You gotta serve somebody

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You gotta serve somebody

 

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Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright play Frank and Claire Underwood in Netflix’s original series, “House of Cards.” | IMDB

In the third episode of Netflix’s “House of Cards,” Congressman Frank Underwood (D-SC) learns that voters in his hometown are rebelling against him.

A 17-year-old girl has died in a car crash while driving past a distracting peach-shaped water tower. The town blames Underwood’s failure to remove the peach for the accident, and the parents want to sue. Underwood sees this as a threat to his reelection efforts, so — like any slick DC insider — he returns to South Carolina to conjure up some empathy for his constituents.

Of course, Underwood does not really care about the dead girl or his hometown. As with every situation in “House of Cards” — one of the few political shows that recognizes that public service is the nation’s only holy office for a Christ-forgetting, Christ-haunted populace — what really matters here is if Underwood can continue to enslave the hearts and faith of his voters.

Underwood knows real power does not come from celebrity endorsements, or PACs, or election promises. Successful leaders — think Moses, Mohammed, Julius Caesar — converted free people into followers, people willing to die for their personage and ideas.

In a speech following the 17-year-old’s funeral, Underwood seeks to do the same. He steps up to the pulpit and lets the congregation indulge in their hatred of him. Instead of offering condolences, he eulogizes hate and encourages them to rave against this injustice — why should anyone have to die before their time? He even goes so far as to shout, “I hate you, God!” much to the shock of the congregation.

But Underwood does not allow himself to linger on hate for long. Instead, he pulls out a Bible and reads from Proverbs, chapter 3: “Trust in the Lord your God with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”

In the span of three minutes, the show has married the heaven and hell of human nature. On the one hand, Underwood’s invitation to the congregation to hate God (and by extension, to hate him) feels like a very natural response to a senseless death. But on the other hand, Underwood’s call to faith taps into the noble human desire to worship a higher being. Underwood is so slick that by the end of the speech the audience is unclear on whether that higher being is God or the congressman himself.

This sort of scene is “House of Cards” at its best. Leave aside the show’s nasty tendency to make tasteless cultural commentary — promoting gay power-sex relationships, endorsing Russian punk bands, writing up a floppy stand-in for Vladimir Putin. Just enjoy a serious take on America’s unspoken religion.

In “House of Cards” religion centers on many things: money, power, sex — even God. It’s a lot to think about. But “lean not on your own understanding”: Frank Underwood thinks he has the answer for what is really worth your devotion in the end.