![]() ![]() He did not attempt to shame skeptics, level judgments, and stated he “didn’t have any axes to grind.” Schulz was also no evangelist and made no effort to convert non-believers. “I preach in these cartoons, and I reserve the same rights to say what I want to say as the minister in the pulpit,” Schulz once said.īut the Peanuts preacher was not of the “hellfire and damnation” variety you might expect to find in a fundamentalist church. In 1963, when debates over the role of religion in public school were raging, Schulz penned a somewhat controversial strip in which Sally recites the pledge of allegiance from her classroom desk and concludes with a resounding, “Amen!” On rare occasions, Schulz stepped out onto more spiritually shaky ground. At the time, less than 9 percent of Christmas episodes and specials contained religious references. Schulz’s most recognizable reference to religion occurs in the Charlie Brown holiday special exploring the “true meaning of Christmas.” Realizing that the holiday’s secular accouterments did not form the essence of Christmas, Linus reads the story of Jesus’s birth directly from King James Version’s account in the Gospel of Luke. Particularly later in his career, the religious references came so frequently that pastors and religious publications regularly requested permission to reprint Peanuts strips, which Schulz almost always granted. To put this into perspective, Schulz only produced 61 strips featuring the famous scene where Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown as he tries to kick it. More than 560 of Schulz’s nearly 17,800 Peanuts newspaper strips contain a religious, spiritual, or theological reference. “But he was a leader in American media when it comes to both the strength and frequency of religious references.” “Many familiar with the Peanuts strip don’t think of Charles Schulz as a Christian pioneer,” said Stephen Lind, the author of A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. By mixing Snoopy with spirituality, he made his readers laugh while inviting them into a depth of conversation uncommon to the funny pages. ![]() Schulz was a devoted Christian unshell the Peanuts and you’ll find the fingerprints of his faith. But Schulz also revolutionized his industry by using his strip to subtly raise religious questions about the Bible, prayer, the nature of God, and the end of the world. ![]()
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