Sunday school. It’s been eight years since I last went, so long ago that I forgot my Bible. But we didn’t need it today; we were watching a video. As the tape slid into the VCR, a sinking feeling hit my stomach when a slightly greasy man appeared on screen.

Part two! Of stuffed animals as gross human caricatures. Yes, Gary Smalley has gone and neatly divided the complexity of human emotions into four representative animals: lion, otter, beaver, and golden retriever. You see, the lion is fierce and dominating, the otter is hyper and... and you get the idea. With each point he waves the appropriate plush doll at the audience, throwing out simple homilies about how every facet of life can be encapsulated in one word (or two for the loyal dog). The only moment of true entertainment came when he was describing his wife’s secretary, a heavily detail-oriented woman. He began, "My wife has a huge beaver..."

Here we were, a room of 18-and-up men and women, marking down scores to see which stuffed animal our souls were most in tune with. I declined. Pastor Matt and Shrew Woman (whose real name I forget) decided our discussion would roam solely within the confines of this broken philosophy. It was like we sat down at the shrine of Gary Smalley’s Wisdom and wondered how best we could bask in its glow. It never occurred to them to gaze down on the philosophy from without and question its basic premises.

The problem is this. It’s neat and silly and maybe even fun to take the animal test, but then to listen to the broad panaceas that Gary delivers about each trait (if you’re a lion... be more compassionate!) is sorely misguided. If you have a vacuum of happiness in life and know that change is the only way, then listening to these sledge-hammer thuds of advice teeters on the edge of danger. The video is designed to appeal to a vast audience, to identify and try to solve as many problems of individuals in as mass a manner as possible. You can’t do it. People’s problems are rarely that simple. It takes a detailed analysis of what’s missing in someone’s life to untangle the precarious network of emotions and foibles that defines each personality.

And Sunday school may or may not be the place to do it. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we should have discussed the legitimacy of the video rather than its sheltered details. Maybe the group would have ultimately decided it was worthwhile, but at least they would have gone through a critical process before any acceptance. To set the bounds of discourse within the topic’s self-defined rules is to constrain the questioning mind.
  ¶ 2:54 AM