“Mr. Rogers is boring.” Never has one statement from a student so filled me with anger and confusion all at the same time. 

It is my practice every semester to expose all of my students to Morgan Neville’s excellent documentary about the life and career of Fred Rogers. Usually, this film receives high acclaim from students. However, for this student, Mr. Rogers was woefully boring. It is hard to disagree with the student’s position.  When viewing Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, one often greets Fred in his performance of curious tasks such as witnessing a turtle walk, watching an egg timer tick down the seconds in a minute, or pause to take slow deep breaths. Fred experienced time in a way seemingly foreign to many children and adults. He is strange, to say the least, and when confronted with the vast array of choices for children’s programs, Mr. Rogers stereotypically does not fit the bill of “entertaining television.” I don’t think my student is alone, but I think his statement is indicative of our time. 

A month after my student’s statement, President Trump ordered the killing of General Qassem Soleimani by a drone strike in Baghdad.  This event is significant for our time for the same reason that Fred Rogers is considered, by many, boring. 

Shortly after the drone strike, Trump held a rally in Miami, FL, for prominent evangelical leaders in preparation for his re-election campaign. Trump cited in this rally the various ways (actual and inflated) he empowered evangelical Christians in the United States (e.g., the restriction on Title X funds, numerous confirmed conservative judges, and ending the war on Christmas). Trump’s re-election will largely depend on this demographic (evangelical Christians), and this stump speech speaks volumes to their fears and, thus, their enthusiastic support of Trump. The rally concluded with a prayer for Trump that he was God’s man and God’s time to take back America. It was a spectacle in every sense of the word and, therefore, very entertaining and not boring. 

The preference for entertainment and power lies in the political ontology popularized in contemporary politics, which finds its best expression in the German Philosopher Martin Heidegger. He places time as a central feature of the human experience. Heidegger explains the centrality of time through his primary philosophical figure of Dasein (being-here).¹  Dasein is the one for whom being is at stake. Time is a crucial element of Dasein’s thrownness (i.e., its groundlessness) into the world. However, time emerges not in advance as our being-here. This move ontologizes temporality as that which makes sense of all we project upon life (e.g., dreams, desire, future). Time, according to Heidegger, cannot be studied through fundamental ontology because being and time are mutually constitutive of one another. Thus, temporality grounds authentic existence.

When temporality takes this place, it causes angst (anxiety). Though temporality, for Heidegger, defines the existentiality of Dasein in the world, it also serves as a potential barrier to authentic existence. Thrown into a world bound to temporality, Dasein experiences authenticity through the acceptance of its boundness to temporality, namely to its death. However, this realization can lead to bad anxiety. By becoming absorbed in Weltzeit (world-time) and refusing to accept its individuality, Dasein becomes fallen. Dasein must embrace its temporality as its own as its ability to be itself. Only when Dasein recognizes the meaninglessness of its actions in the world, can it live its life as its own. 

  Heidegger’s account of time leads to a dangerous place. By giving time, even authentic-time, an ontological basis Heidegger, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes, “is playing with fire.”² Heidegger gives a “real role” to time and history even though it possesses angst and meaninglessness.³ Thus, he separates meaning from world-time and the ability to inhabit this space with one another faithfully. The legacy left by Heidegger leaves a vacuum for power and power-grabbing in world-time. Though Heidegger thinks his existentialism overcomes this fault, he ultimately, as is evident in his interpretation of Nietzsche, relegates humanity to a lonely, existence.⁴ Time, then, is power in world-time and the will to seize it. 

This account of anxiety and time suggests our time, exemplified in evangelical power politics, is fallen. This is not the fallenness of classic Christianity, but the existential fallenness of world-time, which is a tragic symptom of evangelical Christianity.  Evangelicals, primarily white evangelicals, have “fallen” and seek after the account of world-time left to them by Heidegger. In their anxiety and quest for meaning, evangelical Christianity in America grasps after power and thus the presidency. The support Trump experiences arise from this existential angst, namely a projection of its will to power onto world-time. 

It is trendy to critique this element of evangelicalism, but is there a Christian way forward? The Patristic theologians offer a differing account of time that should press back on our own “Christian” account of politics, power, and time through their theology of patience. In recent years, the theme of patience re-emerged as central to any study of the first few Christian centuries due to the work of Alan Krieder’s The Patient Ferment of the Early Church.⁵ Patience, for the early Church, was their account of time because God was patient.⁶ In short, patience became the Early Christian practice of time. 

