Everything Saying “Bible” Ain’t From God

jamin | March 18, 2013 | 0 Comments

Last night I saw my Twitter feed blow up about The History Channel show, The Bible. The show is a 10-hour miniseries that aims to bring the Bible to life. A great concept, in my opinion, if done well (like Kings was done on NBC to creatively retell the stories of Saul and David). Something offensive happened. Apparently, something about Satan and President Barack Obama occurred. I took a look around the innanets and found this.

Credit: History Channel

What in the entire hell which Satan does not occupy? How? What? Why?

Let’s list the problems with this:

This went through levels of approval for design and ideas and maybe some producers were overridden by executive producers from The History Channel to approve this design.
There are gun-toting “Bible” “believing” Americans who already fear that President Obama is a Muslim Atheist Socialist Fascist Communist Antichrist, and this imagery of Satan looking like a 70 year-old version of him is not helping matters.
This uses faith to divide.
Executive Producer Mark Burnett, is a reported Christian and married to Roma Downey (from Touched By An Angel) who also executive produced the series. Burnett has produced for Donald Trump (Celebrity Apprentice) and Sarah Palin (Sarah Palin’s Alaska). I know that in Hollywood you often work where the work shows up, but this leads me to think this snafu went beyond normal business to a political opinion. Burnett and Downey have given to Democratic candidates in the past.
How they didn’t catch this, I don’t know, especially when the actor looks like this out of makeup.

Keene Point of View - Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni

He looks nothing like Obama out of makeup.

Both Rick Warren and TD Jakes lent their celebrity pastor power to the PR campaign for this show. TD Jakes has one of the largest black congregations in the world, most of whom voted for President Obama, so I wonder how he and they feel about this. I, for one, as a black Christian, am pissed.

Lately, I’ve noticed how my faith is used to divide and destroy instead of unite and love. You cannot be a proper Christian unless you’re a Conservative gun-loving Republican in America these days, and I’m tired of it. On top of the Biblical inaccuracies in the series (Noah’s Ark sprung a leak, but Biblically gopher wood was chosen because it was dense and watertight), this adds further problems of bringing the Bible to life for the sake of a quick stunt at publicity or too much focus on created drama when the Bible is chock full of more than enough drama to last through 100 Dallas revivals.

The producers are saying they have the highest respect for President Obama and wouldn’t dream of maligning him this way, but I don’t see how you live in this country and approved something so blatant (and I’m sure someone called it out after the makeup was done and especially during post-production editing). I mean, they were trying to bring the Bible to life but used White actors for “good” characters and minorities for “bad” or unsavory characters. It’s Catholic revisionism all over again, which, wait…Burnett and Downey are Catholic, right? Hmm.

When Christianity is used to divide and incite bad passions like this, it’s not of God. Like Beyonce’s new track “Bow Down,” what’s speaking out of the mouth is not in love or of God when the response to something so small is something so big.