In the last few years, as part of my thinking about the theology of engaging with culture, I have spent a lot of time thinking about common grace in pop culture. What I mean by that, are the fragments of gospel truth that are present in pieces of secular culture simply by way of them being part of God’s creation: made by people made in the image of God, whether they recognise that as a truth or a myth.
This exploration has taken me to various places, and allowed me to think through a theological lens when approaching various cultural texts, for example, Mike Schur’s NBC sitcom, The Good Place, which has functioned as a baseline for me to think about what our culture today believes about morality.
However, one cultural text that has just oozed grace to me, and one I wasn’t necessarily expecting to, is Netflix’s hit makeover show, Queer Eye. For those who are unaware, the show is a reboot of an earlier show called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which five gay men gave makeovers to straight men. The newer, shinier Netflix version is pretty similar in its format; the main change is that they have dropped the limited pool of ‘heroes’ (what they call the people they are making over), and instead are helping people of all genders, sexualities, colours and creed.
I refer to it as a makeover show, but within the production itself, the team much prefer the term ‘make-better’; they are not seeking to change people entirely, but to help them elevate who they are already. These make-betters are done by the Fab 5, who each specialise in a different part of the process: Tan does Fashion, Bobby does Interior Design, Jonathan does Hair and Grooming, Antoni does Food and Wine, Karamo does Culture (which is basically like self-help/psychology).
I have rattled on to people time and time again about how these five are my heroes, but it has taken me until now to actually sit down and type out the grace and hope that I believe this show capture so well. Of course, being a secular show, I’m not claiming Queer Eye to preach the gospel in any way, shape or form. What I am claiming, and hopefully detail in a helpful way here, is that Queer Eye has been a great example of joy and common grace in culture; it has also been a challenge to myself, and hopefully other Christians, of how we can love the LGBTQ+ community well.
The first thing that makes this show an example of common grace, is that the Fab 5 themselves, as men (well 4 men and one non-binary person), are probably some of the best models of healthy masculinity that I’ve seen on TV for a while. It’s not a misandrist complaining of how patriarchy has ruined all men; it’s not demonstrative of how the patriarchy and power misuse has in fact ruined some men. The picture of what it means to be a man, as shown by these 5 and in what they promote to the male heroes with whom they meet, is actually fairly in line with the Biblical picture of masculinity. To be a man is to be strong, and to be a leader, but not at the detriment to your emotional welfare. We see examples of this time and time again through Scripture, from David, who ruled as a noble and strong king, whilst also creating the majority of the Psalms – Scripture’s poetry anthology. We see it in Job, who stood firm when the Lord sent him tests, but did not fail to mourn all he had lost. We see it in Christ, whom Mark notes spoke with authority, but whom John also notes cried at the death of a close friend and again the night before his death. Both the Bible and QE promote this idea that to be a man is to be strong, but to also be unafraid of vulnerability. Another aspect of masculinity that this show preaches, as does the Gospel, is that being a man, and to be the head of a household, means to sacrificially serve your family. Ephesians 5 calls husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. The Fab 5 are constantly calling their heroes to better themselves not just for the sake of themselves, but for the sake of their families. Multiple times, Tan has told men to dress in a way that makes their wives proud to love them, and Karamo has encouraged men to step up as a leader for their family.
This leads well into another thing that I love about Queer Eye – the fact that this show is not about personal makeovers for selfish reasons; for a makeover show, it is overwhelmingly community-oriented. This shows not just in the focus of betterment for your family’s sake, as aforementioned, but also in the way in which the show serves heroes who are already giving to their community and helps them to do so on an even greater scale. They helped a Latina women start an office for her Hispanic arts organisation in her community. They redid a Church hall so it could be used as a community centre. They helped a Fire Station run a fundraiser. They redid a whole BBQ joint so that the owners could run their business with more ease. This isn’t about changing someone’s clothes, but changing someone’s life so that they can change someone else’s in a trickle down effect.
