NBC’s Book of Daniel is Desperate Housewives in Clerical Collar     1/16/2006
By Adam McManus

The church is the last politically correct punching bag.

Let’s be honest. NBC’s The Book of Daniel is simply Desperate Housewives dressed up in a clerical collar. As a result, NBC has stabbed the church in the heart and twisted the blade with this bigoted program that demeans Jesus Christ and mocks Christians.

My question is a simple one: Why is the church the last politically correct punching bag in America?

I seriously doubt that the top network brass would ever lend their approval to a television show that belittled Mohammad, Allah or Muslims. Such a proposal would never make it out of the conference room. The NBC double standard is alive and well.

Right off the bat, pill-popping Episcopal priest Daniel Webster, played by Aidan Quinn, is at the police station, posting bond for his pot-selling teenage daughter, Grace, played by Alison Pill.

Parenthetically, his other children are named Adam and Peter. Notice how Jack Kenny, the show’s homosexual writer, purposely chose Biblical names for the various sin-celebrating characters as a way to suggest that all Christians are wild-eyed hypocrites.

When the policeman on duty makes a wisecrack about Daniel Webster, a “founding father,” posting bond for his lawbreaking daughter, Webster clarifies that he wasn’t one of the founding fathers. He’s right. That was Noah Webster.

But Daniel Webster was one of our five greatest senators, served three presidents as secretary of state, and was arguably America's finest orator around the time of the Civil War. Ironically, in light of the sacrilegious fictional TV character, the real Daniel Webster, a Christian who put his faith into practice, had this to say:

Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.

I counted a fair amount of profanity. The program featured the “d” word six to eight times, took the Lord’s name in vain several times, used the “a” word a couple of times and the “b” word three times.

For example, when the Rev. Webster expresses his anger about the fact that his brother-in-law has stolen $3.5 million from the church treasury, he says, “I’m the one who hired that [Lord’s name in vain] guy. No, I am not taking the Lord’s name in vain. I actually want God to damn him.”

In addition, toward the end of the first episode, Webster’s daughter, Grace, startled that her father knocked on her bedroom door to talk with her, uses the Lord’s name in vain herself. Momentarily, Webster thinks that she can see Jesus standing in the hallway.

No need for Dad to step in and wash his teenage daughter’s mouth out with soap since he’s guilty of the exact same sin.

In his pulpit, Father Webster, wearing authoritative clerical vestments, says, “If temptation comes to us, maybe we shouldn’t beat ourselves up. Maybe we shouldn’t ask for forgiveness from the church or from God until we can forgive ourselves.”

Not very sound theology. Sounds like something Oprah Winfrey might say. No, let’s be clear. We do need to repent, asking God to forgive us first and foremost. I’m reminded of Joseph’s response to the temptation to sleep with Potiphar’s wife. He asked her, “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9)

Certainly every family member is giving in to temptation, and in a big way. Adam is having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of his dad’s boss, the bishop. Peter is having sex with his homosexual partner. Grace is selling marijuana. Webster is popping pain pills. His wife is a drunk. And his lesbian secretary is having sex with his sister-in-law.

I have no objection to depicting Christians who struggle with sin. But this pastor appears to be rationalizing his dysfunctional family’s choice to sin. There is no remorse, no sorrow, no repentance.

What happened to the plumb line of Scripture and its call upon our lives?

Even The Washington Post, one of America’s leading liberal media outlets, condemned NBC’s Book of Daniel. Tom Shales writes:

I cannot recall a series in which a greater number of characters seemed so desperately detestable -- a series with a larger population of loathsome dolts.

But Book of Daniel just barely merits First Amendment protection, flaunting its edginess with such wince-inducing contrivances as a teenage daughter who stuffs her teddy bears with pot, a grandma with Alzheimer's who interrupts Sunday dinner to complain that her husband is “always showing me his penis,” a wife whose lesbian affair with her husband's secretary started when the husband insisted both women join him in a threesome, and an Episcopal priest who pops Vicodins like Tic-Tacs and regularly converses with the living image of Jesus Christ.

After Adam, the Chinese adopted teenage son, played by Ivan Shaw, has finished having sex with 15-year-old Caroline in the back of the family car while parked in the garage, his sister opens the kitchen door into the garage.

“Magic with the ladies?” Grace asks.

Incredibly, he responds, “Want to find out? We’re not actually related.”

Pretty funny, huh? Aren’t you laughing out loud?

The writer Kenny’s hedonistic world view comes through most vividly in his favorite character, the 23-year-old Republican homosexual son named Peter, played by Christian Campbell.

