Did you hear the one about the comedy writer who went to divinity school? He thought it could bring Americans together.
It’s not much of a punchline—because this isn’t a joke. The latest act for former Cheers writer and TV producer Rob Long is a stint at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Long’s CV is prolific and varied. In addition to his TV work, National Review readers know him from his satirical column “The Long View,” which pokes fun at current events and politics. Together with Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson (of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” fame), he also founded Ricochet, a conservative website and podcast network.
A decade ago, Long rediscovered the Episcopalianism of his childhood and eventually became a regular at St. James Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But he noticed a gap emerging between his writing and his new religious faith. “As a young comedy writer, people would just say, ‘hey, we’d love a show about, you know, a blended family in an urban setting,’” he told me in a phone interview conducted just before his biblical Greek exam. “And I’d sit there and kind of create one. But as you get older, it’s harder to do. It’s harder to make stuff up. It has to be true to you. And what was true to me was something that wasn’t happening on the page at all.”
Long set out to find a way to reconcile the two. “Before you know it,” he said, “I was packing up my belongings in New York City and moving to Princeton, New Jersey, and putting on a big backpack filled with books, terrified of my biblical Greek exam.” That a maven of the conservative commentariat would belong to one of the most progressive denominations in the U.S. is in some ways an indicator of the strange political times in which we find ourselves, as many Americans reorient themselves, old cultural labels lose their meaning, and new coalitions form. But it is not much of a departure for Long. “I’m not nearly as conservative as conservatives want me to be,” he said. “But I am not liberal enough for my liberal friends.” Accustomed to being a sign of contradiction himself, Long is hoping to show believers and skeptics alike that religion doesn’t have to be divisive.
It’s God’s table, and everyone is invited. We’re just the waiters.
Despite his right-wing bona fides, it’s easy to see how Long’s conservative friends can brand him what he calls “a woke liberal squish” when he talks about what initially attracted him to the Episcopal Church. A simple invitation that may have been more of a misunderstanding set his reconversion in motion. Walking past St. James on a cold January day, a woman standing outside holding a stack of service bulletins asked Long if he was there for the evening service. “I thought, ‘oh, OK, maybe I am,’” he said, so he went inside and sat down. “It was a lot more welcoming than I thought.”
Whatever else American conservatism might be on the eve of a second Trump administration, “welcoming” is not usually a word its critics use to describe it. But Long said it is precisely St. James’ expansive invitation to communion that attracted and held him. “If you are there and you want to take communion,” he said, “you take communion.” Officially, the Episcopal Church restricts communion—the taking of bread and wine in which the Church believes Jesus Christ is really present—to baptized Christians. Beforehand, the Episcopal catechism requires that recipients “examine [their] lives, repent of [their] sins, and be in love and charity with all people.” The foundations for this practice are old. The Apostle Paul warns in 1 Corinthians 11:29 that “he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.”
Today, St. James’ website states: “All Christians, from any part of God’s household, regardless of denomination or age, are welcome and invited to receive Communion in this Church. Please do not worry about ‘doing it right.’” What matters is simply knowing “that Christ welcomes you, and there is no telling how God might reach you in Communion. Just be open.” In practice, Long said, that means no one checks your credentials as you approach the altar. He is “a huge proponent” of this approach. “It’s God’s table, and everyone is invited,” he said. “We’re just the waiters.”
It is perhaps unsurprising that a guy who is also a fan of microdosing psychedelics would be drawn to Christianity’s expansive notion of God: He can be His own son, and He can be handed out to anybody and everybody as bread and wine. He can even be found, in Long’s words, in “somebody that you just hate.”
The classic Christian piety about seeing the face of Jesus in the poor and marginalized is “beautiful,” Long said. “And I think it leads to a lot of other good things eventually.” But the challenge, he said, is in seeing the face of Jesus in Vladimir Putin. “It’s just really hard when it’s your horrible, you know, down-the-street neighbor,” he said, or “the guy in the apartment next door who plays his music too loud.” In his estimation, faith is less a set of things that you profess to believe than something that you do. Even if it means praying for someone about whom you’ve written a satirical book of verse.
His own personal critiques of Trump and jokes at his expense notwithstanding, Long extends an ”open Communion” approach to American conservatism. He co-hosts Ricochet’s eponymous flagship podcast (“rapid-fire commentary from a center-right perspective”), where guests range from Trump critics and skeptics to vocal Trump supporters. And, of course, after many years of working in entertainment, he boasts a fair number of liberal friends. He finds this same small-c catholicity in the liturgy of the Episcopal Church.
“One of the central parts of the Episcopalian liturgy is doing prayers for people,” Long said. “You pray for the president. You pray for the president whether his name is Donald. You pray for the president whether his name is Joseph.” For many, this is an unfamiliar concept. Long explained: “It’s not that I’m rooting for them or I’m praying for him to win.” Praying for someone isn’t an endorsement, or a “contest,” he said, where you pray for one side to defeat another. “You pray for everything to get better.”
Religion’s ability to unite is something Long hopes to incorporate into his work coming out of divinity school. “As a Christian, a lot of the things that people write and talk about when it comes to this particular faith have been kind of weaponized and kind of toxified,” he said. “And we’ve got to figure out a way to keep the mystery and the humility of being a human being on this incredible planet, while at the same time trying to make sure that everybody knows that whatever we’re talking about in our faith, they are included. There is no border wall.”
“We just took your belief, your faith, whatever it is, and said, OK, this is separate now,” he said, “and it exists on a separate planet. And it’s inappropriate or wrong or divisive or whatever to bring it into your life the way it might be in your life. And that I think, if anything, that would be a great thing to come back to.”
Faith-based media like The Chosen is great, Long said, but he is thinking more in terms of bringing religion back into mainstream pop culture. He points to Homer, Marge, Maggie, Bart, and Lisa Simpson’s regular attendance at the First Church of Springfield as an example.
Long says people in “the faith industry” are guilty of a similar “failure of imagination” to think that people, especially young people, are disinterested in talking about faith. They’re chanting and communing at yoga classes and Burning Man, “so the question is, why aren’t they finding it where we are every Sunday?”
“Look at any of the bestselling books in the bookstore,” Long said, “They’re books that say essentially, ‘How do you know yourself?’” He sees people searching for answers, and a church that needs to be more confident. Whether or not he successfully returns religion to popular entertainment, he is definitely bringing a TV producer’s eye to organized religion. “We’re selling dessert,” he said, “It’s like, how hard could it be?”
In Long’s estimation, churches need to lean into not what makes them like other secular third spaces (he dismisses churches that advertise that they serve Starbucks coffee after services), but into the “unfathomable mystery and very good news, which is that you—not just ‘you people,’ but you and your self—are God’s creation, that he cares about you. Not just your tribe or your neighborhood or your family, but you, and he already knows you, and all he wants you to do is to know him and to know yourself.”
Long sees a lot of “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to entertaining a viewing public that is more secular than previous generations of television audiences. “When you’re working on a TV show or movie, you’re like, ‘Well, what do you got?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, the story really works. The story makes sense. So we don’t need to worry about that, we don’t have to make it funny, or interesting, or scary. But the heart of this story is good.’ Those of us who think that faith would be an interesting and valuable thing to bring back into the public square, the good news is we have the best material to work with. We don’t have to invent any new material.”
This story is part of a series Tablet is publishing to promote religious literacy across different religious communities, supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
