The Gospel According to the Simpsons

By Lanning Taliaferro

Not so long ago, school principals were suspending children who wore Bart Simpson t-shirts to school.

Now All Saints’, Briarcliff Manor, has been using Bart and his whole, hilarious, dysfunctional fictional world in a Christian education curriculum that has adults and children learning while they laugh.

The courses are based on The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family by Mark I. Pinsky.

Pinsky, who writes on religion for the Orlando Sentinel, began watching The Simpsons to monitor his own children’s television choices after the country’s moral leaders had condemned the show. “Tuning in nearly a decade after the series premiered, I found God, faith and spirituality in abundance on The Simpsons,” he wrote.

He published a book on the subject, and then he and Skip Parvin, a Methodist minister who writes youth curricula, put out a companion book, a leader’s guide for group study.

The Simpsons are not for the faint of heart, as Pinsky says. The show is edgy, rude, loud, crude. It often makes fun of organized religion. The people in it are often unattractive, stupid, mean, silly.

And boy are they real. A church-going family, they’re irreverent, misguided, confused about their faith and God. Struggling with school, work, family, friends, neighbors, life and death, they grapple with moral dilemmas all the time: is an illegal cable hook-up a violation of the Eighth Commandment? If God grants your prayer for snow so you can avoid taking a test, do you study or go sledding? Do you buy your wife a birthday present that she wants or that you want?

And whether they rise to the occasion or fail spectacularly, it’s enlightening as well as entertaining.

Watching and then talking about Simpsons proved very popular with members of our high-school Sunday School class.

“It was kind of hip and entertaining, so I was excited and intrigued,” said Christian Roadman, 18. “It was easy for all of us to be interested and involved, drawn into the whole program.”

Roadman’s favorite class was on the episode entitled “Simpsons Bible Stories,” in which everyone in the family falls asleep during a sermon and dreams of being a Biblical character — in stories they don’t get quite right, with consequences neither they, nor we, expect. “It was a humorous twist and a great basis for discussion,” Roadman said.

When we started, many adults in the church were taken aback to hear the famous theme song wafting out of the classroom. Some were familiar with the program; others had been avoiding it for years. Everyone knew that it was controversial.

So the Christian educators talked to the congregation about it from week to week, with a quick description not of each episode but of the issues involved: the power of prayer, temptation, the soul, what is a community of faith.

Soon we had started up an adult group of people who were also intrigued, meeting twice a month to watch an episode and work through the group study guide, just like the teenagers.

“The shows are funny, and the issues are real,” said Jim Lange, whose college-age children hadn’t watched the show.

There are practical issues to deal with. Each episode is about 23 minutes long — just about the length of our Sunday School classes.

We took up one episode a month. The first week, we watched it and picked out a few issues for later discussion. In subsequent weeks, we worked our way through the study guide, which has the Old and New Testament readings suggested for each episode and lots of questions to spark discussion.

The adult discussion was easier to organize: we watched an episode and then discussed it over coffee and cookies for an hour.

A helpful hint for anyone who tries this out: check out what the show’s writers put on the sign outside the Simpson family’s church. One week it was: “All welcome! (just kidding).” Now there’s a basis for discussion.

The Novels of Barbara Pym

By Anne Nelson

I remember the exact moment I discovered Barbara Pym. We were visiting friends for the weekend, and I was on the prowl for some night-table reading. A stack of Barbara Pym paperbacks lurked in the study, with their quaint William Morris-patterned covers and their prim, slightly churchy titles: A Glass of Blessings, Less Than Angels, The Sweet Dove Died. I picked one up, and then, of course, it was all over. Novel by novel, they each slipped down like a g & t on a hot day — refreshing, but with a little jolt.

Barbara Pym was one of those “excellent women” (the title of another of her books) who came of age in a Britain blighted by war. A lesser spirit might have been defeated by her surroundings. Pym was an intelligent, energetic woman who took a determined interest in the niceties of fashion and courting rituals.

She might have married and mothered a large, cheerful family in an English shire, but World War II intervened. Niceties like fashion were non-starters with the pinch of rationing, and even necessities were scarce. One was courted by lovely boys, only to have them go down in flames over Berlin. The punctilious, sometimes smug Britain of the past was gone forever, and hopes of a normal life hung by a fragile thread.

So the war left Barbara Pym — and millions of other Britons — without the life they’d been led to expect. Unwillingly single, with a clerical job and few prospects of advancement on any front, Pym set about creating her own world with her pen. Luckily for us, the first thing she turned her eye on was her parish. Pym was a practicing Anglican, and for her, the world of the Church was as thrilling as grand opera. Yet her voice is so precise, her touch is so light, that she can even make liturgical tensions into something delicious.

“There were two churches in the district,” she writes in Excellent Women, “but I had chosen St. Mary’s rather than All Souls’, not only because it was nearer, but because it was ‘High.’ I am afraid my poor father and mother would not have approved at all and I could imagine my mother, her lips pursed, shaking her head and breathing in a frightened whisper, ‘Incense.’ But perhaps it was only natural that I should want to rebel against my upbringing.”

There, in a few nimble strokes, Pym paints us a world. Like Jane Austen, she dissects the world of privilege from the vantage point of privation. But Pym’s humor is gentle and her voice is wry. She walks us through the microcosm of the parish as a friendly guide — yes, the parish priest may have his vanities, and the “excellent women” of the church committees may practice arcane forms of social warfare. Many of her books juxtapose the mildly comic, archaic High Church Anglicans against characters who exude secular values and represent the world of the “modern.” By the end of her books, a reader sees that the glamour of individualism can fade into loneliness. In Pym’s world, the Church, like a family, is where they always have to take you in. The mild self-mockery of her writing is deceptive. Lying beneath it is an invitation to a profounder sense that those who discard their religious identity and community, do so at their peril.