One of the more interesting lines of questioning about GCB (formerly Good Christian Bitches) at the Television Critics Association press tour has been whether “Christian” is a bigger hurdle for the show than “Bitch.” There’s one way in which that makes sense: this would hardly be the first time that practicing Christians felt like Hollywood hadn’t portrayed them accurately or fairly. (It would make less sense to suggest that Christians are not a market.) In response, series creator Robert Harling* suggested something that shows an appealing degree of structural awareness. Apparently, we should think of the church in GCB the same way we think of a precinct office in a cop show or an emergency room in a hospital, and expect that the show will be bounded by the internal rules and expectations of the church.

“There are rules. And you have to be respectful of those rules,” he said. “Even if it’s a temple or a mosque or whatever, you have to be aware and respectful of faith systems. And, you know, the joy of it is watching these people try to function within these rules. And the rules remain the same. The respect for the faith remains the same…the goal is to watch people try to be good.”

Long-time readers will know that I’m a freak for stories that are driven by bureaucracies, whether it’s a police department, a branch of the federal government, or a school. We have a lot of cop and hospital shows because we’re very familiar with the Hollywood version of how those bureaucracies work and what the dramatic beats exist in those spaces. But expanding the kinds of organizations we’re familiar with and that characters can work in is a worthy goal. Kristin Chenoweth joked of gay men, for example, that “There’s one in every church,” an idea I’m certainly familiar with but which I’m not sure is obvious to non-churchgoers. Establishing that kind of thing and getting folks familiar with it (though not to the point of boredom) and doing similar things for synagogues and mosques could make for some pretty fun storytelling in a new environment.

*Who wrote Soapdish, which I adore. If you have not watched it, you should check it out.

There’s something a bit odd about this GOOD piece about two Christian hipsters who make influential conspiracy-theory oriented viral videos promoting everything from birtherism to Uganda’s anti-gay laws, and have what sounds like a wildly inflammatory anti-abortion movie coming out in February that they’re hoping will catch on because it has a majority-black cast:

Jason “Molotov” Mitchell and his wife, Patricia “DJ Dolce” Mitchell, look like hipsters. She wears a stylish dress and nose stud, her dark hair angled sharply around her face. Jason, who goes by Molotov both socially and professionally, sports a landscaped beard and a tattoo on his forearm that reads “zealot.” They are in tip-top physical condition, they say, because they teach krav maga, an Israeli Defense Force-perfected form of martial arts.

They are charismatic and engaging…I struggle to reconcile this information with the pleasant people I just met…Despite the violent rhetoric, the Mitchells are the friendliest—and some of the savviest—people I have ever interviewed. Avid followers of popular culture, they are not Quiverfull-style Christians who isolate themselves from outside influences. They want to emulate the Biblical mandate to “be in the world but not of it.” So they laugh at The Daily Show and mention that they would enjoy hanging out with Jon Stewart, whom they consider a political foe. Molotov says he wants to emulate Jesus, who, he says, spoke harshly before crowds but showed compassion when people approached him one-on-one.

After all, Christian hipsters have been getting the anthropological treatment at least since Jeff Sharlet wrote about the “New Virgin Army” in Rolling Stone in 2005, the same year the New York Times profiled Jay Bakker. Earlier this year, the paper looked at a hipster-tinged Lower East Side evangelical church. In other words, it’s not really news that people who have tattoos, piercings, good haircuts and cool clothes believe that Christ is their savior and adopt hipster aesthetics to reach their target audiences. Thinking like this is one of the reasons I think progressives need not to get lazy about culture: it’s not enough to assume that our aesthetics and narrative power are just going to keep automatically bringing people over to support good policies and progressive worldviews.

And these things that we think are alluring and convincing, like humor, and storytelling, and multiethnic casting, and chunky glasses, and tattoos, or whatever? We are not alone, and we are not the only people who will figure out how to deploy them. It’s time to stop staring in wonder at the possibility that Cool Kids could think that Obama wasn’t born in the United States or that they’re not having sex until marriage and figure out how to make our own viral videos tighter, our own feature films more compelling to audiences who aren’t getting served by mainstream movies, and our novels more convincing.

On many of your recommendations after our discussion some time back about the comparative visibility of Christian-influenced fantasy in comparison to fantasy that draws its concepts from other faiths, I just finished The Lions of Al-Rassan. I quite enjoyed it, though I think it has perhaps a reverse George R. R. Martin problem—there are a lot of fascinating concepts there that feel wildly underdeveloped, like a Reconstructionist-sounding strain of Kindath theology, or the actual mechanisms of reconquest, and I wish there’d been more room to explore them. But as an exploration of the weaknesses of theocratic governance, it’s a convincing argument with all sorts of resonance today.

