Theology, philosophy and reality television would seem to go together about as well as peanut butter, mayo and pickles. I can’t imagine CBS would clamor to stuff a bunch of pastors into the Big Brother house and film them fighting over original sin and post-millennialism.
But if you’ve ever eaten a peanut butter, mayo and pickle sandwich, you’ll know they’re surprisingly good. And by the same token, reality TV can speak to the bigger issues of life.
Take, for instance, House Hunters.
Last summer, I confessed my strange yen for the HGTV show wherein prospective home buyers tromp through for-sale properties—ogling the backyard and grimacing over the kitchen countertops—before deciding which one to buy.
So I was shocked (shocked!) when House Hunters—one of the few shows I actually watch for fun without having to review it—is now the center of scandal. Some allege that what we see on screen isn’t what actually happens.
No reality show faithfully represents 100% “reality.” I think we all get that. But I wasn’t quite aware of just how far the truth was allegedly being stretched. A former participant on the show says she bought her home well before the House Hunters crew ever came by. And while one of the three houses they “hunted” was obviously the one they bought, the other two were just those of some willing friends and weren’t up for sale at all.
So what does this mean?
To some, not much. In an article awesomely titled, “If House Hunters Is Wrong, I Don’t Want to Be Right,” Time’s TV critic James Poniewozik says:
The fact that many house hunters are not, in fact, hunting will make me watch the show not a whit less—and it seems I am not alone. Admittedly, there's a certain brattiness to my reaction: why are you jerks trying to ruin one of the few pleasures of my sad, pitiful life? But also, I'm not watching House Hunters to learn the raw data about certain real-estate transactions in Texas or West Virginia or Belize, or even to learn the truth of the featured house hunters' lives. I just want a little window, from my narrow house in Brooklyn, on another kind of life—or, if I get caught in a lengthy Hunters marathon, several other kinds of lives. I want to imagine myself weighing the options of price vs. size vs. location. I want to imagine that feeling of possibility, without having to hire movers and brokers and pack all my crap into boxes.
I’m totally with Poniewozik on this one. After having watched as much television as I have, it’s fairly obvious that most reality shows are a mix of fact and fiction. And for me, House Hunters doesn’t need to be completely “real” for me to enjoy it. I like to imagine what it’d be like to move to, say, Portland: What sort of house could I get? How much would I have to pay? Now, if I learned that houses in Portland cost four times as much as they appeared to on the show, I’d feel ripped off. I wouldn’t watch any more.
Which is pretty much what happened when adventurer Bear Grylls was caught cheating on his reality show, Born Survivor. Grylls’ show was predicated on dealing with horrible, outdoorsy-like conditions—catching rabbits in snares, making shelters out of pinecones and lint, that sort of thing. My son and I watched the thing occasionally and enjoyed it when we did. But when I heard that Grylls, after making his pinecone shelter, sometimes hot-footed it to a nearby hotel for the night, that was the end of Born Survivor for me. The integrity of the show—that he was actually doing the stuff he said he was doing—was essential to my enjoyment of the show.
Now, I could leave the blog here if not for an interesting conversation that’s been going on underneath Adam Holz’s fantastic “Tom Cruise and the Postmodern Spirit” blog entry. “Individuals have to decide what is true and real for them,” Cruise is quoted as saying, and readers have been digging into the tricky issue over just what “truth” is.
Cruise was referring to religion in his comments, and we often hear about how, in this postmodern age, religion has become the ultimate squishy truth: Your God’s OK, my God’s OK. Your truth is just as valid as mine.
Now, I don’t know if that really means folks who say this sort of thing believe that God winks in and out of existence depending on who’s thinking about Him (and how). I think that, for some, the underlying meaning is something more along the lines of: The truth, when it comes to God, is unknowable, unfathomable; we can’t know for sure. So let’s grab a coffee and not argue about it.
Because truth—real truth—is obviously out there. As Adam writes, few would argue that gravity is subjective. And neither would God be—a God who created such things as gravity and the universe. Either He’s out there and did so or He’s not and didn’t.
But because you can’t prove the nature and existence of God like you can gravity, things get tricky, and as such it can be tempting to throw up our hands and make religion and God more subjective, more pragmatic. Does my faith help me feel better? Does it help me be a better person? Can it influence how I see the people and the world around me? Faith becomes less a quest for objective truth and more an embracing of a more relative form of truth: A truth like, “I like peanut butter, mayo and pickle sandwiches.” Hey, that’s a true statement … but it might not be true for you.
That sort of faith feels, to me, a little like my reaction to House Hunters. We can’t know whether everything we see on the show is true or not … we don’t have that sort of insight. But for me it doesn’t matter, because I still glean benefit from it. If I was a certain type of person, I might say that the show is “true” for me—or, at least, as true as it needs to be.
But I’m not the sort of person who can turn what should be an objective truth into a relative one. Sure, I can enjoy House Hunters. But I can’t ever pretend that it’s a “true” representation of actual people buying actual houses (if the allegations themselves are true). House Hunters slips into the realm of myth or fable for me: Stories that may have something to say but can’t be taken literally.
When it comes to faith, it’s important for me to believe that my faith is in something real, something true. Yes, my understanding of that truth is inherently flawed, just as I am flawed. But the fact that my understanding is imperfect doesn’t negate the fact that the truth, the real truth, is out there.
I can’t have a House Hunters type of faith. The fact that faith has proved to be of tangible benefit in my life is, really, beside the point. If someone proved to me—definitively proved it—that Christ did not rise from the dead, I couldn’t be a Christian anymore. I couldn’t pretend. I’d turn it off just as quickly as I did Bear Grylls ever so long ago.
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