The Flanderisation of American Evangelicalism
Hens love roosters, geese love ganders, everyone else loves Ned Flanders
This article originally appeared in Vox Clamantis in the Summer edition of 2021 but has been edited & rewritten for The Art of Throwing Eggs. Unless otherwise stated, all images were generated by DALL-E.
‘Reverend’, he says, clad in his trademark pink shirt and green jumper. ‘I think I’m coveting my own wife’. Meek, moustachioed, finicky, self-flagellating: for those of us who learned about the world by watching The Simpsons, Ned Flanders is the very embodiment of American evangelical Christianity. ‘Today on American college and high school campuses’, one commentator wrote in 2001, ‘the name most associated with the word Christian – other than Jesus – is not the pope or Mother Theresa or even Billy Graham’, but, rather, our ‘perky, peppy, nightmare neighborino’.
Flanders has graced our TV screens for three decades now, during which time he has been subject to extensive criticism and commentary. Recent discussions tend to follow a common trajectory. In the earlier seasons of The Simpsons, we are told, Flanders’s piety was a relatively minor component of his personality. In Season 3’s ‘When Flanders Failed’ (3.3; 1991) his religion is mentioned only once, when he desperately sells his Bible to his neighbour, Homer Simpson, for seven cents: indeed, his left-handedness is more central to his personality than his faith. But over time – so this narrative goes – Flanders’s Christianity has come to dominate every aspect of his life. Even his number plate, JHN143, reflects his religious devotion, recalling John 1:43 in which Christ tells Philip the Apostle to ‘Follow me’. Alcuin of York interpreted this passage to mean that ‘Everyone follows Jesus who imitates His humility and suffering, in order to be partaker of His resurrection and ascension’. Nobody in the history of television has strived to imitate Christ’s humility and suffering, and to partake of His resurrection and ascension, more than Ned Flanders.
I. On Flanderisation
Ned Flanders has an entire phenomenon named after him in the world of online media criticism. The website TV Tropes coined the term ‘Flanderisation’ to refer to ‘the act of taking a single action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character’. In many TV shows, you may have noticed, characters become cruder, more one-dimensional, parodies of themselves over time. They become Flanderised.
This of itself is no bad thing. The genius of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, for example, is the way in which it Flanderises its protagonists in a controlled and deliberate manner. Perhaps the best episode of South Park, ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’, is the one in which Eric Cartman is fully and irreversibly Flanderised, transformed from a brat with some Machiavellian tendencies into a full-blown sociopath. Yet the term is always used in a negative sense. In 2019 Adrienne Tyler saw the archetypal ‘Flanderisation’ – the exaggeration of Ned Flanders’s piety, his transformation over the course of The Simpsons into a fully-fledged Bible-thumper – as an act of ‘ruination’:
with time, Ned went from nice, successful, ideal neighbour, to obsessively religious. The team behind The Simpsons decided to make his beliefs the centre of his character, and his life pretty much revolves around church and religion now.
‘It is ironic’, wrote Amelia Tait, ‘that the act of reducing a character to a single trait is called “Flanderisation”, when Lisa Simpson is the most Flanderised character in TV history’. She has a point: Ned Flanders is not necessarily ‘Flanderisation’’s most appropriate namesake and standard-bearer. Indeed, Homer Simpson is ‘Flanderised’ to a greater extent even than his eldest daughter. Probably my favourite episodes of The Simpsons are those which present our portly paterfamilias as a deeply compassionate man: ‘And Maggie Makes Three’ (6.13; 1995) explores the sacrifices he makes to support his three children; ‘One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish’ (2.11; 1991) shows him making amends with his fellow citizens before his imminent death; ‘Last Exit to Springfield’ (4.17; 1993) presents him, our humble everyman, leading a strike of power plant workers against a Grinch-like Monty Burns to preserve the dental plan on which his family relies (Lisa needs braces).