I’d say there’s a stupidity to what Almalik does to Ishak after performing the world’s most successful cesarean section on Zabira, the king’s chief concubine: “he had ordered the physician’s eyes put out and his tongue cut off at the root, that the forbidden sight of an Asharite woman’s nakedness be atoned for, that no man might ever heard a description of Zabira’s milk-white splendor from the Kindath doctor who had exposed her to his cold glance and his scalpel.” But the Kindath don’t have power in Al-Rassan such that they can squander it being appalled. And religion doesn’t only lead to individual bad acts of state: it guarantees a constant cycle of escalation, whether it’s Alvar’s mother getting hyped up to send him off to war by visiting Vasca’s shrine and reaffirming her sense that non-believers need to be annihilated, or providing an enormous list of slights that seem to need avenging:

At certain moments, Jehane thought, in the presence of men like Husari ibn Musa or young Alvar, or Rodrigo Belmonte, it was actually possible to imagine a future for this peninsula that left room for hope. Men and women could change, could cross boundaries, give and take, each from the other…given enough time, enough good will, intelligence. There was a world for the making in Esperana, in Al-Rassan, one world made of the two—or perhaps, if one were to dream, made of the three. Sun, stars and the moon. Then you remembered Orvilla, the Day of the Moat. You looked into the eyes of the Muwardis, or paused on a street corner and heard a wadji demanding death for the foul Kindath sorcerer ben Avren, who drank the blood of Asharite infants torn from their mothers’ arms.

It also makes people unpredictable and irrational. The governor of Fezana gets frustrated because “being deeply cautious by nature, couldn’t quite believe that Ramiro of Valledo would be so foolish enough to come and make war here, laying a siege so far form his own lands. Valledo was being paid parias from Fezana twice a year. Why would any rational man risk life and his kingdom’s stability to conquer a city that was already filling his coffers with gold.” Choices like this, or the destruction of Sorenica aren’t good for the peninsula’s economy and social stability, something its new rulers recognize when they ask the Kindath to resettle and rebuild their shattered city.
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This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 1 episode of Community.

Given the worst-case scenario that this is the second-to-last episode of Community that we’ll ever see, I want everything that we have before the end of the year to be perfect, both to go out on a glorious note and, in the case of cancellation, to mock NBC on the way out the door. It would have been hard for any episode of the show to follow up the last one, which I still believe will be a perfect coda of the series of it comes to that. And while this episode did one thing I liked, I don’t think it entirely worked.

People — including me — have expressed frustration about the way Shirley’s character has been portrayed this season, as she’s turned into an even more moralizing and judgmental character than she was previously, sacrificing the bits of interiority she’s been given as the show’s most perennially short-changed character. It’s tough because there have always been interesting things there. We know that Shirley was, at one point, if not an alcoholic, a drunk, and that she had tremendous anger issues over her divorce. Tonight’s episode was, however silly the engine of revelation, a valuable look at how far back that anger extends. Once, Shirley was a rejected, heavy little girl, and then she redefined herself as a wife and mother, only to have that identity smashed, too. Is it any wonder she clings to piety as a way to hold herself together and her pain and anger within as much as possible? When Shirley condemns things like foosball, or “Like out of town weddings with receptions that are in the same place in everybody’s rooms!” I have the sense that she’s speaking from experience. And if you’ve been some place really bad, “nice” might actually seem like a higher value.
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This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 6 episode of The Walking Dead.

I haven’t felt exceptionally engaged by this season of The Walking Dead, but tonight’s episode raised two big questions for me. First, related to the actual events of the show, what’s really going on at Hershel’s farm? And second, at what point the show’s grossness disgusting for the sake of disgustingness?

Given that most American popular culture doesn’t take belief particularly seriously or delve into theology, I’m glad to see the show reveal Hershel’s faith slowly and to set up a genuine religious conflict between him and Rick who, as he puts it, is trying to stay out of the Almighty’s way. There’s an interesting symmetry to the episode, beginning with Hershel’s eulogy for Otis — who Shane killed to save his own life — in which he calls children like Carl “now, more than ever, our most precious asset,” and the end, in which it’s revealed that Lori is pregnant. Have Rick and company stumbled on a theocracy? Will Lori’s pregnancy be the subject of a tussle that brings their uneasy arrangement down? Hershel’s initially reluctant to let them stay, but after Rick appeals to his religious beliefs, telling him, “If you saw how it is out there, you wouldn’t ask,” he relents, on a trial basis, warning Rick that “If you and your people respect my rules, no promises, but I will consider it.”

