Hollywood's Perception of Christianity

Recently, on a Monday evening, I watched a fairly new show called Perception which airs on TNT.  The premise of Perception is that a brilliant professor of neuroscience, Dr. Daniel Pierce (played by Eric McCormack), helps a former student and now FBI agent (played by Rachael Leigh Cook) solve crimes.  The twist is, this brilliant professor  is also a paranoid schizophrenic and regularly halucinates individuals who help him arrive at the identity of the culprit - thus the title Perception.  His "perception" is much different than that of the people around him, but it is his "unique" perception that gets the job done.

As with most crime dramas, someone is murdered and the rest of the show is devoted to finding out "whodunnit."  This particular episode turned out to be centered around a young man who claimed to hear God speak to him.  I rolled my eyes when I figured this out, as Hollywood's depiction of Christians tends to either leave me arguing with the television and determined to send a letter to the network (which I never actually do) or sitting there in stunned silence at the fact that anyone could get even the  basic tenets of Christianity so wrong.  This episode did not produce anything different.  The "hero" of the show, the brilliant professor, was not only skeptical of all things Christian, but had a good rant about the myth that all religions represent.  The only redeeming scene was when one of the professor's halucinated characters pointed out that Dr. Pierce's belief that no religion was based in any kind of reality was rich coming from someone who is often not in touch with reality himself.  Aside from that, it was typical Hollywood blather.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the problem with Perception is that the writers have the wrong perception (profound, isn't it?).  There could be several reasons for this.  They could be too lazy to do their homework about Christianity.  They could be writing from the perspective of someone who has been hurt by "religious" folks.  Perhaps they don't like what they see on the surface whenever "Christians" make the news (most often the "not-so-stable" fringe element).  Or they could really be antagonistic toward the faith and are all too pleased to make Christian characters look like 1) narrow-minded racist, judgmental, fundamentalist, hateful bigots;  2) dogmatic, anti-science people who come straight out of the dark ages; or 3) Stepford-esque mindless followers who have been taken advantage of by a "wolf in sheep's clothing" (my personal favorite).  Yeah, I could go on and on about Hollywood's skewed "perception" of Christians.

Problem is, it wouldn't really be fair to lay all the blame on the beautiful people...

Truth be told, there are plenty of Christians in church every week who have just as skewed a perception of their faith.  If we, as Christians, were truly living out what Jesus commanded, there would be a lot less to ridicule and make fun of.  We have this extraordinary Savior who wants His followers to live extraordinary lives in Him, but it turns out the followers aren't following all that well.  We're too busy either building our own "spiritual" kingdoms or arguing with each other about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.  Can't imagine where Hollywood writers get their ideas about Christians...*cough, cough*

I read a short little book today called Epic Jesus written by Frank Viola.  It reminded me how amazing Jesus Christ really is.  It is kind of sad that I had to be reminded that Christianity was never intended to be a religion, but a living, vibrant organism based in relationship with Jesus who is, in fact, our life.  The long and short of it is that unless and until we stop focusing on everything but Jesus Himself, we will continue to play the parts that Hollywood has written for us.  Parts with no power and no depth...a joke, really.  And SO not funny.