(no subject)

[seekingferret]

We use the phrase 'Word of God' advisedly when talking about the creators of a TV show discussing some element of their canon. There is an awareness in the phrase that the creators of the show are, in building a world and creating characters and storylines, acting in a deific role with regard to the world of the show.

This fact compromises some efforts by television shows to confront serious questions of faith and God's presence in the world. When something happens to a character and they assign responsibility to God, they're not assigning responsibility to God, the God I believe in, or the God that any theist on Earth believes in. (Except maybe if there's an actual sincere Jedi? I remain unclear on the meaning of people who assert Jedi as their religion) They're assigning responsibility to God, the figure within the world of their show.

This God is two things: First, it is a fictional creation of the creators of the show: The showrunners decide if there is a God within the world or not. The creators of The Prince of Egypt decided that there is an actual God who spoke to Moses and split the Sea and so on, to make an example that as I ponder it I find both crystalline and confusing. Second, it is the creators of the show themselves, in that they are the ones who decide if something happens to a character or not.


What am I talking about? Well, at the moment I'm principally thinking about a storyline on Grey's Anatomy in Season 11. April Kepner, the show's most overtly Christian character, gets pregnant. In the course of prenatal examinations, it is discovered that her child has a serious condition the result of which is that the child will likely only live for a few minutes after birth, if at all.

Frustrated in her faith, Kepner curses God. "How could God do this to me? It's not fair!" This leads her to wonder about God's existence. And this is what I mean when I say that serious theological questions are difficult to discuss in this context. April Kepner has become pregnant with a child who tests her faith because her creators decided that they wanted to test her faith in this fashion. This is why, of all the characters on the show who could have dealt with this medical condition as part of their storyline, it happened to Kepner. The fact that she is being tested and doubting God is in this case proof that there is a God in the context of the show, at least in my second sense, and a cruel and unloving God at that. But we are intended to remain uncertain if there is a God in my first sense.

But unambiguous proof of God's existence is not a true test of faith. So the deck is stacked against Kepner's character arc in this subtle way. It's hard to think about theodicy within Grey's Anatomy without thinking about Shonda and the rest of the writers putting their thumb on the scale. Things happen to characters on TV shows because of reasons related to plot, and that makes it impossible to fully process why and whether God as a figure within the show made things happen.

Comments

[ghost_lingering]

This puts into words many of the thoughts I have about shows like Kings which center around the characters' belief or disbelief in (the show's) God and the canonical ambiguity of whether or that God exists. It's interesting, but I ultimately find it frustrating because it is so clearly engineered by the writers to Say Something Interesting about theology, faith, and the existence of God and that engineering renders it, as you say, impossible to tell if God as a figure in the show made things happen.

But some fictional works grapple with faith do so in ways that I find less frustrating and thinking about it now I'm not sure what the difference is, or if it's simply a matter of my own differing tastes.

I'd like to suspect that some works I react to differently because I read them as fictional works where everything inside the text (the characters, the portrayal of faith, and the portrayal of gods/God within the show) is part of the creator of the text's way of grappling with their own relationship with their faith and god(s) outside the text. And that in sharing the work with an audience, the audience is asked to examine their relationship with faith and god outside of the text by thinking about the events within the text. I am particularly thinking of Angels in America here, which has such an idiosyncratic in-text portrayal of faith and god, but that is also always pushing the audience for a reaction outside of the text, which is part of why I like it.

But that leads me to believe that part of what frustrates me about how faith and god are usually writtern in fictional works is that I dislike how the fictional portrayals of god and faith rub up against my own beliefs and biases. So it becomes a matter of if I like the creators' writing and style, which brings us neatly back to how it's difficult to disentangle the engineering of the work by its creator from the work's portrayal of any in-text gods.

[cahn]

Hmm. I guess, with the caveat that I have not seen or even heard of this arc in Grey's Anatomy besides the summary you just gave (so I might be completely off), I have a different perspective. One of the purposes of art is to reflect the world, and it's certainly something that happens in the world that people of faith conceive children, or try to, and have difficulties with it in one way or another. If it had been another character who wasn't a person of faith, well, that would have been a different story about the world. So that's a story they're telling, and sure, they've made the choice to tell a particular story about faith and have made up a situation in order to tell it, but that would be the case no matter what the story was. I think the thing is for me is that not only are the show writers making up her trial, they're also making up her response to it. That makes it not-God to me -- not really all that much different from me writing, say, a Bible fanfic where people question God :) If April were an autonomous agent who was placed by the show writers in this situation and then we were watching her organic reaction, then I'd have your reaction to it, sure.

(...you know, I should append that the concept of personal agency (free will, essentially) is absolutely integral to LDS doctrine -- God would literally not be God, in LDS doctrine, if He did not give humans agency -- so that's totally informing my reaction.)

Now, I think it's a story that's very easy to get wrong. I certainly know people who have had variants of that story happen in their own lives, including myself. How it interacts with faith... can be complicated (for starters, I mean, I'm in a particular demographic and faith tradition and anecdotal, but I don't actually know anyone who has lost their faith from such a thing, though I know tons of people, again including myself, who have lost their faith; and cursing God is in a very real sense a faithful way of engaging with God, to my mind) and I think I would have a lot of personal issues in watching such a storyline that didn't engage with that complexity (which I'm guessing this one didn't, because TV). But that's orthogonal to your complaint, I think.

ETA: Hmm. After reading ghost_lingering's comment, I see that I'm focusing here on the character and her faith journey rather than in the actual question with which your post is primarily engaging, whether God (whatever one's definition) did or didn't make something happen in that world and what that even means. There also I might have things to say about probability distributions in this world vs. a hands-on God, but I'll spare you :)

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I think my point is that if it were possible to turn off your awareness of the fact that a work of art was created by a particular creator and really view the author as dead, you could follow the faith journey of the character as you describe and think about how it reflects real world faith struggle, but that's not quite possible for me to do, and especially not on a show like Grey's which has such predictable cycles of drama driven by the needs of things like mid-season finales and sweeps week and so on.