In a staple of Simpsons-criticism as ubiquitous as ‘Flanderisation’, our Homer has regrettably turned into a ‘Jerk-Ass’, whose defining feature is his mean-spiritedness. In ‘When Flanders Failed’, Homer comes to regret his crueller impulses: he initially wishes for the bankruptcy of Flanders’s Leftorium, a shop for left-handed people, but when his wish is realised, he feels remorse and seeks to put things right. In more recent episodes, however, this emotional denouement is altogether absent.
A favourite pastime of Simpsons fans is to pinpoint the moment at which the series declined. Probably the most popular contender is Season 9’s ‘The Principal and the Pauper’ (9.2; 1997), but I prefer to trace the decline instead to Season 10’s ‘Homer Simpson in: “Kidney Trouble”’ (10.8; 1998), where Homer refuses to donate one of his kidneys to his father, Abraham. There are signs in the episode that it is approaching a conclusion similar to that achieved by ‘When Flanders Failed’: Homer begins to feel guilty for his lack of compassion, and reconsiders his stubborn refusal to donate his kidney to his father. But as he returns to the hospital, he is consumed once again by selfish fear; he runs away, is struck down by a car, and, while unconscious, his kidney is removed and given to Abraham anyway. All is well, in the end, but not by virtue of Homeric compassion. If The Simpsons has declined in quality over the years – and it unquestionably has – this owes much to the ‘Flanderisation’ of Homer Simpson, whose character now consists of all the cruel boorishness that we find in the earlier seasons, but with none of the emotional redemption.
II. The Spirit and Psychology of Nedward Flanders, Jr.
Ned Flanders’s supposedly Flanderised quality – unlike Homer Simpson’s – is at least given some psychological depth. The impetus of Flanders’s piety is revealed to us in Season 8’s ‘Hurricane Neddy’ (8.8; 1996), in which we meet, in a series of flashbacks, his ‘freaky beatnik’ parents who ‘don’t believe in rules’. Nedward Flanders Sr., and his wife, Agnes ‘Kookie’ Flanders (née Turnipseed), also appear prominently in Season 24’s ‘Black Eyed, Please’ (24.15; 2013), where they are dismissive of their uptight son, whom they dub the ‘Mayor of Dullsville’ (‘dad, you know we don’t discuss politics at the table’, Ned sharply responds). Loose, individualistic, pot-smoking hippies: the comedy flows naturally from the fact that they are the antithesis of their fuddy-duddy son, the dynamic between them subverting our expectations of parent-child relationships. Flanders’s turn to evangelicalism – his ‘Born Again’ experience – is shown to be the product of this upbringing. Starved of order and discipline, he lurched to the opposite extreme, with psychologically harmful results.
As a child Ned Flanders, presumably fuelled by this anarchic home environment, had a proclivity for hellraising inhibition. His behaviour was apparently so disruptive that he was placed in the care of one Dr Foster, a child psychiatrist, who undid his parents’ laxity through a process of rigorous spanking. Flanders, it seems, did not become his scrupulous self immediately – in the cross-dressing ending of ‘Dead Putting Society’ (2.6; 1990), he reminisces about his ‘good old fraternity days’, hinting at some youthful debauchery – but he had, by this stage, imbibed Dr Foster’s lesson that the solution to the chaos of everyday life is strict, uncompromising discipline. His self-punishing piety, and the introspection that it inspires, plays a role in his adult life analogous to his spanking at the hands of Dr Foster as a child.
This, however, encourages him to bottle up his anger and emotion – and Flanders, as we learn over the course of the series, is a very angry and emotional man when pushed to the brink, his hellraising spirit plastered over but never fully extinguished. This anger erupts magnificently in ‘Hurricane Neddy’. After a hurricane destroys his house, he sits alone in the church, imagining himself as a modern-day Job:
Why me, Lord? I’ve always been nice to people. I don’t drink or dance or swear. I’ve even kept kosher just to be on the safe side. I’ve done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff. What more could I do? I feel like I’m coming apart here! I want to yell out but I just can’t dang-diddly-do-dang-do-damn-diddly-darn do it!
