RT Article
T1 Christmas in the 1960s: A Charlie Brown Christmas, Religion, and the Conventions of the Television Genre
JF Journal of religion and popular culture
VO 26
IS 1
SP 1
OP 22
A1 Lind, Stephen J.
LA English
PB University of Saskatchewan
YR 2014
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1691062073
AB This study of Christmas television programming from the 1960s is prompted by the repeated assertion that A Charlie Brown Christmas was an aberration within the television medium because its creator, Charles Schulz, dared to include religious content in the mainstream title. Grounded by historical/archival research, this article presents a content analysis of Christmas titles from the 1960s formative decade-of-change in order to substantiate the claim of television's secularity. The findings demonstrate that even in the genre of Christmas programming, mainstream television has abided by a public/private split from this early era, embracing a model of secularity that resists references to religious belief. A Charlie Brown Christmas and its contemporaries are also analyzed to determine the conventions of the genre that may at times afford such religious aberration when otherwise followed.
K1 Christmas
K1 Religion
K1 Television
K1 Peanuts
K1 Animation
K1 1960
K1 secular, public
DO 10.3138/jrpc.26.1.1