The Righteous Gemstones Captures the Contradictions of American Evangelicalism

Based on its premise and the comedians involved, you’d assume that The Righteous Gemstones is about as mocking and derisive a comedy as you will find on contemporary television. The HBO comedy series follows the Gemstones, a family of rich televangelists in the American South played by Danny McBride, Adam DeVine, and Edi Patterson as the adult children, Jesse, Kelvin, and Judy, and John Goodman as the family patriarch, Eli. The plot follows their various personal struggles and family feuds, with the main arc focusing on Jesse struggling to put to bed an extortion plot hatched (unbeknownst to him) by his estranged son, Gideon (Skyler Gisondo).

Inspired by the Falwell Family and other famous American evangelicals, the show pulls back the curtain on the outrageous excesses and hypocrisy of wealthy American Christians. It is farcical, absurd, and sharply critical of the shortcomings of this particular brand of Protestantism, particularly its materialism and selfishness. But shockingly, The Righteous Gemstones is not entirely dismissive and damning of American evangelicalism and never crosses the line into satire. McBride, who created the show, and series directors, David Gordon Green and Jody Hill, ultimately see these characters as people worth caring about, which prevents the show from becoming too sour and, more importantly, helps the show capture the contradictory essence of American evangelicalism.

To be clear, The Righteous Gemstones makes plain the many shortcomings of the Gemstone family, and American evangelicalism by extension. In the series opening, we meet the Gemstones in the midst of an aggressive expansion as they open up a new church at a mall in the space of a recently-closed Sears. With their aggressive expansion, the Gemstones actively poach the parishioners of an honest local Baptist, Rev. John Wesley Seasons (Dermot Mulroney), who refuses to glitz up his church presentation (and suffers for it). In one scene, Eli and “Baby” Billy Freeman (Walton Goggins), the brother of Eli’s deceased wife, Aimee-Leigh (country singer Jennifer Nettles) and the man Eli has tapped to lead the new church, attend Seasons’ service and shamelessly convince churchgoers to skip Seasons’ service in the future in order to attend Baby Billy’s new one. Following a confrontation with Seasons at a potluck after the service, Eli refuses to budge on his plans for the new church and ends up destroying Seasons’ church’s stained glass window with a potato (I did mention the humour is absurd).

The placement of their new church in a mall is a perfect encapsulation of the consumerism bound up with the brand of Protestant Christianity the Gemstones are selling: for them, eternal salvation is in many ways just another thing you can buy at the mall. For the Gemstones, their religion is as materialistic as any other element of modern American life, from their custom gun ranges to their massive cars to the way that family dinner takes place at a local chain restaurant. After every church service at their megachurch, which more resembles a stadium made up for a pop concert than a sanctuary (much like Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Houston), they share lunch at a chicken establishment owned by their biggest donor, Dale Nancy (Toby Huss). For the Gemstones, family meals are important, but they would never cook such a meal themselves; a mass-market chain restaurant is the perfect place to break bread. While church is central to their lives, at the same time a church service functions as much as a multimedia concert as it does a sacred act of worship; in their conception, God wants you to be entertained while being saved. 

In these ways, The Righteous Gemstones captures how American evangelicalism transforms religion into just another capitalist enterprise. However, the show doesn’t stop at showing the corporate shortcomings of this type of Christianity. It digs into the personal failings of its Christian preachers, namely Jesse and Judy, who are unequivocally bad people.

In the first episode, we meet Jesse as he responds to blackmail from mysterious individuals (who prove to be his son Gideon and Gideon’s stuntman friend, Scotty [Scott MacArthur]), who are threatening to release a party tape of Jesse and his friends snorting cocaine with hookers in a hotel room. Jesse enlists Judy’s help to pay the blackmail, since she has secretly been stealing from the megachurch for years and has amassed a small fortune. Judy only agrees to help in order to hide her own embezzlement, and so the personal failings of these two Gemstone siblings become entwined.

Jesse and Judy’s shortcomings go further than drugs and embezzlement, however. Jesse is a lying husband and a callous father. As the series goes on, we watch him concoct elaborate lies in order to keep the truth of his hedonism from his wife, Amber (Cassidy Freeman). At one point, he hilariously claims that a series of emails about the party night between him and his friends (and exposed by one of his friend’s wives) is merely a series of jokey codes referring to a time they spent together watching the Atlanta-based teen comedy, ATL. At other moments, he berates his siblings and children and has no problem trying to intimidate Reverend Seasons and his friends when he assumes they are the blackmailers.

