Peanuts Creator Charles Schulz:Not the Man I Thought

If you were like me, a kid growing up in the 70’s, you couldn’t wait for the latest Charlie Brown special to appear on the television.  I can remember waiting in eager anticipation for it as though it were the highlight of the day.  Now, I am watching it with my own kids.  For some strange reason (God?), during a recent special, I had some suspicions about the nature of what I was watching.  Charlie Brown as the perennial loser in life, rejected amongst friends, can never do anything right, can’t get the little red-haired girl, can’t kick the football, etc.  I was beginning to wonder if Charlie Brown were merely a disguise behind which Schulz was hiding.  I was aware of his most recent biography, Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis and checked it out at the local library.  Good grief, was that ever a kick to the heart!

I had always presumed that Schulz was a Christian, a believer in Jesus Christ, etc. (you know the mantra).  However, what I found was a man who was anything but that.  He was a misunderstood child with a soft heart and a penchant for drawing and doodling that was equated with being “girlish” in those days.  As a result, his parents did not know how to treat him.  He was painfully shy on the furthest end of the scale that you could imagine; refusing to talk to girls, make new friends or anything else that might pull him out of his shell and expose him as vulnerable.

For a time, he was involved with the Church of God but eventually drifted away.  Christianity Today and Billy Graham would refer to him as a devout evangelical but he was anything but that.  Amongst conservatives he was observed as having the ability to blend in but behind closed doors would acknowledge that everyone was destined for salvation and that nobody could answer whether Christ alone was the answer for salvation.  His view of church life became increasingly cynical and he eventually acknowledged his belief in secular humanism.  In addition to all of his loosely kept doctrinal beliefs was the fact that his first marriage crumbled when he had an affair and wrote numerous love letters of which were quoted in the book.  His wife commented that he never apologized to her.

Some of my worst fears had been realized and I would have preferred to be wrong.  The beloved cartoonist of the cartoon strip that I had cherished for years was now exposed.  All of his drawings were nothing more than a wounded little boy who bled in the black and white world of the funnies pages.  All of his painful rejections were locked up within but inadvertently shared with the world.

His creation of the Great Pumpkin was interesting.  It seemed as though he was trying to convey that it was better to be drunk on false doctrine than believe the truth!

Sadder still is the fact that all of his wounds were buried with him.  Lynn Johnston, cartoonist of the For Better or Worse comic series was with him at his bedside and remarked that he seemed, “angry at God, angry with friends, angry with fate-angry [about] all the troubles he could never let go of.”  “…but at a time when people usually resolve their unresolvable histories by making peace with the past, he was angry that he’d never changed anything.  You could see the bitterness in him…Nothing in all of his seventy-seven years had been resolved.”

Schulz and Peanuts is a candid look into the life of a deeply misunderstood man.  Misunderstood because so many had tagged him as devoutly Christian and nobody was looking past the exterior to look into the heart of this troubled man.  It was Schulz himself who said, “My ordinary appearance was a perfect disguise.”  After all, the exterior is nice, pleasant and satisfactory.  A hero amongst Christendom.

Now, you might say that I am being too hard on Schulz; after all, we all have areas in our lives that need a good cleaning.  But that is what God is for.  He is there to walk us through all of our wounds, hurts and heartaches that life inevitably brings our way.  King David’s affairs of murder or adultery were on no less of a grander scale but herein lie the difference: David allowed God to pick up the pieces and mend them.

The Scriptures magnify the triumphs and troubles of so many to give us their own personal history with God and so it is here with Schulz.  Unfortunately, I do not think his own history ended so well.  This biography is a cautionary tale about life, the troubles that we all inherit in one way or another and what may happen if we do not allow the heart the healing that it deserves.  Schulz once replied vehemently that Charlie Brown would never kick the football.  It was so indicative of his own life.  How I wished he had kicked the football.

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