When Lisa Fields describes what has changed in how people know the Bible, she gives one precise example. People now put Daniel in front of Goliath and David in the lion’s den. The names survived, but the stories that give them meaning did not. In this conversation, the explanation is that many younger people never received the stories in order, and many now meet Scripture only by its reputation as a book of rules. Content creator Chaz Smith’s response is to retell the stories whole and with humor, and to tell them from the security of a son rather than the anxiety of a servant.
Whose memory is this?
The claim rests on a specific memory, so it is worth asking whose it is. Lisa is describing her own formation. She grew up with Sunday school, and she says people in that setting generally knew the stories. “They knew the difference between David and Daniel.” Then she names the change: “Now, people don’t know who David is, who Daniel is,” and some barely know the story of Jesus.
Her claim is narrower than it might first sound. She is not saying an earlier generation read the Bible cover to cover. She is saying that regular classes for children gave people a basic map: who came first, who faced the giant, who faced the lions. Someone could stop attending as an adult and still keep that map.
The evidence here also has limits. This is one interview with two voices. Lisa speaks from her own upbringing, and Smith from his own church childhood. Neither offers data on particular congregations, regions or communities, and the conversation does not compare Black churches with any others. Some churches never lost their children’s classes, and some families teach the stories at home without them. A reader should take Lisa’s account as a firsthand observation from someone who has spent years trying to teach Scripture to the next generation, not as a measured portrait of every church.
Lisa does point to a second trend, and it is easy to blur with the first. She says cultural trends are moving down both for people knowing the Bible and for people holding it as authoritative. These are separate problems. Someone can know Daniel’s story and reject it. Someone else can respect the Bible in the abstract without having read a chapter. A response that addresses only one of them leaves the other in place.
Smith works in a setting that may make the first problem worse. He began posting on Vine in 2013 and has built a following on YouTube and Instagram. Neither speaker blames short-form content for declining literacy. Still, one plausible reading, offered here as an interpretation, is that a feed of separate clips can make names familiar without keeping a long story connected. That would fit the kind of knowledge Lisa describes, where Daniel and David are both recognizable and neither is understood.
Where does the rulebook picture come from?
Smith describes his intended audience in concrete terms. He wants the stories to be “digestible for people who may not ever walk into a church, who may not have ever heard the gospel.” Some of these people, he adds, assume the Bible is a book of rules used to make people afraid and submit.
That impression deserves a serious answer. People rarely invent it on their own. If someone has mostly heard the Bible quoted as a warning, the conclusion is reasonable from where they stand. The careful move is to separate the book from the ways people have used it. A text whose main movement is rescue can still be quoted mainly to frighten, and the person doing the frightening owns that choice.
Smith’s own history complicates the easy version of this story. He did not grow up outside the church. He grew up in it, and he says he had a real relationship with Jesus at a young age. Even so, he describes having “more of a servant mindset than a son mindset,” and explains what that meant: “I felt like I always had to do the right thing for God in order to receive his love.”
That counterexample matters. Restoring Sunday school would not solve everything, because the rulebook picture can form inside the church as well as outside it. A child can learn every name in order and still conclude that God’s love is a wage to be earned.
Can a comedy carry the weight of Scripture?
The strongest objection to Smith’s approach is obvious. If a generation already knows the Bible in fragments, an eight-minute comedy could shrink it further and turn Daniel into a punchline.
Smith answers with both his intention and his method. He describes his animated series, What Had Happened Was, as “retelling the stories from scripture in a fun and entertaining way without watering anything down.” For tone, he compares it to a cross between The Bible Project, which is animated and teaching-focused, and The Boondocks, “Without all the irreverence.” He wants that show’s narrative style and jokes but not its contempt. He also says the work is “really weighty for me is just knowing, like, this is the word of God,” and he denies that he is simply updating old stories for modern culture.
Two parts of his method speak to the objection. First, he says each episode digs into the historical and cultural background of its story, and that he is working with Charlie Trim, an Old Testament teacher at Biola. Second, he wants viewers to see that the Bible is “not just a book with a bunch of characters, but accounts of people who actually lived on this earth and were just like you and me.” That standard sets the limit for the humor. A joke about Daniel’s nerves in a foreign court treats him as a real person under pressure. A joke that treats the lions as a fairy tale tells the viewer the story did not happen.
