For some regrettable reason, I watch Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s hit adult animated TV show, Rick & Morty. The show, which streams online and airs on Adult Swim among other shows like it, is a witty, irreverent, sci-fi sitcom that originated from a dark parody of Back to the Future. The episodes revolve around Rick Sanchez, an elderly alcoholic scientific genius without rival, and his timid, insecure, markedly not smart or particularly outstanding teenage grandson, Morty, going on various adventures across the multiverse through the use of Rick’s trademark “portal gun.” Cool concept. Unfortunately it doesn’t end there though. Through the three and a half seasons we have already, the show has grappled with topics like divorce, abandonment, racism, adultery, sexual deviance, murder, eugenics, politics, religion, etc., all hovering around the ever-present force of Rick’s luciferian selfishness. * Somehow, I have made it through episodes where Rick abandons his real family in an apocalypse he himself caused, and episodes where Morty is forced to kill other versions of himself, his parents and sister to survive. In this week’s episode though, (Season 4, Episode 6: "Never Ricking Morty") I saw something I should have been seeing a long time ago: Rick & Morty is a show that comes from and represents a world that I am no longer part of. In classic Harmon/Roiland fashion, Rick & Morty makes obvious the fact that the world hates modern forms of Christian art.

I am 27 years old and a millennial. I am also a Christian who grew up in the Evangelical community at the turn of the 21st century. I grew up listening to bands like the Newsboys (with Peter Furler at the front, thank you very much), Relient K, and Third Day, hoping that when I shared the music with my secular friends on the school bus the catchiness and quality of the music itself would allow them to overlook the clearly Christian message. I grew up on VeggieTales, and watched episodes of The Story Keepers sometimes in Sunday School. I grew up learning that Jesus Christ was the Savior of the whole world and was the main character of “the greatest story ever told.” I knew these were not the most popular bands, TV shows, and narratives, but I knew they meant well. “Never Ricking Morty” now in 2020 deftly paints a (just obvious enough to not be sued) picture of my childhood culture and values as literally, the worst story ever told.

The plot of the episode is wacky, beginning with an anthology of brief, random, one-hits about Rick, and then evolves into the clever premise that Rick and Morty are riding on a train that is a literal literary device. They are being pursued by a supervillain named “Story Lord” whose goal is to use the popularity and quality of Rick & Morty’s story to break the hyperbolic “fifth wall,” somehow giving Story Lord unlimited power. It is a chintzy, illogical supervillain plot clearly parodying that of classic superhero comics and cartoons. Rick, however, outsmarts him by feeding Story Lord’s story draining machine with, instead of the brilliant hyjinks and plot turns of Rick & Morty, the worst possible and least popular story: the story of someone calling on Jesus for help and accepting Him into their heart. As Rick leads Morty in an altar call-esque prayer asking Jesus to be his personal savior, Story Lord’s “marketability,” “broad appeal,” and “relatability” meters go from full to empty. The villain laments “stop!  You guys would never do this!” as his plan unravels.  Rick and Morty are then surrounded by characters parodying the VeggieTales characters, Bibleman, and other tropes of Christian media, as they tell Story Lord that they gave them “the greatest story ever told,” to which Story Lord responds in a very believable tone, “no it doesn’t! It’s awful!” 

Awful. I felt the sting of that well delivered line (Paul Giamatti voices Story Lord). First of all, I was triggered. After my triggeredness subsided, however, I was hit with the stunning accuracy of much of Rick & Morty’s critique. Christian media and much of Christian art since the postmodern era has been predictable, cheesy, tropey, and narratively weak. They are right that we as viewers are hardly compelled by the story of, for example, a college student suffering from Christian persecution complex who only wins against the evils of his tyrannical atheist professor when he passively prays for help and is rescued deus ex machina. What have we done as Christians that we have allowed what is truly (read the Gospels, I promise) the greatest story ever told to be shrunk, processed, and neutered into something the world recognizes as literally the worst, most eye-rolling narrative they can think of? After Jesus Christ himself blasphemously appears in the episode, beautiful and muscled, to save Rick and Morty, Rick then goes on to imprison Story Lord in “every writer’s hell—the Bible.”  The Bible?  The holiness of Scripture aside, the Bible is one of the most dense, diverse, and most compelling pieces of literature in all history. Readers from Albert Einstein to Mahatma Gandhi have called it the greatest work of human history. If I’m honest with myself, however, Rick still has a valid point.

Culture in recent decades has grown tired of the Bible. It is clear in my life as much as anyone’s. How many times have you seen a TV program, whether well made or not, on the story of Jesus or some other Biblical narrative and not given it a try because “it’s probably cheesy?” It is probably cheesy, or trite, or historically inaccurate, or perhaps even offensive to non-Christians.  Why is this? The stories and wisdom in the Bible are timeless and fascinating. There is even a revival in our culture right now for ancient texts and beliefs, with millennials and Gen-Z individuals being attracted newly to Wicca, yoga, eastern religions, astrology, tarot, and other spiritual disciplines. What is so repellant about Judeo-Christian beliefs? When I was in graduate school I took a class on “Mythology,” and many of my classmates' favorite texts we read that semester was Robert Alter’s translation of Genesis. The Bible is interesting. It is the simplified, purely evangelical nature of our media that has made it so insufferable. People can only hear the same out-of-context story so many times before they themselves shake the dust from their feet and move on.

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