As everyone knows, the final “Peanuts” strip appears Feb. 13. Saying goodbye to Snoopy and the gang is breaking the hearts of millions. It’s a painful cultural milestone for everyone from cartoonists to theologians, say cultural historians.
Why are we overwrought about bidding farewell to Charlie Brown, a boy incapable of kicking a football or flying a kite? What makes intellectuals write volumes on Snoopy, a dog, who wants to be a World War I flying ace? Or religious leaders ruminate over Linus, a child addicted to his security blanket?
One reason for the widespread mourning of its passing is the longevity of Charles Schulz’s strip. United Feature Syndicate began distributing “Peanuts” in 1950. Today, it runs in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and is translated into 21 languages.
Merchandising from “Peanuts” — greeting cards, MetLife commercials, stuffed animals and clothing — brings in more than $1 billion annually.
“Peanuts” has been there for many of its 355 million readers for all or most of their lives. Schulz, 77, is retiring because he is ill with colon cancer.
Doug Marlette, the 50-year-old creator of the “Kudzu” comic strip, says “I was born a few months before Peanuts began. I grew up with it. As a third-grader in Durham, N.C., I delivered the papers that ran ‘Peanuts.’”
But there are also deeper cultural and theological reasons.
People are sad “Peanuts” is ending, said Jeffrey Mahan, professor of ministry, media and culture at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, “because like a Norman Rockwell painting, it presents America as we’d like it to be. It’s suburban. We don’t see broken homes or racial or gender conflict.”
“The ‘Peanuts’ kids have problems. The challenges are personal. Charlie Brown keeps trying to obtain the love of the redheaded girl. Lucy won’t let Schroeder alone. We recognize these problems from our own lives. But they aren’t sociopolitical challenges,” he added.
“Peanuts,” according to Mahan, depicts an idealized, mainstream Protestant viewpoint.
“Religion is an enriching part of the characters’ lives. But not all consuming. Quotes from Scripture break into ‘Peanuts’ sometimes, but don’t dominate it. Charlie Brown’s baseball team isn’t like a Texas Southern Baptist team where the players pray before every game,” Mahan said.
To Hamilton Cravens, a cultural historian at Iowa State University in Ames, “Peanuts” has been a “primer of morality for post-modern, post World War II America. The strip presents a broad-based, secular version of morality.”
Unlike Mahan, Cravens doesn’t believe “Peanuts” depicts an idealized view of America. He says the strip “has a somewhat tragic sense of life. In the 19th century, between the 1830s and 1890s, people were more optimistic. They believe that if you were moral citizens and worked to improve yourself, you could solve your problems.”
This isn’t the case in “Peanuts,” Cravens said. “No matter how hard they try, the kids in ‘Peanuts’ can’t solve their problems. They don’t learn lessons from life. Linus never stops looking for the Great Pumpkin that never comes.
“Charlie Brown always loses. ‘Peanuts’ teaches us that life isn’t a bowl of cherries, that it has its limitations.”
But, he said, “Peanuts” doesn’t have an amoral or totally pessimistic view of life. “Despite life’s difficulties, the kids have to be responsible human beings. They have a conscience. The only character who lacks a conscience is Snoopy, and he’s a dog. ‘Peanuts’ tells us that we can behave responsibly, morally toward each other in a universe filled with limitations.”
People are nostalgic about “Peanuts,” Cravens said, because “it presents a view of shared public morality that doesn’t exist now. It’s a throwback to a time when certain types of behavior were deemed inappropriate for the public sphere.
“Since 1950, our culture has believed less and less in tradition and in setting uniform moral standards. People feel fragmented and disconnected. Losing ‘Peanuts’ increases this sense of disconnection.”
For much of his career, Robert L. Short, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Monticello, Ark., has used “Peanuts” to illustrate his view of Christianity. In 1965, Short wrote the best-selling “The Gospel According to Peanuts” and Westminster/John Knox Press has just released a 35th anniversary edition.
Short later wrote “The Parables of Peanuts” and “Short Meditations on the Bible and Peanuts.” He said “Peanuts” presents the symbols and beliefs of Christianity, depicting a world filled with sin, most clearly expressed through Lucy, who Short said, is often “a little devil.” The “Peanuts” children show what it’s like to worship “false gods” as Linus worships his blanket. Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Short said, are Christ figures.
“Who better embodies the crucified Christ than Charlie Brown with his shirt of thorns, getting hit on the head by Lucy or called a blockhead?” he asked. Yet “Peanuts,” like Christianity, isn’t all gloomy, Short said. Snoopy, he said, is “the hound of heaven” who’s constantly leaping for joy.
In theological circles today, “Peanuts” is identified with a softer gentler stage of the culture, according to Martin E. Marty, professor emeritus of the University of Chicago Divinity School.
“Now, theologians want something with more bite like the ‘Non Sequitur’ comic strip,” said Marty, a historian of American religion. “But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there for them in ‘Peanuts.’ Theologically, ‘Peanuts’ represents a world in which Protestant neo-orthodoxy and humanist existentialism combine to ask, ‘how do you find meaning in a world filled with absurdity?’”
Short, Marlette said, “is on to something” with his view of the strip.
“Humor comes from pain. I love ‘Peanuts’ because I care about the characters. We identify with people who are crucified, who lose. Nobody cares what happens to a winner – we need someone to lose who we can root for.”
Marlette said the strip draws people in because it tells a great story, adding: “The religious symbolism may not be conscious in Schulz. It never is in the artist. ‘Peanuts’ is an artistic instrument which hits on universal basics that influence the culture.” (RNS)
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