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By James Dennis LoRusso, Religion Bulletin

Were you to travel one segment of the Eisenhower Expressway in Illinois this morning, you might discover a curious billboard.  The display features a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski, the self-confessed “Unabomber,” coupled with the question, “I still believe in Global Warming.  Do You?”  The new billboard campaign lining various commuter routes is the latest initiative of the Chicago-based conservative think tank, the Heartland Foundation, to call into question prevailing scientific consensus around climate change.

Predictably, progressives have responded virulently, claiming that Heartland has sunk to a new low in its effort to undermine and politicize “mainstream” science.  In a scathing response, Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast characterizes the strategy as “a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses on guilt by the most extreme association.”  In other words, by linking belief in global warming to the likes of Kaczynski, Castro, and Charles Manson, all of whom presumably agree with the thesis of climate change, Heartland implies that anyone subscribing to such views must also be degenerate.

While Sullivan’s critique is warranted, it also reveals something significant about the shape of American political discourse more generally.  To borrow a notion from Roland Barthes, esteemed scholar of twentieth-century myth, American political discourse has becomedepoliticized.  Barthes writes: “Myth is depoliticized speech… Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” (Mythologies, 143) Barthes wishes for us to see how myths transform historically situated and contested knowledge into concepts beyond the pale of critique.

At first glance, the billboard appears to perform precisely the opposite function of myth; After all, isn’t it calling into question something which “mainstream” science simply acknowledges as “a statement of fact?” Well, yes… and no.  Barthes also reminds us that all is not as it appears in myth.  He writes, “myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.”  Similarly, these billboards clearly intend to question global warming, and to associate this view with various serial killers, dictators, and cult leaders.  Nothing is hidden here.  The mythic component, however, operates at a higher order: It is the underlying assumption, as Barthes suggests, which inflects the meaning of the billboard for the passerby.

By including Kaczynski, the billboard presents global warming as pathological rather than political.  At least in American popular discourse, his actions represent those of a sick and demented mind, rather than a politically motivated individual (despite the vast amount of evidence that the “Unabomber” saw himself as utterly political).  By extension, then, anyone who subscribes to the idea of man-made climate change must also be experiencing some form of mental illness.

Curiously, in his critique of the billboard campaign, Andrew Sullivan merely inverts the main characters, reproducing the same myth.  After carefully pointing out how the Heartland Foundation has rendered “the left” as some monolithic bloc of mentally deranged psychopaths for believing in global warming, Sullivan concludes: “Large sections of the American right are now close to insane as well as depraved.  And there is no Buckley to reign them in.  Just countless Jonah Golbergs seeking to cash in.” Here, he reduces the conservative audience towards whom these billboards are aimed to a mob of mentally deranged subjects.

What, then, does this analysis of political squabbling accomplish? Well, employing Barthes’ lens exposes contemporary American politics as pathological, even bipolar.  Each side deploys the language of pathology in order to construct an “other” that is neither political nor rational (perhaps not even human), but ill or evil.  This strategy insulates one’s position from critique, as it simultaneously depoliticizes the issue (in this case global warming).  “Something must be wrong with those people,” we say.

Taking the attitude that “you can’t reason with a crazy person,” however, seems troubling to me, as I look out on a world filled with violence, suffering, and increasingly concentrated undemocratic power in the form of transnational corporations. Democracy, I was always taught, requires that we accord human dignity to others, even those with whom we disagree politically.  It demands that we take our adversaries as thinking individuals; it asks that we assume that they, despite our differences, believe that they have the best interests of society at hand, and finally, it challenges us to engage in reasoned debate with one another to establish the grounds for practical solutions. Contemporary political actors on all sides instead engage in competing forms of myth-making, designed to dehumanize the opposition and depoliticize the issues.

Of course, Barthes might claim that I am merely constructing a myth of my own, one that naturalizes all humans as reasonable and well-intentioned.  But as he states, “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology.”

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By Catherine Schmidt, Georgia State University

This is part III of a IV part series exploring popular culture depictions of Mary Magdalene.  In part I, we looked at a brief history of pre-Vatican II portrayals of Mary.  Part II discussed the history of Vatican II in relation to Mary and how the change in Church thinking did little to how Mary was portrayed in popular culture as seen in Lady Gaga’s music video “Judas.”  Part III will build on the post-Vatican II portrayals with the musical film Jesus Christ Superstar. 

In stark contrast to DeMille’s and Lady Gaga’s Mary is the Mary that is portrayed in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical turned film Jesus Christ Superstar.  Unlike the other two Marys discussed, Webber and Rice’s Mary is not dressed in elaborate costumes.  As well, she is without makeup and her hair is plain.  The one similarity in dress is the jewelry she wears.  In Jesus Christ Superstar, the only differentiating feature from Mary to the other women is that she has both a necklace and earrings on during her two most prominent songs.  Another stark difference is that this Mary is actually more conservatively dressed compared to the other women in the cast.  Where some women are dressed showing plenty of skin (as can be expected for a film made in the 1970s), Mary is dressed in a long tunic.  However, just because she is dressed more conservatively—a term I will use loosely since Mary’s dress is low-cut—does not mean her character is no longer part of the ancient “mud-slinging job.” 