And that raises an interesting, and perhaps corollary question: why is it that Hershel and his people have been able to remain unmolested? There’s a road that lead to their place. It’s not fortified. There are a lot of humans concentrated there. So what’s going on? What rules could possibly keep zombies out, except for the one living in Well 2? And how did he get there in the first place?

All of these questions are, to me, vastly more interesting than the site of yet another intensely grisly zombie death. When the bloated, shambling corpse breaks in half while they’re trying to haul it out of the well, it’s just disgusting, serving no other purpose other than to illustrate the futility of their effort. And then the show compounds the sickening nature of the scene by having T-Dog bash the zombie’s head to a pulp, a sequence that’s shot in typical detail, rather than a merciful dispatch to the head. I’ve worked hard to get myself used to violence, but I still tend to think that there ought to be some justification for extreme instances of it. And I can’t really see the point: this is pulping someone who was once human just because the outer parameters of the show permit it. I miss the moments from the first season of the show when the actors playing the zombies had a chance to impart a real pathos to their characters, to suggest a strange fragment of humanity remained beneath necrotizing flesh. Those kinds of scene lent a sense of horror, and of choice, to the violence the characters had to admit. Absent that sense of conflict — or a sense that poisoning this one well will have real consequences — scenes like this are just disgusting. They don’t actually mean anything about the dead, or the people forced to dispatch them a second time.

I’m intrigued, if not entirely convinced, by some of the arguments Erik Kain explores here about whether fantasy is an inherently Christian genre. He quotes D.G. Meyers on C.S. Lewis, who writes that:

Lewis said in a 1947 essay that “To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.” No statement about the genre has ever been more definitive. The bedrock premise of fantasy, which cannot be waived without voiding the genre, is the existence of a spirit realm. Lewis’s Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Rowling’s “wizarding world,” parallel universes of all kind are imaginative reconstructions of Christianity’s first principle: namely, that the “kingdom of heaven” is the only true world.

I’m not sure I agree with the premise that fantasy depends on the idea of another world. Certainly there’s some fantasy that depends on escaping entirely to a parallel universe, whether it’s accessible at the back of a wardrobe or through a competitive, Ivy League-style entrance exams process. But another world is hardly a Christian concept: Islam has highly developed and debated visions of limbo, judgment, hell, and heaven.

And there’s also fantasy based on the idea that we simply don’t know everything about the world that we live in, that there is power that we can access here and now if we know where to look for it and are determined enough to exercise it, all of which give us plenty of hooks in Jewish and Islamic tradition. In the former, take the legend of the golem, the idea that by very hard work and access to esoteric knowledge, rabbis were able to summon protectors for the Jewish people from the earth. There’s also a strong tradition of Jewish mysticism and Messianism, which suggests a permeable boundary between realms and regimes. Judaism has a demonic tradition that includes creatures like Dubbyks and Mazikeen, just as Islam has Jinns, Ifrits, and angels. Christians aren’t the only ones to have fairy realms or ghosts. And in Judaism, the Reconstructionist drive toward human transcendence and elimination of oppression is a framework for an epic quest that can take place in the here and now.

I think the point is more that, as a modification of how Erik puts it, that the fantasy that we see on the American market is “not founded in Christian themes so much as it is rooted in distinctly Anglo-Saxon mythology. And not just the mythology of the Medieval, feudalistic period, but the pre-Christian myths of the faerie-folk as well.” That we see certain things on the market doesn’t mean that fantasy is limited to those things, or inherently grows out to those things. It just means that we’re reliant on old patterns. I don’t think Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is perfect, but it is a rich illustration of the possibilities of Egyptian gods of death, of pre-Christian totem spirits, of Ifrits on the streets of New York for fantasy even if it doesn’t fulfill all of that promise itself.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Lockhart/Gardner goes up against the U.S. government this week in “Executive Order 13224″ as they represent Danny Marwat, an American of Afghan descent who was arrested while working as a translator for a defense contractor in Afghanistan and is now suing the government for torturing him. The various government witnesses keep claiming that they can’t answer questions because of the Classified Information Procedures Act, and Diane repeatedly uses this to her advantage by getting the judge to agree that if the government says information about something is classified, they can’t also claim that it never happened in the first place. Diane is enthusiastic about the case because it’s “the right thing to do,” even if it means, as she says, “poking the bear,” but Will isn’t convinced that it’s right at all. His pragmatic worry that going after the government could make life hard for the firm is combined with his belief that Diane is “fighting an old war.” “Rumsfeld and Cheney are gone. They’re writing books,” he tells her, but she’s firm in her conviction that the government should be held liable for torture anyway. When they discover that Marwat has been lying to them about his connection to a suspected terrorist, though, Will and Diane agree to drop the case. But the Justice Department uses evidence uncovered in that trial to bring criminal conspiracy charges against Marwat, and Lockhart/Gardner is back in, this time to defend Marwat. Diane uses a similar tactic: A military officer refuses to answer questions about an interrogation because the information is classified, so the judge agrees that evidence from that interrogation is inadmissible, and throws out the case. Much of Lockhart/Gardner’s work on this case involves reading through redacted transcripts from secret military trials, and the show made very effective use of bleeping techniques during imagined reenactments of these trials to illustrate the extent of the redaction.

