In which a devout Latter-day Saint argues, in full sincerity, that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia may be the most accidentally instructive piece of scripture-adjacent media currently streaming on Hulu.
Reading time: about 15 minutes. Worth it. I promise.
A note before we begin: I am not saying you should watch this show. I am saying that if you have already watched it — and I know some of you have, I've seen the browser history on the family iPad, and we will be discussing that at a later date — you may find that the Spirit can teach us even through the most unlikely vessels. Dennis Reynolds is, apparently, one of those vessels. For character profiles of the Gang, see the characters page. For episode-by-episode breakdowns, consult the episode guide.
Mosiah 3:19 — “For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit.”
King Benjamin, addressing his people from atop a tower because the crowd was too large for the building, delivered what is arguably the most efficient description of the Gang at Paddy's Pub that has ever been recorded in any text, sacred or secular. The natural man is an enemy to God. He is carnal, sensual, devilish. He does not yield. He does not reflect. He doubles down.
What makes Always Sunny theologically remarkable — and I want to be precise here, because I did not say wholesome, I said remarkable — is that each member of the Gang appears to represent a distinct and almost clinical manifestation of natural-man tendencies. The writers almost certainly did not intend this. Rob McElhenney has not, to my knowledge, read Mosiah. And yet.
Dennis is Pride in a form so pure it has become almost abstract. He does not merely think he is better than others — he has constructed an entire internal mythology in which his superiority is a cosmological fact. He references his "Golden God" status with the same matter-of-fact tone a bishop might use to confirm a meeting time. What makes Dennis particularly instructive is that his pride is completely untethered from any actual achievement. He has accomplished very little. His confidence is not earned. It is, in the LDS framework, the counterfeit of the divine identity that is actually available to all of us through the Atonement — the cheap imitation, worn loudly to cover the hollow place where genuine spiritual self-worth would go.
I find Dennis the hardest to watch. He is funny and he is genuinely frightening and sometimes those two things happen in the same sentence.
Mac is the Gang's theologian, which is either the funniest or most heartbreaking thing about the show, depending on your disposition. He is a self-described devout Catholic who engages in behavior that would give a lenient bishop pause. The gap between who Mac says he is and who Mac demonstrably is — this gap is the show's central running joke and also, I would argue, its central spiritual diagnostic.
Proverbs 14:12: "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." Mac is walking that way at a confident jog, karate-kicking anyone who suggests a course correction. What Mac demonstrates is the particular spiritual danger of having just enough religious vocabulary to insulate yourself from actual religious transformation. He knows the words. He has not done the work. The Lord is not fooled. Neither is the audience.
Dee wants what others have — specifically, she wants recognition, respect, and an acting career — and her inability to receive any of these things, combined with the way the Gang reflexively dismisses her, has curdled into a specific kind of envy that periodically erupts into schemes of impressive vindictiveness. She is simultaneously a victim of the Gang's culture and a full participant in perpetuating it. This is not unlike what envy does in actual communities: the envied and the envious trade places without the underlying structure ever changing.
Frank Reynolds began the show as a relatively coherent, if morally flexible, businessman. Over the seasons, he has descended — deliberately, cheerfully, enthusiastically — into a state of near-total surrender to appetite. He eats what he wants. He does what he wants. He sleeps where he lands. He arrived, by his own design, at a condition that Mormon theology would describe as approaching Outer Darkness — not because of the specific acts (though those are concerning), but because of the utter absence of any competing value. Frank has no north star. He has a dumpster and an inexhaustible supply of schemes, and he appears perfectly satisfied.
Danny DeVito plays him magnificently, which makes it worse.
Charlie deserves his own section, which he will get. He is the complicating factor in the taxonomy. He always is.
Or: What Hell Looks Like in a Paddy's Pub T-Shirt
The LDS doctrine of moral agency is, depending on who you ask, either the most liberating or the most sobering principle in the Restoration. God will not override our choices. We are free to choose, and the consequences follow, and if we refuse to learn from the consequences, we are free to make the same choices again, and the consequences will follow again, with compound interest.
The writers of Always Sunny stumbled into this doctrine and have been exploring its implications for sixteen seasons without, apparently, realizing it. The Gang makes choices — almost always bad ones, frequently catastrophic ones — and the choices produce consequences. And then, in the next episode, the consequences are largely forgotten, and the Gang makes choices again. This is not lazy writing (well, sometimes it is). It is, I would argue, a perfect depiction of what it looks like to have agency without repentance.
In the Gospel, the paired concept to agency is accountability. We are agents, and we are accountable. The Atonement of Jesus Christ is what makes it possible to be accountable without being crushed by that accountability — to face what we've done, feel it, change, and move forward. The Gang has none of this mechanism available to them, or rather, they refuse to access it. Every scheme fails. They learn nothing. The next scheme begins.
This, if you want a one-sentence description of what hell looks like, is it. Not fire (necessarily). Just an endless loop of choices, consequences, and an absolute refusal to be changed by either. The Gang is in hell. They've decorated it with Coors Light signs and they seem mostly fine with this, which may be the saddest part.
"And their torment is as a lake of fire and brimstone, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever and has no end." — 2 Nephi 9:16. The flame, in this case, is the accumulated psychic weight of fifteen years of schemes that never worked. Nobody escapes Paddy's.
What I find instructive for my own life — and I think this is the appropriate way to engage with art, even troubling art — is the question: where am I making the same choices and expecting different results? Where is my own Paddy's Pub? This is between me and my Heavenly Father, but I will say that it involves a recurring argument about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher that has been ongoing since 2019.
Or: What a Ward Could Have Fixed
Here is the thing about the Gang that I keep coming back to, the thing that makes the show more than just a catalogue of bad behavior: they keep returning to each other. Every season, every scheme, every catastrophic failure — and they're back at the bar the next morning. They are, in their broken and entirely unrecommended way, a community.
The LDS concept of ward family is one of the most beautiful and, I think, underappreciated ideas in the Restoration. We don't choose our ward. We show up at the building assigned to our address, and we sit next to people we would not necessarily have selected, and we are asked to love them and serve them and be accountable to them. The ward is a covenant community. It is held together not by affinity but by obligation and grace.
The Gang is a perversion of this idea, which is actually what makes it theologically legible. They didn't choose each other either. They're stuck together by circumstance, history, and the shared ownership of a failing bar. They have inside jokes and loyalty and genuine (if deeply dysfunctional) affection for each other. They need each other. And yet, because there is no covenant — no higher purpose binding them, no accountability structure, no one asking "how are you really doing" in an annual interview — their community produces nothing redemptive. It recycles suffering. It is community as closed loop.
What a good ward family would do with the Gang, I think about regularly. Charlie's extraordinary talents would be put to use in ward choir immediately. Dee would be given meaningful callings that let her performance gifts serve something larger than herself. Mac would encounter a bishop who had the spiritual and emotional patience to sit with him through the real conversation that all his bluster is avoiding. Dennis would be loved by people who didn't need anything from him, and that — I genuinely believe this — might be the one thing that could crack him open.
Frank would be assigned to help with the food pantry. I think that would be good for Frank.