There are 40 days between Easter Day and Ascension, the day that the Risen Christ was taken up into heaven. Between Ascension Day and Pentecost, another 10: “Pentecost” means “the fiftieth”. In those ten days Christians, in imitation of the first disciples, devote themselves to prayer. Since 2016, a global ecumenical prayer movement called “Thy Kingdom Come,” initiated by the former archbishops of Canterbury and York, has sought to encourage and direct these prayers.
This year’s theme is “God with us,” and we are asked to pray for more people to come to know Jesus, focusing our prayers on five people of our acquaintance who we think don’t know Jesus already. That, at any rate, is what Christians of riper years are invited to do. For the children there’s something called “Cheeky Pandas”.
What is Cheeky Pandas? Not the bamboo-based toilet paper—that’s “The Cheeky Panda”, something else entirely. The Cheeky Pandas are five cartoon pandas who live in a treehouse that is also a recording studio. Since making cartoons isn’t cheap, they are funded by donations, the advertising generated by their YouTube channel, and a charity, “Swell Revolution,” whose purpose is to create “fresh and exciting resources that are free and accessible to all, using the internet to provide an unlimited digital platform to reach into churches, homes and hearts across the world.”
Why, in the name of all that’s holy, am I drawn to writing about Cheeky Pandas?
Well, right now I’m looking at a photograph. In the middle is the former archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. He’s flanked by two adults in fursuits—yes! In fursuits! They are Cheeky Pandas. The one on Welby’s left has a set of green earphones around his neck. With one paw he seems to be knuckling his eye. With the other paw, he embraces a blonde woman in a dark suit. The Cheeky Panda on Welby’s right has a pink bow on its head. By this you shall know that it is meant to be female, and is presumably the lead singer of the group. She has both her front paws where you can see them. On her right is a smiling young woman of global majority heritage. Arranged in front of this quartet of adults there are five female children.
There’s nothing more important for any religion than that it be passed on from one generation to another. We pass on what’s most important to us: the ways of being that constitute our life in the world, and with them the practice of prayer and the rituals and stories that compose our faith. This is who we are; this is what we do. The first rule in handing on the faith is never to underestimate our children’s intelligence and never to be boring. This is why, in the constant search for good religious books for children, I always look first at the illustrations. Badly illustrated children’s books say, “we think this story is stupid, and we think you’re stupid too.”
What is the matter with Cheeky Pandas? Why are its primitive cartoons and cheesy pop music so much worse than the cartoons and music in South Park? By now, I am transfixed by the Cheeky Pandas video “Self Control (God’s on our side)”. I’m amazed by the big red button: “Push the button/Don’t push the button”, which cartoon watchers of my generation recognise as a reference to the Bomb. I’m not clear if the panda who pushes the button was supposed to push the button or not. Has the rocket exploded now? Do we think that the white boy and the black girl dancing on separate screens are friends? Or do they get sent home in separate cars after the recording? Are the pandas still cheeky, or is that all in the past now they have self-control? Where is this happening? In China, where the pandas come from, or have they been sent on loan to us in the hope that they might breed?
Cheeky Pandas was put together by earnest Christian people who sincerely believe that Christian children and their parents will find it wholesome and spiritually nourishing. They did not dirty their hands. South Park was originally animated using construction paper cutouts, and its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, kept that aesthetic once they switched to computer animation. South Park deals with the more complex aspects of religion, like being Jewish in a majority Christian community during the holidays; how Mormons are generally decent people but believe some really stupid stuff; theodicy; depictions of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH); Scientology; Jesus and Satan as complicated, ambiguous characters, and so forth, and they make it funny. There’s no real passion or intellectual effort involved in whatever labour went into the creation of the Cheeky Pandas. The biggest difference between South Park and Cheeky Pandas is that the Cheeky Pandas are soulless. Those who make them, as the Psalmist says, become like them; so do all who trust in them.