Jesus Christ Superstar was first produced as an album in 1970 just after the Second Vatican Council.  One year later it came to Broadway and received a great reception.  In 1973 it was made into a film and, thus, allowed more than just those able to make it to either New York or London (where it was also now being performed) to see the production.[1]  The musical continues to be produced all over the world and the film has been re-adapted two times, with a third scheduled for release in 2014.[2]  Though the writing of the musical comes at the heels of Vatican II, Webber and Rice apparently did not get the memo about Mary.  Once again, Mary is confused with other women in the Bible and she is still represented as a prostitute.  During the song “What’s the Buzz” Mary starts to wash Jesus’ head and feet with oils.  Then, Judas interrupts the song with his own titled “Strange Thing Mystifying.”  He does not explicitly call Mary a prostitute, but it can been easily inferred when Judas sings “…a man like you can waste his time on women of her kind…” and later “it’s not that I object to her profession, but she doesn’t fit in well with what you teach and say.”  Jesus responds by defending Mary and verbally throws stones at Judas.  He screams/sings “If your slate is clean, then you can throw stones.   If your slate is not, then leave her alone!”  In this one scene, Mary has been combined with three different women in the New Testament, none of which are actually Mary Magdalene.  Mary washing Jesus occurs a second time (possibly to mirror the two separate times different women anoint Jesus’ feet in the New Testament) during her song “Everything’s Alright.”  In this song, Mary tries to calm and seduce Jesus.  Her hands are strategically placed throughout the song to show the intimacy she has for Jesus.  Yet again, Judas interrupts Mary anointing Jesus arguing that the money used for the ointment could have been used to feed the poor (a scene lifted straight from John 12:1-8, except that the Mary in these verses was actually Mary of Bethany and not Mary Magdalene). 

In Mary’s most famous song in the musical, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” the audience learns more about her past.  Unlike The King of Kings in which Judas was her best client or “Judas” in which she is in love with Judas, in Jesus Christ Superstar Mary is in love with Jesus himself.  She laments “I don’t know how to take this.   I don’t see why he moves me.   He’s a man.  He’s just a man.   And I’ve had so many men before in very many ways.   He’s just one more.”  Later in the song she admits that she would not know how to respond if he loved her back.  She would be “lost,” “frightened,” and she would “turn [her] head” despite that she “want[s] him so” and “love[s] him so.”  It has been argued that this song is “no distanced reverence for a demi-god but rather a distressed, emotional entanglement with a fellow human-being.”[3]  By having Mary love Jesus as any woman may love a man, the story becomes more relatable to the audience.  Add Judas, who believes they are wrong for each other and should not be seen together, and it becomes a soap opera of biblical times. 

DeMille was not the only director that looked at popular Christian art and legends for inspiration.  Webber and Rice relied heavily on “conflated and erroneous biblical interpretations,” as well as prevalent art and legends.[4]  In fact, the scene of the last supper, the disciples and Jesus make a point of copying the body positions in Leonardo Di Vinci’s famous masterpiece.  The art that is imitated into the film reinforces the concepts they depict to the audience and, unfortunately, many in the audience believe the images are accurate and not fabrications of the artists’ minds.  If Mary is continually portrayed as a prostitute, audiences will believe she was one, even if academia states otherwise.  Film, especially, has great power in reinforcing the pre-conceived notions of Mary’s image.  As well, what the audience sees in film (especially if the same image is repeated in different films) often over-shadows people’s own interpretations of people and events represented in a film.[5] 

The ending to Jesus Christ Superstar is quite unsettling.  After the death of Jesus, there is no resurrection scene.  The movie ends with the cast packing up the set and loading onto the bus the movie opened with.  With no resurrection scene, Mary is unable to be the first to see the risen Jesus, and thus, unable to be the first to spread the message of his resurrection.  The only Mary the audience is aware of in this musical/film is that of a prostitute in love with Jesus.  

Bart Ehrman argues that because Mary was the first to witness and proclaim the resurrection, she started Christianity.  He stated that if the resurrection did historically happen[6], Mary is far more important than how she is depicted currently (and historically).  His argument is based on the idea that: 

The Christian religion is founded on the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead.  And it appears virtually certain that it was Mary Magdalene of all people, an otherwise unknown Galilean Jewish woman of means, who first propounded this belief.  It is not at all farfetched to claim that Mary was the founder of Christianity.[7]

Had it not been for Mary, Christianity may never have started, according to this argument.  Christianity needed someone to announce that Jesus had risen.  And since she was the first to make such an announcement, Mary started Christianity.[8]  By omitting this scene in Jesus Christ Superstar, Mary’s importance vanishes, and she is just another woman around Jesus. 

We will finish this series with Part IV of that will discuss The Da Vinci Code and concluding remarks.  According toThe Da Vinci Code, Mary knew how to love Jesus.

 ***************

Author’s Bio

Catherine Schmidt is an associate editor of Religion Nerd.  Catherine earned her BA in Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2005) and her MA in Religious Studies at Georgia State University (2012).  She has presented her work at academic conferences in the local, regional, and national level.  Catherine’s interest range include: religion and popular culture, women and religion, Mary Magdalene, and early Christian history.  She hopes in the future to pursue her PhD where she can combine her many interests. 

