Saturday, August 20, 2022

The Chosen

 

Photo and caption from Deseret News

We started watching the most buzz-y Gospel television series, well, ever.

Sometime last spring, I made a guest appearance at a meeting of our parish's pastoral council to pitch an idea I had, to spin up a new ministry for young adults.  My thought was: we'd invite all the young adults in the parish to get together periodically and do fun and spiritual things.  The council members asked me what sorts of activities I envisioned, so I shared a few top-of-mind ideas: we'd do some prayer and spirituality; we'd find some service projects like food bank volunteering or Habitat for Humanity; and perhaps we'd watch some films and then have discussions about them afterward.

That last idea seemed to fire up my pastor.  He said, "You could show them The Chosen, and have discussions about it."  I replied, "Um, maybe".  Truth be told, at that time I didn't know what The Chosen was, although I thought I had vaguely heard of it.  Pre-pandemic, our parish had tried out a video-based program called Alpha which is geared toward building up a parish community, so I assumed The Chosen was another, similar parish religious-ed program.  My response to the pastor was a bit lukewarm because I didn't want to subject the young adults to religious indoctrination.  My idea was that we'd watch films made for mainstream theatrical release that were about relationships or finding your way through life or some other topics and themes that might resonate with young adults.  And then maybe we'd try to connect them with our faith.

It turned out that my youth-ministry idea was superfluous: not long after that meeting, a couple of dozen young adults in the parish who had graduated from college in the last 2-3 years got themselves organized and launched their own young adult ministry, independently of (and oblivious to) my idea to do the same.  So for the young-adult group ministry, I'm standing aside and not getting in their way; they seem to be doing just fine without me.

But that wasn't the last I heard of The Chosen.  A week or two after the meeting, I spent some time with our other parish deacon, a retired (but active and energetic!) guy some 20 or so years my senior, and he filled me in on The Chosen.  It's a television series, a dramatization of the Gospel stories.  Of course, there are a number of famous feature-length films about the life of Christ, but The Chosen bills itself as the first-ever television series about the Gospels.  It's also notable for being entirely crowd-sourced, which I assume means the producers got their funding more or less the same way Bernie Sanders has funded his presidential campaigns, via lots of small donations over the Internet from many people.

This other deacon is anything but lukewarm about The Chosen: he thinks it's terrific.  He and his wife watched the first season, and I believe the second season has dropped now, too.  I understand the writers are taking their time to work through the Gospel stories, and several more seasons are planned.  It's available on several streaming services (including on YouTube - you can simply launch YouTube and search for "The Chosen", and the search results will return full-length episodes), and also can be watched directly from the show's website.  I've read there also is an app available to view it.

As spring turned into summer, I kept hearing about The Chosen from other people.  The Chicago Archdiocese deacons had our triennial convocation in June, so hundreds of us were together for a long weekend, and several deacon couples we dined with were every bit as enthusiastic about the series as the guy at my parish.

Around the same time, one of our parish staff members organized some viewing sessions for parishioners to get together to watch The Chosen.  She offered a daytime series and an evening series.  She has run parish Bible study series for many years, and has a bit of a following, but it seems her series to show and discuss The Chosen has broken her attendance records.   Over a hundred people registered for the first season series.  She's now taking registrations for a fall series to show the second season, and it seems she'll equal or exceed her attendance from the first season.

So, if it's possible for a Christian television series to have buzz, The Chosen seems to have buzz.  (And it is possible: if your children or grandchildren were at the right age when the Veggie Tales animated children's films were being released, you know buzz is possible for this Christian content stuff.)  

Despite all the positive word-of-mouth, I confess to a certain reluctance to watching The Chosen.  As a general rule, I don't watch religious content on television.  I never, ever turn on EWTN or any of the Evangelical cable networks.  

But after hearing all the "you gotta watch this!" advice from friends and acquaintances, my curiosity was piqued.  What's more, I have a certain professional/ministerial obligation: if this series is making an impression on our parishioners, it's good for me to be familiar with it.  (As an aside, it interests me that our parishioners do hear about this stuff: pretty clearly, many of them were much more tuned into the series buzz than I was.  I don't know what networks of family/friends/neighbors they are plugged into which allows them to learn about this stuff, but apparently I'm not plugged into the same sources.  Maybe Facebook accounts for some of it; I'm not much of a Facebook user.)

My wife also had become mildly interested in watching the series.  So we kept telling one another we'd start it soon, and then promptly forget and watch something else. 