A bona fide ‘damn’, rather than one of his characteristic minced-oaths, at last seeps into Flanders’s speech: we realise in this moment that his idiolect, those ‘diddly’s and ‘doodly’s, are in fact a strategy of emotional repression. ‘Damn’ is one of the last words one would expect to hear in Flanders’s voice: in ‘Bart the Lover’ (3.16; 1992), he is horrified when one of his sons says ‘I don’t want any damn vegetables’. Far from a kindly affectation, however, his ‘diddly’s and ‘doodly’s represent his repression of an intense desire to give vent to his anger through swearing. Later in ‘Hurricane Neddy’, after the residents of Springfield botch their attempt to rebuild his house, we see him break down completely, his ‘diddly’s becoming increasingly erratic and hysterical:
Now calm down, Neddilly-diddly-diddly-diddly-diddly… They did their best shodilly-iddly-iddly-diddly… Gotta be nice, hostility-diddly-diddly-diddly… Aw hell! Diddly-ding-dong crap! Can’t you morons do anything right?
‘Hurricane Neddy’ also explores the ways in which Flanders’s religious neuroses harm him and his family in tangible ways. The reason his family is forced to rely on the goodwill of his incompetent fellow-citizens of Springfield is that he stubbornly refuses to purchase insurance on his house, because he deems insurance to be a ‘form of gambling’ (intriguingly, he recants on this position much later, in Season 26’s ‘Sky Police’ (26.16; 2015), when Revd. Timothy Lovejoy points out that gambling was very common in the Bible, adducing Joshua’s and Nehemiah’s drawing of lots). Flanders’s pious risk-aversion also negatively affects his abilities as a parent. In ‘Bart Has Two Mommies’ (17.14; 2006), Rod and Todd inform Marge Simpson that ‘daddy says up-and-down see-saws are dangerous’; when Marge permits them to try the see-saw ‘freestyle’, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 plays triumphantly, reflecting the boys’ state of euphoria and liberation. Flanders’s overcorrection of his own lax upbringing deprives his children of a great deal of (harmless) fun and entertainment. Rod and Todd are less disruptive than he was as a child, but their situation is no less sad.
Much can also be said of Flanders’s sexuality. In ‘A Streetcar Named Marge’ (4.2; 1992) he clearly relishes the opportunity to behave dominantly while playing Stanley Kowalski in a musical rendition of A Streetcar Named Desire; yet he is forced to vent these desires in the simulacrum of the stage precisely because his piety restricts his sexual behaviour in private. One of Flanders’s most recognisably Christian neuroses is his revulsion, taken to comic extremes, at his own flesh. When Homer encounters him in the bath in ‘Home Away from Homer’ (16.20; 2005), he is wearing a swimming costume ‘so I can’t see my own shrinky dink’. His revulsion to sex is so strong that he claims, in ‘A Star Is Born Again’ (14.13; 2003), that ‘I won’t even eat vegetables over two inches long’; and in ‘The Ned-liest Catch’ (22.22; 2011) he is so desperate for his children to grow up in innocence that he insisted on having them delivered by a ‘Dr Stork’, so that he could tell them they were delivered ‘by stork’ without lying. A scene in a flashback episode, ‘Dangerous Curves’ (20.5; 2008), encapsulates Flanders’s sexual psychology. He is on honeymoon with his ill-fated wife, Maude. They pick up a young unmarried couple – Homer Simpson and Marge Bouvier – and insist on keeping them apart from one another. ‘What better way’, Ned asks Maude, ‘to celebrate our wedding night than by keeping an unmarried couple apart?’. Flanders rejects the ‘free love’ ethic of his parents, and his sexual repression extends to his interactions with other people.
