Central released a statement that said, “In light of recent world events, we feel we made the right decision.” Despite the recent battle over Scientology, and the worldwide demonstrations against publication of the Danish cartoons, Stone told the TV critics, “I was absolutely sure, I was a hundred percent sure that Comedy Central would have let us do that because of our track record, because of all the other things we had done, because of the way we were going to do it. . . . Comedy Central was going to be our teammate on this.” As in the case of the Scientology controversy, Parker and Stone had more to say on the subject in a subsequent episode. In response to Family Guy’s broadcast of Muhammad’s image, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, retaliates with his own blasphemous cartoon, one in which Jesus defecates on George W. Bush and the American flag. What hits the president and the flag quickly hit the fan among South Park viewers. With obvious sarcasm, William Donohue of the Catholic League demanded that South Park’s creators resign out of principle for being censored, according to the Associated Press. “The ultimate hypocrite is not Comedy Central. That’s their decision not to show the image of Muhammad or not. It’s Parker and Stone,” Donohue said. “Like little whores, they’ll sit there and grab the bucks. They’ll sit there and they’ll whine and they’ll take their shot at Jesus. That’s their stock in trade.” On CNN, he added, “They take a cheap shot at Christ during Holy Week, and they think that we’re going to sit around and smile about it. . . . Matt Stone and Trey Parker are whores. They are prostitutes. . . . They’re cowards. . . . If they’re men of principle, they should resign immediately and say, ‘Listen, this is out of character. We’re not going to put up with this.’ ” Stone and Parker, discussing the issue months later with the television critics, did not disagree. “That’s the point,” Stone said, of the network’s hypocrisy. “It’s open season on Jesus.” Parker agreed: “You can do anything you want to Jesus.” The lesson, Parker said, is that “if the Catholics don’t want us ripping Jesus anymore, they should just threaten you with violence, and they’ll get their way. That’s why it is such a slippery slope and such a dangerous path to go down.”

Religious Censorship. Parker and Stone had the last word (to date) on the censorship issue, according to the July 13, 2006, Daily Variety. The pair refused to discuss future projects with Comedy Central unless they agreed to show the original Tom Cruise episode, which the network did on July 19. To drive home their point, the duo made the episode, “Trapped in the Closet,” the series’ only submission for an Emmy nomination—which it received. (The Simpsons won in the best animated series category, prompting show-runner Al Jean to quip, “I guess this is what happens when you don’t mock Scientology.”) “It’s true we are not as big as Tom Cruise, but we’ve done two movies for Viacom and 10 years of South Park episodes, and this has been our home,” Stone told Variety. “If they hadn’t put this episode back on the air, we’d have had serious issues, and we wouldn’t be doing anything else with them. . . . We’ve been through a trifecta of annoyances. The ‘Bloody Mary’ episode angered Catholics. And we had a big fight when we wanted to show Muhammad.” Stone repeated his belief that Cruise and Paramount were behind the earlier decision to yank the Scientology episode: “I only know what we were told, that people involved with ‘MI3’ wanted the episode off the air and that is why Comedy Central had to do it. I don’t know why else it would have been pulled.” The fight over the Muhammad episodes was still on their minds. “The mantra has always been everything is fair game,” Stone said, but he believed that the Comedy Central chief who insisted the images of the Prophet be blacked out was mistaken. “I love Doug Herzog, but I think he’s dead wrong and made a totally cowardly decision,” Stone said. “Harper’s recently published the Danish cartoons, and nobody got blown up. The magazine asked us for our uncensored image of Muhammad, and Comedy Central refused.” The network declined comment, Variety reported.

Part of the “anything else” the partners threatened not to do with their corporate parent involved an appearance of Parker with Comedy Central executives at the Television Critics Association visit to Hollywood later that same day, July 13, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The purpose was to promote the show’s upcoming tenth season and a special DVD release. On stage with Stone and Parker were Doug Herzog and Comedy Central spokesman Tom Fox. Stone kicked off the question-and-answer session deadpanning, “First of all, we can’t take any questions about Tom Cruise or Scientology or South Park.” And then they proceeded to talk a good deal about Cruise, Scientology, Muhammad—and corporate censorship. Stone said that he and Parker had not been prepared to quit over the Cruise controversy. They had some leverage with the parent company. “We have a couple of movies with Viacom, and it’s tough to go to work for people you think may be holding one of your episodes hostage. But that’s sort of water under the bridge now because it’s going back on the air.” Parker said he was not surprised that the episode had been nominated for an Emmy. “You can’t pick anything where people are more on your side. This entire city—except Scientology—were like ‘Yeah! Go get ’em!’ ” Stone said they had struck a rich vein with Scientology. “It’s like a field of flowers to run in, for comedians. There’s a lot of funny stuff that is there to be made fun of that some people just won’t go to. For us, it’s material.”

