Good Grief: Charles Schulz and the Theology of Failure
December 2025
Every year, Charlie Brown runs toward the football. Every year, Lucy pulls it away. He lands flat on his back, stares at the sky, and mutters those two words that became a national catchphrase: “Good grief.”
And every year, he tries again.
This isn’t optimism. Charlie Brown knows he will fail; he has failed every time before. The pattern is so predictable that even new readers know what’s coming. Yet something in him refuses to learn the lesson experience keeps teaching: stop trying.
Charles Schulz spent fifty years drawing this scene and variations of it. A boy who loses every baseball game but shows up for the next one. A kid who checks his mailbox every Valentine’s Day and finds it empty. A dog who keeps writing novels that get rejected. Schulz understood something American Christianity often struggles to remember: faithfulness isn’t about winning. It’s about showing up, even when failure feels inevitable.
This December, as we mark the birth of a child whose life would end in apparent defeat, Schulz’s theology of perseverance deserves a closer look.
The Man Who Drew Sadness
We remember Schulz as the creator of Peanuts, the strip that ran from 1950 to 2000 and became part of American consciousness. We remember A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has aired every year since 1965. We remember that he taught Sunday school for two decades and spoke openly about his faith.
What we forget, or never knew, is that Schulz wrestled with depression much of his life. Fame never dissolved his loneliness. His first marriage ended in heartbreak. Spiritually, he hovered between belief and uncertainty, never entirely comfortable with easy answers.
In 1997, three years before his death, he offered a line that revealed the tension he lived with: “I think I’ve discovered the secret of life: you just hang around until you get used to it.”
That wasn’t cynicism. It was honesty about what endurance actually feels like: not triumph or breakthrough, but the daily decision to continue when continuation itself becomes the victory.
And Schulz continued. Every day for fifty years, he stepped to his drawing board and created a world where failure was normal, disappointment was expected, and yet the characters kept trying anyway.
That persistence (drawing failure for half a century) is its own sermon.
The Patron Saint of Inadequacy
His baseball team loses every game. The scores are absurd. His pitching is so disastrous that line drives literally knock him out of his clothes. His team openly despises his leadership. Lucy calls him a blockhead to his face. And every spring, he organizes another season.
The little red-haired girl never notices him. The kite-eating tree always wins. On Halloween, he gets rocks while everyone else gets candy.
He is, by any measurable standard, a failure.
But Schulz knew that failure is not the opposite of faith; failure is the arena where faith takes shape.
Charlie Brown never becomes cynical. He doesn’t lash out or withdraw. He absorbs disappointment, mutters “good grief,” and returns the next day. Not because he expects a different outcome, but because something in him refuses to give failure the final word.
When Jesus said to forgive seventy times seven, He wasn’t offering a strategy for success. He was describing what love looks like when it refuses to quit. Charlie Brown embodies this: he keeps trusting Lucy not because he’s naïve, but because hope in him is more stubborn than cruelty in her.
This is grace in ordinary life: not dramatic transformation, just the courage to keep showing up.
Faith Without Reward
Every Halloween, while other children trick-or-treat, Linus sits in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin. He believes with total sincerity that the Great Pumpkin will rise from the most sincere patch and reward the faithful.
The Great Pumpkin never comes.
Year after year, Linus waits. His friends mock him, Sally resents him, and even Lucy calls him a blockhead. Yet he returns to the pumpkin patch, certain that sincerity must matter.
Still he believes.
Faith that persists only when rewarded isn’t faith. It’s a transaction.
Linus’s belief costs him something: time, friendships, reputation. And he keeps believing anyway. That is fidelity. Not because expectation is fulfilled, but because commitment is chosen.
The biblical prophets understood this. Jeremiah preached for decades and saw no revival. Hosea’s faithfulness didn’t cure his marriage. John the Baptist died in a prison cell, never seeing the kingdom he announced.
They were not rewarded for their faith. They simply lived it.
Linus embodies that same stubborn hope, a hope that refuses to die even when nothing arrives.
The Illusion of Quick Fixes
Lucy’s psychiatric booth sits on the sidewalk with its hand-lettered sign:
“The Doctor Is In: 5¢.”