Thus it is no surprise that Flanders’s outward-facing piety should cause some friction in Springfield’s congregation. The relationship between Ned Flanders and the other principally religious character of Springfield, Reverend Timothy Lovejoy, is emblematic of a broader tension in American Protestant communities, between evangelical intensity and mainline conformity. Lovejoy is fundamentally indifferent to religion, treating his stewardship of the church as no more than an ordinary job: in ‘Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily’ (7.3; 1995) he goes as far as to recommend to Flanders, whose scrupulosity he finds highly obnoxious, that he try ‘any of the other major religions – they’re all pretty much the same’. If Lovejoy does genuinely feel some attachment to Christ – and The Simpsons is ambivalent on this question – he expresses it in a tedious and unexciting way, delivering sermons on such soporific matters as ‘the nine tenets of constancy’ in a drawling monotone. Lovejoy’s attitude towards Flanders is typically portrayed as one of contempt. In ‘22 Short Films About Springfield’ (7.21; 1996) we even find the reverend encouraging his dog to urinate in the Flanders family’s front-garden. In the episode that focuses most closely on the Lovejoy-Flanders relationship, ‘In Marge We Trust’ (8.22; 1997), Lovejoy reveals to Marge that Flanders caused his broader disillusionment with his pastoral duties, his patience eroded by Flanders’s incessant questions on trivial matters. Flanders, typically, is oblivious to the extent to which he is loathed by Lovejoy, and indeed the extent to which Lovejoy is apathetic towards their shared faith.
But perhaps because Flanders spends so much time and energy thinking about spiritual matters, it is he, and not Lovejoy, who dares to question and defy God. When his wife Maude is killed off in Season 11 (incidentally, another good contender for the moment The Simpsons ‘died’), Flanders feels some Lovejoyian apathy about the world, but – unlike Lovejoy – directs it squarely at his creator:
Lord, I never question your will, but I’m wondering whether your decision to take Maude was, well, wrong – unless this is part of your divine plan. Could you please just give me some sign? Anything?
He is met with only silence, and the next day Flanders – to the shock of his sons – refuses to attend church. Flanders’s faith is not absolute. His religious fervour – in contrast to Lovejoy’s indifference – enables him to struggle with God.
III. ‘That’s For A Vengeful God To Do’: Flanderite Theology
But who is Ned Flanders’s God? He is a vindictive God, a vengeful God, one who inspires authoritarian intrusiveness in all His followers. As worshippers of this God, the Flanders clan pride themselves on their ability to elicit feelings of shame in others. This, indeed, is how the late Maude Flanders is eulogised in ‘I’m Goin’ to Praiseland’ (12.19; 2001): on her statue is emblazoned the phrase ‘she taught us the joy of shame and the shame of joy’. In ‘Bart of Darkness’ (6.1; 1994), Maude attends Bible camp to ‘learn how to be more judgemental’. Likewise, in ‘Homer the Heretic’ (4.3; 1992), the Flanders family stalks their irreligious neighbour, relentlessly singing ‘God said to Noah there’s gonna be a floody-floody’; it is revealing how quickly their saccharine clapping gives way to aggression, and a car-chase ensues during which one of the Flanders spawn cries ‘dad, the heathen’s getting away!’. To convert ‘heathens’ is the primary objective of Flanders’s religious vocation: in ‘Viva Ned Flanders’ (10.10; 1999), his sons, having imbibed these ideas from their father, teach Bart Simpson how to play a game called ‘Billy Graham’s Bible Blasters’, where the goal is to ‘convert the heathen’.
Flanders’s intrusiveness is especially egregious in ‘Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily’, where he and Maude attempt by force to baptise Bart and Lisa Simpson. Upon discovering that Bart and Lisa were never baptised (‘Jeepers H. Crackers!’), Maude says ‘we don’t judge your mum and dad – that’s for a vengeful God to do’. Ned is even less hesitant than his wife to pass scathing moral judgement on Homer and Marge: ‘until this’, he says, ‘I never thought Homer and Marge were bad parents, but now I know you kids need a less hell-bound family’. Flanders’s tendency towards meddlesome authoritarianism reveals itself again much later, in ‘To Surveil With Love’ (21.20; 2010), where Flanders is given a job as one of Springfield’s ‘Buttinskis’, monitoring Springfield by CCTV. Relishing the task of making Springfield ‘cleaner than the Lord’s hand-towels’, he describes himself to Marge as ‘a half-man, half-bug that knows what’s best for everybody’.
And since he ‘knows what’s best for everybody’, Flanders likes to play censor. In ‘You Kent Always Say What You Want’ (18.22; 2007), the local news anchor, Kent Brockman, is caught on camera saying a dirty word. Lisa, ever erudite, knows it is the end of Brockman’s career, thanks to ‘religious watchdogs who keep the world safe from the horror of free expression’. ‘You mean there are losers who spend their whole day watching TV looking for stuff to complain about?’, asks Bart. ‘Who’d be lame enough to do that?’