For her part, Judy is an inveterate abuser of her meek fiance, BJ Barnes (Tim Baltz), ridiculing, emasculating, and emotionally-abusing him at every given opportunity. She also has a habit of abusing others in the past; at one point she confesses to BJ to having sexually assaulted her professor in college and ruined his life in the aftermath. Judy is also supremely ungrateful for all the material goods her family has given her. When Eli finally gives Judy a chance to be a part of the Easter service, she scorns him and instead performs with her Uncle Baby Billy at his church plant, mistaking Baby Billy’s eagerness to exploit how she reminds people of her late mother as an earnest interest in her musical talent.

In many ways, Jesse and Judy are simply large children and display all the sorts of selfishness and casual cruelty of especially spoiled kids. However, The Righteous Gemstones does not close the book on the Gemstone family by cataloguing Jesse and Judy’s many shortcomings, or the materialism of the family’s church business. It also explores some of the ways that the Gemstone’s religious mission can nonetheless help other people and embody some of the fruits of the spirit.

Kelvin is the youngest of the Gemstone scions and the least sure of himself, but he’s also the most in touch with the true spirit of his family’s mission. He’s the youth pastor and spends his weeknights leading kids through worship at laser tag and indoor trampoline parks. The fourth episode, “Wicked Lips,” focuses on his attempts to save the soul of Dale Nancy’s rebellious daughter, Dot (Jade Pettyjohn). In the episode, Kelvin and his closest friend, the former Satanist, Keefe Chambers (Tony Cavalero), do a “Satan sweep” of Dot’s room, discovering a discarded condom as well as various other “Satanic paraphernalia,” such a poster for the industrial band Ministry and a fidget spinner, which shows how ludicrous some of Kelvin’s conceptions of evil are. 

But the episode also shows Kelvin’s earnest attempts to connect with Dot, which culminates in his saving her from her jerky boyfriend during a police raid at an underground S&M bar. Eli gives Kelvin the mission to help Dot, and Kelvin takes the mission seriously. He may be shortsighted and foolish, but he’s also good-hearted and ends up genuinely connecting with Dot, showing her what a dismissive asshole her boyfriend is in the process. 

Kelvin is also dedicated to the well-being of Keefe, who is a lost soul in need of saving if there is one on this show. The show portrays Keefe as something of a dimwitted follower, a person who doesn’t understand the simplest of concepts. In the early part of the season, Kelvin takes advantage of Keefe’s trust in order to use his job to help Jesse with his extortion scheme and he keeps him around as a testament to his own capacity to save souls. But after doubting his own ability as a pastor and forcing Keefe away, Kelvin ends up finding Keefe has returned to his Satanist friends and ended up as nothing more than a sex toy for their pleasure. Kelvin ends up saving Keefe from this life of abject humiliation and bringing him back into the Gemstone fold, understanding how important he is to him. There’s more than a bit of homoerotic tension between Kelvin and Keefe, and Kelvin is not particularly self-reflective about his desire to save Keefe, but he does do the right thing in the end and embrace Keefe as a fellow human being, rescuing him from degradation and dehumanization.

Kelvin has some of his father’s passion in him, which is some proof that Eli is the other character on The Righteous Gemstones that defies easy reduction. Because, no matter how easy it would’ve been to reduce Eli to a caricature of the imperious evangelical patriarch, Goodman and the writers refuse to reduce him to one. Eli is something of an emotionally-distant father and an authoritarian in how he leads his church, but he is also a true believer and a dedicated husband. In episode five, “Interlude,” which is a flashback episode to 1989 when Aimee-Leigh announces she is pregnant with Kelvin, we learn that Eli’s distrust of Baby Billy and Eli’s seeming conservatism are more a side effect of his protective instincts around Aimee-Leigh rather than a means of controlling her and his family. He genuinely loves Aimee-Leigh and does not treat his faith as simply a means of making money. A large part of the character’s complexity is a result of casting John Goodman, who excels at embodying conventional American men from the South without reducing them to stereotypes, but the writing is as nuanced as Goodman’s performance.

