The Secret Joys of Christian Entertainment

Shows like VeggieTales and Adventures in Odyssey were embarrassing. But they were fun, too.

I figured out at a young age that being a Christian in America was considered normal but being Seventh-day Adventist was weird. Or, at least, it felt strange enough to be worth hiding from kids at my middle school. My older brother’s silence on the topic at school was an unspoken agreement to what I already knew: We weren’t Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, or Episcopalian—we were Seventh-day Adventist, and that wasn’t normal.

The fourth commandment was the pillar of my family’s faith and was the longest of God’s commands passed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It was also the forgotten commandment, I was taught, and other Christians would disregard the sanctity of the Sabbath, which would be their cause for damnation and was the source of a unique Adventist pride. I would repeat the commandment with our church congregation, a collective pronouncement of the foundation on which our Church stands:

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shall thou labor and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it, thou shalt not do any work. Thou, nor thy sons, nor thy daughters, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy shepherd, nor thy stranger that is within thine gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and Earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it.

Specific rules around the Sabbath varied across families and regions, from simply taking the day off work, to a more conservative view that included preparing your food the day beforehand because cooking on the Sabbath itself would be work. In Michigan, my family was closer to the latter. During the Sabbath, I couldn’t watch TV, play sports or video games, cook, clean, or listen to secular music. As a general rule, if I had to question whether it brought glory to God, it likely didn’t and shouldn’t be done on the Sabbath.

As a kid, my job was to find the loopholes.

I became a pro at finding Christian-themed games that were actually just regular games with some Biblical element tacked on. Six days a week I played freeze tag, whereby when someone tagged me, I was frozen until someone else tagged me free, but on the Sabbath, I played Bible freeze tag, so when someone tagged me, I was frozen until I said a Bible verse and then someone tagged me free. Six days a week we played Charades, but on the seventh day we played Bible Charades.

Christian-based games were sold in stores as altered versions of popular, nonreligious ones. My personal favorite was called Egypt to Canaan, which was like an Old Testament Trivial Pursuit, but your game pieces traveled the path of Moses and the children of Israel out from Egypt and through the desert, surviving on manna sent from heaven and water that poured from rocks until you reached the promised land. Trivia questions moved your pieces forward, and I had to learn the Old Testament fast if I ever wanted to win. My brother and I memorized answers from the trivia cards to race ahead in hopes that a Chance card wouldn’t set us back with an act of unrighteousness. Chance cards were like, “You doubted God, move back two spaces,” or “You built a false idol, move back four spaces,” or “God commanded you to collect manna only after sunset and you lost faith, built an altar, and sacrificed a cow, move back to start.”

I built an appreciation for a genre of entertainment embraced by a small audience of kids who were raised, even if only one day a week, on Christian adventures. Little-known to the less religious families, there were Christian adaptations of everything imaginable across cassette tapes, videos, books, and music. Veggie Tales, Adventures in Odyssey, and Greatest Adventure: Stories From the Bible were great, and on the Sabbath, they were better than nothing. They were like the Christian Disney, so much fun that sometimes, if only for an hour or two, we forgot we were following rules at all.

Photo: Focus on the Family

Since my parents were divorced and every other Sabbath was spent with our dad, my brother and I got to play Bible-based video games on our Sega Genesis when the board games wore out. We had one game called Exodus and another named Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. They were essentially the same game, with puzzles where you moved rocks up, down, left, or right and avoided magicians and other evils. Both were clones of Nintendo’s popular Boulder Dash, but small details would make a regular 16-bit video game into a Christian 16-bit video game for more relaxed parents like my dad. Moses shot W’s at enemies, meant to signify the word of God. The background music was digitized versions of popular children’s hymns like “Father Abraham.” There was Old Testament trivia between each level that would earn manna. Not points. Manna.

Christian playtime was secretly fun, despite the growing realization of the chasm between my Adventist upbringing and the kids I would play with outside. When the sun set on Friday night, ushering in the Sabbath, we would turn off the TV while other kids would keep watching. When we woke up Saturday morning, I would get ready for church while other kids would get ready for Saturday-morning cartoons.

I’d still watch cartoons, only one day a week my cartoons would be different from theirs. Bible-based cartoons were my quintessential Sabbath-afternoon pastime when my morality, values, and character would be reinforced outside of church and inside my family’s comfort zone. I resented the cartoons for taking away X-Men: The Animated Series and The Tick, but the resentment lasted only a few minutes after Friday’s sunset, when it was replaced with Veggie Tales.

