Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope: Negotiating the Intersections of Religion and Sexuality on Network Television's The Book of Daniel

Abstract

This article analyzes the television series The Book of Daniel, a program that shows in full relief the ways that current discourses of religion and sexuality converge to produce a particular type of gay subject. This subject, primarily male, might be understood as bound through an innate identity and commitment to the sanctity and reproduction of heteronormative institutions such as the church and state, which renders him assimilable into the social order. As homosexuality, per se, is no longer “outside” the normative order, the program constructs an unstable, nonbinary, and nonheteronormative other who is best understood as queer.

Keywords:

• gay representations
• media
• queer
• religion
• sexuality
• television

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Sonja Foss and William Waters for insightful conversations about this project at the Augustana College Summer 2008 Faculty Research Retreat. They also appreciate the discerning feedback from our three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Here, we are making an important distinction between television that is advertiser supported, which includes network and basic cable, and television that is supported by subscription. While in general the gaps between such forms of television continue to erode (see Lotz, 2007), the need of broadcast television networks to please both advertisers and adhere to Federal Communications Commission guidelines regarding content, and the need of basic cable networks, likewise, to please advertisers has tended to equate to more narrowed representations of gays and lesbians.

2. While conservative groups like the American Family Association protested the depiction of Jesus in an entertainment television program, series creator Jack Kenny said Daniel's conversations with Jesus were meant as an inner dialogue. In an interview, Kenny stated, “He's not really talking to a living Jesus … This is Daniel's personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This is how it manifests itself. He talks to him, this is his way of praying: He's talking to his best friend, his brother, his pal, his partner” (quoted in Sepinwall, n.d., para. 16). As Daniel's counselor, Jesus generally does not give Daniel direction, but instead encourages him to seek within himself for the answer he already knows. A National Review writer described the character of Jesus to be “generally likeable albeit substance-less” (Wittig, 2006, para. 6). He continued, “Sure, Jesus pops in an [sic] out. But for all he adds to the story, he might as well been a stock wacky-neighbor-with-sage-advice a lá Wilson of Home Improvement” (para. 8).

3. The program occasionally featured other gay characters that played minor roles in the narrative. We do not include analysis of these characters because they are not central to the arguments made in this article.

4. A queer reading involves reading against the dominant discourse of the text to uncover, reveal, or demonstrate the ways the text challenges heteronormative ideas. While what Sedgwick terms a “hermeneutics of suspicion” has come under attack recently (see Schiappa, Gregg & Hewes, 2006), we believe that the power of broadcasting images to shape understandings of sexuality necessitates critical attention informed by queer theory to the ways that such representations construct particular definitions of gayness that promote limited social change for a limited number of people.