'Wake Up Dead Man' and Religion on Screen

Religion didn't just disappear from film & TV. It left culture at large

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A friend asked me to come to his birthday dinner next week. “That is,” he added, “if they’ll let you out.”

“Let me out?” I asked.

I have been a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary for more than a year. I’m about mid-way through the Masters in Divinity program, on my way — God willing and the people consenting — to ordination in the Episcopal Church. But I still have some in my circle who don’t quite understand what I’m doing with my time.

Some of them, like my birthday friend, hear the word “seminary” and assume that I spend my days in robes, cloistered in some stone tower, chanting away in a tiny room. When he asks, “Will they let you out?” I think he’s imagining some fearsome character of indistinct gender with a heavy ring of skeleton keys, guarding a heavy swinging gate. He imagines that I use the heavy ropes that are ordinarily wrapped around my cloaks to form a simple knot-ladder, which I use to slip down from the tower window and into the foggy night.

Instead, I’m a graduate student who spends a lot of time, voluntarily, in the Seminary library — it’s a gorgeous place to read and study, but still: it’s a library — and in my free time I do what other graduate students do, which is to drink espresso and complain about the reading.

It’s the word “seminary” that throws them. Our culture is now so secular that words which used to be in the common vocabulary now have an exotic and spooky vibe. The language of religion — which used to be as familiar and common as words we use every day, like “upload” and “probiotic” — now have a weirdness that causes old friends to ask if “they” will “let” me come to a birthday party.