Grilled Cheesus was originally aired on October 5, 2010. It was the third episode of the second season. The show starts off when Finn believes he sees the face of Jesus in his grilled cheese sandwich and immediately becomes “religious”. Meanwhile, Kurt’s father has a heart attack and the members of the Glee club surround him in love and some of the girls offer up prayers. Also, the cheerleading coach, Sue, admits that when she was a young girl she prayed that God would heal her sister who has Down Syndrome. Because Jean was not healed, Sue concluded that God doesn’t exist. Kurt’s father begins to get better as Kurt begins to accept his friends prayers and Finn quickly loses his new found religion as the episode ends with him finishing the remainder of his grilled cheese sandwich.
They manage to do a good job of portraying religion and belief in a somewhat respectable way. Some of the characters, like Mercedes and Quinn are strong in their Christian faith. We see this when they pray for Kurt and offer him guidance and love. It also comes to our attention again that Puck and Rachel are Jewish. But the characters that are probably the most relevant to the audience are the ones who don’t know what they believe. Agnosticism is becoming its own religion. A lot of youth today can relate to Brittany when she says “Whenever I pray, I fall asleep…”. For a long time people just believed what their parents believed, never questioning or searching for answers themselves. Rather, they just trusted in what they were told. In this day and age that is no longer the case. People are in the grey area. There a variety of reasons for this. A five year study done in “You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith,” a new book by Barna president David Kinnaman, has shown us that youth and young adults are leaving the church. The results were almost three out of five young Christians (59 percent) leave church life either permanently or for an extended period of time after age 15. One in three said that church is just plain boring. The interest is no longer there for a lot of people.
We are able to see both sides of the argument in the episode “Grilled Cheesus”. This is only episode that really focuses in on religion throughout the entire episode and features the majority of the characters’ opinions and standpoint on faith. There are, however, other examples of religious themes throughout the series.
Religion in Glee 