The most recent book on the television worlds of Joss Whedon I have been reading is The Psychology of Joss Whedon edited by Joy Davidson and published by Dallas based BenBella books. Amongst the interesting essays by various social scientists in this collection is an autobiographical one by Stephanie DeLuse, an essay that stimulated me to follow her example and explore how I lost one of my traditional religions, though i was only marginally devoted to it in the first place, just as she lost hers.
DeLuse writes about her upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist religion in her essay “More Than Entertainment’ in the book. She explores the minuses of such an upbringing. She mentions that were positives but doesn’t make these explicit. Perhaps it was a focus on ethics if an authoritarian ethics and morality. This community—she doesn’t note which fundamentalist Christian group it was though I suspect it was not Mormon fundamentalism as polygamy, which is central to sectarian Mormon fundamentalist groups is not implied whatsoever—was, she writes, authoritarian patriarchal, paternalistic, ethnocentric, apocalyptic, and manichean. It was an authoritarian group which convinced if not coerced her to marry a 26 year old patriarch when she was 17 and which had negative impacts on her health (mental? physical? both?), impacts that eventually forced her to leave the community and face shunning, a shunning she still faces today from the group.
One of the things Deluse notes was that she was not allowed to, in this authoritarian social group, watch television, particularly television of a “nefarious” sort like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, both of which the faith defined as “occult” and hence evil. For this faith such television was worldly and wicked and hence verboten. Paradoxically, television, in the form of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, would prove to be healing balm for the scars that fundamentalist Christianity left on her body and her mind. It made her think, think about women’s roles in society, about misogyny, and about social ethics and morality.
I was not brought up in any Christian fundamentalist, evangelical, liturgical, or mainstream religion at all. The Dallas I grew up in—Big D was only one of the places I lived in my youth—was dominated by the Southern Baptists and the Methodists, the former perceived as conservative, the latter as liberal—but I was neither nor were my parents. My religion was, if only briefly and without much depth to it, Americanism and Texasism, the religions which preached the gospel of American and Texas greatness (second to none), manicheanism (we good, they bad), messianism (we are on a mission from god), apocalypticism (utopia is coming to the America and Texas near you), and compassionate (if, of course, converts accepted the gospel of America and Texas). I recall feeling briefly proud of being a Texas as I sat in my Texas civics class in junior high and reflected on the brilliant words to the Texas national hymn, “Texas Our Texas".
It really didn’t take me long to lose this faith. The war in Vietnam was the initial agent of change. It was a war I eventually came to realise was based on a series of lies: lies about the dangers of communism to the US (the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were, of course, primarily nationalists), lies about dominos falling, likes about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the lie that the US was not the latest in a long line of imperial great powers. With the proper empirically grounded scepticism in place I soon realised that the US was grounded it lies: lies that it was democratic (it is, as is almost always the case with great powers and beyond, oligarchic), lies about its economic system (the lie that it is great for everyone; it is good, of course, for the oligarchs), lies that it was a beacon to the rest of the world (the lie that its messianic mission was to spread “democracy” and that it was protecting democracy by its police actions all around the world), and lies that it was the most moral nation on earth (tell that to those collaterally damaged by America’s war machine, political system, economic system, and cultural system).Unlike DeLuse, for whom Buffy was therapeutic, it helped her think her way through her sometimes difficult situation and helped heal her as she went through this process, my therapy was history, sociology, and the knowledge music, like that of the Beatles and the Stones, and films, like Dr. Stangelove, brought to my consciousness.
Faith in and worship of the United States and Texas weren’t the only things my escape from a fundamentally and inhterently hateful faith brought me (the US is ethnocentric as are all human groups and what they have wrought). I also, over time, recognised the fallacies associated with the ideologies these religions had about human beings. Many, if not most human beings, drawing on a Christian cultural script similar to the manichean and apocalypiic good versus evil and virgin versus whore ones that have had an immense impact on Western culture (including Islam which has its own iterations of these), the saint versus sinner binary, tend to divide human beings into saints on the one side of the accounting page and sinners on the other. Of course, human beings in general, are neither saints nor sinners. They are, in fact, both. Take the recent case of Buffy’s creator, Joss Whedon.
Whedon, like America and Texas, has been accused of being a hypocrite, of shilling for feminism while cheating on his wife. Like America and Texas, who are perhaps more whores than adulterers, he has been accused of adultery (something unlike many adulterers he has admitted to) and harassing behaviour on set, which I assume means he was dictatorially demanding (something that comes with the territory of director, military commander, football coach). Unlike America and Texas, however, he has been shunned by pots and kettles living in glass houses. Humans, you see, just like nation-states like the US, are tried and true hypocrites.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Whedon’s weaknesses should be ignored. I am simply noting that those self-righteous, self-serving, and vengeance seeking individuals who are whinging about Whedon’s behaviours, such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, and Marti Noxon, have, I am certain, similar skeletons in their own closet. I should also, while I am here, note the similarities between those who watched the Shoah happen without doing much, bear some similarities to those who, in the soap opera that is human life and existence, try to straddle the fence trying not to offend anyone in the process.
The Vietnam War was not the only thing that made me question my religion and heal from it. Cultural Anthropology also made me sceptical of religion and made me recognise that not only nation-states are fallible but so are humans. I learned from Cultural Anthropology that humans have had, over the course of human history, among other things, varying marriage systems, varying conceptions of when marriage is acceptable, and varying sexual practises, all of which function to do one of the things all of these function to do (increasing the age of marriage is functional in a demographically growing world), replicate the species. I learned that notions of what is “deviant” are often if not generally social and culturally constructed and that deviance serves the function of socialising for conformity in most cultures, in showing the masses what not to do if they want to get along and what to do if they don't. I learned that adultery is common, that sexual “deviance” is common, and that hypocrisy is omnipresent in the human species. I learned, in other words, to question political, economic, and cultural authority and developed, in the process, a healthy dislike of, for example, paternalism, patriarchalism, patronisation, bureaucracies, and hypocrisies of all flavours.
And it is here—the commonplaceness of, the widespread reality of “sin”—that one has to ground one’s understanding of the human species on and one’s social ethics on. We have to understand, in other words, that humans are fallible, that human criticisms of human weakness is a socialisation for conformity process and that it is often if not always hypocritical, and that we have to accept human beings for what they are and what they always will be not what we wish they could be (utopian ideologies are almost always dangerous and hazardous to human health). Now don’t get me wrong, human weakness runs along a continuum. There is a massive difference between, for example, Adolf Hitler and Joss Whedon though one wonders if his groupies turned haters grasp this anymore than they grasp their own hypocrisies.
Being a life long and professional “deviant", of course, has brought much pain—being the “deviant" has its drawbacks including shunning and isolation including in the academy that vaunted (if mythical) bastion of freedom of though—but it has also brought much pleasure, pleasure that, to some extent, compensates for the trials and tribulation of outsiderness. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
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