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.