By Chelsea Langston Bombino
Mr. Rogers is having a moment in our culture. In the last few years, there has been an upswell of interest in this iconic children’s television figure, who was also an ordained Presybyterian minister. A movie, documentary, podcast and many other media forms have revisited the narrative of Fred Rogers' personal and spiritual life and legacy as an early childhood educator whose medium was TV. What is it, many are now asking, that uniquely speaks into our own deeply divided political and cultural moment, that causes us, collectively, to want to revisit, or in some cases, visit for the first time, the seemingly slow, quiet and idiosyncratic world that created a show that has been off the air for almost a generation?
In this article, I will suggest that the answer to this question is to be found in the ways Americans increasingly use the institutions in their lives for their own self-interest, rather than as communities of shared purpose and mutual formation. Recently, American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin and Timothy P. Carney engaged in a public discussion of Dr. Levin’s latest work, “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream” (Basic Books, 2020). Dr. Levin argues that in America, the public’s trust in organizations is declining, specifically, in institutions such as universities, Congress, and the media. Dr. Levin poses that, although it is true that public faith in institutions has waned for the past 50 years, “modern elites have accelerated this process by acting like outsiders and treating institutions as stages for cultivating a personal brand instead of forges that shape personal character and public responsibility.”
Dr. Levin suggests that our social institutions have, particularly among cultural, political and academic elites, become platforms to be used to grow their own statuses for professional or personal gain. In other words, in what Dr. Levin calls the “crisis of connectedness”, many are now using institutions not as communities of purpose in which they experience a mutually beneficial shaping, but rather, as catalysts to launch their own individual purposes.
Institutions as Communities of Shared Purpose and Symbiotic Formation
I believe our renewed collective interest in Mr. Rogers reflects our shared desire to reinvigorate the communities and institutions of our own lives with shared purposes that promote things like justice, public empathy, and human dignity. I will briefly unpack both Mr. Rogers’ lived philosophy of utilizing television as a vehicle for mutual education, the arguments Dr. Levin poses in his new book on how our institutions have drifted from this model, and how this, for Christians, relates to our spiritual calling to engage the institutions in our own lives as an essential act of our image-bearing offices.
I didn’t grow up watching Mr. Rogers, and even as an adult working in Christian Reformed circles, where Fred Rogers was revered for the way he instilled cultural empathy and quietly imbued values of inherent human dignity through the popular form of television, I didn’t really ‘get it.’ That changed this Christmas, when my husband and I drove from Maryland to Michigan with our two month old son and listened to a podcast called “Finding Fred.” In the podcast, Carvell Wallace explores the subtle ways Mr. Rogers embodied the themes of loving our neighbors, finding the image of God in every person, and the acknowledgement that children are whole humans now, capable of both forming and being formed by their families, schools, neighborhoods and the other institutions of which they are a part.
As “Finding Fred” explores, Mr. Rogers saw television for the first time on a break from college at his parents’ home. He didn’t know anything about this new medium, but during his first exposure to it, he was deeply troubled by how he saw it being used: "I got into television because I saw people throwing pies at each other's faces, and that to me was such demeaning behavior. And if there's anything that bothers me, it's one person demeaning another," he confessed to Amy Hollingsworth, author of "The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers." "That really makes me mad!" Rogers once said in an interview with CNN. “I thought there was some way of using this fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen.”
Durable Forms of Common Life for the Common Good
Fred Rogers understood something deeply important about television. He understood it as an institution, what Yuval Levin defines as “a durable form of common life.” And within the institution of television, Mr. Rogers understood that it could be used as a stage for undermining human dignity and transmitting those values to children, through expressions of violence or violation, or it could be used as a formative experience, where children receive a “television visit” from a consistent adult engaged in the boring routines of everyday life yet deeply interested in engaging them and validating their own experiences as deeply human and shared. Mr. Rogers also did not view television as a one-sided medium where he simply promoted his own values and vision of an imaginary world. Rather, Mr. Rogers was deeply impacted by his own personal relationships with many children and often shared stories of how he had learned profound things from his young viewers. For example, after 9/11, he learned that many children actually believed that there was a terrorist attack happening everyday, because of how often the footage of the twin towers coming down was repeated. The mutuality of his exchanges with many children over the years, through in person visits and constant letter writing, deeply shaped the content of his television show. He believed that to understand how children made meaning out of complex and difficult life circumstances, listening and engaging and being formed by them was essential.
