Orange the New Religious Illiteracy?

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I’ve finished watching the first season of “Orange is the New Black,” the hit Netflix series. It’s well-acted and insightful, and I’m looking forward to seeing more.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the series follows an upper middle-class, well-educated young woman named Piper Chapman who gets caught up in a drug deal and is sentenced to 15 months in prison. There she has to deal with all manner of people, many of whom are poor and uneducated.

Toward the end of the first season, the plot is more and more focused on the ongoing tension between Chapman and a prisoner named Pennsatucky, who, some would say, is a fanatical Christian. At one point, to avoid hostility from Pennsatucky and her friends, Chapman agrees to be baptized, then backs out with a speech in which she proclaims,

“I believe in science; I believe in evolution. I cannot get behind a supreme being who weighs in on the Tony Awards while a million people get whacked with machetes. I don’t believe a billion Indians are going to hell. I don’t believe we get cancer to learn life’s lessons; I don’t believe people die young because God needs another angel.”

All I can say to that is, “Me, too, and me, neither.”

At worst, the speech represents the religious illiteracy that is common among many seemingly educated people today. At best, it’s a model for the term, “straw man.” Wikipedia defines that as “a common type of argument…based on the misrepresentation of the original topic of argument. To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument.”

The origin of the term “straw man” is apparently unclear but I would guess it is related to warriors who practiced their skills on “men” they made of straw, stabbed with their swords and swiped with their spears, and easily knocked down. Chapman’s speech lists fallacious and easily refuted views of “Christianity” based on various perverted popular beliefs, making them easy to refute and disavow.

She can’t believe in God because she believes in science and evolution? Since when are they mutually exclusive? Doesn’t she know those topics are taught in thousands of religiously-affiliated schools and colleges; that Charles Darwin, credited with establishing the theory of evolution, was himself a believer, as are many famous scientists and evolutionists, including Francis Collins, who directed the Genome Project and is director of the National Institutes of Health? Doesn’t she know that many theologians acknowledge that religion itself appears to have evolved?

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Chapman then lists what she doesn’t believe in, which I can only describe as non-sequiturs – things that follow only from the kind of faith proclaimed by people on the fringes of belief. It appears that, like many of her contemporaries, Chapman hasn’t looked into religion since she was in Sunday school – if she was ever in Sunday school – and knows little about what constitutes faith.

Unfortunately, she’s not alone. People move from elementary school into high school, college and often graduate school, improving their knowledge about all manner of subjects. For many, however, knowledge about their own and others’ religions remains at the elementary-school level.

Chapman’s rejection of faith, however, may actually have more to do with who she is and who Pennsatucky is, as well as the target audience for the show, than with rational arguments about faith and belief.

Author B.D. McClay says Orange Is the New Black seems aimed at an audience of Piper Chapmans, who are “upper-middle-class, very educated, largely secular.”

“They aren’t friends with Pennsatucky; they don’t know anybody like her. Pennsatucky might be their waitress, or sell them some snacks at a gas station. But that’s about as close as their world and hers will ever come to touching. So it doesn’t matter, really, that none of these things about Pennsatucky make sense. They aren’t meant to make sense. They’re meant to be frightening.”

If there is such a thing as homophobia, and I believe there is, maybe there’s such a thing as “Christophobia,” the fear of, or reluctance to, associate with or be involved with Christians. And I suspect you will find it mostly among middle and upper-middle class, otherwise educated people, for many of whom the subject of faith and religion is taboo.

There are reasoned, informed reasons for rejecting belief in God, but Chapman appears to be blissfully unaware of them.  

Still, the show has redeeming qualities. It does a good job of showing the evident purposelessness, randomness and irrationality of prison life and portrays many prisoners as brave and thoughtful women who show us how to have hope in the face of powerlessness and apparent hopelessness.