It began as a novel in 1956 that stayed on the New York Times best seller list for five years. It was made into a major motion picture in 1957. In high school in those long ago days one student would whisper to another "read it" or "see the movie". Since it dealt with incest and implied without actually showing a couple swimming naked, parents were wishing that the kids would do neither. I saw it a year later but since it wasn't a war or cowboy movie I remembered little of it. Nearly twenty years later I watched it on TV and thought to myself "that wasn't as wild and raunchy as they led us to believe back in high school". Had I been desensitized? Then about another twenty years went by and I watched it on TV again. My reaction that time was "that came close to being a Christian movie".
How could something considered very explicit in the 1950's be considered by a critical thinker today (as I believe I am) as being very close to a Christian treatment of the themes of incest, murder, adultery, illegitimacy, a couple swimming nude, etc.
The name "Peyton Place" may have been fictional but it seems the author, Grace Metalius, combined three towns in New Hampshire to create the Peyton Place setting. A sequel, Return to Peyton Place, was filmed in 1959 and it became a TV soap opera series from 1964 to 1969. The title kept reappearing on TV in soap opera settings or made for TV films. One does not hear it much any more. It may even seem quaint. The themes of the book and the movie have been portrayed in the years since 1957 in ways that leave nothing - I mean nothing - to the imagination.
When I listed the themes of the book and the movie I omitted two major ones: gossip and hypocrisy. Near the end, after attending church, one of the characters makes a powerful statement against these two evils that would, as I implied earlier, do justice to any Christian movie. This movie did not even come close to being "explicit" in the way that movies became a few years later. The fact that the book and movie were "hush, hush" among polite people in those days is a most powerful witness to the reality of a Christian consensus then. A survey just several years ago revealed that several hundred young adults overwhelmingly considered "not recycling" and "using too much water and electricity" as much worse sins than viewing pornography and watching explicit movies. The degrading of ourselves, each other and our bodies is now "no big deal".
Don't believe those who dismiss all this by saying that the 1950's were "puritanical". C.S. Lewis warned us about the reckless and ignorant use of that adjective.
"Don't be under any illusion -- neither the impure, the idolater or the adulterer; neither the effeminate, the pervert or the thief; neither the swindler, the drunkard, the foul-mouthed or the rapacious shall have any share in the kingdom of God. And such men, remember, were some of you! But you have cleansed yourselves from all that; you have been made whole in spirit; you have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and in the very Spirit of our God." (I Cor. 6:9-11 from The New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips [1958]; italics his) How amazing is it that this very accurate reading of this passage of Scripture was going to press at the very time that Peyton Place appeared?
At the heart of the Peyton Place story was the fact that what people condemn in public they may be doing in private. Since God sees all of our private world maybe He looked at the behind-the-scenes America of 1957 in much the same way we see the public life of people today. Sin has always been here whether it was Sodom, Babylon, Rome or the United States. The one very large difference between 1957 and today is the rejection of all absolutes by which to judge anything right or wrong.
In the same year that the movie appeared the newly formed South Central school district in Huron County, Ohio was torn by dissension. A teacher sent a letter to the local newspaper. I have a copy of that paper and one line from that teacher's letter reveals a lot about the prevailing Christian consensus in the U.S. in those days. Speaking of the angry dissension in the school district about creating one new high school she said, "we are not acting like Christians". What would be the reaction if a public school teacher said that in a letter to a newspaper today.
