I have written about the spark “The Good Wife” gets from arguments between its agnostic main character, attorney Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and her daughter, Grace (Makenzie Vega), a convert to Christianity. Pop culture characters rarely talk about religion, unless it is to wonder at the practices of believers who rarely get to speak for themselves, so these discussions make Alicia and Grace feel more alive and specific than many of their fictional counterparts.
Last night, the show put on a clinic on another facet of how religion might be incorporated into pop culture beyond everyday discussions. In a very funny episode titled “Dear God,” “The Good Wife” left behind the courtroom at the request of two men who asked that their conflict over genetically modified seeds be settled in an arbitration process guided by Christian principles (for the skeptical, this conciliation process is a real thing).
“Wendell is my neighbor,” Ed Pratt (Richard Thomas), a wealthy developer of a new seed strain who was suing a farmer (Robert Joy) for stealing the seeds, told his legal team. “I have a disagreement with him, not you all.”
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Part of what worked about “Dear God” is that the targets of the humor were the lawyers rather than Ed, Wendell or their mediator, Del (Robert Sean Leonard).
The legal teams bicker over who can answer Del’s questions, assuming that legal standards about speculation, leading questions and expertise are what is important. Instead, Del keeps insisting that Ed and Wendell’s honest impressions of what they were doing is what truly matters. Trained to believe that everyone lies and that withholding information is often the best strategy, Alicia and her colleagues are flummoxed by an environment that assumes trustworthiness and good intentions.
As the case goes on, the lawyers get excited by the idea of Christianity as a tool they can use in much the same way they employ legal texts and precedents.
When Del suggests that sin cannot exist without intention, Alicia goes to Grace for help combing through the Bible to find verses to suggest the opposite. The two end up in an argument not about their usual subject — Alicia’s inability to understand Grace’s faith — but rather the practice of proof-texting, the practice of taking quotations out of context to prove a point, even though the whole of the text may not support that argument.
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The conversation moved from there into a discussion of how Grace approaches the Bible. In explaining that, Grace brought Alicia closer than ever into getting why she believes. “That sounds … smart,” Alicia told her daughter. It is a wonderful scene about the law and the case of the week that also advances a long-running character thread between mother and daughter. “The Good Wife” pulled all that off while explaining a concept that might be unfamiliar to a lot of secular viewers without losing the flow of the dialogue.
Later, when the case started going badly for Wendell, his lawyer tried to shift the whole process by suggesting that the patent system could not be applied to life without violating Christian principles. It was a rhetorical move that was all about strategic advantage and not remotely about conviction. While the lawyers began behaving in arbitration exactly as they behaved in court, Ed and Wendell came to their own conclusion: Wendell admitted he had tried to get around the price of Ed’s seeds, and Ed agreed to give Wendell a discount for the sake of neighborliness. What mattered to them was not patents, profits or whether God approves of ownership of life but how to live fairly with one another.
For Ed and Wendell, the legal system was the initial venue where it made sense for their case to land, but the law turned out to be laughably insufficient to their actual priorities and needs. And for “The Good Wife,” which has always drawn a great deal of its distinctive power from its clear-eyed perspective on what the law does to the people who practice it, “Dear God” was a smart way to remind audiences of the limitations of secular deities.
If more pop culture approached faith with this sort of sophistication and humor, religious viewers and atheist or agnostic ones might find that they have more in common than we and the entertainment industry often assume.
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