SOUL FOOD:’The Simpsons’ isn’t about religion

In big, merry red letters, the question “TV’s Most Religious Family?” hovered above Homer’s thick, bald skull and skirted Marge’s billowing blue hair. The Simpson family was on the cover of “The Christian Century.”

Dad Homer, mom Marge, grade-schoolers Bart and Lisa, baby Maggie. And household pets pooch Santa’s Little Helper and black cat Snowball 2 (the first). This yellow-skinned, bulbous-eyed, wacky-haired, increasingly iconic cartoon clan had been holding TV viewers rapt for more than a decade.

From the ‘50s “Leave It to Beaver” to the contemporary “That ‘70s Show,” no family sitcom had ever taken up religion the way “The Simpsons” had. It was January 2001.

The next month, a likeness of the family’s evangelical Christian neighbor Ned Flanders (a regular on the series) showed up on the cover of “Christianity Today.” Given the moniker “Saint Flanders,” he’d been drawn tongue-in-cheek in a religious-icon style.

In a letter to the editor, Fr. John M. Reeves from the Office of Church Growth and Evangelism of the Orthodox Church in America called it “deeply offensive to Orthodox Christians.” It was, he said, nothing short of “an attack on the Incarnation of Christ himself!”

A reader from Colorado applauded the art but expressed her dismay at the article it illustrated — “Blessed Ned of Springfield,” written by Mark I. Pinsky. She questioned his credentials as an “observant Jew … acquainted with two (very conservative) [Christian] families” and, therefore, his assessment of “the impact of Flanders and company on evangelicals.”

Nevertheless, Pinsky, a religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, became the go-to guy on all things religious in Springfield, the (imaginary) town where the Simpsons live. Five months later, Westminster Knox Press released the first edition of his, “The Gospel According to The Simpsons.”

“O little town of Springfield!” Orthodox Christian cultural critic Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote in praise of the book, “Mark Pinsky provides an excellent exploration of the spiritual dimension of the most openly religious town on television.”

Several other notable Christians also endorsed the book. Tony Campolo (American Baptist minister, author, professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University in Pennsylvania and spiritual counselor to former President Bill Clinton) penned its foreword.

Trying to quell the quarrels flaring over the way the cheeky sitcom rendered Christianity, he wrote: “At first glance what you see and hear while watching ‘The Simpsons’ might be a ‘turn off’ because it can easily be mistaken for an assault that ridicules middle-class Christianity. It is not!”

The more he writes, however, the more the trouble seems far worse. Ned Flanders, he notes, never gets to say anything about the “heart of evangelical Christianity — that salvation comes by faith in a Christ who saves us by His grace … a gift of God, ‘not of works.’”

Instead, Campolo, an American Baptist minister, explains, “you get the popular media impression” that if on judgment day a person’s good deeds outnumber the bad, “heaven is his or her reward.” But, what the heck?

In “Blessed Ned of Springfield” Pinsky contradicts Campolo’s view on Ned’s Christian faith. Pinsky writes: “Ned believes in salvation through grace, and he expects Jesus’ return to earth at any moment. Yet Ned is also deeply immersed in the good works of the social gospel.

The aim of the sitcom isn’t to ridicule Christians, Campolo muses. This is done because its writers “are probably afraid of offending people of other religions.”

“Everything is lampooned … everyone is made to look silly,” he makes clear. “What else would you expect from a sitcom?” he asks.

Well, the word that comes up again and again is “respect.” Pinsky consistently argues the “gospel” of the sitcom is to respect and never mock “sincere faith.”

But Ryan Beiler, Simpsons fan and web editor for Sojourners.com, sees it differently. He has described the show’s attitude as “irreverent-verging-onsacrilegious.”

In an interview with Pinsky, even Steve Tompkins, one of the sitcom’s writers, conceded, “At times, the show does seem to engage in ‘blasphemy for blasphemy’s sake’ … the things that should be mocked are mocked, and the things that shouldn’t be mocked are mocked.”

It’s hard indeed to find respect in this gem wisdom from Bart Simpson on Protestant and Catholic Christianity: “It’s all Christianity, people. The little, stupid differences are nothing next to the big, stupid similarities.” But on more than one occasion, Bart has been likened to the devil.

Much, if not most, of “The Simpsons” gut-busting humor comes from its writers tapping the deep, inexhaustible well of human frailty, even depravity, we all share. Whatever our religious convictions or lack of them we can see ourselves, we can laugh at ourselves, in “The Simpsons.”

Religion is part of our lives and our social fabric. Matt Groening, who created “The Simpsons” and the writers who put words in their mouths, have smartly chosen not to excise it.

But they are not evangelists. Not for any faith. As Beiler has said, every religious gesture or utterance in Springfield “is almost always a set-up or a punch line.”

Now the most openly religious town of television has come to the big screen. An early scene of “The Simpsons Movie” takes place in the First Church of Springfield, where much of the town’s population has gathered for a memorial service.

The Simpson family is late. Just outside the church’s stained-glass windows Homer assures them their tardiness will not be noticed.

“Those pious morons are too busy praying to their phony-baloney God,” he shouts to the heavens. They enter the sanctuary under peevish stares and slide into a pew.

When, moments later, Grampa Simpson writhes in the aisle speaking in tongues, Homer grabs a Bible for guidance. Thumbing back and forth through its pages he wails, “This book doesn’t have any answers!”

Faced with a disaster of apocalyptic scale, townsfolk rush from Moe’s Bar and dash to the church while churchgoers sprint to Moe’s. Just like on TV, the Simpsons go to church; they pray. At the hands of an Inuit shaman, Homer even has a salvific epiphany.

But “The Simpsons” is not about religion; religion simply runs scattershot through it like all things in Springfield. There, like everything else on the face of God’s good earth, it is nothing if not comedic fodder.