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By Catherine Schmidt, Georgia State University

In part one of this series, we looked at how Mary Magdalene was depicted in popular culture prior to Vatican II. This second installment will discuss both the history of Vatican II in relation to Mary and Lady Gaga’s interpretation of Mary in her music video for her son “Judas”. 

In the 1960s the Catholic Church held a council to essentially modernize the Catholic Church. This was the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II. One of the many things done was the changing of the suggested readings for Mary’s saint day. No longer did the readings include the Biblical verses that Pope Gregory I attributed to Mary, making her a prostitute in the eyes of the church. The verses suggested would now be verses to highlight her greatest biblical achievement: being the first to see the resurrected Jesus. After almost fourteen hundred years, Mary would no longer be thought of as a prostitute, sinner, or repentant whore, right? Unfortunately, not quite. Just because her designation on a calendar was changed by the Catholic Church, it did not change fourteen hundred years of thinking.  Due to all the depictions of Mary as a prostitute in pieces of art, theater, novels, sermons, and film, the “error was so firmly entrenched in Western thought”[1] and it would take more than an official change in Catholic Church thinking to change Mary’s reputation.  According to some scholars, even after Vatican II, many Catholics were unaware, until The Da Vinci Code in 2003, that Mary was not a prostitute. Since American popular culture continued to portray her as such, the views of her stayed the same in the public eye.[2] Even after the novel and film The Da Vinci Code, Mary continues to be portrayed as a prostitute. Mary’s depiction in The Da Vinci Code will be discussed in Part 4 of this series. 

On May 5, 2011, popular culture icon Lady Gaga released the music video for her song “Judas” from her album Born this Way. In the music video, Lady Gaga plays the role of a modern day Mary who is a member of a motorcycle gang. Though Lady Gaga states she is a Catholic, the way she represents Mary both lyrically and visually in the video shows that she does not pay close attention to scripture. As with pre-Vatican II artistic renderings, Lady Gaga’s Mary is still portrayed as a “fame hooker, prostitute, [and] wench.”[3] Though unlike The King of Kings (see Part 1 of 4) in which Judas is only Mary’s favorite client, the lyrics and music video for the song argue that Mary was in love with Judas with the chorus repeating the line “I’m in love with Judas, Judas!” 

Throughout the music video, Lady Gaga’s Mary is dressed very provocatively, which can be expected from something produced by Lady Gaga.  Her Mary goes through several different costume changes.  There are three interesting outfits that I will comment on.  The first is the very first image we see of Lady Gaga as Mary.  In the opening scene of the video, Mary is riding on the back of a motorcycle holding on to Jesus.  While the other disciples have their names written on the back of their leather jackets, the viewer knows this is Jesus because of his crown of golden thorns he is wearing.  The visual is reinforced with the lyrics “a king with no crown, king with no crown.”  Mary, likewise, has a crown but it is made of jewels.  Here, Lady Gaga is suggesting that Mary is Jesus’ queen. The second interesting outfit is from one of the many dancing scenes in the video. The outfit is a red bikini (the bikini not being the unusual aspect of a Lady Gaga video) with gold crosses on the breasts. Attached to the lower portion of the bikini is a train. This train brings back images of Mary’s cape from the opening scenes in The King of Kings. In an online article responding to the music video, Ed Masley stated: 

This isn’t the first time an artist has turned to the Bible for metaphors, of course.  But [Lady] Gaga dances in her underwear, so it probably seems more sacrilegious than when someone like Bob Dylan does it, even though the central theme of both the lyrics and the video is humanity’s inner struggle to choose virtue over vice, as represented here by Jesus over Judas.[4] 

Lady Gaga’s last outfit of the video has her dressed in a large, elaborate white gown.  She is again suggesting that Mary is the bride of Jesus by wearing what looks like a wedding dress.  As well, Lady Gaga, like Pope Gregory I, combines the many women of the New Testament in her music video into one Mary.  Song lyrics include “I wash his feet with my hair if he needs” and there is a scene where Mary washes Jesus’ feet—as well as Judas’ which is unique to Lady Gaga.  Something that is not depicted incorrectly in The King of Kings, but is in this music video, is Mary being stoned at the very end of the video (in reference to the unnamed sinful woman that Jesus saves from being stoned.  In Gaga’s video, Jesus does not arrive in time to save this woman).  

It is as if Vatican II never happened in Lady Gaga’s world.  Mary is still confused with other women in the New Testament.  To go even further, Lady Gaga’s Mary, unlike many other depictions of Mary, is not the repentant sinner.  At one point in the song she sings “in the most Biblical sense, I am beyond repentance.  Fame hooker, prostitute, wench” and while “Jesus is [her] virtue.  Judas is the demon [she] clings to.”  Mary has not been freed of her demons by Jesus nor is she remorseful of her past.  Lady Gaga’s video/lyrical depiction of Mary consequently allows the misrepresentation and “mud-slinging job” to live on for another generation. Yet another generation, even after the Catholic Church no longer supports the same opinion officially, sees Mary portrayed this way and believes it is true. “Seeing engages us in the activity of the transmission of knowledge. Knowledge is power. Images have power, and an essential part of that power is their ability to communicate authority and reality.”[5]  Since the Mary in Lady Gaga’s video is what audiences expect Mary to be (that is confused with other women in the New Testament, and not dressed in a bikini) it becomes their reality of what Mary should be. 

