From Big Idea to Bad Ideas

By: Chris Johnson

Since the early nineties, one common cultural icon has united generations of Christian youth: VeggieTales.

It was almost a Sunday ritual for me as a kid after church, to swing open the heavy glass doors of the church library and pick out whichever VeggieTales VHS tape was calling my name for the afternoon’s entertainment. My sister and I could sing along to the Silly Songs with Larry, and we could quote lines from the tapes back and forth to each other.

To quote a 2002 write-up from Time on the ascendance of VeggieTales: “Although the series is based on sacred texts, the popularity of the videos rests largely on their irreverence. The parable of the Good Samaritan is recast with vegetables that wear shoes on their heads as the enemies of those that wear pots. Instead of David and Goliath, an asparagus fights a gigantic pickle. There are overt Monty Python references. When the videos first started appearing in Christian bookstores, college students working there on summer break were their biggest champions, playing them endlessly on the store monitors.

But the irreverence has limits. ‘We will not portray Jesus as a vegetable,’ says Phil Vischer, 35, the Billy Graham-Bill Gates hybrid who made the first video in 1993 with fellow Bible-college dropout Mike Nawrocki. (‘We failed chapel,’ Vischer says, because they were always up late the night before writing puppet skits.) Raised on a cultural diet of church and MTV, they wanted to create something that combined family and production values…”

That’s quite a “cultural diet,” and it just goes to show how entertainment shapes the way that children think, and stays with them into adulthood.

It was probably about the time that interview took place that I lost interest in the singing vegetables – although they held a fond place in my heart – but lately, and as I’ve raised my own children, I’ve been having second thoughts.

The more I’ve studied the Bible for myself, I’ve wondered what God thinks of such uses of His Word. Consider Who God Is: all-knowing, all-powerful, and Goodness itself. He’s the Creator and Sustainer of all things. Everything that exists, exists for His glory and He chose to reveal Himself at a particular time, in a particular way, and through the writings of particular men.

We might say that God is an artist whose medium is history, and the Bible is His self-edited biography.

And we say, “you know what would make this story more interesting? If we told it with vegetables!”

The man behind that epiphany was Phil Vischer. In that same Time interview, Vischer laid out his dream, “He wants VeggieTales’ parent company, Big Idea, to be the new Disney; that is, the go-to company for family entertainment. ‘When people get their Game Cube or X Box, their first question should be ‘”Hey, I wonder if Big Idea has a game for us?”’ …Vischer wants his products to celebrate the benevolent. ‘There’s so little media that makes a parent’s job easier,’ Vischer says. ‘It’s not that the big media companies are immoral, they’re amoral. We want to offset that amorality.’

That was a big assumption for Vischer, and who knows, maybe it was closer to being true back then. But when Vischer’s dream of turning his company, Big Idea, into the next Disney fizzled out, his “benevolent” intellectual property ended up in the hands of NBC, who promptly removed all religious references from the show.

In 2020, the Christmas DVD didn’t exactly feature Jesus as a vegetable, but it did feature a vegetable pretending to be Jesus in a Christmas Pageant.

Most troubling of Mr. Vischer’s “Big Ideas” though, is the one he recently expressed on a podcast and then on Twitter regarding the national debate surrounding abortion.

In his words, “I’m opposed to abortion, but take a position similar to the National Association of Evangelicals, that some exceptions may be justified under certain circumstances.” While it seems Phil is trying to take some cover behind the National Association of Evangelicals, their website does not sound so agnostic on the issue.

The NAE’s official position statement on abortion says, “Because God created human beings in his image, every human life from conception to death bears the image of God and has inestimable worth (Genesis 1:27). The Bible reveals God’s calling and care for persons before they are born (Psalm 139:13)

Yet, Vischer says, “The Bible isn’t clear on the details of ‘personhood.’”

But it really is. As the NAE refers to Psalm 139, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.”  

Christians must learn this lesson from Vischer’s example. A desire to be accepted by the world, perhaps resulting in part from a “cultural diet of church and MTV,” leads to questioning even what ought to be the simplest ethical questions.

Long before VeggieTales, Sunday School children were singing a simple song that reminds where to look for answers to such controversial questions: “I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E.”

To view this article in your browser, Click Here

For more information, articles and newsletters, please check out our website at https://americandecency.org/

You can support ADA financially by visiting: https://give.cornerstone.cc/americandecency

 

 

 

 

---