I talk back to my TV.

I don’t do it regularly.  I also don’t expect my TV to respond.  I don’t expect the actors in my favorite shows to stop, mid-script, turn their heads toward me, and respond to my comments or anything.

But, from time-to-time, I need to respond.  Two shows seem to draw this out of me more than any other: Bones and House.  The reason I talk back is because of religion.

Both characters are supreme intellects; geniuses of the highest order; that are at the top of their respective fields.  And both have a deep ideological faith in rationality.  I respect the subtle differences between what each one believes.  But together, they represent the modernist obsession with a systematic ordering of things and justification of progressive research.  They also represent the atheist that is bent on using those methods to disprove the existence of God.

This is where I start to get mad.

I don’t get mad because I can’t handle the criticism, because most of the time I think they are pretty much right (and have a great way of expressing their skepticism).  I get mad because nobody challenges them in the way that they challenge others.  So I do it.  Every time they make accusations about someone’s uncompromising devotion to a deity, I rebut that they mimic that devotion with an uncompromising devotion to reason.  They practice an atheistic fundamentalism that seems to abound with the “new atheists,” practicing an ideological tyranny and blindness that should humble these intellectual giants.

In truth, however, that isn’t enough to get me talking at the TV.  Well, maybe it’s enough, but not enough to get me to do so on a regular basis.  No, it requires someone going over the line: a character doing something oppressive and reprehensible.  Luckily both shows will do this with some regularity.

As much as I enjoy watching these characters, I have a really hard time with how they actually treat those that outwardly express their religious beliefs.  They both move from being intellectually condescending to emotionally abusive in a shallow attempt to prove that their world-view is correct.  Sure, Dr. House is an ass and Dr. Brennan is socially incompetent, but that doesn’t make their attempts to win arguments with unsuspecting random people any less abusive, and any more justifiable.  Every single time, their abusiveness is unprovoked—they are set off merely by the sight of a clerical collar or a passing reference to GOD.  In truth, they are both pitiful, ignorant characters who abuse and mistreat those they deem inferior like atheist Pharisees demanding strict adherence to a world view of their own devising.

Occasionally, they meet their match in someone that challenges them and rivals their ability to set the terms of the debate—the very means by which they routinely get the upper hand.  But neither show ever allows for true revelation—merely the occasional insight.  At the end of each episode, the character walks away, generally feeling justified in their pre-constructed world view with only the subtlest of new understanding.

An example of this is evidenced in an episode of House (“Wilson”) from last season in which Greg and James are looking for a donor for a patient.  When the donor’s next of kin shows apprehension at “defiling the body,” House simply diagnoses the woman as a religious nutcase, so when the phone call comes that the organ is no longer viable, he says to the woman: “Well played.  Religion just killed another person.”

The truth is that it religion didn’t killed anybody.  However, a better case can be made against that woman’s theology.  All the more troubling is that she didn’t appear to be confident in her decision theologically; her argument was that she just got reunited with the loved one.  Her not wanting to defile the body was religious custom tacked on as a response to the situation, while her main interest was the relationship that had been restored and was now severed.  In this way, you can’t blame an institution, but the individual.  It wasn’t her faith, but her assessment of what she should do.

This is the real reason that theology is important.  It isn’t about making long descriptions of the nature of the universe or even making excuses for a checkered past, but helping people find grace and redemption in a world that ought not be so easily defined.

In the above example, House’s a/theology and the woman’s weak theology argued while a dead person’s organ literally began to rot inside her body.  Just because House gets the last word doesn’t really mean he won.  Nobody won.

Theology as argument is the modernist idea that I hope we can rid ourselves of very, very quickly, so that we can explore the nature of God through collaboration.  This small epiphany came to me while reading Listening to Beliefs of Emerging Churches several years ago.  Written as something of a conversation, five church leaders were given the opportunity to write about emergent theology.  For her piece, Karen Ward chose to integrate the writings of people from her church, Church of the Apostles in Seattle.  She could have written page after page about her own beliefs, but instead, allowed the community to express what the community believes as a community.  This reminded me that theology isn’t something for experts, but for everyone, and it is incredibly important that we treat it as a community’s responsibility.  Otherwise “study of God” is relegated to argument and manipulation.  It is my belief that theology is at its best when it attempts to help people to authentically deal with and prepare us for tough questions, including organ donation.  In the above example, the woman does not find help in her theology—she is let down by it.  In this way, theology is something to be practiced and reflected upon regularly, not sited distantly.