God and GLEE

My wife and I love the show GLEE.  Love it.  I'm not even sure the word "Gleek" is strong enough to describe it.  We look forward to every episode, we buy the songs, we discuss the plot lines.  Really, it's rather pathetic, isn't it?

There's a reason, though, that I love GLEE.  I love it because it is a tremendously hopeful and joyful show.  No matter the dramatic circumstances the characters face, virtually every episode ends on an uplifting note.  Take the most recent episode: the club discovers that one of their members is living in a hotel because his dad lost his job.  A devastating - and all too common - reality.  The response of the GLEE club is to sing - with this member and his little siblings - Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop," an anthem of hope about looking forward to a better future.

Cheesy?  Yes.  But also joyful and hopeful.

Like I said, every episode seems to have an uplifting note.  I was mystified, then, when some time ago a pastor friend of mine made a comment on Facebook about how terrible GLEE is as a show.  When I questioned him as to why, his response was something along the lines of "It promotes homosexual relationships."  I didn't know how to respond at the time.

I think I might now.

Here's the thing - my pastor friend is wrong.  GLEE - as I see it, at least - does not promote homosexual relationships so much as it refuses to exclude homosexuals and refuses to participate in the stereotypes that many people want to hold up about homosexuals and other outcasts.

A lot of people, many of whom would call themselves Christians, are bound and determined to exclude members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities - and this desired exclusion goes beyond wanting to keep them out of the church.  This is not enough for them - LGBT individuals must be excluded from society as a whole.  They must not be allowed to adopt children, or share benefits like heterosexual couples.  They must be kept away from children so that their "perversion" won't rub off.  It is sad but true that a group of people that think this way still exists.

And as much as I respect my pastor friend, I believe he falls into that category.  Moreover, I believe that is why he has such a problem with GLEE.

Because in order to exclude an entire group of people, you first have to set them apart as needing to be excluded.  You cannot treat a person you want to exclude as a person.  You have to symbolically exclude them - in language and in thought - in order to proceed to physical exclusion.  So homosexuals become "fags," lesbians become "dykes," and so on.  All LGBT individuals are portrayed as freaks and deviants who are promiscuous, diseased and who prey on children.  In this way it becomes permissible - even admirable - to deny such people the rights and privileges associated with "normal" people.

The only problem is that if this kind of exclusion is to succeed, it must be complete.  The symbolic and stereotypical caricatures cannot be challenged.  If the "other" - in this case, members of the LGBT community, is humanized it becomes more difficult to convince people to hate them, to exclude them, to deny their humanity.

So when a show like GLEE comes on - with characters like the flamboyant and self-assured Kurt and the conflicted, tormented Dave and Santana who struggles with denial and Brittany who simply doesn't know - and paints such people in normal terms as just like other students, such a show must be resisted.  Gays cannot be kind or loving or compassionate because if they are then what grounds are left for exclusion.  Hence the outcry among certain segments of the so-called "Christian" community against a show that consistently sends a message of hope.

It is for this reason - the steadfast message of hope and love and acceptance - that I think GLEE sometimes preaches the message of God better than I have ever done, even in the best of my sermons.  The message of God is a message of embrace and inclusion, not of exclusion.  It is a message of love, not hate.  It is a message of hope that doesn't dehumanize any individual or group.

In short, what I'm saying is that Jesus might well be a "Gleek" - or at least Jesus would be more interested in its message of inclusion than too many Christians' message of exclusion.