Reality TV Goes Christian
Nashville producers create a show with no sex, no drugs and no cussing
by Bill Ditenhafer
MTV’s Road Rules is not for everyone. In its 11th season—it’s just one year younger than its network sibling The Real World—the reality television ground breaker has had its libidinous twentysomething cast members wallowing in everything from animal-sex-organ-eating contests to male striptease dance-offs. A little too much reality, one could argue. Of course, if you’re Todd Starnes, you instead find inspiration.
“I was home sick watching a marathon edition of the show, and I noticed they were using spiritual concepts to describe how they felt about their experiences,” says Starnes, an assistant editor at the Nashville-based Christian news wire Baptist Press. “They were using words like 'faith’ and 'trust,’ and I thought, 'Well, hey, if they’re doing this on what is a very secular show, just think how it can be done on a Christian version.’ ” And lo, TruthQuest: California was born.
“If you’re Christian, you think, 'What a great concept,’ ” says Martin Coleman, executive producer of the 13-episode program. “If you’re the secular media, you’re saying, 'Oh brother, here come the Christians.’ ”
TruthQuest: California, the world’s first overtly Christian reality TV show, became so, in fact, because of the unprecedented cooperation of three separate Southern Baptist entities. Starnes’ Baptist Press partially bankrolled the project. Fort Worth-based FamilyNet Television, a Christian cable channel with an estimated 38 million viewers (none of whom reside in the Comcast-controlled Nashville area, although plans to add the channel are being discussed), supplied the airwaves and crew. And Nashville’s Broadman & Holman, the publishing arm of Lifeway Christian Resources, developed the TruthQuest title, which ties in with its long line of teen-aimed Christian learning products by the same name.
In the case of MTV’s Road Rules, seven college-age kids with the bodies of porn stars and the impulse control of laboratory bunnies are crammed into an RV to drive across the country. For TruthQuest, it’s something a bit less, well, telegenic. Unlike its secular counterpart, the show finds 12 much more “realistic” looking teenagers with—let’s not kid ourselves—atypical spiritual priorities and and leads them across California in a carefully chaperoned tour bus.
“To be honest with you, I’ve never actually seen that show,” Coleman says of Road Rules. “We used it as a model very loosely.” What the creators of TruthQuest set out to do was to put their young Christian cast into situations outside of their comfort zones, to set their Christian values against the more typical young American culture. With shows like Road Rules, the stage was set.
“People need to see that not every teenager has a foul mouth, or is out there being promiscuous or smoking,” says cast member Sarah Brown, 16, of Youngstown, Ohio. “You know, we actually do positive things.” In a recent news story, the Charisma Online News Service took a slightly more aggressive view, describing the show as “a Christian reality program that aims to prove not all of America’s youth are selfish deviants as often portrayed on other shows.”
But the program itself, which begins this week, fits in fairly comfortably with the rest of television’s reality TV fodder. For a fraction of the budget, Coleman and his crew have produced a show that, with the volume down, is relatively indistinguishable from its secular competitors. With polished contributions from several Christian rock bands (another Nashville touch), the program moves along at the same frenetic pace as its MTV counterpart, though maybe to a less recognizable beat.
But what gives this show its dramatic pulse, of course, is the religious premise. Like a brave little cork floating in the otherwise hypodermic-needle-filled sea of young adulthood (at least according to MTV), TruthQuest reveals kids who actually listen to their parents and who walk past the tattoo and piercing parlors. True, it is no more representative than the rock star-inspired troupe on MTV, but it is, at least, a different version of America’s youth—and, the producers argue, one that is more realistic.
They may have a point. In the first episode, which introduces all 12 individual cast members, “They say a lot of churchy things,” Coleman says. “They use a lot of church vernacular like 'salvation’ and 'glory,’ so we really tried to separate them as individuals.” Viewers immediately know they’re in completely new reality television territory.
“You know, I’m a Christian in high school,” says cast member David Hicks, of Cleveland, Tenn., “and that’s not the most popular thing to be.” (Incidentally, including David, five TruthQuesters hail from the great Southern Baptist stronghold of Tennessee—three from Cleveland and two from Franklin.)
During an episode filmed in San Francisco, three cast members are sent into a Haight-Ashbury soup kitchen for homeless teenagers where they encounter several self-confessed vampires, who delightedly nibble on each other’s necks while espousing the virtues of the decidedly unchristian practice of bloodsucking.
“These kids—we’re talking goody-two-shoes types of kids,” Coleman says. “Their eyes were as big as saucers.”
Like the Road Rules cast, whose episodic physical challenges serve, for the most part, to add some structure to the otherwise far more exciting adventures they partake in, the TruthQuesters’ physical tests (they try surfing and rappelling, among other things) pale in comparison to the challenge of holding onto their previously untested faith.
In the end, as arguably hokey as TruthQuest: California may be, it’s also arguably a lot more realistic than many other so-called reality shows. After all, isn’t not having sex an all-too-common part of being a teenager?
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