“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” -Isaiah 11:6; 2 Nephi 21:6

I currently have toddlers. That means I have watched way too much Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

For those of you currently past the toddler phase: Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is the successor-state to the late, lamented Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood of yore, even recycling “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” as its opening theme song and “It’s Such a Good Feeling” as its closing. It adapts characters who initially appeared in hand-puppet format on Mr. Rogers into CGI Flash Animation, including the titular Daniel Tiger, O the Owl, King Friday, Prince Tuesday, and etc.–not to mention the mailman Mr. McFeely, the Trolley, and the set-design for the Land of Make-Believe itself.

Also like Mr. Rogers, the show is custom-designed for pre-schoolers specifically, and hence features heavy repetition, frequent music numbers, rigid story-telling formula, bright colors, and basic life lessons (and I mean really basic, e.g. “share with your friends,” “when you’re sick, rest is best,” “use your words when you’re mad”–though in fairness, it’s not like full-grown adults couldn’t use these refreshers, too).

It’s tempting when you’ve watched way too much of a kid’s show that you are emphatically no longer the target audience for, to get cynical and sarcastic about it–not even out of maliciousness necessarily, but simply to preserve your sanity! Hence our frequent fantasies of, say, beating Barney the Purple Dinosaur with a two-by-four, or strangling Elmo to death, or making off-color jokes about Dick and Jane.

Hence, it is not uncommon for young, college-age parents saturated with Daniel Tiger to snark that the whole show is actually a revisionist-colonialist fantasy, since it features a European-coded monarchy (i.e. King Friday and his heirs) “benevolently” overseeing a fiefdom of anthropomorphic African animals and people of color living in apparent harmony on the shores of “Jungle Beach.” It’s a fantasy straight out of Kipling! A land of make-believe indeed.

However, both the Apostle Paul and Mormon and Moroni of old have counseled us to have charity–for “if ye have not charity, ye are nothing”–so call it Stockholm Syndrome if you must, but I would actually like to take a charitable approach to Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and maybe even take it seriously for a moment.

Because, again, what do we actually encounter in Daniel Tiger’s Land of Make-Believe? The show is at repeated pains to portray King Friday doing his own yardwork–and the dauphin Prince Tuesday cheerfully working as a waiter, a grocery-store clerk, a life-guard, a camp counselor, Daniel’s baby-sitter, or whatever odd-job the plot calls for–all making it clear that the monarch employs no serfs nor servants, and that his family entire works to earn their own wages without living off of others. Was that not the ideal of King Benjamin in the Book of Mormon? (c.f. Mosiah 2:14.) His own successor King Mosiah declared that it is good to have kings if you could always have a righteous king, and only proposed the democratic judgeship system since it is obvious that such is rarely the case (c.f. D&C 121:39).

Indeed, when will it ever be the case to have a truly, genuinely benevolent monarchy? Per our own belief system, it will be during the Millennium of Christ’s rule–when peace and equality rests upon the world–and when you watch Daniel Tiger from that angle, so much of the show clicks into place.

Because perhaps the most outstanding feature of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood to first-time parents is just how aggressively low-stakes all of the conflict are! Seriously, it’s almost soothing. Daniel will get mad because, say, he can’t go play at the beach while it’s raining out, or because his baby sister Margaret is getting more attention than him on her birthday, or his friend O the Owl gets sick on their way to tour the crayon factory–and these are always solved by, say, Daniel and Prince Wednesday using their imaginations to create an “inside beach,” or Daniel learning from his parents to be a “birthday pal” to his sister, or Daniel’s Dad taking pictures of the crayon factory to share with O the Owl later.

It’s almost all a parody of real problems! There are zero portrayals of, say, multi-generational poverty traps, or institutionalized racism, or war, or substance abuse, or child abuse, or worse. It truly is a land of make believe after all! I don’t know if kids trapped in actually abusive homes find this show to be comforting escapism, or taunting mockery!

But then, perhaps that is exactly the point: it is explicitly a “land of make believe,” and hence is a portrayal not of how society is, but how it should be–a collection of clean, cooperative, racially-diverse, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with a high-functioning public-transit system, sans poverty and sans prejudice.

Because frankly, isn’t that what we as Latter-day Saints are supposedly looking forward to? When we envision the United Order and how the Law of Consecration will be administered during the Millennium of Christ’s rule, isn’t the genuine, communitarian happiness of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood more-or-less what we have in mind? For that matter, when we read of the City of Enoch, or the Lehites after Christ’s visit to the Americas, living in a perfect Zion of neither rich nor poor (c.f. Acts 2:44-45 and 4 Nephi 1:3)–or read of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young attempting to establish the same in Nauvoo and Utah territory respectively–isn’t this the sort of society we have in mind? If not, what have you imagined instead? Or have you been able to imagine it?

Mark Fisher famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; what else is the Land of Make-Believe for, then to help our children imagine it–for of such is the kingdom of God?

Perhaps it is not incidental that Daniel Tiger is of the same genus as the lion, for Isaiah also prophesies of the time when “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (found in Isaiah 11:6, and endorsed by the Book of Mormon’s own 2 Nephi 30:12.) Though perhaps unintentional on the part of the show-runners, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” might just inadvertantly be the most accurate representation for what raising children during the Millennium might actually look like.