Lady Gaga’s representation of Mary is not that of a powerful woman. The video suggests that her stamp in history is that of a whore in love with both Jesus and Judas. Varying interpretations of Mary are not only due to Pope Gregory I’s sermon, but also the lack of canonical information on her. Ingrid Maisch argued that many interpreters of Mary are “eager to describe her significance, but they believe that the New Testament evidence yields too little information; hence the evidence is ‘enhanced’ by making the connection to other women…The confused picture is ‘used’ as a means of pursuing various ends.”[6] Mary continues to be marginalized and demeaned even forty-two years after Vatican II. 

Stay tuned for Part 3 of the 4 part article that will build even further the myth of Mary’s reputation. Jesus Christ Superstar will be discussed that adds an extra element of Mary’s sexual love of Jesus.

****************

Author’s Bio

Catherine Schmidt is an associate editor of Religion Nerd.  Catherine earned her BA in Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2005) and her MA in Religious Studies at Georgia State University (2012).  She has presented her work at academic conferences in the local, regional, and national level.  Catherine’s interest range include: religion and popular culture, women and religion, Mary Magdalene, and early Christian history.  She hopes in the future to pursue her PhD where she can combine her many interests. 

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University  

President Obama’s Press Secretary, Jay Carney, put it this way: “The President believes that everyone who serves the American people by working for this government needs to hold themselves to the highest standards of public service.” 

Mitt Romney was pithier; he said he’d “clean house.” 

A thoughtful US citizen might well wonder what they were referring to, sadly enough, because there are so many scandals to choose from. 

There is the GSA scandal, first of all: Hundreds of thousands of dollars squandered by a federal bureaucracy for lavish entertaining in Las Vegas and the Napa Valley. The outrage expressed for this one is already bipartisan and utterly emotive. 

But there is also the Secret Service scandal, involving (at present counting) twelve Secret Service officers who engaged in some lavish entertaining of their own, in Cartagena, Columbia, several short days prior to the President’s visit. Here the enquiry had less to do with the expense, and more to do with the sex. Apparently, a number of Secret Service officers had hired escorts—prostitutes, thank you very much—for a late night party at their hotel. 

Conspicuously absent from this list of potential scandals is the report printed by the Los Angeles Times that US service personnel in Afghanistan have been at it again, this time photographing themselves with severed body parts they claim belong to Taliban suicide bombers. 

So we’ve got a choice here, and we’ve got it all: money, sex, and violent disregard. 

My concern has to do with the sinking sense that I know exactly which one of these stories has legs. The military story is already half-forgotten 24 hours later. Apparently those people “who serve the American people by working for the government” get a pass. 

The GSA story has legs, especially as we learn more about what exactly transpired in Vegas and Napa Valley. The money can’t all have been for psychics and for clowns. 

The story that is sure to last is the Secret Service scandal. Because there’s sex involved. Sure, it’s sex somebody allegedly paid for, but nobody is alleging that a US government agency paid for it. These boys paid for their own party. It’s not a violation of public funds that’s at issue here; it’s sex, pure and simple. 

It is dismaying that the sexual obsessions of contemporary US culture could so completely stack the deck against caring about what, by any reasonable moral accounting, is the worst of these three. 

Ever since Homer first channeled his Muse, the mutilation of the enemy corpse has been a symbol of the very worst of which humanity is capable. And such violations almost always carried consequences, immediate ones. As we continue to turn a blind eye to what our own moral callousness vis-à-vis a perceived enemy, alive or dead, implies, invocations of “the highest standards of public service” will continue to appear to be as hollow and hypocritical as our enemies take them to be.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

One of the dangers in reporting on the Republican presidential primaries, and now the looming presidential election season, is that national issues and agendas drown out any real connection to more local issues and concerns. I was reminded of this again last week as I drove through heavily wooded back roads of Alabama, and saw signage on trees relating to the primary election they held in back mid-March. Over and over again, I saw the name: Roy Moore. 

It was a familiar name but it took a moment to recall why. Roy Moore was elected as the Alabama State Supreme Court Justice in 2000. He infamously arranged to have a two-ton granite display of the Ten Commandments placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building the next year. He did this in the middle of the night on July 31, 2001, without consulting the other Supreme Court justices. Moore was ordered by a US District Court to remove the monument and refused to do so. His eight colleagues overruled him, and the Ten Commandments monument was removed from the rotunda and taken on a nationwide fund-raising tour. Meanwhile, Alabama’s Judicial Ethics panel voted unanimously to remove Moore from his position on November 13, 2003. 

Moore ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for state governor in 2006, losing by a 2 to 1 majority to the incumbent governor, Bob Riley. He tried again in 2010, but came in fourth with only 19% of the Republican vote. In 2011, Moore formed an exploratory committee to consider a run for the White House, but decided the odds were long, even by his risk taker’s standards. 

