Reading Francis

“Ted Lasso is my new religion.”

Since I got hooked on the AppleTV+ series Ted Lasso after its first season, I’ve witnessed the tidal patterns of word-of-mouth promotion that I guess is how ideas spread these days. Every few months, a friend on social media will ask a variation of, “Is Ted Lasso worth watching?” After one such inquiry, I responded with the comment, “Ted Lasso is my new religion,” which was both goofily unserious and somehow not completely untrue. 

I would argue that Ted Lasso, both the show and the character, has a lapsed Catholicity that refers back to both the outward signs and the deeper truths of faith, even as it/he claims an agnostic ground.

It’s pretty clear that the show’s creators have a deep familiarity with the mechanics of Catholic faith. You see the sign of the cross after a Star Wars/Catholic reference in the 1st episode of season 2 (“May the force be with you”; “And also with you.”), between Ted and a character (whose son is a priest). When a character refers to a doner kebab place as “his church,” a series of religious references ensue, including a transubstantiation joke (how often do you see those?). In an episode set at a funeral, the characters discuss going to confession. When Coach Beard (a professed atheist) reveals that he has Vatican City citizenship, Ted makes the three-fold sign of the cross Catholics make at the reading of the Gospel in mass. (Not to mention Dani Rojas’ many references to Catholic spirituality.) These are small snippets in a non-religious show, but they are sophisticated enough to indicate that someone in the creative process knows what they’re talking about. 

But that’s not really the Catholicity of Ted.

I should step back and say that there are some significant elements of the show that would offend many Catholics (and a lot of other folks). There is a LOT of swearing; Roy’s first line in the series invokes the Holy Family in a curse and swearing is the lingua franca of most of the other characters as well. There is a fair amount of frank talk of sex outside of marriage. For many Catholics (and other Christians), the pervasive nature of these elements is disqualifying; I know many wonderful people who can’t get past these things in a movie, show, poem or song. For some Catholics, the positive depiction of same-sex relationships is a stumbling block as well. Heck, Ted only refers to God in the feminine. In truth, God is rarely invoked at all.

But Ted Lasso, and Ted Lasso, retain an essential Catholicity.

Ted Lasso is, at its core, a show about the power of vulnerability and forgiveness in a wounded and broken world. As is the Gospel.

Jason Sudeikis, the show’s co-creator and lead actor, has reportedly said that “this is a show about bad dads,” and indeed, multiple character arcs revolve around the struggle to overcome the wounds caused by fathers, present and absent. In the penultimate episode, Phillip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse” is quoted to Ted, and through it, the impact of the show’s “bad dads” looks a lot like the Catholic doctrine of original sin.

But the show doesn’t sit in that concupiscent swamp. A wounded healer with his own father issues, Ted brings a change in ethos within AFC Richmond that both affirms the essential dignity of each person, with special emphasis on the most outcast, and promotes a transparent embrace of mercy. Throughout the show, characters explicitly ask for, offer, and receive forgiveness, in dialogue more frank than what I experience in real life. The moments that most reliably bring tears in this show are those in which someone receives grace they weren’t expecting. It is really something to watch.

The result of three years of this approach – a flawed leader focused on helping the group become their best versions while offering relentless encouragement, support and forgiveness – is a beloved community. When a player in season three says to the team, “I love you all so very much,” it not only becomes a wordy rallying cry, but it just rings true. And the changes in character that result from bathing in that wellspring of forgiveness are truly inspiring.

So what? We Christians, of whatever stripe, stake our faith on the idea of an aggressively forgiving God in the face of our essential brokenness. We aspire to a community that reflects the grace its members receive. We invest our identities in the claim that the God who knows our failings still says “I love you all so very much.” We proclaim that actually believing in that love can form us into better versions of ourselves.

As we in the Church try to grapple with a declining impact in the world, maybe Ted Lasso’s cultural resonance can remind us of some things. To the extent that we allow our faith to rise and fall on “traditional values”, downstream ethics, and rules of decorum, we both close ourselves off to the lives of others and brand religious faith as irrelevant to the culture. 

But the core messages of the Gospel – the dignity of every person, the reality of sin and the power of mercy to overcome it, the offer to share our lives in vulnerable and healing ways – they still speak to the hearts of those who have wandered away. People are so hungry for those messages that they will watch a made-up American football coach in England just to see what forgiveness might look like. If we focused on the kerygmatic fundamentals of love and mercy, rather than fighting culture wars, could we get folks to recognize that they aren’t just visible in fiction?

Maybe we just have to believe in BELIEVE, as the man says.