But tonight, we started it.  We watched Season 1, Episode 1.  It's...not awful.  Its production values are pretty okay, and the performances weren't too bad, but the first episode was a little slow.  The initial episode was all back-story of secondary characters (Mary Magdalene, Peter and Andrew, Nicodemus, and a young tax collector whose identity I haven't pegged yet - the Rich Young Man?  Zacchaeus?  My wife's guess is Matthew the tax collector), well-informed by biblical content and scholarship, but fictionalized, i.e. they made up a ton of stuff.  

It's probably not ideal for me to try something new on a Friday night, because I'm pretty brain dead from the work week.  Not to put too fine a point on it:  during the episode, I fell asleep briefly twice or thrice.  

We'll keep powering through it, unless it gets to be unwatchable.

What about you?  Have you checked out The Chosen?  What do you think of it?

32 comments:

  1. Never heard of it. Betty will probably be willing to try it. She likes historical fiction. While we don't have TV, we do have access to some PBS material because of my annual donation to the local PBS music station.

    Most recently we watched the first episode of Mark Twain. It survived the sleep test on me. Mostly because it dealt with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Those books were read to us by our teacher when I was in fifth and sixth grade. It was interesting to relive that boyhood experience.

    My approach to the Gospel's is literary rather than historical or even sociological. While we can recreate an imaginative story of biblical times; it is just that, subject to reinventing every time we make a new archeological finding. For example, a decade or so ago a particularly low Sea of Galilee revealed that the shoreline was full of piers and boat docks and fish processing areas. So, when we imagine that Jesus is walking and preaching on the seashore it was not an idyllic place like our many public beaches but an ancient industrial complex, including the all-important tax collector's area. Got to make sure Herod and the Roman's get their unfair share.

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    1. Jack, you'd have to be able to stream it to your TV set, if you plan to watch it together on television with Betty. Just FYI.

      I guess "fiction" is the right word? We know very little about Mary Magdalene's backstory, so the writers spun one for her - informed by what scholars know of that place and time (which is quite a lot) so it all seems plausible.

      I could see a viewer without much exposure to the bible assuming (wrongly) that what was in this first episode was a faithful re-creation of actual biblical content.

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    2. Yes. It’s fiction with a fundamentalist slant.

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  2. I had heard the title, The Chosen. That's all. It really wasn't on my radar. I tend to get irritated by soap opera-ized Biblical stories. Get enough of that from stuff that relies on the accounts of visionaries such as Ann Catherine Emmerich (looking at you, Mel Gibson). But from your description its not that sort of thing, nor like the DaVinci code either. So it might be worth a try. We don't have the paid version of youtube, but we do have Hulu and Prime. Wonder if we can get it from either of those?

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  3. What people get (or not) from televised Scripture re-enactments may be akin to the somewhat vexed question of what they get from historical TV and movies. Cool media like TV and movies are extremely seductive and immersive, but consumed passively and without much analysis. Food for thought here: https://theconversation.com/are-movies-a-good-way-to-learn-history-75976

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  4. You don't need the paid version of YouTube- it's on the free version. Believe it's also on Prime but we haven't looked for it there yet. We watched it last night on Peacock.

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  5. Our pastor really liked the movie Into Great Silence (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence)
    So we decided to give it a try. It follows the daily lives of Carthusian monks who live in a medieval monastery in the French Alps. They follow a vow of silence, so there is no dialogue. No music either, except for the monks' chanting. Very peaceful and restful, but 162 minutes long. We only watched the first half, figured the second half would be pretty similar! Not great for plot, but if you suffer from insomnia, it would probably help you get to sleep.

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    1. I watched it when I was dealing with a periodic fevers and felt too blah to do anything but sit up in bed. It was extremely hypnotic and pleasant. If you were sick, you could put it on a loop and just let it wash over you.

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  6. Katherine, I saw Into the Great Silence years ago. I loved it. I’m sorry that you left before it was done. I went to see it with a friend from CP. so we were already used to silence as prayer. But even we were a bit restless during the first half of the film. By the end I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to stay in the silence. She had the same reaction.

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  7. I have commented about The Chosen three times. Each time I publish it appears. When I look again it’s gone. Maybe it’s too long but there is no message about that.

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    1. Ho Anne, I see this comment, and your test comment. AMD the one where you call it 'Fundamentalist fiction. And your comments about Into the Great Silence. Please try to post your comment again about The Chosen.

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  8. Anne, we still have the DVD of Great Silence, so maybe we will finish the second half. As I said, it was very peaceful. And the monastery was interesting, it was very old. But I don't think I could do that austere of a lifestyle.

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    1. I couldn't do it either. It's obviously a very special, and rare, vocation. But I did love the movie. I'm not sure that simply watching the second half would have the same effect as sitting in silence watching for 3 hours straight in a dark movie theater.