The worship of God drove early Christianity’s philosophical understanding of time. Because God was real, time was real. Time was not weighed between an authentic and inauthentic existential moment, but in God’s patient action in time. God’s patience was, for the early Church fathers and mothers, most evident in the incarnation where God willfully takes on time and experiences the fiercest rejection of humanity. It is this God who takes time, not as a strategy to gain political power but how God draws all things to himself. (John 12:32)

Thus, the early Christians did not seek out avenues of power but instead desired patience. In patience, the church fathers and mothers taught that one need not ontologize temporality to appreciate time, but rather time was/is/will be the splendid site of God’s patient work. As the early Church father Tertullian writes, “Patience is grounded in the resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come.”⁷ Embedded in the doctrine of God, for the early Church, was an already present metaphysics of time. Humanity is not bound to time, but humanity, through the incarnation, and time are united to God. As such, they were patient, not as a means to gain political influence, but because they worshiped a patient God.  

If Christians are to remain Christian in a time like our own, namely a time of seemingly endless power gathering, then patience must be reclaimed as a central theological virtue. The early Church believed that wrong-doing grows tired in response to embodied patience. This practice extends to every act of Christian life. It takes patience to read the Scriptures, especially when so many only dare to do so when it is advantageous to the perpetuation of their power. It takes patience to pray, not for a political leader’s ascent but their conversion. It takes patience to question our violence as a means to achieve peace, and thus to love our enemies. But it is undoubtedly patience that helps Christians to see that God moves not according to the will presidents and kings, but of a patient, crucified messiah. 

Moving into the ethos of patience brings us back to Fred. When Fred watches the egg timer or teaches a child how to breathe deeply, he illustrates his patience. Much of our cultural desire to seize power arises from our inability to be patient. This fact mirrors itself in our entertainment. In short, there is a connection between our desire to make our time meaningful by our power and our constant desire to be entertained. Our inability as humans to sit with reality and the deep complexity of our humanity was close to Fred’s heart. He pointed children back to this fact. Yet, those who have eyes to see and ears to hear might witness the patience of Fred Rogers.

Fred’s patient witness is best illustrated in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The Neighborhood of Make-Believe was an attempt to appeal to children’s creative imagination, namely to entice children’s moral imagination. Biographer Shea Tuttle brilliantly illuminates the theological richness of Fred’s Neighborhood of Make-Believe by calling the stories experienced therein as “parables of the kingdom.”⁸ Fred was very passionate about children and their ability to comprehend the essential aspects of their humanity. On several occasions, he spoke about war in the Neighborhood. However, one particular “parable” from the Neighborhood illustrates Fred’s patience and challenges the assumptions to power Christians assume. 

In the early 80s, Fred filmed a parable that illustrated the patience of the kingdom in response to power.⁹ During a social studies lesson, Prince Tuesday, son of the king of the Neighborhood, questions whether the Neighborhood of Make-Believe ever experienced war. After asking his father, King Friday, Prince Tuesday finds that the Neighborhood has always experienced peace. However, the king recently became suspicious of the neighboring town of Southwood. Word comes to king Friday that the nearby neighborhood bought one million unknown parts from a local factory, which he assumes will be used to build bombs. This is a direct threat to his rule as king. In response, the king decides to buy a million and one parts to make weapons of his own. As tensions rise in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, several citizens take it upon themselves to visit Southwood. To their surprise, Southwood was building a bridge to better get to Make-Believe and not bombs. In short, they wanted to be closer to their neighbors. The story concludes with eased tensions between the two neighborhoods. The remaining parts purchased by king Friday would serve as the parts for a fleet of record players for every school in the two neighborhoods. 

Fred’s parable is directly related to our contemporary setting. Unlike his contemporaries, Fred ended the story, not with an action-packed war, that would have a lot of entertainment value. Instead, Fred invites children to sit with their unease and instead opt for peace. It takes patience on behalf of the citizens to investigate and not to bomb. King Friday’s paranoia to maintain his power reveals itself to be misplaced, and new actions emerge in place of war. The peaceful parable challenges children, and indeed all people, to choose patience, not power. The celebration between these two neighborhoods truly images the kingdom. It is only possible when people want a patient experience of time instead of a desire to gain power over it. 

Indeed, Fred celebrated this different account of time, but I believe it is not too dissimilar from our church fathers and mothers. If Fred was boring, then may all Christians aspire to such boredom or such patience.

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