Trading Spouses, new age vs. Christianity

The Trading Spouses show is not one that I would watch. The whole premise is just not entertaining to me. But I saw previews for an episode where an overweight “Christian” woman traded places with a hippie-new-age type woman, I knew I wanted to see how this would be portrayed.

Again, I don’t watch this show, so I don’t know if it routinely tends to slant things in a hostile manner against Christianity.

This episode found a Christian family with a seriously disfunctional mother and family dynamic, and a new-age family whose members are well-adjusted.

We see the Christian mother getting freaked out by things she sees as demonic or “dark” while the new age mother is ostracized by a group of Christian ladies. The new age woman liberates the daughter who gets picked on in the Christian home, while the Christian woman tries hard to convert the new age family to Christianity.

The new agers are again and again shown as understanding and/or just confused by the Christian woman’s behavior. And she seems disappointed that they don’t embrace Christ, when all they’ve seen of Christ is her emotional break-downs and “Christian” superstition.

Now, I certainly understand the sensationalism of switching roles between a new ager and a Christian. But this show looked as if they found the craziest Christian woman they could find and swapped her with the most well-adjusted new ager they could find. I mean, the new ager had her own talk show on the radio — she obviously is well grounded in her beliefs. The Christian woman is unbalanced and it shows in almost everything she does. Her view of Christianity is more like a superstition than any real Christian belief system that I know of.

The show ends with the new age woman having a wonderful welcome home and the Christian woman freaking out when she gets home, tearing up the letter left by the new-ager, refusing the money as “tainted,” and throwing the camera crew out of her house “in Jesus name I pray.” But at the end of the show they indicate that she decided to keep the money upon further reflection.

So in the end, we learn that Christians are closed minded, superstitious, unprincipled people, and that new agey types are open to new ideas and understanding.

Nice.