And now Moore is back, running for his old job as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. And while he has promised not to try to restore the monument, his views on the very tenuous separation between the Christian religion and the southern states is very clear. 

This time, Moore won his bid, and so now he will be on the ballot as the Republican candidate for State Supreme Court Justice in November. Moore has indicated that he does not wish to pick this fight a second time, and that the centerpiece of his understanding of judicial responsibility is how to adjudicate fairly and efficiently in a time of massive cuts in state spending in all social sectors, but especially for courts and policing. 

Fair enough, but his re-election website  tells a very different story, a story that makes the Ten Commandments monument, the subsequent debate it generated, and his eventual dismissal all central to his entire judicial philosophy. Moore’s own providential career, as he suggests quite clearly, has always hinged on the Ten Commandments. As the six-and-one-half minute video on his website makes clear, when God brought his future wife into his life in 1985, and shortly after they married, she was given the responsibility for decorating their new home. She placed a copy of the Ten Commandments prominently on the wall of that home. 

Later, when Moore took up his duties as Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice, he elected to bring that wall hanging into his courthouse. That decision prompted an immediate push-back from the ACLU, and the video suggests that this was what inspired Moore to up the ante by placing a much larger display in the rotunda in a manner that would be literally impossible to miss. His martyrdom to the cause of an inseparable church and state serves, he suggests, as “a reminder of our nation’s Godly heritage,” as well as of “the divine foundation of this nation.” Moore himself points to the real unity of his judicial career as a “long battle to recognize the sovereignty of God,” and to call the country back to its true identity as “one nation under God.” It is striking that the very next phrase of that pledge of allegiance—”indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”—is omitted from the video on his website. 

It really almost has to be that way. For Roy Moore is divisive, intentionally so. And he speaks far more of God and religious rights than he does of liberty and justice for the non-Christian citizens in our midst. That seems a distinctly backward set of priorities for the chief justice in any state to possess in the twenty-first century. 

Make no mistake about this; this is a big election with real legal and cultural and religious consequence. And it serves as a reminder of why we need to pay attention to more than just the presidential entries on the ballots, come November.

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By Matt Sheedy, Religion Bulletin

A recent article posted on the Scientific American website entitled, “NASA Crushes 2012 Mayan Apocalypse Claims,” provides a good example of what is wrong with common secular approaches to religion in the public sphere. The article features a three-minute video put out by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where spokesperson Don Yeoman discusses “false claims about the Mayan apocalypse,” including fears that we will fall prey to solar flares, tidal effects or, even more fantastically, that the “imaginary planet Nibiru, will collide with earth,” a premise that, he notes with a chuckle, is impossible, for if it were true “we would have seen it long ago.” All things considered we can rest assured, the article’s author tells us, that this is a “non-event.”

While happily affirming the logic of these scientific claims, it is worth considering what type of social ontology this line of reasoning suggests. Among other things, this hermeneutic works through a binary logic where the actions or claims of an individual or group are measured solely on the basis of whether they are able to follow and assent to certain logical propositions about evidence-based reality regarding the workings of the natural world. What is concealed here are the ways in which this strategy serves to privilege a particular method of reasoning and system of knowledge production, while excluding the larger social field of political, historical, and cultural explanations that also contribute to seemingly bizarre claims.

Although the implications of this kind of taxonomy may appear relatively benign when classifying those who believe in the Mayan apocalypse, it is worth recalling how a similar taxonomy was deployed by the “New Atheists” in their classification of religion (especially Islam), where large groups of people from different countries, cultures, etc., were often reduced to the category of irrational social actors in need of our help, be it through forceful arguments or, failing that, through bombs raining down from the sky.

A more fruitful approach to phenomena like the Mayan apocalypse is one that begins with social practices as the primary site of investigation and expands outward towards other convergent ideas, be they historical, political, cognitive, or what have you. For example, Kate Dailey-Baley’s recent post, “Theorizing Zombies” looks at the ways in which Haitian zombies and the American zombie apocalypse genre are tied to 1) a history of colonial and racial oppression and 2) a culture of fear amidst economic troubles and the War on Terror. While this general approach is no doubt familiar to many of us, it is worth considering its value not only in the world of scholarship, but also as an alternative to more popular secular discourses about religion in the public sphere. While not discounting cognitive explanations like those offered by Yeoman, this approach has the additional merit of showing how seemingly irrational beliefs and practices must be explained not only in terms of individual minds, but also in relation to larger social forces that implicate society as a whole, thus making explicit the fact that we are all in the soup together.

At the risk of sounding apologetic, in this year of 2012, where increased public attention on the theme of apocalypse is on the rise, it is also worth considering how this so-called “non-event” offers scholars of religion an opportunity to contribute to a broader public conversation, drawing attention, for example, to how fears of apocalypse are connected to other myths and narratives, both historically and in the present, how they are reflected in popular culture (e.g., Hollywood films), or how this interest in the Maya might be situated in relation to new age movements and the long-standing Western idealization of so-called “Eastern” and/or polytheistic traditions. In these frightening and uncertain times (read “under the yoke of neo-liberal economic policies”), this may be just the kind of publicity that the academic study of religion needs to help save it from what looks to some like the dawn of our own impending doom!

