Tonight at 8, The Simpsons take a thinly veiled shot at a new local tourist attraction. “I’m Going to Praiseland” is what Simpsons neighbor Ned Flanders resolves to do as a way of paying tribute to his late wife, Maude.
He’s not just going to Praiseland (anything like the local Holy Land Experience, we wonder?). He’s building it. That was Maude’s dream, to set up a Bible-themed amusement park. Ned, the show’s resident Christian fundamentalist, has a moral dilemma when he faces a choice between the truth and a big lie that will increase admissions to the park.
Shots at amusement parks are nothing new on the show, which will begin its 13th season this fall. But neither are religious quandaries. For 12 years, the sitcom about the most dysfunctional family of them all has packed yuks, pratfalls, sly political jabs and corrosive social satire into 22 minutes each week. And, often as not, it has dealt with religion.
“People who have studied this tell me that something like 30 percent of the episodes deal with religion,” said Orlando Sentinel religion writer Mark Pinsky, author of The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family, which hits bookstores this fall. Pinsky sees the series as surprisingly “pro-God, pro-faith,” and he’s got a point.
When Krusty the Klown was forced to deal with his Jewish heritage (and rabbi father), rabbis around the country picked up on the episode and used it to teach kids about their faith. Rev. Lovejoy (“A man who doesn’t ‘love joy’,” Pinsky said.) has wrestled with pastor burnout. Homer has flirted with abandoning religion altogether (“Homer the Heretic”), and the secular humanist Lisa had to contend with a supposed miracle (an angel’s skeleton). Bart, who once slipped Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda da Vida” into church hymnals, found that one way to score a quick $5 was to sell his soul.
And Ned Flanders can be both a beacon of Christian charity and a book-burning pillar of Protestant intolerance.
“Christian activists tell me that, on college campuses, that Ned is a better-known exemplar of Christianity than the pope or Billy Graham,” Pinsky said. Ned’s faith has made him willing to risk his life for his fellow man but also silly enough to ban his kids from playing board games with dice in them “because dice are wicked.” He is, Pinsky says, “a very nuanced character, a guy who would be right at home at a Promise Keepers convention.”
In a landscape where the few TV shows to deal with faith are often treacle (Touched by an Angel), The Simpsons challenges, debates and often as not, shores up religious beliefs, from Christianity to Hinduism. A dozen years into its run, it remains reverent, irreverent, and above all, relevant. Talk about miracles.
Roger Moore
