Jesus v Jerry – a post-christendom opera -Jan 13, 2005

During the November 2004 US presidential election the eyes of many in Britain looked towards the influence of the religious right on American society with a mixture of distaste, pity and bafflement.

Thank goodness this could never happen here in ‘secular Europe’, they thought. Given the threats and nastiness involved in recent rows about alleged blasphemy, that may prove too simple a diagnosis.

According to polls some 45 percent of US citizens now deny evolutionary theory and advocate ‘creationism’, a farrago of nonsense based on an ideologically fallacious misreading of the Genesis narratives. Millions also believe that America’s right to remake the world militarily in its own image is divine will.

For this new ‘moral majority’ ethics begins in the bedroom, stalks the classroom and apparently ends as soon as someone is able to accumulate, kill and pollute on behalf of ‘God’s nation’.

It’s hard to imagine such a worldview gripping the popular imagination of middle Britain, certainly. Prejudices die hard there; you only have to read the Daily Mail to see that. But generally speaking, the argument goes, we prefer agnostic parochialism to crusading zeal.

However this picture of settled, temperamentally secular Britain breaks down when we consider the furore over Jerry Springer – The Opera (which the BBC has just taken from stage to screen in face of menacing protests) and Behzti (the play abandoned by a Birmingham theatre after a campaign of intimidation).

Then there are the less publicised verbal assaults against soap opera Eastenders over the use of a religious statue, and the police protection needed for the play Corpus Christi at St Andrew’s.

Affronted Christians, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus are on the march – demanding the right not to be offended and to live in a society where their values are foundational. Against them are pitted those who want religion out of the social and political picture altogether. It is a standoff with no easy winners and many likely victims.

How on earth did we get into this mess? There are a number of reasons. They start with the huge gulf in cultural understanding that divides the cosmopolitan literati from conservative-minded religious believers.

Most of those who condemn Jerry Springer - The Opera have little evident appreciation for irony, satire or the comedic portrayal of darkness, danger and confusion. Either that or they think that their fellow adults need nannying away from such things on pain of corruption.

Many of them probably still think that Monty Python’s Life of Brian is blasphemous, failing to understand that what is being laughed at in the film is not Jesus but mindless messianism, political or religious.

I still cringe when I recall those TV debates when the Python movie first came out, with self-styled Christian campaigners completely missing the theological point that was only too apparent to the filmmakers they were attacking. Talk about irony.

To put it bluntly, the religiously offended are bad at interpreting texts – which is why they also make unreliable, rigid and unimaginative expositors of the Bible. The Word made flesh, taking on the mess of humanity, is too much for them to bear. They prefer something safe, prescriptive and sanitised.

In the case of Springer, newspaper columnist Melanie Philips (no lily-livered leftie, she) has hit the nail on the head. She writes: “Protesting Christians have simply failed to understand… The show is not, as they claim, an attack on God, Jesus or Christianity. It is instead an attack upon the values of modern television, and, specifically, upon the American TV show Jerry Springer …”

Quite right. But the affronted faithful don’t get it. So the task of debate, argument and education about culture within the Christian church (and within other faith communities) is huge. An uphill task, even.

And it matters too, because when sensibility leans towards censorship it becomes ineluctably political, issuing in the too-easy conflation of mainstream and fringe faith groups united in knee-jerk reaction to that which causes them offence.

The media plays its part in stirring this cauldron. It laps up the outrage and panders promiscuously to extreme groups like Christian Voice, UK Lifeleague and Operation Christian Vote. As moderate voices are sidelined (“not news”), the agenda shifts insidiously towards moral panic.

So the Bishop of Manchester is now joining 1,900 other official complainants to the BBC on behalf of the Church of England, in spite of a much more thoughtful comment from members of the Churches’ Media Council acknowledging that the Springer show is “an allegory, a morality play.”

The responsibility is the Bishop’s of course. But he would probably never have heard of the Springer production without the placards and the publicity. That’s how the game spreads.

What is entailed here is not a simple disagreement about taste (that in itself is no bad thing), but the attempt by some Christians – and those of allied convictions – to impose their view on such matters through public policy.

This attempt comes in two forms. The old-fashioned kind is about making Britain “a Christian country” once again. In other words, seeking to restore religious hegemony in public life.

The new-fashioned kind claims to be about “the rights of communities rather than individuals”, but is actually about some members of a community imposing their claims on others within and without that community.

This is symptomatic of widespread confusion about the distinction between maintaining religious liberty on the one hand and seeking religious control on the other. Some evangelical groups, for instance, wish to defend their right to offend other faiths or outlooks, but protest strongly when anyone does the same to their beliefs.

All this constitutes a slippery slope to damnation. Instead of abolishing blasphemy laws (which only encourage it, in any case) siren voices start to call for their extension “in order to be fair”. What we end up with is legal warfare between competing sects.

And instead of utilising existing public order laws rightfully to prevent intimidation and threat against identifiable groups of people, ill-defined notions of ‘religious discrimination’ get bandied around – designed to outlaw things that are already, in fact, illegal.

Much of this unhealthy posturing is fostered by the Blair government’s apparent eagerness to placate faith communities in the run up to another general election. This does not encourage genuine participation by religious bodies in civil society; it actually makes them objects of suspicion and control.

Underlying all this is a hankering among many Christians for the dying edifice of Christendom: the withering ideal of a supposedly “Christian society” preserved from decay by the power of a state Church and by the reservation of a privileged place in governance for its members.

In its generic sense this is what is really at stake in the cultural protests of Christian conservatives and their allies in other faith groups. They are utterly furious in the face of a culture they cannot control any more.

The truth is that neither Christians, nor Muslims (nor humanists) can call all the shots. And nor should they. But this realisation can be immensely painful to those who have grown up thinking of themselves as part of a ‘natural majority’, or who can brook no dissent from their ideals.

The resulting anger and sense of disempowerment is much wider and more powerful than the metropolitan elite comprehends. Left unattended it will explode, as we have seen over Springer and Behzti.

That is why even the suasions of the religious right in the US and its minnow satellites in Britain need to be understood and responded to, not simply mocked.

We may not be able to resolve irreconcilable differences, but we can confront hurt and seek the path of persuasion instead of compulsion in handling them.

For the mainstream churches, moreover, this post-Christendom challenge ought to be conceivable in much more positive terms. The end of the domination of ‘our group’ in society is also the opportunity to rethink radically what we are actually about.

Suppose Christianity chose to take the person of Jesus (rather than its own status) seriously again, for example? In doing this it could no longer be wedded to manipulation and control. For without abandoning such mechanisms it could never hope to embrace the disarming, transforming, defenceless God of cradle and cross.

“Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit says the Sovereign One” is the way the ancient Hebrew prophet Zechariah put the matter. What is needed is a religion of thought not rage, love not intimidation, laughter not fear, witness not war, sign not censorship, reason not retribution, life not death.

Setting up Jesus versus Jerry and throwing insults at the other guy loses this plot entirely. What we should be working on instead is ‘After Christendom – The Opera’. Hopeful, dangerous, vulnerable… and much more fun.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.