As the old proverb goes, seeing is not necessarily believing, and you never know who may be using this. In a culture conditioned to filters and frictionless time lines that line has become an unspoken guide to how to watch people on a screen people whose lives are made by faith.
The repetitive issue of reality TV with faith communities can hardly be reduced to theology. It is reduced to the habits of the medium: to the condensing of the everyday religious life into well-understood story lines, the classifying of believers into immediately familiar types, the fact that worship or moral language is a plot device. The audience tends to feel wrong, yet the inappropriateness may pass as “stereotyping” instead of the underlying problem: the instrumentation of the genre is designed to make communities become as characters.
The first and the most invisible instrument is editing. A former reality contestant has explained how perception is formed by the editing in or out choices done to the post-production, as it is a superpower that most ordinary people do not know about. Not that only makes people heroes or villains, but what kinds of lives turn out to be narratable. Religious institutions are so inclined to operate by repetition weekly meetings, mutual service, long-term relationships, gradual internal transformation. True reality TV, in its turn, operates on gasoline: conflict, revelation, expulsion, redemption. Something that cannot be accelerated is cut and something that cannot be dramatized is dramatized.
Religious people also seem to be “performative” on reality shows due to a structural reason and this is that the shows themselves are simulative, i.e., resemble ritual. A discussion of the competition formats states that the genre appropriates the meter of liturgy, with pre-existing phrases, divine locations of verdict, and repetitive rituals that denote who is “in” and who is “out.” Even when it is genuine, that ritual bone makes prayer and faith-talk seem stage business because the show has already an officiant, a ceremony, and people who need converting.
That tension is most evident when creators shoot discernment, the laborious, secret process of making a choice about a profession or a path in life. Stacey Jackson, the cast member of Lifetime series about lifetime series about women considering religious life, told the interviewer that she was involved in the series because it would put her “where the people could meet.” She also talked of unresolved issues regarding portrayal such as the fear of her appearance and the possibility of whether the Church would be represented properly. The fact that her story reflects nothing like caricature is worthy of attention in itself, and even more, as she is describing a production environment she found to be respectful, where the drama was constructed on the inside, and where the camera served as “flies on the wall.” A confession is very hard to make, on record, that reality TV can shoot faith without over-the-top moralizing it into a morality play.
Instead, more frequently, reality shows are rewarding the reverse. The clean arcs and the high contrast which must be possessed by the producers require that a community be reduced to its most explicitly “explainable” edges: the oddly extreme family, the melodramatic rule, the boundary which can be determined between the insiders and the outsiders. One of the critics of religion based reality TV programming said that the shows have a habit of highlighting a small percentage of the believers and then letting that small percentage represent the entirety. Not only is that unfair representation, it is a narrative shortcut. The viewers do not simply internalise the myths about a religion they are deprived of what faith communities are mostly composed of: the care and duties that are respected without applause and types of belonging that are less polished than what are broadcast on television because they are not enacted in front of outsiders.
What is lost to viewers is not necessarily only “accuracy.” The conversion to content of life is cost. It is in the background that social platforms have taught audiences to seek warps, the slight indications that a piece of art has been manipulated. Unscripted TV is also subject to the same literacy. Once a community comes out as unbelievably extreme, or it seems that the spirituality of an individual has come up just in time when a storyline requires it, the question is not whether faith is bizarre. And the question is what the edit had to believe in to do it.