The answer, obviously, is Ned Flanders, who – scandalised by Brockman’s on-air offence – feels obliged to write angrily to the network. His children ask him what he is doing, and he proudly tells them that he is ‘imploring people I never met to pressure a government with better things to do to punish a man who meant no harm for something nobody even saw’. Part of the irony, as The Simpsons explores on numerous occasions, is that Flanders’s censoriousness, if applied consistently, would ban even the religious texts that he holds so dear. ‘Homer and Ned’s Hail Mary Pass’ (16.8; 2005) explores this double standard. Flanders’s religious films, starring his sons as Cain and Abel, are violent, gruesome, and bloody. This upsets Marge (whose Christianity is more of the ‘God said to Noah there’s gonna be a floody-floody’ type), but Lisa points out that ‘the Bible is pretty violent’ (‘and sexy’, Bart adds, adducing the story of David and Bathsheba). What we might call Margean Christianity – that really faith boils down to happy-clappy neighbour-love – is undermined again in ‘Bart’s Girlfriend’ (6.7; 1994), in which her praise for the church’s teaching of ‘morals, decency, and how to love your fellow man’ is immediately juxtaposed with the contents of Lovejoy’s sermon: ‘And with flaming swords, the Aramites did pierce the eyes of their fellow man and did feast on what flowed forth’. The Simpsons pokes fun at the absurdity of evangelicals who glorify violence in certain contexts, while at the same time playing the role of social ‘watchdog’.
For all his more attractive qualities, then, Ned Flanders is a hypocrite. His resolution to ‘do everything the Bible says – even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff’ reveals both a belief in scriptural inerrancy and an acceptance of its contradictions. His knowledge of the Bible, with which he is ‘as familiar as it’s proper to be’, in fact gives him the capacity to rationalise and justify all his behaviour: in scripture he can find a wide array of excuses to do whatever he likes (‘The Monkey Suit’, 17.21; 2006). He takes it upon himself to police the behaviour of others, in line with religious injunctions: recall how he and Maude, while on their honeymoon, keep Homer and Marge apart from one another. And yet, when Flanders wants to engage in premarital sex with an actress named Sara Sloane, in ‘A Star Is Born Again’ (14.13; 2003), he feels able to justify it with a tenuous reference to scripture (the verse ‘a man should make restitution if he eats his neighbour’s grain’ is ‘good enough for me’). Flanders fails as a Christian by Margean standards. He may have ‘turned every cheek in his body’, as Homer says in ‘Homer Loves Flanders’ (5.16; 1994), but he does not ‘judge not, lest ye be judged’, or even extend to his neighbour, whom he prevents from having premarital sex, the leniency in which he indulges as he lies with Sara Sloane.
IV. Yearning for the ‘America of Yesteryear’: Flanders Bares His Political Soul
In ‘Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasss Song’– as the new headmaster of Springfield Elementary after Principal Skinner’s ousting – Ned Flanders says on the loudspeaker ‘Let’s thank the Lord for another beautiful school day’. It so happens that Superintendent Chalmers is within earshot. ‘Thank the Lord?’, Chalmers says – ‘that sounded like a prayer. A prayer! A prayer in a public school! God has no place within this school, just like facts have no place within organised religion!’.
This marks one of the first occasions in The Simpsons where Flanders’s religion comes into direct conflict with his public responsibilities. Flanders, as we have seen, believes strongly that he ought to press his religion upon those around him; this creates problems for him in his day-to-day life in secular society; this, in turn, breeds a sense that he belongs to an oppressed group; and this serves only to intensify the conservative instincts that were already entailed by his religious convictions.
