COMPLICITY AND CHRISTIANITY: WHAT THE BACHELOR TEACHES US
Screenshot from ABC’s The Bachelor, taken from The Christian Post.
It was supposed to be a research project. I had just gotten a TV and a Netflix account, and I wanted to watch one of the shows that so many Americans love. Of course, I refer to The Bachelor. Twenty or more young, single, and attractive women go on a reality TV show to meet the man who might be the love of their life. (Statistically, he’s not, not even for the woman that is chosen at the end.) Over the period of a month or two, he dates them all at once, eliminates ones he doesn’t feel a connection with at “rose ceremonies,” does some global travel, meets families, and eventually gets down on one knee and proposes to the woman he wants to marry. (And who, statistically, he breaks up with within a year.)
The only season on Netflix at the time starred Jason Mesnick, a single dad and commercial real estate agent from Seattle, who had been left heartbroken as the runner-up on the previous season of The Bachelor’s sister show, aptly titled The Bachelorette. Over the course of the season, I recognized why so many loved it - the catty drama (spilling info from the house the women share to Jason), the outrageous storylines (Shannon stalked Jason’s MySpace!), and that season’s famous ending, where, having been engaged to Melissa Rycroft for a month or so, he breaks up with her on national television before asking his runner up, Molly Malaney, to go out with him.
As you may guess from the MySpace reference, that season was shot in 2008. So when I started watching the most recent season of The Bachelorette when it started airing in October, I found it to be remarkably different. The drama had been dialed up, the references were current, and then, near the end of the season, there was the religion. After her Fantasy Suite date (the time where the couple get private time away from the cameras for a night to have sex and/or talk about serious things), bachelorette Tayshia Adams eliminated fan favorite Ivan Hall for “religious reasons.” In a podcast, Hall later admitted that he was an agnostic and that while he would support Adams taking any hypothetical children to church, that he wouldn’t go. And that was enough for her to say “this isn’t the man I would want to raise children with.” Similarly, at the start of this Bachelor season, bachelor Matt James opened his first cocktail party with the women with a prayer to the Christian God.
As I later learned via my favorite Bachelor podcast Game of Roses, this only marked one point in the game’s “Christian Era.” A distinct turn in 2013 with born-again virgin Sean Lowe as the lead and his successful marriage to Catherine Guidici has led to a strong period of Christian influence, leading up to bachelorette Hannah Brown’s famous line “I’ve had sex and Jesus still loves me” and the aforementioned prayer led by James. Additionally, a potential contestant for James’s season who was rejected speculated that it might have been of her Judaism, and Mesnick has openly complained about the way the show cut around his Judaism, telling HuffPost “I wouldn’t say [my family is] religious, but the Jewish religion, culture-type stuff does come up every once in a while. And it completely was taken out [of the show]. We filmed a bunch of Jewish things. And everything was cut out. I’m like, wait a second! Let’s spin some dreidels!” Additionally, Mesnick has revealed that during his televised wedding to Malaney, producers asked him to not perform the traditional Jewish wedding ritual of smashing the glass. This show is sexist, racist, homophobic, and, as the previews indicate for upcoming episodes of this season, will be partaking in some good old-fashioned slut-shaming. In short, this show is a mess. And we are complicit.
The Game of Roses podcast often reminds us that we are complicit. As one of my Facebook group glossaries on the show defines it, “We recognize there is wrong-doing in the game: the producers are overtly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and manipulate the players; and we still watch it (thus supporting the show).” However, I think there’s a bit more to this than just complicity in the game. The Bachelor is nothing less than a mirror for American society, and a carnival funhouse mirror, no less. It can distort and twist all it likes, but at the end of the day, the image reflected is an image of us.
If the image we see in these shows is a reflection of our nation, it’s clear that we have a lot of work to do. Prayer on a supposedly secular TV show doesn’t just happen anywhere - it happens in a place where pastors preach that “America is a Christian Nation,” where Christian leaders offer political endorsements of those that preach a gospel that is in opposition to the beliefs of Jesus Christ, and where our religious affiliation, or lack thereof, is grounds for abuse, mistrust, and discrimination.
It’s a bit different than The Bachelor, though. As season 24 winner Hannah Ann Sluss famously said in dictating what Bachelor scholars (okay, maybe just Game of Roses) refer to as the “Slussian Protocol,” contestants “know what [they] signed up for.” But for a great many of us, we didn’t sign up to be here at this time in this place. We didn’t choose to be contestants on the game show of “Living In America In 2021.” And even if I was going to sign up, I would have seen what happened on earlier seasons to help me understand what I’d be expected to do.
Arguably, I am not among the most complicit in “Bachelor Nation,” as the fanbase is so called. That honor goes to the men and women who sign up to become part of the machinations of producers, who are truly there “for the wrong reasons” (fame), and who, through their silence in two-plus months of interactions, enable production and ABC to do what they do. For The Bachelor, we get to, at the very least, pretend and imagine that we are not the most complicit. But for those of us who live in the US - we are direct participants in the culture that has brought us to this point in our common life. We are complicit, and we didn’t sign up for this.
The trope of refuge in audacity is common on reality shows like The Bachelor. You can’t just show similar and formulaic seasons again and again. To edit a line from Tacitus, “Anything, once done once, has no refuge but in audacity.” For The Bachelor to keep its charm, it must attempt, year in and year out, to have, as host Chris Harrison likes to say, “the most dramatic season (or rose ceremony, or talkback special, etc etc etc) ever!” And unfortunately, this franchise is a bit less important than the future of the world and the future of Christianity. Preachers, pastors, professors, and, yes, even Presidents, have taken refuge in audacity, using their position and influence to get away with almost anything. Tomorrow’s a new day. Let’s start it by recognizing our complicity in the narratives of false Christianity and by having the audacity to insist on a different way.
“What does the Lord require of you?,” asks the prophet Micah. As most Episcopalians know, the answer is “to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” What if we took that as a phrase with real depth and meaning, not just something nice to put on paraphernalia. What if we showed it by increasing our participation in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy? What if we divested ourselves of relationships with leaders and figures who stand in total opposition to our understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? (Yes, I am talking about the soon-to-be former President, whom those nice disciplinary rubrics seem tailor-made for, #hottake.) Christianity requires us to be active in our faith. Complicity in our American life is not part of that.
