You probably don’t watch “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”.
That’s too bad.
Don’t take me too seriously on that, and don’t think I endorse everything afoot on the show. But having become an avid fan of the show in the waning days of this charged political season, I’ve done no small amount of reading about the creative engine that runs this Emmy, Grammy and Peabody-award winning show.
Before I justify the silly title of this piece, I think a quote or two are in order.
Back in October of 2004, Jon Stewart had a now-legendary appearance on the since-defunct CNN show “Crossfire”. (Here is video, and here is a transcript.) In the course of Stewart’s demolishing the show’s pretense of being a valuable addition to public discourse, one of the hosts inadvertently cast light upon a truth I have begun holding more and more dear to my heart.
Early in the discussion, Stewart makes it plain that the hosts of “Crossfire” appear to not recognize the difference between his show, on the Comedy Central network, and theirs, on the globally-recognized, industry-pioneering and standard-setting Cable News Network (CNN). He brings this out most powerfully by simply reminding his hosts the following:
STEWART: You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.
If you are unfamiliar with Stewart and his show, the quote below, from this exceptional Rolling Stone article, given by the host of a spinoff of “The Daily Show” and fellow writer, will further elucidate my point:
[Former 'Daily Show correspondent Stephen]COLBERT: I make up facts left and right. Liberals will come on the show and say, “Well, conservatives want this to be a theocracy.” And I’ll say, “Well, why not, the Founding Fathers were all fundamentalist Christians.” And they’ll say, “No, they weren’t.” I say, “Yes, they were. And, ladies and gentlemen, if I’m wrong I will eat your encyclopedias.” And the person folds, ’cause they don’t realize I have no problem making things up, because I have no credibility to lose.
Bear with me for just two more, from both of these guys together:
STEWART: What people in Washington don’t understand is that we’re not running for re-election. We don’t have to parse every word for fear that it appears in our opponent’s commercial and suddenly renders us impotent.
COLBERT: We claim no respectability. There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don’t have to defend anything.
All of this quite simply reduces to this: these two guys make no claim whatsoever to ‘respectability’ as journalists… because they aren’t journalists. First and foremost for them is to elicit laughs, within their particular plot of the comedic landscape. That just so happens to entail their pretending to be journalists. But firstly, they are people-going-for-a-joke-ians (or, translated from Hyperhyphenian, “comedians”).
Just as we’ve got to guard against treating Stewart and Colbert as Real Journalists, I wonder how much of our bad theology, and even outright heresy, we can trace back to the simple forcing of something from the Scriptures which they fundamentally, well, aren’t.
I have had the exceptional privilege to study the Christian faith, our Scriptures and our traditions more than most. So doing has afforded me many an opportunity to observe people mishandling (if not manhandling!) the Scriptures in ways that do extraordinary violence to anything resembling coherence within the word of God and even simple common sense.
To take what is probably the most contested discussion of all (but also by far the richest one for our purposes), consider the Creation narrative in Genesis. Was it intended as a scientific treatise, to tell us in precise terms ways in which God spake the world into existence? If so, centuries of fierce arguments over how to work through that interpretation dot the landscape of today.
Or is it a polemic written by Moses to ridicule other, non-Israelite belief systems of the time? If so, what else is there to see in Genesis 1-6, using those particular lenses? (And what else all of a sudden isn’t there?)
Or was it mere myth, of the ‘here’s a quaint little bedtime story’ sort? If so, that forces us into a virtual minefield of interpretational baggage to untangle.
And don’t expect ThisSpace to be the forum for untangling those issues. Yet the answer to a question about what Genesis is intended to be has EXTRAORDINARY ramifications as to how you handle the Scriptures along the way. The basic question that you’re answering is, “for what can I use Genesis responsibly, and for what ought I not?” Tough decisions, with serious ramifications, have to be made there; otherwise you’ll look like someone that thinks Jon Stewart is the Walter Cronkite of our generation.
Notice in the Stewart and Colbert quotes above that those who criticize them are forced to find grounds on which to criticize them besides the obvious (i.e., that they aren’t very good journalists). That’s a fight Stewart and Colbert have no interest in fighting anyway, thus the adventure in missing the point entirely that has so befuddled their detractors.
The simple lesson then is this: consider carefully what it is the intent you so boldly presume upon a piece of art, a person’s behavior, some quote, a public official or piece of Scripture. Nobody wants to read their Bible with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert reading over their shoulder, do they?
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