Believe, Peter Rollins and Being Good

Believe (2014) is a promising new series that was unfortunately canceled due to poor ratings. The series revolves around 10-year-old Bo Adams (Johnny Sequoyah), a extraordinary girl with a host of psychic powers inherited from her deceased Mother. In the pilot episode, we learn that Milton Winter (Delroy Lindo) has whisked her away from the sinister organization Orchestra headed by the world renown geneticist Roman Skouras (Kyle MacLachlan). Bo's foster parents are assassinated by Moore (mastery played by Sienna Guillory) and against commonsense Winter breaks out William Tate from death-row to rescue Bo from a hospital before Moore can get to her. It is quickly revealed to the viewer that Tate is actually Bo's long-lost Father. The gem of the series is the insanely beautiful relationship between a Father and his Daughter.

  

I want to say this is a scene from a promo for the series finale.

The show revolves around Tate and Bo on the run from Skouras's Orchesta and the Government. Bo and Tate have a cute, sanguine relationship that involves much bickering as the two clash on the correct corse of action to take. Besides being chased by the baddies, a common theme in the series is Bo using her precognition to help the people she meets along the journey. This aspect is quite reminiscent of Touched by an Angel. Tate argues with her to mind her own business and not risk going out of their way to help those in need. Tate is cynical and Bo is optimistic, overflowing with good intentions. It is not until the end of the series that Tate comes to terms with Bo as a perpetual goodie-two-shoes.

I want to draw a comparison between Bo, deconstruction, and the postmodern theologian, Peter Rollins. Jacques Derrida, the founder of the post-structuralist philosophy known as deconstruction, has spilt much ink philosophizing about the idea of the gift. His theory of the gift revolves around the idea that a pure gift is that which is given away without receiving something in return. Like a crafty philosopher, Derrida informs us that even if we are thanked for a gift we have given, it is not a pure gift: we receive the social thank you in exchange. Even if we receive a conscious, warm fuzzy feeling from our gift, it is not a pure gift. Derrida has made the pure gift practically impossible, and this is his intent. 

Tate hugging Bo after he discovers that she is his daughter.

Peter Rollins takes the Derridean insight and twists it to be applicable to the Christian concept of Love. His approach to Love is closely associated with the old Greek Virtue Ethics. In other words, love, or the good, is about being good. It is about forming a disposition that is naturally good. This virtue/Derridean ethic of his stands in stark contrast to the conscious choice ethics without passion of Kantianism, of which Nietzsche wrote, "What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty?" (The AntiChrist, §11). Rollins argues with Nietzsche, not for an automaton of duty, but an automaton of passion and being. He declares:

For a love that is born from God is a love that gives with the same reflex as that which causes a bird to sing or the heart to beat. For a concrete example of this, we can say that an act of love could involve giving money to someone on the street without stopping to think, or talking to someone who is in pain without thought that we are doing anything special or different from any other daily activity. Is this not what is really meant by the biblical injunction to give so as the right hand does not know what the left has given? The love that arises from God is a love that loves anonymously, a love that acts without such self-centered reflections, that gives without thought" (How (not) to Speak of God, p. 74).

Bo giving Tate the thumbs up after controlling the roulette ball for him in Atlantic City.

Bo exists as the perfect representation of a truly loving individual in the Rollinsian sense. She does not have to compel herself through a monumental force of the will to do good unto others. It comes naturally for her. The opposite is true. Bo has to force herself to do something "wrong," exempli gratia, Tate has to convince her that if she does not help him cheat at roulette with her psychic abilities, that she cannot eat (for they have no money). And what does Bo do with the thousands of  dollars they win? She gives the lion's share of it away to a sick boy who is suffering from cancer, and whose mother is struggling to pay for his proper treatment. Bo gifts the money away without a second thought. It is simply who she is. She is the special girl who helps people. 

Tate fights Bo most of the way. His cynical attitude demands that your first priority is to look after yourself. Yet, Bo is quite selfless. On the eleventh episode, she directly marches into a subway station where her premonition told her something terrible would happen. Towards the end of the series, a character develop in Tate's character is that he finally learns to stop fighting Bo, and to simply let her be herself. Everybody wants her to be somebody else, but Bo just wants to be her caring, loving self. She does not know anything different. She doesn't know how not to care. Her heart bleeds out of her natural being. 

And, for that, Bo is one of the subversive and crafty archetypes of Christ. Out of the mouth of babes, comes a logic that subverts the wisdom of the world. For all their machinations, nobody can stop Bo from being the bearer of the Spirit of Christ in her body. She is not a self-righteous Messiah who comes with power to change the world. The subversive revolution of Bo begins with the real, the everyday. Using her gifts, to help those around her, because that is her natural passionate being.