I noted a while back a key element of Dog: The Bounty Hunter is that the posse circles up to pray before they go out to round up the bad guy. This is particularly interesting because we rarely see this sort of “lived religion” on television. Perhaps on an odd episode of Friday Night Lights you’d see the football team say a prayer before a big game, but that’s the exception not the rule and that’s a scripted program not a reality series.

More recently, we are seeing prayer within the context of another reality series. That series is Ruby, a show in which a morbidly obese woman brings a team of experts together to help her overcome her issues with weight and food.

Ruby is from Savannah, Georgia. She is an obviously religious woman as we see her attend church and it is evident that she is a regular attendee. When Ruby goes through a particularly difficult time, she turns to her church to help her find the strength that she needs to recommit herself to her goal of getting in shape. As I’ve written about elsewhere here, Ruby is not alone in turning to faith for assistance in this area. Where Ruby is different, however, is that faith is not integral to the diet as it is to her life. It will be interesting to see how much faith is an element in the show when it starts its new season on February 14th.

In the meantime, I’m curious if others have notice this as a trend. Are people turning to God on other reality series?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 11:30 am and is filed under Religion and Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.