Her advice rarely helps, and she often caused the problem in the first place. Yet she charges a nickel and presumes authority.
Schulz wasn’t just poking fun at therapy. The booth is a critique of cheap grace, the desire for quick solutions to deep problems.
Lucy represents our longing for formulas: say this prayer, follow these steps, read this book, apply this insight, and your struggles will vanish.
But wisdom is not a commodity you buy. It’s a character you become. And character forms slowly, through failure and endurance, through the long work of getting back up.
Lucy sells advice. Charlie Brown practices faithfulness.
That’s transformation, not information.
Dancing Anyway
Snoopy’s life is, on paper, small. A doghouse. A food bowl. A yard.
And yet he imagines himself a World War I Flying Ace. He writes novels. He travels the world in his mind. Most of all, he dances constantly, joyfully, for no reason at all.
Joy, Schulz suggests, is not the absence of suffering. Joy is the decision to delight in life as it is.
Snoopy doesn’t wait for improvement. He moves through ordinary days as if they are worth celebrating, and in doing so, he makes them so.
The Christian tradition calls this gratitude. Not sentimental positivity, but practiced attention to what is good even when much is hard.
Snoopy dances not because life is easy, but because life is a gift.
The Sadness Schulz Wouldn’t Hide
Peanuts is often melancholy. The strip ends not with punchlines, but with sighs: a character staring at the sky, a disappointment lingering in the final panel.
Schulz refused to sanitize life. Children feel loneliness. Adults carry disappointment. Faith coexists with grief. His characters voice the sadness people usually hide:
“Nobody likes me.”
“I got a rock.”
“My anxieties have anxieties.”
This honesty is its own form of grace.
Advent acknowledges darkness before light, longing before fulfillment. Schulz lived in that space. Charlie Brown doesn’t stop being anxious. Linus doesn’t abandon his blanket. Lucy doesn’t suddenly become kind. They remain who they are, and somehow grace finds them there.
Schulz trusted honesty more than cheerfulness: that naming sorrow is more faithful than denying it.
What We Forget
Our culture equates blessing with success, faith with winning, struggle with spiritual failure. We elevate testimonies about breakthroughs, not testimonies about endurance.
Schulz offers a counterpoint: faithfulness is not measured by outcomes. Losing does not negate dignity. Perseverance is moral formation.
Most of what sustains the world happens in obscurity: by parents caring for aging parents, teachers in underfunded schools, friends who keep calling when calls aren’t returned.
We want faith to make us winners. Schulz believed faith simply makes us people who keep showing up.
Scripture on Prime Time
In 1965, CBS gave Schulz a Christmas special. Executives hated it: too slow, no laugh track, and far too religious. They begged him to remove Linus’s recitation of Luke 2.
Schulz refused.
The scene is simple. Charlie Brown asks, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus steps forward, asks for the spotlight, drops his security blanket, and recites the nativity story.
No commentary. No apology. Just Scripture, offered with tenderness.
A Charlie Brown Christmas became the most-watched special of the year and remains a December tradition. Schulz didn’t win by compromise. He won by trusting that truth, spoken simply, can stand on its own.
The Point Is Returning
“Good grief” is a contradiction. Grief and goodness should not coexist. And yet they do. Grief can shape compassion. Disappointment can form humility. Failure can teach perseverance.
Charlie Brown will try again next year. Lucy will pull the football away. He will fall, stare at the sky, and mutter “good grief.”
And then he will get up.
This is Schulz’s moral world: the point isn’t victory. The point is returning: to hope after disappointment, to trust after betrayal, to love after loss. Not triumph, but courage. Not success, but faithfulness.
The cross was a failure by every measure that mattered to the powerful. Yet Christians call it good: the day everything went wrong is the day everything changed.
Maybe the gospel isn’t about never falling down.
Maybe it’s about getting back up.
Maybe faith isn’t the certainty you’ll win.
Maybe it’s the stubborn hope that refuses to let failure have the last word.
Good grief, indeed.
Selected References
Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts comic strip (1950–2000)
A Charlie Brown Christmas, CBS television special (1965)
David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
Luke 2:8–14
Matthew 18:21–22