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By Catherine Schmidt, Georgia State University 

There is something about Mary…Magdalene that is.  She is one of the few New Testament women (or even characters for that matter) that continues to fascinate the public; and yet, we know so very little about her.  Because we know so little, it leads some people to create stories of what they think she was like.  Depending on the time and place, she is different things for different people.  Sometimes she is a repentant whore while other times she is the lover—or even wife—of Jesus Christ.  

Many of these depictions of Mary Magdalene actually diminish her memory.  Mary, according to leading feminist scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether, was an unfortunate recipient of a “mud-slinging job” in order for her authority to be questioned by the early Catholic Church.[1]  The Catholic Church could then use Mary as an excuse to keep women from power.  The American popular culture takes this marginalization and runs with it.  Numerous forms of popular media portray Mary in a diminished role and so it is harder to correct the minds of the public.  

According to Richard Santana and Gregory Erickson, America is a “biblical” culture that does not actually read the Bible.  They argued that American popular culture and popular religion have been heavily influenced and impacted by religiously themed books—as well as anything else visual.[2]  This article is part of a four part series that will examine how Mary’s role is diminished within popular culture through her sexuality, and how that image then affects women’s role in Christianity.  

Part I will discuss pre-Vatican II portrayals as demonstrated in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent film The King of Kings, part II will provide background to post-Vatican II depictions using Lady Gaga’s 2011 music video for her song “Judas” as an example.  Part III will expand further on Mary’s reputation with Norman Jewison’s 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar based on the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and, lastly, part IV will conclude the series with Ron Howard’s 2006 film The Da Vinci Code based on Dan Brown’s book by the same name. 

As briefly discussed above, according to Ruether, women in Christianity, not just Mary, were marginalized in order for their power to be removed.  She argued: 

Occasionally a woman in the tradition stands out as so powerful and so central that she can neither be silenced or sanitized.  Here the patriarchal censure introduces what might be called a “mud-slinging job” to displace them from authority and dignity…The Christian tradition marginalized Mary Magdalene by turning her into a repentant prostitute, thus marginalizing her from her position as leading female apostle and first witness of the resurrection, commissioned to bring the good news back to the male disciples who had fled the scene and were trembling in the upper room.[3]

Diminishing Mary’s role allowed men to have complete control over the Catholic Church as well as over women.  Women were not allowed to hold a position that would have her above a man.  The Catholic Church, to this day, does not allow the ordination of women based primarily on the belief that Jesus’ disciples were all men.[4]  It is interesting to note, however, that several non-canonical gospels show that Jesus possibly had female disciples.  If women in the canonical gospels were portrayed as weak and unbelieving sinners, then the Catholic Church (i.e. men) could treat all women as such.  Even after other non-canonical texts have been found to show that women were not always seen as frail, doubting, and adulterous and previous distortions of Mary’s image by the Catholic Church reversed, Mary has continued to be portrayed by popular media in a way that marginalizes her.  

There has been some popular media, such as the book and movie The Da Vinci Code, that attempts to correct the idea that Mary was just a prostitute, but even when she is not portrayed as such, the way she is portrayed still marginalizes her, just in a different way. This will be discussed in the fourth installment of the article.  These alternative portrayals of Mary are deemed inaccurate and unorthodox by those in power within the Catholic Church, and thus, the misinterpretation of Mary as a prostitute or sinful woman is harder to prove erroneous in the minds of the public, both Christian and non-Christian.  

If one of the most important woman in Christianity can be made weak and unimportant, then women can continue to be oppressed, and verses such as 1 Timothy 2:12 (which states that women must be silent in the church) can continue to be used as basis to keep women out of power.  James Carroll argued that the early Church Fathers wanted to “disempower the figure of Mary Magdalene, so that her succeeding sisters in the church would not compete with men for power” and had “the impulse to discredit women generally.  This was most efficiently done by reducing them to their sexuality.”[5]  Reducing Mary to her sexuality affected not only her memory, but how women have been treated throughout Christian history.           

When Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings was released in 1927, it was not the first time in the short history of filmmaking that Mary was depicted on the silver screen.  The King of Kings was the ninth movie to portray Mary, however, this movie continues, even to this day, to be “one of the most popular and influential movies ever made” due to its continued popularity worldwide.[6]  At the very beginning of the silent film, there is a short note from DeMille stating: “He Himself, commanded that His message be carried to the uttermost parts of the earth.  May this portrayal play a reverent part in the spirit of that great command.”  From this statement it is clear that DeMille wanted to make a film about the story of Jesus in order to, at some level, evangelize.  However, that does not mean that the film was completely accurate.  DeMille liberally quotes the Bible throughout the film.  Bible verses are out of order, out of context, paraphrased, and said by people who did not actually say them.  As well, DeMille added material to what is not found in the canonical gospels.  It has been argued that DeMille did this for two reasons: “to make money and to make the narrative about Jesus work on the screen.  In doing so, DeMille made Jesus interesting and thereby distorted the original gospel narratives, voiding the rhetorical and theological purposes of the gospel accounts of Jesus.”[7]  And of course, if the biography of Jesus is uninteresting based solely on the canonical gospels, Mary’s would be even less interesting.  “The sparse information in the New Testament about Mary of Magdala is not adequate for a biography, and thus not for a biographical novel either.  Anyone who attempts the latter therefore has recourse to legends and creative fantasies.”[8]  How would one depict a woman who, according to the gospel of Luke, had seven demons cast out of her?  By making her a prostitute and associating the seven demons with the seven deadly sins, according to DeMille.  