Comedy Central representatives alternated between appearing lame and game at the press conference, explaining why they pulled the rerun of the Scientology episode and then why they permitted it to air. Fox, a spokesman for the cable network, said the episode was pulled so they could choose another one as a tribute to Hayes. “That’s our story and we’re sticking with it,” he said. “This episode just happens to be rotating back in.” Nicely done, Stone piped up. After the session, Herzog told Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post, “We reserve the right to air them when and where we see fit.”

“So there’s two things we can’t do on Comedy Central,” Parker said, “show Muhammad and Tom Cruise.” Stone was more concerned about Muhammad. “We have this really strong political and philosophical position on the Muhammad controversy, and no one wants to talk about that. Everyone just wants to talk about Tom Cruise.” Their original decision, he said, was innocuous. “We wanted to make Muhammad’s image just standing there, totally harmless,” and he and Parker were “one hundred percent sure” Comedy Central would back them. Instead, said Parker, “a new taboo was created out of nothing.” Herzog said the decision to block the image was a “judgment made on behalf of a big media company,” and, in a perfect world, he would have liked to air the episode with the image. He admitted that it was possible that “history might show we overreacted—and we’re willing to live with that. . . . The ramifications are Matt and Trey are pissed off at you and Matt calling you a coward in Daily Variety.” Stone corrected the executive, slightly, saying he called the decision cowardly.

Then Herzog joked that the Muslim prophet’s image was still there, “underneath the black screen,” adding, “We’re looking forward to the day when we can uncover it.”

When I visit churches to talk about The Simpsons, often on Sunday mornings or afternoons, I try to make the case that the show is sympathetic to sincere faith, if not to organized religion. On these occasions I will often conclude by asking those in the pews or the social hall to give the show a chance. Invariably when I do this, the episode airing that evening will be raunchy in the extreme, with nothing positive to say about religion. With South Park, I would never urge a congregation member to watch the show. And don’t wait for a South Park Sunday school study guide from me or from the publisher of this book.

On balance, I think the newfound freedom created by The Simpsons to portray religion is a good thing, but not everyone agrees. “I think there is tastelessness out there,” Ron Buford, a lay minister with the United Church of Christ, told the Hackensack Record. “Even though people might have the license and the freedom that permits free speech, it is unfortunate when the use of religious symbols shows a complete disrespect for the culture and the people.” Not that Buford endorses legal restrictions that would outlaw religious satires, regardless how tasteless. “I can’t stand for freedom of speech on my side and not stand for freedom of speech on their side,” he told the paper. Robert Hodgson, dean of the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship in New York, agreed: “Part of living in Western culture is that in the public square everything can be analyzed, accepted and rejected.” Other religious denominations have become inured to the lampoons. “The Roman Catholic response to a television series, for example, is generally pretty mild and pretty timid partly because there is a very long history of representing the Catholic Church and the Catholic clergy in radio and film,” Hodgson told the paper.

In a March 10, 2006, column in the Chicago Sun-Times, Cathleen Falsani wondered whether everything is now fair game, whether anything could be considered blasphemous or sacrilegious. After all, the irreverent quarterly Heeb: The New Jew Review, showed a topless Virgin Mary when it took its shot at The Passion of the Christ. But the venerable magazine Wittenburg Door still draws the line at “Jesus on the cross” jokes, editor Robert Durden told Falsani. So she, too, consulted Hodgson, who suggested it had a lot to do with perception. “Historically, blasphemy has always been identified with criticizing, denigrating, or marginalizing the sacred, and in Jewish and Christian tradition it’s connected with profaning the name of God, or persons such as Jesus or the Holy Spirit, or even teaching connected with the God of the Bible,” Hodgson told her. “It’s the kind of categorical expression for vast disrespect of the most sacred and holy things in our faith.” When holy symbols are “put back into popular culture and the media in ways that don’t seem consistent with their sacredness, their holiness, that’s where blasphemy occurs,” he said. “The test of blasphemy is often not whether we as the consumers feel a T-shirt of an icon or a statue is misplaced or misused. The real test is what do members of that community of faith think?”

For better or worse, the genie is out of the bottle, the lid to Pandora’s box has been lifted, and religion is now considered fair game for parody, at least in animated comedies. Sometimes it’s treated with grudging, if playful, respect; sometimes it’s treated with nothing more than childish cheap shots. But in every case this shows that what was once confined to discussion within churches, temples, and classrooms has now entered the unhallowed arena of popular culture. As I suggested earlier, this portrayal of faith and religion—whether in snippets or full-length episodes—provides an opportunity to begin meaningful discussions.