And God Said, Let There Be Legos
by Andrew Harmon

Think back to a day in your long-departed childhood. At school, you doze during a long-division lesson taught by a curmudgeonly teacher, watch an out-of-focus filmstrip on caterpillars and scrape your knees during a game of kickball. Shaken by the wicked world, you slouch your way home and march up to your room, where you are greeted by a gargantuan bin of Legos. Then, you shut your door, sit Indian-style on the floor, and spread thousands of blocks around you, immersing yourself like the housewife taking a bath in that Calgon commercial.

"So what if I had a bad day?" you tell yourself. "I'm going to make a pirate ship with a hot tub and a helipad. So there." Surrounded by a sea of Legos, you hold dominion over your creation, and life offers you a sense of unbridled possibility that is rarely matched in your adult existence.

At least one of us had the good sense to uphold this tradition.

Enter "The Reverend" Brendan Powell Smith, creator of The Brick Testament, a website of Bible stories depicted through Lego tableaux that are sometimes searing, often humorous and always well crafted. It's where irony, Christianity and Legos coalesce to create a beatific vision.

To clarify: Smith isn't really a reverend, at least in the traditional sense. He is a 30-year-old freelance Web designer who lives in Mountain View, Calif. Don't expect to bump into him at any church socials, either. Smith is an atheist. The Brick Testament is not his first quirky project — some might recall his previous endeavor, the Internet film Vendetta: A Christmas Story. He also makes up half of the indie pop group The Human Heads, a collaboration with his girlfriend.

According to Smith, the idea for The Brick Testament was a burning bush epiphany. Well, sort of. "God appeared to me in the form of a flaming burrito, it's true," he says, via e-mail. "And while it may strike some people as odd that God called on an atheist to illustrate the Bible in Lego, remember that Moses was a murderer before he was called, and Paul a persecutor of Christians. So by comparison, I'm practically a saint."

Visitors to the website often remark, "Wow, this guy's got a lot of time on his hands." Indeed, Smith's elaborate Lego scenes take about a week to build per story, followed by a rigorous photo shoot with a digital camera. The details in the photographs are often stunning. For example, blood — whether from the ram slaughtered by Abraham or from a woman stoned to death for misplacing her virginity — is depicted by teensy red translucent squares piled around the victim. And each character bears a facial expression that is uncannily apt to the situation: God's downturned eyebrows scorning Adam and Eve's disobedience, a nonbeliever's gnashing teeth as he writhes in the flames of hell, Mary's freckled surprise when confronted by the angel Gabriel, King Herod's wrinkled consternation as news spreads of Jesus' birth.

Since its inception in 2001, The Brick Testament has become a hit on the Web, averaging 200,000 visitors a month. In October, Smith's creation made its first foray into print, with "The Brick Testament: Stories from the Book of Genesis." But with whom is The Brick Testament popular? Smith assures you that you don't have to be a recovering Catholic with ironic sensibilities to enjoy it. "Judging by the hundreds of e-mails I've received, the site is equally popular among religious believers and skeptics," he says. "For every person that writes to let me know that my depictions of some of the Bible's more horrific tales have solidified their atheism, there's another from a minister or church youth worker praising the site and asking permission to use it in their Sunday school lessons. I'm flattered that such a wide range of people are finding things in it that they enjoy."

Of course, The Brick Testament is not embraced by all. The August 2002 issue of Bible Review deemed it "Winner of Web's Worst Bible Art." The UK's Sunday Mail slammed The Brick Testament's frank depictions of illicit sex as "popular among paedophiles." And among a flood of glowing e-mails, a trickle of castigation drips into Smith's inbox. One recent critic wrote, "I cannot begin to tell you how you have sent my spirit grieving. You took something that could have been used to light a fire for the Bible in children and totally thrust it into the world by including sex and sexual positions..." (To Smith's credit, The Brick Testament does have content warnings for sex, violence, nudity and cursing, which Smith says he put on the site "to help parents determine if they want their kids to view the uncensored word of God.")

Thomas Carder, president of ChildCare Action Project, a nonprofit Christian organization and media watchdog, accuses Smith of adulterating the meaning of the biblical verses that accompany each photo, verses which Smith says he has re-worded from the New Jerusalem Bible. "[W]hat I saw was [a] paraphrasing of the scriptures," says Carder via e-mail, "obviously with a lack of understanding of the Word or with a desire to cheapen it or to make it appear to say something it doesn't say. It appears he has read the words without reading the Word."

Matthew Fox, a noted theologian and founder of the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, Calif., disagrees with Carder's assessment of the biblical verse illustrated in The Brick Testament. "The fact is that the quotes are all accurate," asserts Fox. "Shocking, really, when you see them lined up together — slaves, women, semen-spilling, etc. It's great to reproduce the worst passages of the Bible and get us to meditate on them. [It] gets people over bibliolatry, and makes them think about the 'holy books'. One can never surrender conscience."

Others have accused Smith of depicting only the Bible's grisly content. For instance, take a look at his illustration of a blasphemous man being stoned to death in Leviticus (the "stones" being gray plastic discs, each the size of a Grape Nut.) And who knew that Deuteronomy 23:1 forbids a man with a lopped-off penis from entering the house of the Lord? Chances are you won't forget it after seeing a Lego Lorena Bobbitt calmly walking away from her mutilated husband.

Smith also tackles some uncomfortable verses later on in the Bible, most notably a seamless collection of slavery edicts from the New Testament books of Timothy, Titus, Peter and Corinthians I. The accompanying images show Lego cotton and tobacco fields teemed with little slaves in varying shades of brown, supervised by a man in a white suit with a Salvador Dali moustache and a bullwhip. His squat, mischievous daughter trails dutifully behind in a pink dress, her smirk evidencing a budding imperiousness. The biblical verses warn two Lego slaves against stealing or escaping from their master, elucidating that life in bondage is prescriptive, irreversible and, alas, biblically sanctioned.

Smith believes his decision to depict these verses does not make The Brick Testament any more biased than other illustrations that tend to gloss over them. "I am the first to admit that The Brick Testament tends toward illustrating oft-overlooked, ignored or morally-troubling passages," he says. "But I do not think for a second that I am twisting around the passages to make the Bible any more 'sensational' than it already is. I merely shine a light on what is generally kept in the dark, and then refrain from any further commentary or interpretation."

Love it or hate it, The Brick Testament succeeds in imparting biblical stories to a wide and heterogeneous audience, perhaps moreso than any other biblical illustration. And there is a very real possibility that it will teach you more about the Scriptures than a lifetime of attending church services at half-attention. But will it ultimately cause you to exalt or reject the Bible? Smith doesn't believe so. "I don't think Brick Testament could ever aspire to be a real force in changing people's beliefs, whether as an evangelical tool or as a promotion of atheism or agnosticism. I can present things to people, increase their knowledge and entertain them in the process, but I no longer expect anyone else to draw the same conclusions I have."

— Andrew Harmon (harmoninla@hotmail.com).