When it was first shown in theaters, the movie was praised for accurately portraying the story of Jesus.  According to Diane Apostolos-Cappadona: 

The seeing of this film had an indelible impact on the minds of thousands of young people who saw it throughout the 1920s and 1930s.  Ask them to describe Mary Magdalene, and see if you don’t recognize Jacqueline Logan—bad girl turned saint!  After all, seeing is believing.[9]

Since the film, like many others, relied heavily on previous depictions of Jesus and Mary in art, which often had her wearing little-to-no clothing with ornate jewelry and extravagant hairstyles,[10]  DeMille’s Mary was what the audience expected. 

In The King of Kings, there are three scenes in which Mary is prominent that I will focus on.  The first scene is the opening scene of the movie, which opens up at the elaborate home of Mary.  She is cast as a successful prostitute surrounded by what appear to be important people of the community; this is affirmed when she, later in the scene, asks for her zebras that were gifts from a Nubian King.  She has multiple servants that will do whatever she commands, including one that keeps her cool her with a large, feathered fan.  She is surrounded by musicians, exotic animals, and food to show off her opulence.  Mary is dressed in an outfit which for the 1920s was very provocative and revealing.  One could argue that this outfit could rival only Princess Leia in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi.  As if the gold bra were not enough, Mary sports heavy makeup, has her hair braided elaborately, and wears much jewelry to drive home the point to the 1920s audience that she is a woman of sin.  The viewer learns that Mary’s favorite customer, Judas, has been missing for several days.  Mary demands to know where he is (and who his new lover is) and learns that he is with “a Carpenter from Nazareth.”  She decides to go to this carpenter and bring her best client back.  In a sign of her great importance, she goes off in a Zebra-drawn chariot.  At this point the scene cuts to Jesus performing miracles and the twelve disciples, along with Jesus’ mother Mary, are introduced.  Mary the Mother is dressed in polar opposite of what Mary Magdalene is dressed in.  Jesus’ mother is literally dressed from head to toe in cloth.  Women in this film are dressed either as Mary Magdalene at the beginning scene—as a prostitute—or like Mary the Mother—as a virginal woman.  This portrays to the audience that women can be only whores or virgins with no middle ground.  

Mary arrives at the home Jesus is in with an air of prominence around her.  She commands beggars away and requires her servants to lay a carpet down on the ground so that she does not have to walk in the dirt.  She enters the home and sees her former client Judas, now one of the twelve disciples.  Mary struts over to Jesus with the intention of demanding Judas to return to her, but as soon as she looks into the eyes of Jesus she is transformed from prostitute to penitent sinner.  She becomes very aware that what she had been doing was against everything Jesus teaches.  Jesus then casts out seven demons from Mary, which DeMille chooses to be the seven deadly sins (he even modifies a Bible verse to make it seem like the demons cast out of her were the seven deadly sins).  Once the demons are cast out of Mary, she looks down on herself and is ashamed.  She covers herself up with her cape.  After this scene, she dresses in a manner similar to Mary the Mother.  This again signals to the audience that women are either virginal or prostitutes, with no other options.  

The final scene of importance that includes Mary, is the second to last scene in the film.  This is the resurrection scene and the only color scene in an otherwise black and white film.  Here Jesus first appears to Mary and commands her to tell the others that he has risen.  It is unclear from the next scene if Mary is actually successful in doing as commanded.  Ten of the now eleven disciples are in a room looking sad and forlorn (Thomas enters the room only after Jesus has appeared).  Had Mary been successful, would not the disciples be waiting in anticipation for Jesus to come back?  Or, did they not believe her because she was a mere woman? 

