For Nikki Bado-Fralick, it began with the board game Mormon-Opoly. For Rebecca Sachs Norris, the object was an action figure of Job, boils covering his plastic body. Both scholars would eventually amass huge collections of religious playthings that became prompts for both research and pedagogy. Their work, they say, counters a tendency to marginalize such objects. “That we may not readily associate games and dolls with religion says more about the artificial lines drawn around religion than the intrinsic nature of games or play,” write the scholars, associate professors of religious studies at Iowa State University and Merrimack College respectively.
There are lots of “who knew?” moments in their Toying With God: The World of Religious Games and Dolls (Baylor University Press). However, beyond the curiosity of learning about Passover plague toys, Resurrection Eggs, Breastplates of Righteousness, or board games like Kosherland, Race to the Kabah, and Missionary Conquest, there are recurrent questions. Among them, what is the role of play in religion? And is fun, enforced, still fun?
The scholars’ toy-packed offices lure students and colleagues alike. But many visitors are confused about whether given objects were manufactured for faith or satire, for learning children or knowing adults. The Jesus with eyes that track you around the room, that’s a gag-gift right? But what of the incongruously roly-poly Christ-crucified in BibleLand, a game for young children in which only the winner gets to go to heaven?
Most religious board games are patterned on existing secular amusements, with a familiar competitive fervor. Take Missionary Conquest. “Conquer the world—for Christ!,” reads the ad copy of the game, a Christian clone of Risk. “No Bible knowledge is required!” The game’s colonialist politics trouble the authors—"not exactly a game of ecumenical good will.” They note that the highest number of “blessing points” come when the Gospel is preached in such settings as an infiltrated Mecca, with even more points granted if martyrdom follows.
What actually flummoxes students, however, are board games that move away from competition. In a mild case, the authors write, students had trouble understanding that “in Episcopopoly, it is not possible to win the game without helping others.” The issue was more marked in two Buddhist games, Karma Chakra and BuddhaWheel. Students worked hard to beat one another even though there are no winners, and any competition that might exist is internal. “A better rebirth is still a rebirth,” say the scholars. Even if a player manages to escape that cycle and achieve Buddhahood, the next role is to be a Buddha in aid of other players. There is no actual end. The games’ twist on convention becomes a teaching tool about the faith.
With dolls, readers soon learn that there are Barbies and anti-Barbies. For parents worried about the appearance of that flighty vixen, there are alternatives. Muslim moms and dads, for example, can offer their daughters Fulla, a Middle Eastern doll who has the option of full hijab. For those objecting to the Barbie-like vibe of the still-flashy Fulla, there is Muslim-American-made Razanne, with accessories for scouting. Similarly, Orthodox Jewish parents can look to Gali Girls, dolls who combine modest dress with lessons on Jewish history and values, while the pillowy dolls of Holy Huggables include Jesus and Queen Esther. For boys, given the traditionalism of this market, GI Joe steps aside for a fierce Samson action figure or a David and Goliath, among others, and of course again Jesus, if unarmed. Yet as Barbies—decapitated, burned, and sexually experimented on— could tell us subversion persists. Children are not limited by a doll’s given characterization, no matter how devout. Any thought that religious dolls will avoid such detours is dismissed. “The problem lies not with Barbie,” the authors write, “but with play.”
In Spring 2006, Tom De Haven became a source for Superman. A new movie, Superman Returns, was about to have its premiere. The scholar and novelist was sought out, he recalls, because of It’s Superman!, his noirish take on the superhero in his original 1930s milieu that was published half a year before. Interviewers, he says, kept asking him versions of the same three questions. “Why has Superman lasted for almost 70 years? Can you explain his appeal? Does he still matter in the 21st century?”
De Haven had quick answers for the first two queries. “Superman is forever a work in progress,” writes De Haven, a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. The superhero changes for successive generations, yet retains an essential core. His appeal is a quintessential American story of immigrant, orphan, and hero, whose version of the “national fantasy” of mobility is the superpower of flight. But matters?, De Haven asked himself. As a commodity, certainly. “But matters matters? Matters as something emotionally powerful, as a signifier of virtues and qualities we automatically profess to esteem, as an avatar of Americanness?”
The lively result of all that pondering is Our Hero: Superman on Earth, the latest in the Icons of America series at Yale University Press.
Beginning with Superman’s creators, the writer Jerry Siegel and the artist Joe Shuster, De Haven traces the qualities of change and endurance that have shaped the man of steel through comics, radio, movies, and television shows. A surprise might be his early incarnation as a working-class avenger, a “Tom Joad in aerialist’s tights,” writes De Haven. As first scripted by Siegel in the 1930s, Superman was apt to raze urban slums, expose unsafe working conditions, and battle crooked politicians, lobbyists, and factory owners until the bosses at National Comics quashed the activism. “Enough already with the propaganda,” De Haven imagines them demanding. “Who do you think you are, Clifford Odets?”
In today’s comics, Superman “often seems lost, a bit of a wallflower in the busy compositions.” Yet, De Haven concludes, the Man of Steel will endure. “Certain qualities of Superman are immutable. Change any of them, somehow they change back,” writes the author. “All we need, finally, from Superman, any Superman, are a few basics.”
