If you want to see what sin looks like in a laboratory—a gorgeous, depressing, cinematic laboratory—then study AMC’s television series Mad Men. Its characters, although trapped in a very specific time and place in American history, reveal the universal way that human vice separates mankind from the divine. The show’s creators expose the massive divide between beauty and ugliness, a spiritual paradox where appearances deceive us on every level.

I find it hard to recommend Mad Men to most people, especially Christians. Its sexual scenes are uncomfortable; its vices are glamorous. I don’t let my children watch it. I watch the characters sin and then sin again with awkward fascination. I am both appalled by the protagonist and instructed by his self-deception. My parents, who met and married in New York City in 1960 and subsequently lived in real life with every cup, necktie, and piece of furniture on the set, would no doubt find the cultural references and costuming to be pitch-perfect. Yet I’m certain they would squirm at the debauchery behind the proper offices of Sterling Cooper. I have yet to recommend it to them.

So what do I find so redeeming about this series?

First, the show illustrates the brutal emptiness of hedonism in striking detail. To see an episode is to be reminded of Fitzgerald’s fiction, where the pleasures of the body almost always lead to spiritual decay. The characters drink, smoke, and fondle each other as though the body is indestructible. And if the scientific ignorance of Mad Men’s community is astonishing (like the doctor who smokes during a gynecological consultation or the 10 a.m. gin-sipping business meetings) it parallels the spiritual ignorance of the lead characters who somehow believe that the sins of the flesh are inconsequential to one’s spirit.

Secondly, the series helps us to reconsider what we may believe about gender roles in America. Like most students of American history, I read about the 1920s suffrage movement, the 1950s cult of domesticity, and the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s. Having an incomplete picture of where the pendulum was before my female forebears pushed it too far to the left, I was somehow led to believe that gender roles were more biblical in my parents’ generation and that feminism was a troublemaker, maybe even a tad evil. Yet the series’ glaring depictions of sexism, control, manipulation, and arrogance couldn’t be further from the biblical model of love and respect outlined in the New Testament. If you are a woman younger than thirty, you may have no memory of institutionalized sexism, having lived your entire life with unobstructed opportunities. Just one episode might make you extraordinarily grateful for the shifting culture.   

Finally, Don Draper himself is a Shakespearean tragedy in a perfectly tailored suit. Although he embodies the kind of cultural nobility that every man dreams of—professional respect, material success, ascending worth, sexual potency, calm self-assurance, and a masculine physical presence—his spiritual decay is obvious. To witness both sides of Draper is to uncover the truth about humankind. We are desperate men, every one of us, without goodness, integrity, divinity, and truth. The shiny things in life (and the creators of the show are masters at showcasing this gloss) are really quite fragile. The darkness of man’s heart is consistent and pervasive in every generation, even the well-heeled ones.

Does this mean that every Christian should embrace the series as if it were a spiritual lesson? Not at all. However, here’s my small opinion. The problem with Christian-labeled art is that it often tries to hard to turn every human event into a lesson. But the creators of Mad Men, whose agenda is hardly biblical, have captured mankind in all its broken, hedonistic ugliness and then gotten out of the way. For me, seeing its art through the lens of Christ’s redemption, that’s enough.