The eCrozier

The places in the media where one can hear a good Soren Kierkegaard joke are historically limited, but to my delight I found some on The Good Place (two seasons on Netflix). The show’s central character is Eleanor Shellstrop. Her sitz im leben (“setting in life” – Kierkegaard would love that reference from Biblical criticism) is actually death. She wakes up in the afterlife and learns she’s died after having been run over by a rogue line of shopping carts in a store parking lot. She now finds herself in a place full of shiny, happy people (R.E.M.) with endless supplies of frozen yoghurt. As she learns how she “earned” her way into heaven, she discovers there’s been a mistake by those overseeing who qualifies for The Good Place. Apparently, there’s more than one Eleanor Shellstrop in this world and she isn’t the good one who was a tireless lawyer defending the oppressed. No, she was the one who was a cynical telemarketer knowingly selling bogus dietary supplements to a gullible public.

But Eleanor wants to stay in The Good Place and not be exposed as the undeserving fraud she truly is, so her quest is to maintain her mistaken identity. The show’s conceit is based on her anxiety that she’ll be found out as undeserving (we’re all afraid of that, right?); that she isn’t a good person; that she didn’t live a good life (there are hilarious “flashbacks” to prove this). And yet, she has to appear to be a good person to her fellow “saints” if she is to avoid being sent to The Bad Place. I will leave the show’s details there because I don’t wish to spoil the delicious plot twists that ensue.

The show’s premise is hardly Christian. In fact, it actually represents America’s quite unchristian “civil religion,” the religion that’s invoked throughout popular culture. This civil religion is now so ingrained in our culture that many people can’t differentiate it from the particular claims of Christianity. Among the claims over the centuries of this “civil religion,” two tend to stand out and remain persistent: (1) God wants all people to be good, kind, and happy and that’s our goal in life; and, (2) Good, kind, and happy people go to heaven when they die.

Of course, this contradicts the Bible and our Christian tradition that more honestly confesses our human complexity, namely, that we’re both beautiful and broken; both hiding and hidden in Christ, at once both accessible and completely inaccessible to others. Our lives expose this complexity, and in God’s plan of salvation, Jesus’s cross reconciles what seemed irreconcilably complex. Put simply, we don’t go to heaven when we die as a reward for accomplishing the goal of being good, kind, and happy people. Salvation isn’t a reward for shiny, happy people. It’s an award by a loving and forgiving God who knows us all to be, at least on some level like Eleanor, undeserving frauds.

Part of what makes The Good Place so sublime is that in the arc of the show’s storyline (trying not to spoil anything here), Eleanor discovers and accepts her own complexity, receives both love and mercy for who she truly is, and then and only then, does she begin to become a good person. And that moves The Good Place, maybe even unintendedly by the show’s writers, toward an honest Christian narrative.

+Scott