In a flashback scene where we witness Aimee-Leigh’s final moments in the hospital, Eli quickly turns to prayer and unites his family in the immediate aftermath of her death. McBride and his fellow filmmakers do not inject any scorn into the scene. For instance, they do not include a shot of one character quietly mocking the prayer, as a joke for the audience. Nor does the scene undercut Eli’s impulses to pray by showing them to be an irrational attempt to regain control of an uncontrollable situation. It is simply presented as a genuine moment of religious connection in the midst of grief.

So no matter how farcical The Righteous Gemstones is at times and no matter how awful the actions of the characters can be, the filmmakers are capable of showing how faith can also unite a family and bring them comfort in times of weakness. Most importantly, the series also shows how preaching forgiveness is not simply an empty act within American evangelicalism; the characters may be hypocrites in their personal actions, but Jesse’s Easter sermon, which encourages followers to forgive Judas Iscariot and pray for his soul, is not an empty exhortation. It is true that forgiveness needs to be an action and not just a thought; for instance, if the sermon was left on its own, it’d offer nothing but cheap grace. But Jesse does act on his own words, showing that for these characters, as for all Christians, forgiveness is essential for growth and wellbeing. It is the only way to heal.

The season one finale, “Better Is the End of a Thing Than Its Beginning,” reflects on the notion of forgiveness as it brings all the various plot threads to a head. Judy ends up reconciling with BJ, who has embraced more control of their relationship, to the betterment of them both. Jesse has come clean to his wife, who kicks him out of the house (shooting him in the butt in the process), but also reconciling with Gideon. His final scene shows him heading to Haiti to work with Gideon on a missionary project building water infrastructure in a poor town, something that Jesse openly mocked as a worthless gesture in an earlier scene. He humbles himself and forgives his son for trying to blackmail him, and in the process, his son forgives him for his failings as a father. In our last glimpse of the characters, father and son are united in love and good work.

Furthermore, Eli forgives Baby Billy for stealing the ransom money and makes amends to Reverend Seasons by offering him the post at his new church. Reverend Seasons says that he doesn’t want to work for Eli, but Eli corrects him and demonstrates a more proper understanding of authority: Seasons isn’t working for him, but for the “man upstairs.” In the same episode, Kelvin rescues Keefe, as discussed above. The many personal and corporate failings of the Gemstones tear the characters apart over the course of the series, but forgiveness and reconciliation bring them back together.

By the end of season one, it becomes clear that The Righteous Gemstones demonstrates the good of American evangelicalism as well as the bad. It can skewer the hypocrisy and materialism of American Protestantism while also celebrating the worth of family and the healing potential of forgiveness. It proves to be a show that captures both sides of this religious culture in an honest, intimate manner that manages the delicate feat of making fun of a subculture without reducing it to caricature.

In many ways, The Righteous Gemstones is like the catchy tune “Misbehavin’” that made Aimee-Leigh and Baby Billy famous country Christian music stars within the world of the show. On the surface, “Misbehavin’” is a ridiculous song, with goofy lyrics like “runnin’ through the house with a pickle in my mouth,” but it’s undeniably catchy. And as you listen to it more and watch Aimee-Leigh and Baby Billy break out into a country jig during a musical interlude, you realize that there’s something genuinely appealing about the song—that if you move past the ridiculous lyrics and the shameless religious baiting, you’ll discover it has a bit of the joy of music itself. It is a conflicted song, but it is not simply a joke; there’s real music here. 

That’s how The Righteous Gemstones approaches American evangelicalism as a whole. It shows it to be a conflicted religion and culture that empowers some of the worst aspects of American consumerism and hypocrisy, but there is something real at its core: a focus on family and forgiveness. To steal and paraphrase a line from Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar!, which similarly skewers and celebrates Hollywood in seemingly paradoxical ways, The Righteous Gemstones shows that this brand of Christianity “has worth” and the people that serve it have worth if they serve it properly.

The Righteous Gemstones (HBO)

Created by Danny McBride; starring Danny McBride, Adam DeVine, Edi Patterson, Tony Cavalero, Cassidy Freeman, Skyler Gisondo, Gregalan Williams, Tim Baltz, Dermot Mulroney, Walton Goggins, John Goodman, Jennifer Nettles.

Related Posts