Alongside Veggie Tales were less commercially popular, more obscure cartoons that had come before it and helped pave the way for its success. Greatest Adventure: Stories From the Bible ran from 1986 to 1992 in 13 30-minute episodes. It featured a smart, outspoken woman in Margo, a dark-skinned jokester in Moki, and an upright, classic good guy in Derek. The one Black character, Moki, was the only non-archeologist in the bunch, oddly referred to only as “their nomad friend,” and was used mostly for comic relief. Still, he was there, making me laugh as the Bible’s class clown and the earliest Black animated character I can recall.

I would quote lines from episodes with my brother, our favorite being the taunts of the Philistine Goliath. Goliath’s challenge had been made plainly, from the moment he appeared on a distant hilltop with his goons behind him, leaving the Israelites aghast.

“Israelites! Send out a man who dares fight me. If he kills me, all Philistines will be your servants.” The Israelites mumbled in agreement. “But,” Goliath added, “if I kill him, all Israelites will be our slaves.” The mumbles faded, and King Saul was left with a choice. The Israelites could wage war and risk the death of many, or they could put all their faith in one individual battle and save countless lives. Only no one would step up to fight Goliath, a fact that led to his daily taunting.

“Come! Come! I grow lonely out here,” he yelled at the audience of cowards. “Surely, amongst the men of Saul, there is one man with spine. Step forth!” Every weak-hearted Israelite in that camp looked at each other, and then down at the ground, ashamed, until Goliath yelled his final instructions and my first introduction to the schoolyard bully: “I shall return tomorrow, and every day thereafter, until you send forth a warrior to meet me.” With that, Goliath stabbed his spear into the ground to mark the spot he would return each day to take the Israelites’ lunch money.

But David was in the audience one day.

Goliath had pointed at Israelite men one by one, asking if they would be the one to step to the throne, laughing at each prospect. The Israelite men looked at the ground, afraid and embarrassed of being called out with no intention of standing up for themselves. But there’s always one kid who isn’t afraid of the schoolyard bully, and that was David.

“Why does no one fight him?” David asked. “Who is this Philistine who defies you?”

“Goliath of Gath,” his brother responded. “He has made this challenge every day.”

“For how long?” David asked. He was expecting it was one day of cowardice, maybe two. A week would be unfathomable.

“The past 40 days,” his brother replied. And that shit nearly broke David.

David was like, Forty days? Forty days, like the whole time Noah was on the boat? Forty days like Moses on Mount Sinai? Forty days, like how long we took to spy out Canaan? Forty—you fucking kidding me.

His brothers were angry and embarrassed. “You have no right to talk so big. You know nothing of fighting, only tending sheep. Why did you come here anyway? You wanted to peek out from behind a tree and see a battle?”

David looked around. Do you see a fucking battle here? “I see no battle,” he yelled. “Only one lone enemy who dishonors us. If no one else fights the Philistine, I will.”

“You?” his brothers said.

“Yes, and gladly,” David responded. And he did. After persuading King Saul to put him on the court, David came out the next morning with no armor, no sword, just the shepherd gear he wore to work in the morning. Goliath was fucking disgusted.

“For your insolence,” Goliath taunted David, “I will carve your flesh and feed it to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field.” But David stood defiant. And you know the rest.

Christian TV played on repeat each Sabbath, part of its entertainment value coming from just how well I knew each line of dialogue. That was the nature of my childhood for one day each week, a whole world of faith-based media whose content was different from what I watched the other six days, but with an obsession equally sincere as I accepted its consolation.

But they weren’t Saturday-morning cartoons.

I knew well enough to keep them a secret.

***

This article has been excerpted from Jordan Calhoun's new book, Piccolo Is Black: A Memoir of Race, Religion, and Pop Culture. (When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.)

Thanks to everyone for their responses to last week’s essay about Abercrombie & Fitch. Today’s newsletter is obviously an excerpt from my memoir, and I hope you grab the book and keep reading about my weird little life. And to those who’ve already finished it, I hope you love it as much as I do. If you want to see what pure joy and overwhelm looks like, here’s a picture of me looking at a cake with my book cover on it.