3. What We’ve Learned Today (What Was VeggieTales?)
At the end of every VeggieTales episode, Bob and Larry would lay bare before the viewer — with the help of an accompanying theme song and Bible verse — the clear lesson to be derived from the previous half-hour. I wish that I could, with such brevity and clarity, communicate what we can learn about evangelicalism from the phenomenon of VeggieTales. There are many discussions to be had about the values and limitations of individual episodes, but the following are my attempts to summarize what the phenomenon itself can teach us about the past and present of evangelical communication.
To borrow again from researcher Hillary Warren, “the ability of and the willingness of Christian evangelists to make messages and media that were attractive and accessible certainly led to the growth of evangelical Christianity” (Warren 38). Phenomena like VeggieTales aren’t just manifestations of evangelicalism; they are forces that keep evangelical Christianity growing.
However, I believe that the singular focus on putting evangelical content into VeggieTales blinded its creators to what its form would communicate about Christianity. When a “Christian” show is presented to children with the same trappings as any other consumer good (i.e. excessive merchandising, advertising, etc.), it does nothing to suggest that unfettered consumerism is at odds with the way of Jesus. This indistinguishability from other consumer goods has the effect of initiating children into the beliefs and rituals of American consumerism safely underneath the umbrella of “Christianity.”
However, Christianity makes wildly different claims over our distributions of wealth than American consumerism does, and to dismiss this as a central tenant of the religion is to misunderstand the religion altogether. To quote from Drew Hart’s Who Will Be a Witness?:
“There are over two thousand Bible verses about wealth. And the gospel narratives of Jesus spend a lot of time redefining our relationship to wealth. However, there are almost no expectations for economic discipleship for comfortable Christians in most churches in the United States. Local churches either teach the exact opposite of what Jesus taught so that Christian economics fits into the American dream or suggest that it is not the church’s business to interfere in the economic lives of parishioners. It’s these kinds of hypocrisies that turn people away from the church and malign our witness in the public square” (Hart, 247).
I believe that capitalism — the ability to fulfill needs and desires through the accumulation and expenditure of individual wealth — has been a more shaping influence in my lived experience than Christianity. Now, I believe that VeggieTales was more effective at evangelizing the former over the latter.
There is also information communicated to children by the form of television itself. Television is a media that exists primarily to entertain. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman’s work on the effects of television on public discourse, the author claims that educational programming such as Sesame Street “encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street… whereas in a classroom, fun is never more than a means to an end, on television it is the end in itself” (Postman, 143).
As the saying goes, you win people to what you win them with. Vischer likely might have argued that the fun of VeggieTales was a means to the end of receptivity to a Christian message, but I would argue that Postman’s claim still applies to VeggieTales. If one starts hiding a teaspoon of medicine inside a cup of sugar, it should be expected that the recipient of will gain less of a taste for medicine than they will for sugar. Do I believe that VeggieTales was able to attract children to Christian messages? Absolutely. However, I ultimately believe that VeggieTales made kids consumers than it did Christians.
Was VeggieTales really trying to make anyone a Christian?
As I’ve written about VeggieTales as an artifact of evangelicalism, I have wondered if Phil Vischer would agree with that label. I’ve already identified some of the hallmarks of Protestant evangelical theology evident in the series, but would Vischer say that VeggieTales was evangelizing? Despite countless identifications of VeggieTales as a Christian series, Vischer said the following in a 1999 post on the Big Idea website
“Someday if that (individual salvation) happens, that would be great, but for now I want everyone… to say ‘I think I should look a little more into God because of what I just saw… I was called to go head-to-head with Disney on the shelves of the Wal-Marts and Kmarts of the world.”
I would argue that evangelism does not require a proverbial altar call to be understood as evangelism. VeggieTales, in its pursuit of beating Disney at its own game, was simply evangelizing a different version of faith. VeggieTales was content to present Christianity as tantamount to an inoffensive set of personal virtues to which Christ is inessential and to which the church is unnecessary. To quote researcher Telford Work:
“The missing Christ and Church of Veggie ethics in a way reflect Christology’s and ecclesiology’s complex status in an evangelicalism that has struggled… to accommodate itself to a world where Christology and ecclesiology are no longer welcome, at least not in their classical Christian forms.”
Much has been written regarding “moralistic therapeutic deism,” a term that is not unhelpful in describing the theology of VeggieTales. This term, as coined by sociologist Christian Smith in his 2005 (note the proximity to VeggieTales) book Soul Searching, refers to a distinctly American theology in which the rational, autonomous self is centralized and the purpose of God is to tell us how to live and to improve our lives while requiring little to nothing of us. To conflate a marketable set of “Christian values” with “Christianity” itself is ultimately to mischaracterize it.
To his credit, Vischer has come to realize many of the educational shortcomings of the series. The following quote is from a September 2011 issue of WORLD Magazine:
“I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity… ‘Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,’ or ‘hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!’ But that isn’t Christianity, it’s morality… we’re drinking a cocktail that’s a mix of the Protestant work ethic, the American dream, and the gospel. And we’ve intertwined them so completely that we can’t tell them apart anymore.”
Vischer wanted to be Walt Disney, and he now sees himself as answerable to God for the idolatry of that ideal. I would argue that he is answerable to the children who have had to learn on their own just how little media empires like Disney’s have in common with the Kingdom of God. Furthermore, I would argue he’s answerable to the children who have never had a subsequent influence to separate the two.
Could it be that young evangelicals in the age of television and the Internet have seen evangelical Christianity sell itself more times than we’ve seen the way of Jesus exampled? What if each new attempt to stake our ministries on relevance and popularity — every book, event, influencer, and high-tech light set up — has meaningfully altered what is being communicated to us?
I do not want to be misunderstood as arguing that true Christianity is too complicated, boring, or serious to be meaningful to children. Furthermore, I even believe that Christian media can serve as a helpful reminder to us that neither churches and clergy are exclusive purviews of wisdom nor conduits to relationships with God. However, Jesus made it clear to His disciples to “not hinder” the children from coming to him “for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:13–15).
Rather than hindering children by uncritically instilling in them incomplete and lesser ideas about Christianity that can and do come to us from within our own traditions and subcultures, let us continue to ensure that our love for Jesus is made manifest in our thoughtful engagement even and especially with children. After all, “God made them special, and He loves them very much.”
