'The Bible': Why the History Channel is smacked with 'Obama-Satan' accusation
'Why’s Jesus and the good guys always white and the devil’s looking like Obama,” a little girl watching a rec center TV asks. History Channel's 'The Bible' suffers from the same parenting issue we do here at home, that too often the messenger’s demeanor distracts from and derails the message.
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According to The Christian Post, both History channel as well as "The Bible" mini-series producers, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, have called the suggestions "utter nonsense."
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Lisa Suhay, who has four sons at home in Norfolk, Va., is a children’s book author and founder of the Norfolk (Va.) Initiative for Chess Excellence (NICE) , a nonprofit organization serving at-risk youth via mentoring and teaching the game of chess for critical thinking and life strategies.
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The problem with “utter nonsense” is that people just can’t seem to stop uttering it all over the Twitterverse and other social media sites.
To find answers I turned to the book I’m currently slogging through on my Kindle, “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don't,” by Nate Silver. Mr. Silver is a statistician, writer, and founder of The New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com. Silver also developed PECOTA, a system for forecasting baseball performance that was bought by Baseball Prospectus. I’m reading it to try to understand why my kids and adults follow trends – i.e. The Harlem Shake. The first time I saw the video I dismissed it and then it was well, bigger than "The Bible" in popularity.
Silver talks about finding the signal or message in all the noise we tend to find generated around it and the chaos and unpredictability of audiences. I really feel for Ms. Downey and Mr. Burnett because on some level they must have believed that you can’t go wrong with a series on “The Greatest Story Every Told.” But they didn’t take into account the noise of people like Beck and, at some level, me. They gave us too much noise to work with in high volume and what they’re getting is feedback instead of people hearing the vital messages of the Bible’s stories themselves.
The Obama-Satan attack really kills me because Downey once performed in the TV series "Touched by an Angel," which I watched religiously. It produced of the most effective noise-free moments of racial introspection I have ever seen on television. In that episode Downey is transformed into an African-American woman in the South during the height of the Ku Klux Klan and finds herself being hunted down by the Klan across a wooded area.
The angel, running for her life as an African-American woman, falls to her knees just as the killers are about to discover her and begs God, “Please, Father, make me white again. Please make me white.” Just as the white hand of her would-be attacker falls on her shoulder she is suddenly white again and thus safe.
The angel is disgraced, bereft, and horrified by her choice and words, but is comforted by another angel, played by actress Della Reese, for the fact that she learned, and now her compassion, understanding, and vision would be true for all eternity.
That was a noise-free signal that was powerful and, while controversial, it was effective for me and I believe many others as well.
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I want "The Bible" series to succeed, but there is just too much chaos in the audience and too much noise generated by the choices the producers made. In defense of the producers, there was no way the series' makers, who filmed prior to the election, could have known Obama would be president now. OK. I do see the resemblance between Obama and the actor playing Satan, but only after Beck framed them in that context and I really don’t think it was purposeful. The biggest note here is that only chaos theory can account that we’re even talking about this instead of Jesus being tested by Satan in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11).
That’s more background story noise than the Easter Bunny makes laying eggs in the yard as I try to explain the Biblical underpinnings of a time of rebirth and hope to my sons.
It’s a beautiful effort to try to bring the history of the Bible to those who have no experience with it, but unfortunately they don’t make noise-cancelling headphones for this production. Perhaps the best thing we can do is to ask people like Beck to stop making use of the spiritual as a loud, untuned instrument of political destruction. Perhaps he could pipe-down and let the message through.
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