Given his demographic profile, it is of course unsurprising that Flanders is a social conservative. Some examples of this are worth briefly surveying. When Flanders’s sons play Cain and Abel in one of his short films in ‘Homer and Ned’s Hail Mary Pass’, Flanders identifies some of the terrible consequences of Abel’s murder, including ‘Massachusetts legalis[ing] gay marriage’ and ‘stem cells cur[ing] Alzheimer’s’. He also speaks in the idiom of ‘flyover country’ American conservatism: in ‘A Star is Born Again’ he presents himself as a representative of ‘the useless mass of land between Los Angeles and New York called America’. He is a devoted enemy of the New Atheism: in ‘Black-Eyed Please’ his ‘personal hell’ includes people worshipping a Satanic Richard Dawkins, and in ‘Sky Police’ his nightmare is that the church will be replaced by an ‘atheist strip club’ whose main attraction is ‘Crystal Hitchens’. His bogeyman is that amorphous figure, the ‘secular humanist’, and he imparts this prejudice onto his two sons. In ‘Bart Has Two Mommies’ Rod and Todd play a Christian rendition of Cluedo, where the big revelation is that ‘the secular humanist did it in the schoolhouse with misinformation’ (the ‘misinformation’ card shows a picture of a dinosaur).
Once the image of nauseating piety and perfection, Flanders now is a stereotype of the evangelical Republican. Perhaps some of this is down to the political overexcitement of the predominantly liberal writers of The Simpsons, who insist on making Flanders express his political convictions in the least sympathetic way possible. ‘The only thing [the courts] are good for’, Flanders says in ‘The Bart of War’ (14.21; 2003), ‘is telling women what to do with their bodies’. His opposition to abortion is underlined by violent tendencies. In ‘HOMR’ (12.9; 2001), he and his sons cheer at a cartoon in which a character named Gravey, who plans to blow up Planned Parenthood with a pipe bomb, scolds his dog, Jobriath, for questioning his course of action (‘I’m sick of your lack of faith!’).
Flanders is also – to the chagrin of the predominantly liberal audience of The Simpsons – a homophobe. At the end of ‘Bart Has Two Mommies’, Bart Simpson tricks Rod / Todd (both of whom are frequently implied to be homosexual) into saying ‘I’m gay! Mrs Simpson made me gay!’; Flanders scowls at poor Marge. Likewise, in (the admittedly non-canonical) ‘Treehouse of Horror XIV’, Flanders boasts that he ‘finish[ed] first in the Walk for the Cure of Homosexuality’. Flanders represents the evangelical extreme; so it is no surprise that he becomes increasingly ostracised from secular American life, and that he increasingly cleaves onto conservative politics, which he sees as the great protector of his America from the forces of ‘secular humanism’.
Things come to a head in Season 17’s ‘The Monkey Suit’ (17.21; 2006), where Flanders – who by this stage has long been characterised as a Young Earth creationist – campaigns against the teaching of evolution at Springfield Elementary. On a visit to the Springfield Museum of Natural History, he takes deep offence at the very suggestion that evolution can be reconciled with his faith: ‘everything is what it was and always will be! God put us here and that’s that!’. He takes this to Lovejoy, who points to the Bible and – in another exposition of his own religious insouciance – says ‘Ned, you’ve got to take this thing with a grain of salt – I mean, come on!’. But Helen Lovejoy, the reverend’s gossipy wife, points out that ‘this controversy could put more meat in the seats’; after all, evolution might prove to be ‘the hot-button issue we need to mobilise our flock’. Flanders is as sure that ‘human and ape are not related’ as he is that ‘Jesus hates hip-hop’; Lovejoy, on the other hand, seeks only to attract his flock away from the local Episcopalian church, with its vibrating pews (Harry Shearer, the voice actor of both Flanders and Lovejoy, brilliantly emphasises the piss in ‘Episcopalian’). We find, in this exchange, a microcosm of the religious right: part zealotry, as represented by Flanders; part cynical self-interest, as represented by the Lovejoys.
When apart, neither Flanders nor Lovejoy wields much influence in Springfield. But once they combine forces, they are able to bully Principal Skinner into showing an ‘unbiased’ film to his students, entitled ‘So You’re Calling God a Liar’, which, among other things, depicts Charles Darwin snogging Satan. This, surely, is Flanders at his least likeable. His dogmatism results in our freethinking heroine, Lisa Simpson, getting arrested by Police Chief Wiggum for the crime of ‘teaching non-biblical science’.