When it comes to self-help and personal improvement, I feel that our current culture often falls into two extremes. The first extreme is is self-love to the point of saying that you don’t need to change anything about yourself. You do you. Live life the way you want. The other extreme is to constantly feel like you need to be someone else. When mental health statistics are at an all time high, and people all around the world suffer from body dysmorphia and eating disorders, it is no wonder that bookshops sell hundreds of self-help books all the time. However, Queer Eye manages to find the balance of preaching self-love, but also acknowledging that you are not the finished model, and you can always be better than you were yesterday. An oft quoted Bible verse is 1 Samuel 16:7, “People look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.” Whilst this show of course does give a lot of time to outward appearance, it is not instead of doing the emotional heart work.
The other element in which Queer Eye has taught me some surprising gospel lessons, is the way that it has given insight into the LGBTQ+ experience, and offered some helpful reflections on how we as the Church can better engage with this community.
In a season 2 episode, that week’s hero, Mama Tammye, a Christian woman who initially rejected but has now welcomed her gay son back into her life, said something that stuck in mind in a profound way, and that I come back to regularly. She said, “You cannot antagonise and evangelise at the same time.” And isn’t that just so true? We have seen time and time again cases of the Church treating sexuality as the church’s biggest issue, and in doing so, have not only forgotten to share the grace and redemption at the heart of the gospel message, but forgotten to humanise LGBTQ+ people and acknowledge the pain for them that comes with the cost of following Jesus.
This show, with the majority of its seasons set in the deep South of the US, the Bible Belt states, finds itself stumbling upon these questions of the relationship between LGBTQ+ people and the Church more frequently than you’d imagine. Multiple times we meet heroes who identify as Christian, and who have never actually spent a day with an LGBT person, let alone a whole week with five! And the thing they always find, is that these people are not strange ‘others’ in the way that they expect them to be, but rather are broken, messy, beautiful human beings, whose character reflects the fragments of God’s image in them, as well as the marks left by living in a fallen humanity.
The other way in which this show challenges the way that the Church ministers to LGBTQ+ people, is in the repeated reminder that a person being gay or pansexual or gender non-conforming, does not mean that they have had the same monolithic experience with Christianity, or that they even have the same viewpoint of who the Christian God is. This is demonstrated time and time again, and never more explicitly than in one scene where the Fab 5 discuss their opinions in the car. Bobby reflects on his painful upbringing in which the church he had dedicated himself to as a teen, the place where he prayed and begged for God to take away his same-sex attraction, rejected him and exiled him when he came out as gay (Later in the same episode, he refuses to step inside a church building whilst the others all happily go in). Jonathan says that he believes that there is a God, and that he rather likes Jesus, but has not appreciated how the church has treated them or the wider community. Karamo, on the other end of the spectrum to Bobby, reflects on how much he loves the church and the way he has seen family and God’s grace modelled so well by it. All of this is a challenge, because its implications are monumental to the way we do evangelism. We cannot preach the gospel in the exact same way to somebody with Karamo’s viewpoint and somebody with Bobby’s experiences, and expect them to hear the same thing.
The gospel is unchanging, and I believe it is an authoritative truth. But the people we share it with and the way we share it has to constantly be in flux, evolving with the culture we live in, so that we present it not in a way that is palatable, (because that wasn’t Jesus’ way), but in a way that deeply cares about the person we are presenting it to, and that sees them as God does.
In all of this, I put the disclaimer of reminding readers, and viewers of Queer Eye, that it is not a Christian show, and subsequently, we cannot and should not hold it, or these people, to the standard we hold Christian media or Christian brothers and sisters. However, these people not holding themselves to the standard we hold ourselves to in the Christian life, is not a reason to not be impacted and influenced by them, and is certainly not a reason to not engage with this media. As so many of the heroes on Queer Eye find, the Fab 5 have the power to emotionally move us, and challenge our worldview. I suggest that it isn’t a bad idea to let them.