Abstract
Saved! and Keeping Up with the Steins illustrate the ambivalence many moderns feel toward religion. While spirituality is respected, institutionalized religion is not. The film heroes cannot find a spiritual space in the religious schools and communities in which they are being raised. Steins takes place in non-coercive Jewish settings, while the Christian community in Saved! is all-encompassing and demanding. Neither setting combines the components Rosenak sees as essential to modern religious life: an authentic religious heritage which is also relevant to the human needs of its adherents. Neither religious school can compensate for the shortcomings of the kids’ homes and communities. The hero in Steins manages to construct a kind of anemic ethnic Jewish identity, but the heroine in Saved! largely rejects her Christian community and identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Continuum Companion to Religion & Film (2009), Routledge Companion to Religion and Film (2009), Religion and Film Reader (2007), and Religion and Film: An Introduction (2006). Neither Keeping Up with the Steins nor Saved! appears in the online indices of any of these works. Screening the Sacred (1995) was published before either film was made.
- 2.
By contrast, in M$B (Chap. 2), Coach Dunn is a devout Catholic and his attendance at Mass, daily prayer, and intense discussions with his priest are an important part of the film. However, as the religious dimension is unrelated to his professional role as boxing coach, it is not mentioned at all in Chap. 4.
- 3.
Mox’s stance is shared by the classical Biblical prophets from Isaiah on down: not the dismantling of religious institutions , but their purification and rededication.
- 4.
A critique of Catholic schools is a Hollywood staple. See Bulman, “The anomaly of the Catholic school film” p. 135ff.
- 5.
“Oh Great Spirit, we want to walk in beauty in this beautiful house of dawn. I’m praying in a humble way. You walk on this Mother Earth in this sacred way. We hope to follow you, Mother Medicine. Bless us.”
- 6.
The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man would appear only in 2009. Its lampooning of suburban Hebrew School and Jewish congregational life well represents the standard critical view of religious institutions . Philip Roth’s short story “Conversion of the Jews ” (1959) portrays the evils of socialization in mid-twentieth-century Hebrew Schools.
- 7.
The film offers no hint of the innovation Hess (2004, p. 92) has found in Catholic communities , let alone the empowerment felt in the Jewish Chavurah movement: “What makes certain grassroots communities so vibrantly Catholic right now is precisely this ability to define themselves as Catholic over and against hierarchical pressures from within the Church.”
- 8.
In order to broaden its audience beyond the Jewish community, the movie promoted itself as “A comedy about coming of age … and surviving it.”
- 9.
Sociologists of American Jewry give the food connection its ethnic due, though it may lack religious meaning : “Social scientists have often belittled the meaning of food , seeing it as part of merely symbolic and largely superficial ethnicity. Apparently, our respondents take a brighter view of the linkage between Jewish food and Jewish grandmothers [“Grandma Rose’s Brisket” is on the Fiedler’s buffet], lending it deeper meaning than many social scientists have recognized and making it a major causal factor in their adult Jewish development … The survival of distinctive ethnic cuisines long after the disappearance of other markers of difference has made food a near-universal link to ethnic identity ” (Cohen and Eisen, p. 50).
- 10.
For my critique of “teaching Jewish values ,” see Resnick (2014).
- 11.
Even before we see a scene inside AECH, we see the Christian Jewels taking part in a vociferous demonstration against abortion outside a Planned Parenthood clinic.
- 12.
For a list of her doubts, see pp. 108–109.
- 13.
An assertion I defend in my article on the movie , Resnick (2011b).
- 14.
It is sadly ironic that Ben does not mention the end of his haftorah (Micah 6:8) as it is one of the most quoted passages in the entire Hebrew Bible, laden with universal meaning: “He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice , and to love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God.” Either the screenwriter was unaware of it or deliberately decided not to include it.
- 15.
For a detailed discussion of the illiberal and farcical dimensions of the film, see my treatment, 2011b, pp. 38–40.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Leslie Francis, Yosi Gordon, and Yisrael Rich for their helpful comments on this chapter.
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Resnick, D. (2018). Religious Education. In: Representing Education in Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59929-2_6
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