Who is Phil Vischer? Is he the head of the NRA? Someone who designs violent video games? The lead singer in a death metal band? Nope - he's the founder of Veggie Tales, and (especially if you like to talk to tomatoes) his story is a good one.
I know that when kids are young, popping in a video can be a lifesaver. Sometimes you need a diversion for them because you need a few minutes of freedom or concentration, or to survive a very long car ride. I get that, so this is not a post about why it's wrong to put kids in front of screens. (Put down the pitchforks!)
But I do think everyone who is a fan of Veggie Tales or has every watched Veggie Tales or at least has heard of Veggie Tales (so in other words, everyone) needs to read and then carefully consider the words of its founder, Phil Vischer. Because when someone calls "oops" on their life's work, that deserves our attention - especially when that work has become so woven into the fabric of American kids' experience of Christianity.
It's a long story, but ten years after Veggie Tales debuted in 1993, Vischer lost the company. By his own admission, the Big Idea Productions grew too quickly, got overextended, and couldn't pay its bills. Shortly after the release of Jonah in 2002, the company was sold off in bankruptcy court. (This is a greatly condensed version. The full story is here.) In the process, Vischer lost creative control over Bob, Larry and the rest of the Veggie characters he'd created. Quite a blow for a man who'd pledged to make his production company "the Christian Disney".
Even in the midst of his company's rapid expansion, Vischer had a sense that things weren't right. His health suffered. He felt burdened to do even more. He sought out counseling to deal with his anxiety.
In a 2013 conference address at Biola University (go to about the 36:30 mark), Vischer recounted the day of the Columbine shootings, when he happened to have a counseling session already scheduled. The counselor noticed how upset he was by the news, and asked him, "What are you feeling?"
And I thought about it and then I said, "I could've done something...One of the reasons this happened is that the media that those boys were consuming, were just drowning in, was so, just, evil and then violent, and that's what God has called me to do is change the media, and make it better, and maybe if I had done more, maybe if I'd gone faster or worked harder, this wouldn't have happened." The counselor looked at me, stared at me for a while, and said, "Wow. That's quite a burden to carry." I said, "Yeah. Yeah it is."
I was carrying an immense burden to save the world, to make a difference. To offset the evil streaming out of Hollywood into living rooms across the country. To do as much as I could, as fast as I could. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I thought about at night - and it was making me miserable. It was killing me. I was not a happy person.Later in the talk, Vischer says that this burden was like a rock he was dragging uphill, and it took losing his company to see that it was a burden God had never intended him to assume. "Only one person has ever walked the face of the earth who could save the world. And his name wasn't Phil."
Following Big Idea's bankruptcy, Vischer entered into what he calls a "forced sabbatical", during which he reevaluated both what he had tried to do (build a the Christian Disney in order to counteract the negative influence of typical media on kids) and the content of his product. He gave this interview to World magazine in 2011, in which he said:
I looked back at the previous 10 years and realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, "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. (emphasis added)Now, defenders of Veggie Tales will find all sorts of reasons why there's nothing wrong with Veggie Tales and why they'll continue to buy and watch Veggie Tales with their kids. They'll point to the fact that Veggie Tales is cute, and clever, and family-friendly (you can watch without your finger hovering over the fast-forward button on the remote), and funny (not annoying), and that kids can still remember Veggie Tales songs they were raised on 10 and 15 years ago. And best of all, it teaches morals and life lessons that kids need to hear.
And yet...Phil Vischer's reflections on his own work deserve to be taken seriously. Because when a guy who created something comes back almost 20 years later and says, "You know what? If I had it to do all over again, I'd approach it differently," he is saying that his films were actually about something different than what we believed they were about. Actually, scratch that - the films said they taught about courage and forgiveness and trust and perseverance and VALUES, and they did do those things. But they taught them in the name of Christianity. And that's the rub.
When we feed our kids a steady stream of "do this" and "be this way" and especially "God loves it when we _________", we shape in their minds a powerful conception of what Christianity is. Most kids misunderstand the gospel. They're socially conditioned instead to believe in karma. Whether we call it by that name or not, that's the idea: be good, and you get good; be bad, and you get punished. We've placed such a premium on being a "good kid" that kids view themselves and others through a black-and-white filter: There are "good kids" and "bad kids". I'm good, or I'm bad. Be good. Don't be bad.
This knocks grace out of its central position in our relationship with God, and replaces it with performance. And that's a trap. "Doesn't God want us to be good?" Well, yeah, he does. And I want to be able to fly. And I can - with the help of machines built by people with much greater abilities than I have on my own.
But we have a fatal tendency to divorce God from the equation. He is not just the reason for being good ("God wants you to...", "The Bible says we should..."), he is the way to be good. And kind. And patient. Which brings us to the fruit (not "fruits", as it's commonly misidentified) of the Spirit. I cringe every time a Sunday school lesson proposes to teach kids how to "practice the fruits of the Spirit". It's an easy lesson to teach - fruits are visual, kids will enjoy coloring them in and cutting them out, and they get to decide which fruit will stand for which character trait (because, hey, everyone knows a banana represents peace, right?) - and it utterly misses the point of what Paul was expressing.
Vischer says he discovered something key while reading Galatians 5 in the midst of his turmoil as Big Idea was expanding. "I'd always looked at it as an obligation, a duty: if you are a Christian, you have to act loving, you have to act peaceful, you have to act joyful. I looked at it like homework: Oh great, something else I have to do. But now I saw what Paul really meant: If you are filled with the Spirit, these attributes will flow out of you, whether you want them to or not."
The point of the fruit of the Spirit is the Spirit, not the fruit. The problem with any character education program is that it threatens to take our eye off the ball, so that the exercise of good "qualities" becomes the focus - "I can do it!" - rather than learning how to open ourselves, receive from, and rely on God - whose Spirit works the change inside of us. It's natural, in our human state, to veer off in the direction of thinking of character like a muscle - the more often we use it, the easier it will be to do the right thing again in the future. But that's not the Bible's message about character at all. The answer to living virtously isn't to strengthen my own self. It's to drop my resistance and create space in myself for the Holy Spirit to work - to bear its fruit.
The urge to major in teaching character is strong. We want 5 year olds who are exceptionally virtuous. Their behavior becomes the barometer of good parenting. Plus it makes them easier to deal with. But there's a grave danger in "convincing kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity," and it's this: One day kids will grow up and meet people of other faiths who are also humble, and kind, and loving, and who believe God has their backs, and it's not a far leap from there to, "All religions basically teach the same thing."
When NBC signed on Veggie Tales as a Saturday morning show, its standards and practices division required Big Idea to strip it of its Bible references (as Vischer put it, "every line that implied God or the Bible might have an impact on how we live our lives today" needed to be removed). This raised the ire of some conservative media watchdog groups - How dare NBC edit out God!?! - but that misses the point: if you can remove all God and Christian references from a show and the show still works, you've got a problem. An NBC executive said at the time, "There's a fine line of universally accepted religious values," he said. "We don't get too specific with any particular religious doctrine or any particular religious denomination."
But there's the problem: this business of getting specific on particular doctrines matters. It's what sets Christianity apart from other religions. It's what sets other religions apart from other religions:
- God: an idea, or a being? One, or many? Intimately involved, or distant?
- Jesus: teacher, prophet, or God-made-man?
- Us: basically good, or corrupted?
- Sin: real, or imaginary? Mere mistakes, or disobedience that carries a price?
- Jesus' death: the result of a tragic misunderstanding, or a history-changing act that brought the possibility of our redemption?