His first season covers Daniel 1-7, which is the very Daniel people now place in front of Goliath. Even so, any series has a ceiling. Smith’s stated goal is to get people interested in reading the Bible and knowing Jesus for themselves. An episode can spark that interest, but the real test is whether viewers move from the cartoon to the chapters, and a pilot cannot measure that.
Why laughter belongs here
Smith makes a stronger case for humor than many churchgoers would. “I think the power of laughter is really underestimated.” He mentions the familiar proverb comparing a merry heart to medicine (Proverbs 17:22). Then he goes further: “behind true, like, genuine laughter is joy.” From there he cites the line that the joy of the Lord is our strength.
The setting of that line supports his project more than a passing quotation suggests. In Nehemiah 8, a people who had returned from exile gather to hear the law read aloud. The scene is about a community recovering a text it had lost touch with. “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). The people weep when they hear it. The leaders tell them not to mourn, “for the joy of the LORD is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). A few verses later the people celebrate, and the narrator gives the reason: they had understood the words read to them (Nehemiah 8:12).
Nehemiah 8 is narrative. It records an event and gives no instruction about methods of teaching. What it shows is an order: the reading is explained, the people understand, and the joy comes after. Smith’s argument runs along similar lines. He treats laughter as evidence of something deeper, saying, “I think there’s a level of intimacy that is required to produce genuine laughter and joy, a level of intimacy with the Lord.”
He gives an example from his own messages. Several times, he says, people have written to tell him they were considering self-harm or worse, then came across his videos and started laughing. Often it was over something small: “I’ll post a video pronouncing words incorrectly, and people will crack up at it, and it’ll totally change their mood.” Those moments, he says, opened a way to tell people where his joy comes from. These are his reports, and they show what humor did in particular conversations, not what it will always do. If you are in a place like the one those messages describe, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US, and let a real person sit with you in it.
Knowing more still matters
Smith does not let an approach built on joy become an excuse to skip study. He names a common line, that a person doesn’t need to know everything, only Jesus. His reply is brief: “Yeah, that’s true, but knowing more helps.” He compares it to a sword. Every believer carries one, he says, but some are duller because their owners never worked to sharpen them.
His practice is concrete. He reads Scripture on his own, asks a lot of questions, and recommends “having conversations with people who you disagree with.” That bears directly on the literacy problem. People who already know the stories but cannot explain them when someone pushes back will have little to hand on.
He also admits that the closer kind of witness, the kind where people see your flaws, is hard. His answer to that difficulty is simple: “we don’t need to be perfect in order for that to happen.” For most believers, that is the most usable part of the conversation. Few will make a video, but nearly everyone knows a coworker or cousin who has never heard the story told straight.
Son first, then servant
Smith points to the prodigal son as the story that changed his posture, and the text supports his reading. On the way home, the younger son rehearses a speech: “And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants” (Luke 15:19). When he reaches his father, he gets through the confession, but the request to be made a hired servant is never spoken (Luke 15:21). The next words are the father’s, calling for the best robe and a ring (Luke 15:22). The servant plan never reaches the father’s ears.
That is the shift Smith describes: “I’m a son first before I’m a servant of God.” He links it to Romans 5:8, which he paraphrases in the conversation. In the KJV it reads: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Love comes first, while the person is still unworthy, and service follows from it.
This affects how the Bible gets presented to people who don’t know it. Smith says remembering God’s love keeps him focused on “loving the person that’s in front of me and not being self-centered,” and less worried about what that person thinks of him. What he wants instead is plain: “I want them to know how much Yahweh loves them.” A believer who still feels like a hired hand tends to present the Bible the same way, as a list of tasks to finish before God will accept you. That is how the rulebook picture gets passed from one person to the next.
The David and Daniel mix-up will not be fixed by correcting names. What a new reader needs is the connected story, told by someone who has already been welcomed home and is not still rehearsing a speech to earn a place. Someone who hears Luke 15 told that way has a reason to open the book and see whether the father really says what the storyteller claims.