By Our Love? by Jim Rohner

A few weeks ago I was talking to my Queue The Day podcast co-host about all the recent TV we had been watching and I mentioned how I was watching GCB for More Than One Lesson blogging purposes.  We asked for my thoughts on the show, I responded with the knee jerk, “it’s the least offensive attack on Christianity I’ve ever seen.”  At that point, I had only watched the pilot and seeing as one episode is never enough exposure to make any judgments about a theoretically long-running series (unless it’s Breaking Bad), my comment was more the result of a combination of the relatively unflattering picture that the mainstream media has historically painted of Christianity and GCB’s general lack of acerbity throughout its roughly 44-minute running time.

And yet, here we are now more than a month removed from the show’s premiere and I can’t help but think how eerily accurate my offhand comment has turned out to be. That’s not to say that Robert Harling and the folks at ABC are using GCB as an opportunity to actively criticize Christianity, but by creating a show that is meant to appeal to the widest possible audience, they’re not doing anything to help defend Christianity either.

GCB, for those of you who are unfamiliar or who have not yet read Travis Fishburn’s insights, follows Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb), a mother and recent widow who is forced to move back to her hometown of Dallas, Texas from California after the death of her cheating husband, who left his family broke after emptying the bank accounts he filled with pyramid scheme money.  An older and humbled woman now, Amanda was somewhat of a menace in high school – the pretty popular girl who made life for her less aesthetically pleasing classmates a living hell. Speaking of hell, it’s been said that it hath no fury like a woman scorned and these women, now grown up and wealthy, have held onto this scorn tightly, practically chomping at the bit to release their righteous fury on the heathen re-entering their midst.

The group’s ringleader is Carlene Cockburn (Kristin Chenoweth), whose bible quoting is the loudest and most frequent.  Seeing as GCB is a comedy, the quotes are often the most comically and hypocritically out of context.  While Carlene and the girls wage their holy crusade on the woman who scarred them in the ways plastic surgery can’t fix, Amanda does her best to convince them all she’s changed while, of course, serving a healthy dose of humble pie in the process.

Keep in mind that GCB does air on ABC and while they have made a name for themselves with some rather unconventional programming – Lost, Modern Family, Desperate Housewives – they’re still the third most watched network on TV and they’re not in the business of stepping on anyone’s toes.  This is, after all, the network that takes the Academy Awards oh so seriously.

So in order for GCB to appeal to a mass audience, it can’t be openly antagonistic and almost without exception, it’s not.  GCB features some surprisingly sharp writing, some competent if not admirable comedic direction and, at times, fast paced editing reminiscent of Gilmore Girls’ signature snappiness.  Additionally, there are dainty women in heels falling down, double entendres and an ever-present tongue-in-cheek tone that comes courtesy of its laundry list of caricatures.  It’d be easy for someone who isn’t religious to watch the show and say, “what’s the big deal?  It’s not being mean, it’s just being funny.”

On the surface, that’s true.  I can’t imagine that Harling had any intention of using GCB as his soapbox to condemn the Christian church worldwide.  But what GCB does on a weekly basis is to identify the flaws in Christianity by using a hideously unflattering demographic – that of the wealthy and selfish elite.  We as Christians know that the temptation of both wealth and self-servitude are not exclusive to any one race, religion or creed, but we also must acknowledge that possessing wealth and spotlight certainly puts us more heavily under the microscope in terms of potential criticism for how we use them.

Therefore, much of the show revolves around these hypocritical, wealthy women – Carlene Cockburn, Sharon Peacham (Jennifer Aspen), Cricket Caruth-Reilly (Miriam Shor) and to a lesser extent, Amanda’s closest friend, Heather Cruz (Marisol Nichols) and mother, Gigi Stopper (Annie Potts) – plotting awful and vengeful things (in hilarious fashion, of course) while Amanda does her best not to retaliate and instruct her kids how to avoid being the mean-spirited popular girl she was in high school.  With this contrast, Harding has created a show that doesn’t necessarily proclaim, “look at the evils of Christianity” as much as it does, “look at how much better non-Christians can be at Christianity.”

Admittedly, this mentality has been a huge problem recently with the Church and the fact that the loudest voices are often the most off base.  These days, if behavior rather than creed were to dictate it, the song “They’ll Know W e Are Christians By Our Love” could very well be tweaked to say “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Condemnations.”  Suffice it to say that on a major scale, we aren’t doing ourselves any favors. GCB isn’t helping either.

The C in the title is supposed to stand for “Christian,” but the creators have stripped all belief and theology from the equation.  Without a doubt this has been done because theology is incredibly uninteresting – at least from a marketer’s standpoint – but in the process, the show has relegated Christianity to a series of behaviors instead of beliefs, the why of which being less important than the how.  For all the talk of God, the Bible and its applicable verses, the show features very little (at the moment I’m actually failing to recall any) talk of Jesus.  Were GCB a show simply dealing with the wealthy elite of Dallas with spirituality just contributing one archetypical element to their story then this wouldn’t be such a big deal.  But Christ is at the very center of Christianity.  He is not an example of the life we should lead, but the REASON why we do what we do – or at the very least, what we’re supposed to do – in the first place.  But that doesn’t serve the purposes of the GCB folks.  It’s much easier instead to pick and choose what elements of our religion works best for their purposes.  For them, it’s enough to focus on the works and leave faith by the wayside.

Does this make GCB evil?  I don’t think so.  Does that mean you shouldn’t watch it?  I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that, either.  As both a Christian and film lover, I frequently engage with media that runs contradictory to what I believe and for all intents and purposes, GCB is a good show.  But in all we do, in everything we watch, we should pray for discernment; not just for our ability to discern, but also for our ability to convey that discernment to others.  GCB, like any other film or TV show out there, has the potential to mislead people.  In that case, we should be the ones to point them back in the right direction.