God Disapproves Of Bluey

You may be old enough to remember the flap over gay Teletubbies. Well, here comes the critique of Bluey for violating God's gender roles.

There have been, apparently, some complaints from "Christian moms" about sassiness and mysticism in the popular kids show (note: we don't follow the show here, but both of my granddaughters are big fans, and they are both brilliant). And there some thoughtful and positive views of the show on Christian media. 

But over on Align, a website that is part of Blaze Media, we find a different take. Blaze Media is the current version of The Blaze, the right wing outfit that started life as Glenn Beck TV, a pay television station that was Beck's attempt to build a career after Fox canned him (it was 2011, so Youtube was still a baby and Tik Tok didn't exist). TheBlaze was also his right wing website. The channel has wandered around, while giving space to the usual crew of right wing commentators. 

The article is written by Jeremy Pryor, who has run an assortment of christianist businesses, including Family Teams, which promotes families as "teams" with everyone taking a traditional role.

Pryor seems like a pleasant enough person (he notes that people don't think of Abraham through the lens of fatherhood "besides a particularly annoying youth group song" and I hear that). But he's got some Strong Ideas about how Bluey represents a new version of fatherhood that "embodies almost all of the elements of the traditional mother, purged of the essence of elements from the historic father." And Pryor has a problem with that.

God created the concept of male and female to create the kind of family that would maximize fruitfulness and multiplication and that over generations of collective effort would subdue and rule the created order.

 Pryor argues that lacking a strong symbolic depiction of fatherhood has left us "untethered the concept of fatherhood and masculinity from anything objective and leaves us vulnerable to following the ever-changing depictions of fatherhood and masculinity invented by modern cultural sensibilities."

Pryor's doesn't get too far into what that "objective" vision of fatherhood and masculinity looks like in this piece, though we do get a reference to "the beautiful biblical balancing of the life-giving presence of motherhood and the training, territory expanding, and leadership of fatherhood." So this modern fatherhood typified by Bandit is all backwards--  

It empties the father character of all the elements of the traditionally masculine father we’ve grown uncomfortable with, and at the same time, it provides freedom for the mother to get out in the world and explore her individual passions.

Pryor has apparently gotten into this elsewhere, and he does acknowledge that even among Christians, his beef with Bluey is a minority view.

Pryor's argument hinges on a feature of right wing thought. It's the belief that there is One Right Answer to life's big questions (in this case, "what should fatherhood look like") and that this One Right Answer is "objective" and unaffected by human society and culture. A video about raising boys with biblical masculinity includes the tag line "it's NOT a social construct.".

I don't want to go down the rabbit of either biblical inerrancy or cultural views of family roles (as parsed for various classes and cultures and ages etc). But Pryor is following in the footsteps of plenty of cultural conservatives who identify what they are comfortable with in cultural roles and then identify a source (the bible, pseudo-science, their own personal genius) to cement the notion that their personal cultural beliefs are actually the One Right Answer according to [insert authority here]. 

Sometimes this trick is performed in a deliberate, self-serving manner, and sometimes it comes from a sincere belief. My sense is that Pryor is sincere enough, and he seems conscious of how his ideas can be co-opted by folks who are off track. But for these folks, education can be a huge threat.

In another podcast video, Pryor explains that schools can be bad for family teams. "What I will not tolerate," he says, is when the child at school starts to think they are on another team, where they have an allegiance to their peers over their family (aka the process that most teens go through). In other words, daring to think that they have an independent life outside the family, some sort of existence in which they are not subordinate to the (properly masculine) father. 

Family Teams has a ton of videos including ones that point out that girls probably shouldn't go to college, nor should a wife earn more than her husband. There is also remarkably little rhetoric about God Himself. 

I occasionally bring up the 5% rule: 95% of everything is just stuff that human beings make up and then pretend is Really Important, and only about 5% of everything is Actually Important. The trick is that we don't agree on what the 5% is. There will always be folks who not only are supremely confident that they have 5% (or more) that is correct, but that it is divinely ordained by some higher authority and therefor Objectively True. In a pluralistic society, not to mention the school system that serves that pluralistic society, there will always be tension between these folks and everybody else. And they will always be arguing for their own favorite social construct and insisting that it's the One Right Answer straight from a Higher Authority. This particular social construct is problematic because it requires women and children to be subordinate to the "team leader." And that's why Bandit, the animated cartoon father who is too much like a mother, is in such trouble.