Most of you know that I am a die hard Law & Order fan. ALL of them. I used to TiVo it, but then we got rid of TiVo, and now I watch it semi-religiously on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Tuesday 9pm being Criminal Intent and 10 pm being Special Victims Unit, Friday 10pm being 'the original".
When I can't watch, I iTunes the episodes and watch later. I even have Paul sucked in and it is part of date night. We just gotta be home by 10. Paul mentioned in his "I love you but I am calling you out on your junk" way that I am dedicated to Law & Order, and supposedly dedicated to the faith/culture dialogue, yet he has yet to see a post on the show and all the theological things that I rant about in relation to it. So here is the first:
Two L&O's in the past month have been using the “preacher gone gay” subject matter as material for screenplays. What is fascinating to me is not the whole "ripped from the headlines" thing (L&O has always done that) but how people of faith are being portrayed in these episodes. I have to applaud and shake my finger at the writer of "Brother's Keeper", Marsha Norman (with story help from Warren Leight) for her/their eerily realistic portrayal of how some Evangelicals act, and her/their lack of seeing the scope of Christianity.
Newsflash to culture: NOT ALL CHRISTIANS THINK THE SAME THINGAll story aside, as I would hate to spoil anything, we see many instances in L&O where the faith people portrayed are Neo-Fundamentalist, not Evangelical, but the label Evangelical is used to describe said Neo-Fundamentalists. This disturbs me greatly – but it also informs me as to why most people who may not be Christ-driven think that Evangelicals are people who believe certain things like, say, anyone who doesn’t believe the Bible is perfect will go to a literal Hell.
People care about the “Godtalk” of TV. People are in culture and they are thinking about this show theologically… Even if they don’t phrase it like that.
Check out this comment from the official website:
“Moving on, I agree in that Stabler is cute... And I know divorce is a sin. My parents got divorced, and it was my mom's fault. My father was a devout Catholic and would never have consented but my mom moved us to Florida from North Carolina because in North Carolina you need the consent of both adults to go through with a divorce but in Florida you only need one. Too bad my father never caught on to her little manipulative game... I feel for him though. I miss my father very much and i hate that Stabler's relationship with his daughters is strained.
sMyRnaBeaCHBabE21
March 4 - 5:07pm PT”
Now to be fair, there was one episode of SVU where we got to see a gentler version; maybe even we could call it a more grace-filled version, of Christianity. Several women who had been raped were searching for their rapist before the statute of limitations ran out. One of the victims knew her rapist, but refused to turn him in. Why? Because she was Brethren. That was the show’s explanation. Her faith prompted her to but action behind the thought that forgiveness outweighs (in this case) New York state law. BTW: the link to the episode no longer exists.
L&O – highly theological, not necessarily highly accurate. So maybe our job is to help explain.
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