Apparently a lot of Christians I know really love VeggieTales, having either grown up watching it or having had kids who grew up loving it. Both Catholics and Protestants and even some Mormons. I am a Roman Catholic, but I am not one of these people. I was only fleetingly familiar with the property upon taking the job and had no real personal investment in it whatsoever. I learned very quickly, however, that this is apparently a thing a lot of Christians in America have liked in the past and many of them have asked me over the years what I thought of the version of this property that I was working on from a theological or "Biblical" point of view. Things like, "should I let my kid watch this?" et al.
It seems to me, now that I have been away from that job for a number of years and being as I am an outspoken Catholic apologist and have been a Catechist and a Mystagogue to both children and adults in the past, that I ought to write down a detailed answer to this question.
The first form of the question:
"Should I let my kid watch this show?"
I can't answer that for you.
The Catholic Church does not censor what television shows I am allowed to watch or that I am allowed to show my prospective children much less does it give me authority to govern these aspects of someone else's life. The show does not contain violence or pornography, if that is what you mean, but I was watching things like Mad Max, Aliens, Predator and Terminator when I was 6 years old, so I don't have the same kind of aversion to kids being exposed to violence in certain story contexts. In short, you are their parents. It's your decision. I will say that you shouldn't let your kid watch anything on television or the internet or in a theater without heavy context and guided interpretation. This is also true of reading material, especially anything in the Bible. Art and literature are a hall of mirrors in the absence proper Traditional interpretation. Without it, you will only find in these things the reflection of your own twisted ego. That's really all I have to say about it.
The second form of the question:
"Is the show scriptural?"
If you are asking me if there was a corporate mandate to place a verse from a protestant version of the bible into every eleven minute episode, then yes, there was. I actually found that this clashed with the structure and purpose of the show, though, so I often lobbied for the deletion of bible verses from from the episodes as they had no relevance to the script without having their meanings twisted and the context subverted. I was not the only person on the production to do this, but the results were mixed. This is relevant to the third form of the question.
The third form of the question:
"Is the show theologically sound?"
The answer here is an emphatic "no."
As a Roman Catholic, I struggled day in and day out with whether or not I should quit my job based on the the level on which the show was inconsistent with my most deeply held beliefs. I have never worked on anything before or since in a Hollywood studio setting that created this magnitude of daily internal conflict over whether or not I should simply walk away from the project. This is not an attack against anyone on the project, it is simply a reflection upon my own moral struggle with the project.
If you aren't familiar with the disparity in beliefs between American New Protestants and Roman Catholics, they are too numerous to go into for the purposes of this document. That said, my daily struggle was not always based upon a conflict between Catholic and American New Protestant doctrines. I was aware from the outset that VeggieTales has always been produced by and aimed at people who's beliefs are held by roughly only 12 percent of the global Christian population. Namely, those who self identify as "Evangelical Protestants," most of whom make up the majority of American Christians. I did not go into this project with a false notion that the show was going to somehow reflect the beliefs held by the majority of the global Christian population, including my own. This generated enough conflict for me, but the reality is that most of the theology presented in the show does not even reflect the Biblical interpretation of so called "Evangelical Protestants." The presentations of scripture within the episodes often don't reflect the Biblical interpretation of any form of Christianity, let alone the twelve percent of Christians the show is supposedly aimed at.
Most of the Bible verses in the show are awkwardly forced into the context of life lessons for children. This is done with no regard for the original intent of the Biblical authors or with any known school of interpretation other than frivolous free association. The format of the series itself, in which each episode teaches a life lesson from the Bible, seems ignorant of what the Bible is in the first place. We made one hundred fifty six episodes. The Bible doesn't contain anywhere near that number of unique moral lessons for everyday life, let alone any formidable amount of content that is even remotely appropriate for a preschool aged child to hear about. The Bible is not primarily a collection of moral platitudes the way that a lot of modern people seem to assume it is. Therefore it should be easy for any reader to imagine how much each verse quoted in the series would have to be twisted out of its own intention in order to make any sense in the context of a lesson in a preschool children's cartoon.
It may be possible to do ten or fifteen preschool cartoon episodes with moral lessons based directly on Bible verses that have to be quoted verbatim without retreading ground you have already covered. Maybe. And even if you do start retreading moral lessons you've already covered, it gets pretty weird when you aren't allowed to go back to quote the same Bible verse again. It's pretty hard to find five different Bible verses that can honestly be linked to something like "teamwork!" without getting into some really abstract or even lurid territory... Remember, they have to be both appropriate and comprehensible for a preschool kid... And when you are trying to make one hundred fifty six stories with moral lessons from the Bible for Preschool children, believe me, you are gonna try to pass off the concept of "teamwork" as some kind of Biblical moral imperative at least five times... at least... When you get past twenty original stories, and twenty is a stretch in my opinion, you start finding that you've basically run out of biblical material that is appropriate to the format that you have not yet quoted once already. It's a lot easier to teach kids one hundred fifty six solid life lessons without butchering a previously unmentioned Bible verse and stripping it of its context every single time . This would have been as simple to do as cutting out the Bible verse. But the episode would still be required to have a Bible verse in it, rendering almost every episode an inevitable assertion of material heresy.
Most secular Hollywood cartoons with simple moral lessons in them are more theologically sound in the eyes of most thinking Christians than an episode of VeggieTales: In The House for the simple fact that nearly every VeggieTales episode expounds interpretations of out-of-context Bible verses that would be almost universally considered to be heretical among all Christians. I often voiced concern about scripture interpretations that I knew that no Christian would agree with. Occasionally, these concerns were heeded, but never in a way that made me proud of the show's approach to theology.
An example that I can remember off the top of my head is an episode in which Larry is being told he should "be himself." The Bible quote that was used in the episode to back this up was a passage in which Saint Paul is making a legal argument in defense of apostolic succession. No matter how they interpret this passage, no Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant, believes that this passage is telling anyone to "just be themselves." I actually put my foot down on this one and argued quite emphatically for its removal from the show. It was one of a few times I was taken seriously, one of the reasons being that I simply wasn't going to continue working on the episode otherwise. This one is a good example of the general problem with the show. Teaching a kid to "just be themselves" isn't necessarily a bad thing. Telling them that Paul's arguments in defense of apostolic succession are the reason a Christian should "just be himself," however, is heretical to pretty much any brand of Christian I have ever met, no matter how obscure they are... And trust me, I've come across a lot of tiny Christian sects with beliefs that are diametrically apposed to the majority of the world's Christians, even including the rarer Evangelical Protestant denominations, and they would still think that was wrong.
Conclusion:
Many of the crew members of this show have remained my friends to this day. Most of them are fine people and a lot of us were kind of in the same boat concerning how we felt about the format and message of the show. We wanted to do good work and many of us did. The design of the show and its technical execution are beautiful in my opinion, especially given the budget and the rigid limitations of a strict studio system, but the writing and theology are bonkers.
Does this mean you shouldn't let your kids watch it? The truth is, I don't care. It will probably entertain them as well as anything a preschool kid is going to be entertained by. It's really up to you. But I do encourage you not to lean on any television show as a surrogate for the proper handing on of the living Tradition of Christianity to the next generation. Especially not a show that was specifically designed by a giant corporation for the purpose of making money off a demographic they are largely embarrassed by.