When, exactly, did Ned Flanders become a Republican? It is striking that in earlier episodes of The Simpsons – ‘Sideshow Bob Roberts’ being a key example – the GOP is presented not as religious but, in fact, Satanic, the party of the antichrist: a vampire is present at its spooky headquarters; Mr Burns greets everyone with an ominous ‘mahok’; and Birch Barlow, a Rush Limbaugh stand-in, recommends that the mayoral candidacy be handed to the hirsute attempted murderer (now honestly, did they ever give anyone a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?), Sideshow Bob Terwilliger. Every constituency in the Republican coalition of the early 1990s is represented at this meeting of GOP bigwigs – Rainier Wolfcastle is Arnold Schwarzenegger; Mr Burns is the moneyed elite; Sideshow Bob is patrician New England; Dr Hibbert the educated (and, it so happens, black) upper-middle class – except for one. There is no representative of the religious right, even though The Simpsons already has a character who would fit the bill. Ned Flanders is conspicuous only by his absence.
Because, in the mid-1990s, it was still possible to conceive of a Republican Party without its evangelical constituent. And at the turn of the century, this ceased to be the case. From then on, it is made explicit that Flanders is a Republican. In ‘Home Away from Homer’ (16.21; 2005) Flanders states ‘I wish we lived in a place more like the America of yesteryear, that only exists in the brains of us Republicans’. In ‘A Star Is Born Again’, Flanders goes as far as to hint at having some involvement in the Republican Party organisation, when he confesses that ‘I haven’t felt this good since we stole the 2000 election’. ‘The America of yesteryear’: this is what Flanders strives for. It is much the same as his conception of ‘Middle America’, ‘the useless mass of land between Los Angeles and New York’; an America which faithfully encapsulates his religious, conservative values, finally pruned of ‘secular humanism’. It is not the America of his youth, for his youth was lawless and anarchic. It is an imagined America, an America that never really existed – save, as he admits, for ‘in the brains of us Republicans’.
V. How Evangelicalism Got Flanderised
So Flanders has been Flanderised: the writers of The Simpsons took one of his traits and ‘exaggerated it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character’. But he has not been Flanderised in quite the sense as is generally supposed. Flanders has not really become more pious over the course of The Simpsons: he has always been a committed Christian, and his Christianity has always played a central role in his characterisation. His religious neuroses, as we have seen, lie behind every other facet of his psychology; and even if they are not to the fore in, say, Season 3’s ‘When Flanders Failed’, they are front and centre only a year later in ‘Homer the Heretic’, well before the series’ general decline (and well before the charge of ‘Flanderisation’ is usually made). Flanders has not become more pious; rather, he has become more political. And he has become more political because, over the course of The Simpsons’ run, the line between piety and politics in America has blurred.
In the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan obtained two-thirds of the white evangelical vote. At the time this was a surprise, since Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist who spoke regularly about his faith. But the proportion of white evangelicals who consistently vote Republican has crept upwards since then. In 2016, Donald Trump – hardly a paragon of Christian virtue – won over 80 per cent of the white evangelical vote, a greater share even than George W. Bush’s. Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for Bush, has described how evangelicals have been highly receptive to a Republican ‘message of resentful, declinist populism’. Yearning for ‘the America of yesteryear’ is not a far cry from ‘Make America Great Again’: in Flanders, then, we find the germ of this politics of nostalgia, resentment, and decay.
Flanders has always been a parody of American evangelicalism. Once it was possible to parody American evangelicalism by characterising it as innocent, scrupulous, kind – albeit in a cloying and irritating way. But today evangelicalism in America is as much a political designation as a religious one: between the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, pro-Republican politics became the uniform position of white evangelicals in general. Thus Flanders, if he was to be an effective parody at all, simply had to become a dogmatic conservative: he had to be Flanderised. So really it is American evangelicalism which has been Flanderised – and Flanders himself only mirrors it. Its political implications, its attachment to conservative politics, once was only a trait, and now consumes the whole.