Why 'The Handmaid's Tale' is Relevant to All Christians Today
Hulu's newest series, the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's classic, "The Handmaid's Tale," resonates with today's society and culture in so many levels, and Christians in particular could learn a lot from it, a reviewer said.
The series is about a fictional dystopian society called Gilead where a Christian fundamentalist movement, called the "Sons of Jacob," takes over the government. The group then imposes totalitarian rule based on Old Testament teachings, in which human rights are limited and women's rights almost non-existent.
While the series seems to be a criticism of the current government in the United States and the prevalence of misogyny in society, Ayana Lage of Bustle said it "offers warnings in spades" especially in the sense that even "the Bible can be used to justify unspeakable evil" against women.
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Among the issues "The Handmaid's Tale" indirectly tackled are modesty, same-sex discrimination, and sexual slavery.
Lage noted that the way the series showed handmaids being given to their masters for forced sexual relationships is similar to certain stories in the Bible. For instance, she said Leah and Rachel both gave their slaves to their husband Jacob to bear him children when they could not.
Though the series offered a lot of Christian undertones, Margaret Atwood, who wrote the novel where the series is based on, does not consider her story religious.
"I don't consider these people to be Christians because they do not have at the core of their behavior and ideologies what I, in my feeble Canadian way, would consider to be the core of Christianity," Atwood told Sojourners.
However, she explained that people can still learn from it and understand how faith can be a good thing despite the seemingly bad representation of Christianity in the series.
"So faith is a force of good particularly when people are feeling beleaguered and in need of hope," she said. "So you can have bad iterations and you can also have the iteration in which people have got too much power and then start abusing it. But that is human behavior, so you can't just lay it down to religion."