When the case begins, Glenn Childs invokes the titular executive order. Diane says it is designed to help investigate charities who are funding terrorists, but Childs says it also applies to terrorists who hire lawyers. The judge agrees with Diane that it’s a violation of attorney/client privilege, but concedes that it’s the law, so a representative from Lockhart/Gardner must meet periodically with Gordon Higgs, a monitor from the Treasury Department. Diane assigns this task to Alicia, and though Higgs assures her that there’s a Chinese wall between Treasury and Justice, Alicia immediately feels as though Higgs is trying to make her investigate on his behalf, especially when he asks her to report back if Marwat ever mentions the Badula Qulp region of Afghanistan. Marwat later mentions Badula Qulp, so in her second meeting with Higgs, Alicia tries not to answer the question, and Higgs threatens her with a large fine and jail time. He also advises her against getting a lawyer – not something a government representative is supposed to do. Alicia decides to fight back, “poking the bear” – the government – from yet another side. Will offers her a high-powered lawyer who is experienced in cases like this, but Alicia wants some distance from the firm and instead goes to Elsbeth Tascioni, one of the lawyers who worked on Peter’s case. Tascioni first comes across as scattered, a little ditzy, and almost amateurish, but she then uses these behaviors that are generally coded as “feminine” and ineffective to run circles around Higgs. Even Alicia doesn’t realize what Tascioni is up to as she gets Alicia to agree to help her with a case involving an insurance company – and then reveals that this insurance company covered Marwat’s company, so Alicia can’t answer questions about Marwat without it breaking the insurance company’s attorney/client privilege. She even throws in a hilarious bit about how the Supreme Court is very into corporate personhood recently and wouldn’t “take kindly” to Higgs infringing on the insurance company’s rights.
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This post contains spoilers through the October 16 episode of The Walking Dead.

Well, The Walking Dead is back, and grimmer than ever: Andrea’s suicidal, Sophia’s lost in the woods, Lori and Shane can’t quit each other, and God appears to hate Rick Grimes.

In an interview with Colson Whitehead about his new zombie novel, Zone One, that I’ve got going up a little after 4 p.m. today, we spoke a bit about what happens to social norms when society collapses: do people try to build societies based on radically new rules? Or do they preserve their traditions. A milder version of that tension is present in tonight’s episode. Lori expresses some discomfort when the characters come upon a huge number of cars full of the dead — and of valuable supplies. “This is a graveyard,” she says. “I don’t know how I feel about this.” But where Lori sees desecration, Carol sees a small potential for liberation. “Ed never let me wear nice things like this,” she remarks, holding up a pretty red blouse. And Lori’s moment of nerves doesn’t mean she’s consistently committed to upholding old norms, or that it’s easy for her. She’s struggling with her attraction to Shane, who she doesn’t want to sleep with, but she can’t quite walk away from either. “Just trying to be the good guy, Lori,” Shane tells her, informing of his intention to leave the main group. “Even if you don’t see it.”

Andrea’s similarly struggling with her relationship with Dale, and her larger need to find a reason to keep living after the loss of her sister. Dale confiscates her gun after she fails to put it back together in time to protect herself from the walkers, but also because he believes she’ll use it. “You chose suicide,” Dale protests when she demands her gun back. “What’s that to you? You barely know me,” Andrea spits back to the man who’s come to think of himself as related to her. “I didn’t want your blood on my hands…What did you expect? That I had an epiphany? Some life-affirming catharsis…I wanted to die on my terms, not torn apart by some drooling freaks. You took that away from me…You took my choice away from me. And you expect gratitude?”
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