“Mr. Rogers saw television as something that would become part of the fabric of American culture and that it would, right or wrong, fill the spaces previously occupied by other institutions and communities of purpose. ”
Dr. Levin commented during his recent public discussion that we have the responsibility to not just use institutions as a platform for our own self interests, but to shape the institutions of which we are apart and consider how we are shaped by then. This was essentially how Fred Rogers approached the institution of television. In fact, Mr. Rogers believed: “we can begin to produce and promote television programs for children as an expression of caring for the children of the whole country.” Instead of “being fed slick stimulating sound-tracked trash,” a child could be taught that he or she “is accepted as he is: happy, sad, angry, lonely, exactly as he is.”
Mr. Rogers saw television as something that would become part of the fabric of American culture and that it would, right or wrong, fill the spaces previously occupied by other institutions and communities of purpose. Similarly, Dr. Levin poses in his new book, Amercians are missing the structures for our common lives: a way to give shape and purpose and concrete meaning and identity to the things we do together. Dr. Levin argues that our social spaces are not just made up of a vacuum of individuals, but American life is a space filled with institutions, with the structures of our lives. Institutions, which are not just a bunch of people, but a group organized around a common purpose, are by their nature meant to be formative.
Levin and Rogers shared the belief that the communities of purpose of which we are a part – both formal and informal – are not there just to serve us or as a launching pad for our individual goals, but institutions by their nature are participatory groups. When individuals engage in the process of carrying out the purposes for which the community or institution exists, the institution itself also shapes the individuals as they shape it. This mutuality is an integral role of every institution, whether a local school, a congregational community, a social services agency, or a family. However, as Dr. Levin argues, Americans lose trust in large social institutions when our large social institutions become performative rather than formative. Fred Rogers spent 40 years of his life incarnating the hopeful, yet grounded aspiration that television could be a symbiotic community where children, as equal participants, were both formed by and forming the “neighborhood” they experienced through their screen.
In the Process of Forming, We Are Formed for Shared, Sacred Purposes
By giving children the space and respect to express their feelings and put language to how they understood the world around them, Mr. Rogers embodied the notion that institutions – whether they be media institutions like TV – or more localized institutions like family, church and neighborhood, are communities of purpose designed to both shape and be shaped by us. Although he was the protagonist of his own show, Mr. Rogers used his platform less as a stage for self-aggrandizement and more as a vehicle for mutual learning.
For those who seek to both form and be formed by institutions with shared religious paradigms, this matters deeply. We live in a moment where our political communities, financial institutions, businesses, and media are viewed with deep skepticism for the ways in which they perpetuate performative, rather than formative, roles. Our religious institutions are certainly not exempt from this. Every spiritually oriented group – from a congregational community, to a social outreach ministry, to a homeschool co-op, to a small group, to a spiritually animated civic organization – needs to take seriously its role in engaging deeply with its members, in the difficult but needed and God-given process of shaping and being shaping.
James Skillen writes in “Step into My Office”:
In the broadest sense, “offices” are the varieties of duties and responsibilities to which God calls us with our diverse talents. Because this world is not in arbitrary chaos, its historical shape does not arise from us ex nihilo. We can only shape what the Creator gives us to shape. Families, schools, governments and business enterprises take on particular shapes because everything that we do is a creaturely response to the multiple arenas of human accountability God created for us.
We understand our role as creatures of God through bearing His image in everything we do. And that “everything we do” is not done on a blank canvas. It is done in the institutional structures through which we carry out His image: as parents and children in families, as workers in modern-day vineyards and fields, as givers of hospitality in our neighborhoods, as citizens in political communities, as advocates for the oppressed, and in so many other roles that have corresponding communities of purpose with shared norms through which we participate in the interdependent and connected roles of individual and communal image-bearing.
What Fred Rogers and Yuval Levin both make clear in their lived and written messages is that institutions matter for the flourishing of human life. We are created to be associational and to imprint on others and in turn, be imprinted upon.
Fred Rogers wrote and sung that “Love is people needing people/Love is people caring for people/...Love’s a little child/Sharing with another. Love’s a brave man/Daring to liberate his brother.” I would take it one step further and say that Love needs institutions, and Love is institutions that both transmit these values and provide the space for us to live out our common purposes of love of neighbor, in all of its forms.
Chelsea Langston Bombino is the Director of Sacred Sector, an initiative of the Center for Public Justice. Sacred Sector is a learning community for faith-based organizations and emerging leaders within the faith-based nonprofit sector to integrate and fully embody their sacred missions in every area of organizational life. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Sacred Sector Program Manager Virginia Creasy at virginia.creasy@cpjustice.org.
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