      Maybe someday I will watch it again.

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  10. Dallas Jenkins, the show's creator, is the son of Jerry Jenkins, author of the "Left Behind" novels. Both are involved with Harvest Bible Chapel, an evangelical megachurch in Chicago, which has been in the news for a variety of the usual improprieties that plague these outfits.

    See: slate.com/human-interest/2019/03/mancow-muller-james-macdonald-harvest-bible-chapel.html

    Maybe there is nothing wrong with the portrayals of the Gospels in this show from a doctrinal POV. I haven't seen it, don't care to.

    It's up to Catholics and parish leaders to decide if they want to support programming from and help make money for individuals that are sometimes anti-Catholic and want to promote a very inflexible approach to Scripture.

    Surely there are Catholic entertainments for and by Catholics that could be considered. Zefirelli's hippy-dippy life of St Francis, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," would be one. I could provide many others if anyone is so inclined.

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    1. I agree with Jean. It’s a poor choice for a Catholic parish “ Bible study”. My evangelical Protestant sister in law pushed me to watch it a couple of years ago. I made it through three or four episodes, a bit upset at some of the way they portray people, especially Mary Magdalene. I am not especially bible literate yet even I knew they were distorting some of the scriptures.

      If I were you, Jim, I would take advantage of Jeans offer to get some suggestions for your parish. I would also recommend adding some secular films with powerful moral themes such as Schindler’s List, Chocolat, Glory, etc.

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    2. FYI - I don't think our staff member is billing The Chosen as bible study.

      I didn't know that the creator has that affiliation, or at least history, with Harvest Bible Chapel. That place is just a few miles from my home.

      As I understand it, there is an advisory board of some sort for The Chosen which is ecumenical, and includes some Catholic input. Thought I had heard or read that somewhere.

      My wife and I will continue to watch some episodes (if she's willing - I think she is). We'll see if we get any farther than Anne. Maybe this came through from my post: the first episode didn't exactly change my life. But I'll try to stay open-minded about it.

      Anne - yes, the sorts of films you mentioned are along the lines of what I'd share with young adults, had my idea for young adult ministry gone forward. Although maybe we'd choose something a *little* lighter than Schindler's List :-)

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    3. I found watching "Breaking Bad" with The Boy at as a teenager offered many opportunities to talk about the sin of pride and the nature of evil. Not the CCD ladies' material of choice, but might have been one of my better efforts at "faith sharing." Creator Vince Gilligan was raised a Catholic.

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    4. Jean, FYI, I've just been reading that link you provided about the downfall of pastor James MacDonald from Harvest Bible Chapel, and following add'l links from that link. What a tool that guy sounds like.

      I'd add: I see parallels between the Trump political organization and some of these megachurch organizations: the way they demand absolute (and unrequited) loyalty from their subordinates and followers, the way they rule through fear and intimidation, their finely tuned fundraising apparatuses, and their leaders' tendency to treat women as personal playthings. Now I'm wondering whether this is one of the reasons that Evangelicals have gravitated to Trump: he's a type that they're familiar with.

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    5. Anne, just curious, how did the series portray Mary Magdalene? I've seen many takes on her; somehow most of them don't ring true to me.

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    6. Re Trump and Evangelicals: I don't know why they like Trump other than that he projects some kind of Alpha Male image that they like a lot. The Chosen's "album cover" at the top of your post shows a bunch of handsome, nicely built specimens of manhood, no women. Guys running things for the Lord while the women stay covered up and make sandwiches and coffee. Kind of their ideal.

      Churches don't pay taxes, so they are under scrutiny only by their bishops or equivalent and parishioners. Easy for financial improprieties to occur unnoticed. We've had two high profile situations like this in the Lansing diocese.

      I presume Harvest Bible is a non-denom, so no bishop or similar, and the leaders are handpicked cronies = lots of interesting accounting practices.

      Sen Chuck Grassley went after mega churches some years back, and some of them were duly punished.

      But people have to be less stupid about what's being done with their donations and demand accountability.

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    7. Catholics have demanded accountability for 20 years now but most of the bishops have never come clean.

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    8. The world is run by tools, Jim. The dangerous part is when the tools rig things so that calling out their toolery becomes heretical or treasonous.

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  11. I have had my last three comments disappear.

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  12. Anne, is it just comments under this topic/post that are disappearing?

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  13. Anne, if they are very long, they will disappear, though I get a "message too long" notice on some devices, though. Most blog platforms will cut off comments at 5,000 characters.

    Type on Word and edit using the handy character counter?

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  14. They are a few sentences. Not long

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  15. Nope. Not just this thread. Others too

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  16. This comment has been removed by the author.

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