Jerry Seinfeld is one of my favorite comics. I grew up in the 90’s so the Seinfeld show is a staple from those years. Recently, I went back and binge-watched the entire series over a few months. Once again, I enjoyed how episodes revolved around little things, social miscues, and personality quirks that make this humor so enjoyable.
The not-so-enjoyable theme of the show is how much of it centers around short-term relationships based on personal gratification. I wonder if that becomes more noticeable when watched in a truncated period rather than once a week for nine seasons.
It’s interesting that after watching, I felt it wasn’t just the landline cell phones, 90’s hairstyles, and no Internet that seemed outdated. The serial dating of the four main characters also seemed like a relic of another era. Jerry, Kramer, and George framed their entire life around finding more short-term relationships with zero commitment. The covenant of marriage was depicted as an unnecessary and dreaded entanglement.
Today, in the wake of social phenomena like #metoo, consequence-free sex is more verboten than it was 30 years ago. That’s not to say the culture has embraced a Christian sexual ethic. We still live in a very sensual time, but you can’t help but notice that the swashbuckling male who brags about how many girlfriends he’s had is celebrated way less than it used to be.
Seinfeld operated under the assumption of secularism and projected the reality of life in what Charles Taylor calls “the immanent frame.” You’ll be hard-pressed to find any nod to the transcendent in any episode. The only mentions of religion are negative. Elaine dated a Christian guy, and he was the oddball. She dated another guy who, to her horror, had his radio preset to contemporary Christian music. It’s not that Seinfeld mocked religion, they just pretended it didn’t exist.
The creators don’t deny their framing. One of their maxims was “no learning.” It is a comedy about the everyday foibles of people who seem to get things wrong. Yet it turns out that “a show about nothing” is more than just about picking fun at things we mostly ignore. This “nothing” could also refer to their view about the meaning of life. If this is all there is, then of course, hedonism and personal pleasure should be the highest goal. “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die (1 Corinthians 15:32).”
Maybe Seinfeld seems a tad out of place today, despite all of its hilarious humor at everyday foibles, because people are looking more intently through the cracks in the immanent frame. Secularism provides a much less satisfying way to see the world. In the 90’s, some said with hubris, that we were at “the end of history.” The Soviet Union had been vanquished, democracy was spreading, and it seemed humankind had arrived. But consider what has happened since the last decade of the 20th century. The world’s lone superpower was attacked on 9/11, and the technology we assumed would bring people together has only exacerbated our tensions. We have experienced a worldwide pandemic, multiple natural disasters, and even war in Europe. That doesn’t even account for failed conflicts, scandals, and recessions. Secularism, it turns out, isn’t durable in these troubled times. What’s more, 21st-century movements, such as transgender ideology, CRT, and radical environmentalism make near-religious claims and have established codes of right and wrong.
People are recognizing there is more to this life than what we see. Some are embracing the aforementioned causes as their new religion. But others might look again at the worldview that secularism tried so hard to explain away.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who deconverted from Islam to atheism before converting to Christianity, writes of her journey
I’m a brand new Christian. But what I’m finding about it, which is the opposite of growing up as a Muslim, the message of Islam — but the message of Christianity I get is that it’s a message of love. It’s a message of redemption. It’s a story of renewal and rebirth. And so, Jesus dying and rising again for me symbolizes that story. And in a small way, I felt like I have died and I was reborn. And that story of redemption and rebirth, I think makes Christianity actually a very, very powerful story for the human condition and human existence.
Other atheists like Richard Dawkins and Louis Perry have not embraced Christianity but have acknowledged the social benefits of those who do. Again, I don’t want to overstate my claim. We still live in a very sensual, materialistic culture. But secularism is showing less and less appeal to those who seek answers.
Which, while still hilarious, makes Seinfeld seem less relevant today. Even Julie Louis Dreyfuss, who played Elaine Benes, described the premise of the show as “a bunch of losers on a couch hanging out.” It turns out that the life portrayed is not the life anyone wants to live.
Piercing the assumptions of Seinfeld is the cry of the 4th-century bishop Augustine, who acknowledged true reality, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”