Not surprisingly, Webster approves of and gives his blessing to Peter’s choice to have homosexual sex. In fact, later in the second episode, which aired Friday night, Webster essentially states that if the Episcopalian New Hampshire bishop is open about his homosexual preference, then son Peter has nothing to be ashamed of.

“It’s bad enough that the priest actually supports active commission of sin, or is indifferent to it, but it is sheer blasphemy to depict Jesus that way, which this program does,” said Robert Knight, director of the Culture & Family Institute at Concerned Women for America. “In one scene, Jesus smiles and gives thumbs up to fornication when a man and woman counseled by the priest announces that they are going to skip marriage and live together. And homosexuality is portrayed as entirely natural and unobjectionable to all concerned, including our Lord.”

But what about the way NBC treats the character of Jesus? There is one positive note. This particular dialogue was refreshing.

“Why do you talk to me?” asks Webster of Jesus.

“I talk to everybody, but most don’t listen,” says Jesus, played by Garret Dillahunt.

But sadly the Jesus invented by NBC is not the Jesus of the Bible. Don’t misunderstand me. I love the device itself. The idea of Jesus appearing to a television character is compelling and commendable. But this was not the Jesus I know and love.

Tom Shales notes, “Actually, [Webster and Jesus] don't so much converse as swap jokes, with Jesus being a pushover for a bad gag and much too cool a guy to be judgmental about the deplorable pack of crackpots who make up the priest's family and friends.”

At the end of the pilot, Webster is startled that his sister-in-law and her husband’s presumed mistress are giggling over coffee at the kitchen table. Webster peeks in the window and does a double take.

Then Jesus appears in the driveway next to Webster. “You never know, do you?” Jesus says, implying again that He, Jesus, is not omniscient, doesn’t have a clue about what’s going to happen next.

All these reasons are why 500,000 Christians sent e-mails to NBC in New York, thanks to the leadership of the American Family Association, pleading with them to reconsider continuing the program which was first broadcast on January 6 in back-to-back episodes.

Thankfully at least four NBC affiliates used their Federal Communications Commission-given right to not air the series: KARK in Little Rock, Arkansas, WTWO in Terre Haute, Indiana, KBTV in Beaumont, Texas, and WGBC in Meridian, Mississippi.

I challenged the listeners to KSLR Radio here in San Antonio, Texas, to picket WOAI-TV4, our local NBC affiliate. Sixty Christians stood with me holding signs that said, “WOAI-TV attacks Christians,” “God is grieved,” “WOAI-TV makes Jesus sad” and “Read the REAL book of Daniel.” Our local NBC and Fox affiliates, as well as the San Antonio Express-News and The Texas Observer, covered our protest.

Plus, my four-day on-air focus generated 600 e-mails and 100 phone calls of complaint to the San Antonio NBC affiliate before the program initially aired.

Despite the publicity generated by the program’s heretical nature, it only garnered “a basement rating in the Nielsen ratings for this program -- a 2.7 rating, which is very low. It shows NBC it’s a failure,” said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the American Family Association (AFA), to the Baptist Press.

“I think it was doomed to fail from the start. Advertisers for the most part -- the most nationally recognized advertisers -- avoided it like the plague because it is a plague. This program is equivalent to leprosy to the Christian community,” he said.

The next step for Christians is to target the national advertisers who bought ad time for pennies on the dollar. The list includes: Walt Disney World, Burlington Coat Factory, Icy Hot Sleeve (Chattel), Just for Men, H&R Block, Gold Bond Ultimate (Chattel), and Charter Digital.

If you’d like to contact them by phone, e-mail or letter, click here.

With the blockbuster success of The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia, I would think that Hollywood would see the value in honoring Christianity, not mocking it. I predict that NBC’s The Book of Daniel will die a similar death as ABC’s Nothing Sacred, which took similar potshots at people of faith.

If nothing else, perhaps the controversy will prompt nominal American Christians to crack open their Old Testaments and read about the real Daniel, a man who refused to compromise, risking his very life in the process.

Too bad NBC’s Daniel doesn’t resemble him more.

Adam McManus hosts a weekday afternoon radio show called "Take A Stand" on AM 630, KSLR in San Antonio, Texas from 3-6 p.m. central. If you’d like him to speak to your group or you’d like to react to this column, call Adam at (210) 344-8481 ext 132 or e-mail adam@takeastand.net. Join 5,300 people and sign up for his weekday e-mail alert about upcoming guests, critical articles and action steps to make a difference. Go to: www.TakeAStand.net and listen live at www.kslr.com.

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