Losing God's Religion

By James Poniewozik

Throughout religious history, getting spoken to by God has not been a sign of fun times ahead. Abraham had to agree to kill his son. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. On CBS's Joan of Arcadia (Fridays, 8 p.m. E.T.), God appears to a teenage girl and commands her ... to take AP chemistry.

This marriage of the sacred and the mundane has made Arcadia the rare TV show about spirituality to win over both audiences and critics. Whereas its predecessors have been either panned but popular marshmallow halos (Highway to Heaven) or controversial, swiftly canceled critical darlings (Nothing Sacred), Arcadia has avoided, Goldilocks-style, going too soft or too hard. Joan (Amber Tamblyn) is an average, nonreligious teen with whom the Lord decides to strike up a friendship, manifesting himself (and herself) in persons from a TV anchorman to a cafeteria lunch lady. Joan has a heart-wrenching family situation--a brother who's been partially paralyzed in a car accident--but the show leavens the emotional moments with a light touch. Its God has a wry, chop-busting wit: "In me you trust," muses the Almighty, examining a dollar bill. "Not exactly true." And Joan's father (Joe Mantegna) is Arcadia's chief of police, for those viewers who wouldn't find the manifestation of the Almighty dramatic enough without the occasional kidnapping to spice things up.

But above all, Arcadia has managed to skate between preachiness and blasphemy by taking the religion out of God, literally. The show's creator, Barbara Hall, gave the writers a list of 10 "commandments" ("God cannot directly intervene"; "Everyone is allowed to say no to God, including Joan"). The third dictum is "God can never identify one religion as being right." This is probably an impossible rule to follow--some people believe in a God who is quite particular about which religion is right, and by the fourth episode God alludes to having told Noah to build the Ark. But mostly Arcadia espouses the little-c catholicism captured in its credits, which juxtapose images of the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Bob Dylan: as long as you believe there's an answer blowin' in the wind, you're on the side of the angels.

Conveniently, Joan, like many a teen, has too many preoccupations to ask God whether Muhammad is his Prophet or if God so loved the world that he gave up his only son. God also avoids the big picture: no talk of worship or salvation or Thou Shalt Nots. "The way we approach what God says is, Less is more," says Hall. Instead, God asks Joan to stop underachieving, to learn chess, to get a part-time job--the Lord as almighty guidance counselor. God explains that by bettering herself, Joan sets off chain reactions that help others: in chem class, for instance, she befriends a school misfit who knows where her brother can get a car outfitted for paraplegics.

All this is less likely to offend any demographic than pinko talk about camels and needles. By separating God from religion, Arcadia takes away what makes faith divisive--a reasonable goal for a major-network series that needs to draw a broad audience to thrive. But reducing God to principles we can all agree on also means taking away much of what makes faith difficult. With this God, everything is a win-win, and all Joan's chain reactions are for the better. "Better is how it works with me," God says. "An infinite good in an infinite universe." A comforting thought for the home audience, and it beats holy war, but it avoids the hard choices that arise from believing there are principles you must follow because they are right, even if you--like the 15th century Joan--must suffer for it. Arcadia's God asks for hard work but not self-sacrifice. If you realize your potential, you enlarge the pie of world happiness. It's supply-side spirituality.

If God, however, is simply asking Joan to do what all teens have to do--develop an identity--Arcadia works because Tamblyn reminds us so well how tough that job is. Joan may talk to God, but she has to do the work her own, mortal self, from accepting life's unfairness to finding her niche at school. Hall calls Joan a "metaphysical warrior," and the battles that go on behind Tamblyn's wrinkled brow are as compelling as any supernatural fireworks. Unlike most prime-time teens, Joan is neither a babe nor a brain, neither a Goody Two-Shoes nor a sarcastic rebel. She's the most extraordinarily average teen to crop up on a TV show in years--yet after a few episodes, you realize you would watch her story even if God stopped showing up. Perhaps that's the true message of Joan of Arcadia: that God is a divine MacGuffin, dramatic bait to make us realize how interesting and powerful an ordinary person can be. In a TV world glutted with cops and superheroes, achieving that realization is a blessing indeed.