A Television Show Set in the Afterlife Sends Up America’s Post-Christian Theology

Feb. 19 2018

The sitcom The Good Place, poised to enter its third season, is based on a novel premise: the selfish main character, Eleanor, has found herself mistakenly sent to heaven. To keep her secret safe, her heavenly husband—who had been an ethics professor in this world—gives her lessons in how to be a good person so that she can successfully blend in among the saved. Alexi Sargeant, who finds the show “unexpectedly profound,” writes in his review:

The Good Place . . . begins by skewering shallowly sentimental ideas of heaven and then transitions to asking (sincerely!) how a bad person can become good. . . . [It] explores and then explodes “moralistic therapeutic deism,” the mushy, post-Christian pseudo-religion of America’s youth diagnosed by the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. Moralistic therapeutic deism posits that God wants you to be happy but otherwise stays out of the way and that nice people go to heaven when they die. The Good Place starts off as a Technicolor Divine Comedy for the therapeutic deist universe. The twists of the show suggest [the show’s creator] is well aware of the extent to which this worldview is lame and saccharine. . . .

One whole episode is spent running variations on the famous “trolley problem,” the allegedly ethics-clarifying hypothetical that asks you to decide how you would act if an out-of-control trolley were on course to run over several people. Would you pull a lever to direct the trolley if it meant it would run over only one person? Would you push a person into the trolley’s path? . . . [The episode’s plot seems to be] suggesting there is something demonic about the trolley problem itself, or at least about the utilitarian interpretations that make it a numbers game—as if any evil can be made good if a malicious mastermind adds enough arbitrary consequences to refraining from evil.

In one of its best moves, writes Sargent, the series employs a single well-executed plot twist that “upends audience expectations and retroactively makes this sappy, chichi heaven a satire of our impoverished imaginings of eternal bliss.”

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Afterlife, Arts & Culture, Decline of religion, Ethics, Television

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict