Morgan Spurlock, filmmaker and creator of the successful fast food critical documentary Super Size Me [1], has a groundbreaking program running on the cable network FX called 30 Days [2]. The premise of the show goes like this: every episode details the journey of one person, either Spurlock or another willing participant, living a life vastly juxtaposed to their own for, you guessed it, 30 days.
The show’s first episode last year let audiences watch as Spurlock and his girlfriend attempted to shell out a living on minimum wage. Episodes through this year have sent an outsourced American to meet his Indian replacement, [3] a minuteman to live with a family of illegal immigrants [4], and a Christian man to follow Islam in a Muslim community [5]. But tonight’s upcoming episode leaves me truly confounded: an atheist woman moves in with evangelical Christians [6].
So far, nearly every episode of 30 Days has introduced an average American to a radically different perspective, and has left them deeply changed and enlightened in the process. For example, the outsourced American, upon viewing the extreme poverty and antiquated living conditions of India, concluded that his replacements needed his technology support job much more than he did. He entered the country complaining that his job loss had made him downsize from a house to an apartment; he left with the guilt that he could not take all of the impoverished children he enountered back with him.
This episode, though, doesn’t sound all that earth-shattering. An atheist, encountering a widespread Christian movement, in America? It sounds like Spurlock has it backwards. [7] The atheist woman’s host family will no doubt learn with shock that despite her lack of religious faith, she has morals and decency, but what can she learn from a community that already dominates a large subset of American culture? Unlike Muslims, illegal immigrants, and those earning minimum wage, evangelical Christians hardly have a bad rap that needs debunking.
Regardless of this judgement call with which I would dispute, I highly reccommend this program as one of only two [8] or three [9] worthy programs on television.
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