Freedom From Religion (Page 2)

Beyond specific policy issues, pro-church arguments aim to shift progressive sympathies from secularists battling the political power of churches toward the claims of churches and believers that they are victims of a biased and rigid secularism. In part, those claims reflect the anger of religious intellectuals who feel marginalized in the secular cultures of the academy and the media and personally insulted by stereotypes that assume Catholics mindlessly take orders from the Pope, evangelical Christians are superstitious ignoramuses and "religious intellectual" is an oxymoron. Believers have also complained of protests that go beyond targeting church officials and their politics to take aim at worshipers themselves, like ACT UP's widely (and in my view rightly) criticized disruption of services at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

But charges of discrimination have also taken far more problematic forms. Consider the 1989 crisis over the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which depicted Mohammed in a manner that scandalized the Islamic world. Censorship, book-burning and riots in Islamic countries reached a climax in Iranian dictator Khomeini's call to Muslims around the world to execute Rushdie for blasphemy. A clearer case of religious oppression would be hard to come by; yet the writers and civil libertarians who protested on Rushdie's behalf (myself included) were criticized from the left--by columnist Juan Gonzalez and liberal theologian Harvey Cox, among others--for their supposed cultural imperialism and insensitivity to devout Muslims' feelings.

Most such sentiment probably had more to do with reflexive pro-Third World attitudes than with concern for religion as such. But parallel arguments have surfaced in home-grown controversies about art deemed sacrilegious and offensive to Christians--such as Andres Serrano's notorious depiction of a crucifix immersed in urine, Piss Christ, and Chris Ofili's elephant-dung-encrusted Virgin Mary in the 1999 "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. These works have repeatedly been characterized as expressions of anti-Catholic bigotry; that Serrano received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Brooklyn Museum gets support from New York City have been cited as evidence of state-sponsored hate. As liberal Catholic and Commonweal editor Margaret O'Brien Steinfels put it in a New York Times Op-Ed, "Elephant dung smeared on a church, synagogue or mosque would get the perpetrator arrested."

Yet both these artists have chosen to engage with their own religious tradition, through images that to my secular eye are designed not to insult believers but to question the disgust with the body and materiality embedded in orthodox Christianity and endemic to our culture. In Piss Christ, the radiant, sensuous liquid that surrounds the cross is not identifiable as urine unless you read the title. It seems clear--especially in the context of other Serrano works involving equally gorgeous, abstracted images of blood and semen--that the artist is invoking the idea of piss as desecration to challenge it with another possibility: that bodily fluids are holy. Similarly, Ofili's sweet-faced Madonna, with its dung (which is not "smeared") and little pornographic cherubs, is an earthy rather than ethereal figure. If these images are bigoted, then so by implication is any art that refuses a conventional reverence toward religious icons or invests them with idiosyncratic meanings that contradict orthodox beliefs.

Critics of organized religion who call attention to its history of persecuting dissenters have also been charged with bias on the grounds that modern secular regimes have committed even more murders. In his Notre Dame speech Lieberman recalled, as an illustration of antireligious intolerance, that when Jim Wallis gave a talk at Harvard on religion and public life, a member of the liberal audience asked, "What about the Inquisition?" Is it then intolerant of anti-Communists to bring up the gulag, since after all Christianity hardly has clean hands? Some commentators have even implied that opposition to the sexual politics of conservative churches is tantamount to discrimination. In the Times, religion columnist Peter Steinfels, also on the Catholic left, scoffs at Democrats' criticism of Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University; as he sees it, Bob Jones's anachronistic version of anti-Catholicism is innocuous compared with the way Catholic Democrats have been made to feel like "pariahs" by their party's "unqualified support for abortion rights." (It's not as unqualified as all that, but never mind.) On his list of anti-Catholic prejudices held by America's supposedly enlightened opinion-makers, he includes the notion that the Church's sexual standards are "unnatural, repressive, and hypocritical." I concede that "hypocritical" is a presumptuous judgment, and "unnatural" a philosophical can of worms. But the belief that proscriptions on sex outside marriage, homosexuality, masturbation, birth control and abortion are repressive (and, I would add, sexist) is not a prejudice--it represents a basic disagreement with the Church about the conditions of human well-being.

Just as the family issue migrated from the precincts of the Christian right into the political mainstream via neoconservatives, communitarians and New Democrats, the faith issue has followed a similar route. The Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, with their influence on the Republican Party--a Justice Department run by John Ashcroft would be their biggest prize yet --opened up political space for attacks on secularism. But the biblical rhetoric of right-wing evangelicals, with its invocations to a "Christian nation" and sectarian campaigns like the fight against teaching evolution in the public schools, have little popular appeal outside the South; nor do they speak to the centrist elites in the media and the governing class, let alone the left. Ashcroft is the nose-thumbing choice of an accidental President; if confirmed (as this issue goes to press the Senate has not yet voted) he will no doubt do real damage, but he will also excite constant opposition, and his influence on the larger culture will be minimal. Before pro-church views could make real headway, they had to be translated into a less parochial language.

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