representation is a two-way street

on The Rehearsal and not seeing evangelicals

please Angela can I go trick-or-treating

There’s a line I repeat in my head whenever the topic of representation comes up. Yes, person X with identity Y never saw themselves represented until Media Content Z. Great! Happy for you! But, I wonder selfishly, when will I see myself represented?

That is, of course, absurd. I am a straight white male. Whole media ecosystems are created in the effort to see myself, like some kind of elaborate mirror test with chimpanzees. Do I see myself as Tony Soprano today? Walter White? Tim Robinson, yelling his heart out for my edification? The possibilities are endless!

Yet there is one aspect of my identity, or at least my background, that doesn’t really get represented. I speak, of course, of evangelicalism. I was raised in the Focus on the Family environment of the 80s and 90s, learning about virtue from Elisabeth Elliot and masculinity from Breakaway. If you don’t get those references, consider yourself lucky. If you do, we’ll get through this together.

My evangelical background feels like—and I’m hesitant to say this—but it does, sort of, make me feel like I grew up as an immigrant. When I hear immigrants discuss their upbringing, their sense of being at a remove from the surrounding culture, of trying to navigate those gaps, of dealing with social and often religious conservatism in too-small domestic settings, I often think, yeah, that sounds familiar. I feel seen. But I have to be careful about expressing that, as the books/movies/shows that depict such experiences, that do make me feel seen, are often made by and about nonwhite people. Korean experience; West African experience: and so on. It feels weird to say, but something like Chewing Gum, made by Michaela Coel, a British woman of Ghanaian descent, feels closer to my own experiences than, say, Fleabag, or Girls, or Workaholics, or what have you. Coel is a black woman, yes, but her youth in a strict religious environment means I can see myself in her work much more easily than any number of straight white males.

‘Evangelical’ operates, for me, as identity marker in much the same way that other markers do for people very different than me: black, LGBTQ, etc. Efforts are underway to cater to such audiences, and yeah, sometimes it’s pandering, but who doesn’t like to be pandered to in once in a while? Everyone deserves that.

Am I saying that I feel like the raised-evangelical aspect of my background isn’t getting pandered to? Am I really that shallow?

I mean, kinda?

But that raises the question: what would such pandering look like? And would I even want it?

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After watching The Curse (which I will write about in-depth later on), I finally watched The Rehearsal. If you don’t know, The Rehearsal is a project from Nathan Fielder, a kind of comic auteur of reality TV. After making Nathan for You, a parody of business rescue shows, The Rehearsal carries an even more absurd idea even further. Nathan says he wants to help people prepare for life’s big moments by letting them rehearse those moments in advance, endlessly. If you want to talk to your brother about getting your share of the inheritance, but are scared of the prospect, Nathan has you covered. He will rent a space, build a set, hire dozens of actors, all so you can rehearse that tough moment again and again, until you have it right.

The central person Nathan helps is a woman named Angela. Angela wants to raise a child in a house in the country. She wants to homestead her own garden. She wants to homeschool her child. And Nathan constructs a whole house to help her practice her dream.

Angela is also, as becomes clear, an evangelical. Very evangelical. Extremely evangelical. She refuses to celebrate Halloween, on account of the satanism. She uses essential oils. She tells Nathan, who is Jewish, to his face, that he’s going to hell.

I know Angela. Hell, I’m related to Angela.

Angela is the most accurate representation of American evangelicalism on a show that I’ve ever seen. And you know what? I could barely take it. It was too much. Too cringe. I watched through my fingers the whole time.

And that’s me, someone who’s left evangelicalism behind. (You see what I did there.) For those who are presently evangelicals, I can’t imagine they would want to see themselves depicted like that, however accurate it may be. They may say they want representation, but the result leaves a bad taste in their mouth.

Representation is a two-way street. Hollywood has to want to offer Group X a form of representation, which is where evangelicals get caught up. Godless Hollywood hates Christians! And yes, it’s probably accurate that your average Hollywood exec doesn’t know anything about evangelicals, other than that they’re likely to vote for Trump. But it works the other way too. Evangelicals don’t want to be represented by Hollywood. They don’t want to see themselves portrayed with any kind of accuracy. And considering the result, who can blame them?