When Jesus blessed those who suffer persecution and revulsion on His account, He did not mean only the Christian martyrs.
He also meant well-known Christian actresses on popular television shows who speak up rather than allow casual slanders against Him.
Tuesday on the podcast “Soul Boom,” hosted by longtime actor Rainn Wilson — best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on “The Office” from 2005 to 2013 — former co-star Angela Kinsey, who played Angela Martin on the long-running sitcom, revealed that she once successfully protested a line in the show that she regarded as denigrating toward Jesus.
After ranging across a variety of topics, Wilson and Kinsey began to reminisce about their time on “The Office.”
They marveled, for instance, at the fact that they and their former co-stars still maintain a text thread. They talked of the show’s remarkable popularity. And Kinsey lamented the disappearance of “destination television” that “brings people together.”
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The combination of nostalgia and obvious friendship between the two led seamlessly into a thoughtful question from Wilson.
“You grew up Christian and had a very, kind of, loving, wholesome relationship with the church, with prayer,” Wilson began.
On the show, however, Kinsey played what Wilson regarded as a puritanical caricature — an “uptight, Christian, cat lady.”
Would you make a similar stand for Christ in your own job?
Having drawn that thoughtful distinction, Wilson then asked if the caricature ever caused Kinsey any problems.
“Yeah, yeah, actually there were one or two times where there would be a joke written for her that I thought was just really stereotypical, maybe one-note,” Kinsey replied.
She then recalled a specific instance in which she objected to a line written for her character.
Actor Oscar Nunez played Oscar Martinez, a character in “The Office” who happened to be gay. And the script for one episode had Angela acting “super-judgey” toward Oscar in a way that left Kinsey so uncomfortable that she addressed the concern with Greg Daniels, one of the show’s creators.
“I never went up to Greg about any joke,” Kinsey said. “But there was a joke at Oscar’s expense, and I went up to Greg, and I was like, ‘You know, I can’t’ — she sort of, I think Angela Martin invoked Jesus in the moment — and I just was like, ‘I don’t feel good about it. I don’t feel good about that. You know, I don’t feel like that’s what Jesus represented to me.’”
To his credit, Daniels removed the joke.
“And he was like, ‘OK.’ And he heard me, and he took the joke out,” Kinsey recalled.
In all, Kinsey and Wilson spent nearly six minutes discussing faith. At one point, in fact, they shared a prayer of thanksgiving together.
Wilson, according to Fox News, does not profess Christianity. He adheres to the deistic Baha’i faith, which originated in 19th-century Iraq.
Readers may view the entire episode below. The segment on faith and prayer began around the 39:10 mark and continued until around the 45:00 mark.
WARNING: The following video includes vulgar language that may offend some readers.
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:11).
Judging by his willingness to remove a joke that included what Kinsey regarded as a denigrating inference about Jesus, Daniels certainly did not seem determined to revile or persecute anyone. In fact, he probably did not think anything of it until she objected.
On the other hand, every such objection risks a kind of persecution. A lesser producer, for instance, could have caused trouble for Kinsey. She might have lost her job, as others have.
Thus, it is not only the experience of actual revulsion and persecution that matters to our Lord. When we place ourselves at risk of those things on His account, we also find ourselves “blessed.”
