Glee, the hit show about a high school Glee club, has very sharp claws, which is one reason kids like it so much. It is routinely, if hilariously, cruel (the sweet jock is described as so dumb, “he’s cheating off a girl who thinks the square root of 4 is rainbows”). But no darker current–let alone motivation for parental monitoring–had occurred to me until I recently heard a bright, earnest youth minister tell a group of high school kids that he thought Glee was “anti-Christian.”
It is easy to see his point, if you look at the specifics. In his view, Glee portrays Christians as phonies and hypocrites. He observed that the only self-identified Christian is the shiny blond Quinn, cheerleading president of the celibacy club, who is pregnant by one classmate but pretending the father is another. (To make matters more complicated, in a heartbreaking scene, she begs her parents’ forgiveness; in righteous fury, they throw her out of the house.) Meanwhile, the glee-club director, Mr. Schuester, is unhappily married to a perky little spider, which makes the adultery subplot involving him look positively charitable. The students lie, they cheat, they steal, they lust, they lace the bake-sale cupcakes with pot in order to give the student body a severe case of the munchies. Nearly all the Ten Commandments get violated at one point or another, while the audience is invited to laugh at people’s pain and folly and humiliation.
Which led my husband to pose the question to our daughters, What would Jesus watch? That in turn led to an intriguing–and useful–conversation around our dinner table. It’s the oldest teacher’s trick, better to show than tell: the Sermon on the Mount was clean and clear, but Jesus also offered parables, little mysteries to unwrap and examine for their coded messages. This is a delivery device especially good for teenagers building their rebellious muscles.
It insults kids to suggest that simply watching Characters Behaving Badly onscreen means they’ll take that as permission to do the same themselves. The fact that Glee is about a club full of misfits already makes it ripe gospel ground; Jesus was not likely to be sitting at the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria. And it’s set in high school, meaning it’s about a journey not just to college and career but to identity and conviction, the price of popularity, the compromises we must make between what we want and what we need.
In a recent episode, seeing the Glee kids’ insensitivity to the challenges faced by their disabled friend, Mr. Schuester ordered all of them to spend three hours a day in a wheelchair and learn for themselves what it was like to walk in their friend’s shoes–or roll in his chair. A second subplot explored the love and tension between a flamboyantly gay kid and his devoted, conflicted dad. A third forced us to revisit the judgment we’d reached about the show’s most gleefully conniving character, cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, who has all the charm and subtlety of a python. She accepted a clumsy girl with Down syndrome onto her immaculate squad and treated her just like all the other members–brutally and contemptuously. When Mr. Schuester challenged her motives, she stared him down. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” she told him, and as we watched her arrive later at a nursing home, smile so tenderly and sit down to read Little Red Riding Hood to her big sister with Down syndrome, we realized the same was true of us.
The point is not whether there is an embedded moral message to be found beneath all the snark and snideness in this show or any other. The point lies in the surprises that jostle us out of our smug little certainties and invite us to weigh what we value, whatever our faith tradition. I’m reminded of the furor over kids’ reading Harry Potter, which some conservative Christian parents rejected because the books dealt with magic and witches and wizards. I never understood why J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’ witches and wizards got a free pass just because the authors wore their missions on their sleeves. (You see it in the Twilight saga too; we’re O.K. with vampires and werewolves as long as they’re fighting it out to protect a girl’s virginity.) If, to some parents, J.K. Rowling’s subtlety makes her lessons suspect, I think it makes them powerful. Kids, like adults, resist force-feeding. When a whole generation obsessed about Harry, parents everywhere were given a rich new repertoire of characters and plotlines with which to teach about loyalty, courage, humility and, Rowling’s central message, the notion that love has ultimate power, even over death.
That one, actually, wasn’t even very subtle.
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