Anyways, instead I am writing about something totally different. If I had to pick a topic for our class to discuss, it would be the topic of how Christians and the Christian faith are currently portrayed in most pop culture, especially pop culture that appeals especially to teenagers. I am a Christian, so I feel like this is something that I can relate personally to. Out of the pop culture that I tend to pay attention to (I guess "consume" would be the right word?), I have noticed very few representations of Christian characters, and the ones that do exist seem to be very unrealistic.
One representation of Christian characters on television is from the ABC Family show The Secret Life of the American Teenager. This show isn't on the air anymore, but it ran for five seasons from 2008-2012 (the years that I was in high school), and was quite popular with the teen viewing demographic for all of those years. I watched it during the first few seasons, and was intrigued especially with the characters of Grace and Jack, two of the main characters who at the beginning of the show were advertised as evangelical Christians. Yet despite this, both are shown throughout all seasons of the show as being obsessed with relationships and having sex (and not just with each other). The dialogue of the characters and their actions in the show portrayed it as though their obsession with sex was directly related their faith, and as a Christian viewer I found that a bit disturbing. (Granted, the whole show seemed to be very sex focussed but where these two characters were blatantly Christian I didn't see the need to do that). Another example that is sort of similar is from the television show Hart of Dixie (which I have written about before in a different blog post of mine). I love this show and view it in a much higher regard then I did with Secret Life, but I will still acknowledge that they don't portray Christians on the show in the most realistic light. Lemon Breeland, one of the main characters on the show, was raised as a traditional Southern Belle and is seen from season one as being in church every Sunday and being involved in her church community. Yet Lemon frequently engages in premarital sex on the show; and irrelated to her sex life, can be downright cruel to her friends, family and neighbors, and very manipulative to get what she wants when she wants it. Of course this adds drama to the show and makes for an interesting character portrayal... but none of these behaviors are Christian-like at all. (Disclaimer: of course in the religion Christianity the whole belief is that everyone does sin. But what I'm trying to say is that Lemon's actions in the show are often intentional and go beyond that. And I'm sure that there are numerous more TV and movie examples as well- these are just the two that I was most familiar with from pop culture that I have personally watched.)
 |
| A quote from Grace from the Secret Life of the American Teenager |
There is currently a thriving Christian music industry, but it is often far removed from mainstream music. Artists that are able to cross between the two genres are few and far between. I have noticed that in country music references to church and faith are more common, but I believe that is more often because the Christian faith is more a way of life in the parts of the country where many country artists get their influences from more then anything else.
Anyways: how/why does this relate to our course content? Well, Christian young adults are a larger population then one might thing! Studies show that over 70% of teens claim to identify with the Christian faith (source for statistic). While stats also show that many teens to tend to leave the church during or after their college years, I think that definitely part of that might be because of the way that pop culture portrays Christianity: both the lack of Christians portrayed in pop culture and the few unrealistic portrayals that are there! With such high numbers of teens claiming to belong to the Christian faith then I think that Christians would be an underrepresented group in pop culture (kind of like how we discussed earlier in class with some races being over or underrepresented).
If this topic did come up in class, then I would also be interested in hearing everyone's views on how other religions are represented in American pop culture. I know the most about Christianity since that is my own faith, but I also respect and am curious to learn about others' beliefs. Plus it would be interesting to compare Christianity's representation to other religions like Judaism, Islam... etc. Or even different denominations of Christianity! I think there's a lot to talk about with this topic.
P.S. Another show that I have blogged about before is 7th Heaven. I think this is one show that did a FANTASTIC job of portraying Christianity realistically (among other things!).... but I don't want all of my blog posts for this class to just be me singing my praises of a show that went off the air seven years ago. :-) (And I don't think another TV show/movie has come close to doing what 7th Heaven did since then!)
-Annaliese
No comments:
Post a Comment