Viewers saw the way DeMille depicted Mary as real or true due to her being depicted as they believed she should be.  Jacqueline Logan as Mary confirmed what the audience already thought Mary should look and act like from church sermons, Bible studies, and Sunday school.[11] DeMille himself was heavily influenced by the pictures in his family Bible, illustrated by James Tissot (1836-1902), as well as the Biblical art of GustaveDoré (1832-83).[12]  These depictions show Mary as a prostitute.  As it is well-known, however, Mary as a prostitute did not start with these nineteenth-century artists.  In a 591 sermon, Pope Gregory I combined Mary Magdalene, several unnamed women, and Mary of Bethany (who washed Jesus’ feet) and stated that all the women were actually just one: Mary Magdalene.  By doing such an act, Mary’s greatest claim to fame (according to the canonical gospels) of being the first to witness and announce the resurrection is changed to her repenting her sexual and/or evil ways.[13]  Mary was then, for more than a millennium after Pope Gregory I’s sermon, “unjustly condemned for something she never did, and denied her rightful place in Church history, while Paul has been exonerated for his own sins and held up as a model for all.”[14]  Mary goes from a faithful follower and supporter of Jesus who is worthy enough to be the first to see him risen to repentant whore and is condemned for that.  Yet Paul, a male, who admits to persecuting and killing Christians, is considered an exemplary Christian.  Pope Gregory I’s sermon was the “mud-slinging job” Ruether is alluding to.  By combining the women, “whether intentionally or not, he changed the Christian world’s attitude toward Mary Magdalene, women, and sexuality for centuries to come.”[15]  From that point on, Mary would be defined by her sexuality, and not for being an important disciple (and if one takes into account the non-canonical texts she was also a confidant of Jesus) that was the first to see Christ’s resurrection.[16]  The audience of The King of Kings will likely remember the opening scene Mary over the closing scene Mary because that is the Mary they have been raised to know because of Pope Gregory I’s “mud-slinging job.” 

We will continue to build on the myth of Mary’s reputation in the next segment and see how early film depictions of Mary—such as The King of Kings—contributed to how she has been  perceived in subsequent portrayals.

************************

Author’s Bio

Catherine Schmidt is an associate editor of Religion Nerd.  Catherine earned her BA in Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2005) and her MA in Religious Studies at Georgia State University (2012).  She has presented her work at academic conferences in the local, regional, and national level.  Catherine’s interest range include: religion and popular culture, women and religion, Mary Magdalene, and early Christian history.  She hopes in the future to pursue her PhD where she can combine her many interests. 

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Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Huff Post

One of the least remarked aspects of the early Christian reporting of Jesus’s death by crucifixion is the following:

Jesus let out a great cry and expired. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom Seeing this, the centurion who was standing near him when he expired said “Truly, this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15: 37-39)

Make no mistake about the implications here: a Roman soldier presiding over this ghastly execution was converted to the correct view about Jesus by observing the way he died, not by seeing him raised from death. There was something about the death of Jesus that was unique, and even revelatory, according to Mark.

That was not Paul’s view of the matter, by all accounts. The epistolary Apostle goes so far as to say that if Jesus were not raised from death, then the Christian faith is literally nothing more than a vanity.

If there is no rising of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching has been vain and your faith has been vain. (First Corinthians 15: 13-14)

The consensus view is that Paul’s letters were written in the mid-to late 50s, whereas Mark’s Gospel was written right around 70 C.E., after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by centurions very much like the one he describes observing Jesus’s death.

Some important implications of this dating are the following. It could be the case that Mark was responding directly to Paul’s claims in this letter. It could be the case that he had never heard Paul speak, nor ever read this letter. It could be the case that Mark was responding to the kind of beliefs articulated by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, whether Paul was the original author of such views or simply one especially vocal proponent of them.

What is not in doubt is that the death of Jesus on a Roman cross represented a scandal with which all of his early followers had to deal. They dealt with it in many ways. We are witnessing a very significant fault-line here within the foundational texts of the New Testament, a fault-line that calls into question both the nature of Jesus’s death and its ultimate meaning. It’s a major theological parting of the ways, a parting easy to miss because it’s all contained in the same Scripture, point for point and book for book.

Let’s call it the parting of the ways between Good Friday Christianity and the Easter Sunday version.

Other Gospel writers tried to split the difference between these two versions, the one emphasizing the revelatory power of Jesus’s death versus the other emphasizing the revelatory power of being raised from death. According to Matthew, a number of “saints” were raised from their graves in the same moment that the Temple curtain split and Jesus expired; it was the vision of tombs opening that caused the centurion to draw his dramatic conclusion abut Jesus (Matthew 27: 52-54). According to Luke, when the centurion saw Jesus breath his last, he concluded that the Roman authorities had made a mistake: “Surely this man was innocent!” (Luke 23:47), he says.

Because of all this confusion over the details of Jesus’s dying and rising, it is worth taking a closer look at Mark’s brand of Good Friday Christianity. It presents us with a shattering vision, in every way.

It all began in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night when Jesus’s ministry begins to come unraveled. We are told that Judas had decided to betray his teacher, and Jesus clearly has some sense of this as well. He prays to God, reminding his heavenly father than anything is possible to God, even delivering him from the coming trial. He begs to be so delivered; he is not. Instead, the disciples he asked to stand guard and stand their ground fail him. First they fall asleep, three times; later they flee. Jesus, suddenly powerless, is swallowed up by an imposing crowd and spirited away. His disciples will not see him again.

Jesus was tortured physically and emotionally, humiliated in a way that far exceeds the merits of the case or the normal practices of Roman centurions in their provinces. Mark spares no detail, no matter how horrible. Utterly abandoned and alone, Jesus is even mocked by the two men who were crucified alongside of him; this is another of those details that is easy to miss, but horrible to imagine. (Luke could not stomach this; in his version, one man mocks Jesus, whereas the other defends him, and Jesus promises that they will meet later in paradise, Luke 23: 43). Jesus’s final words are a quotation from Psalm 22, one of David’s purest anguish-songs: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15: 15:34). Then he expired (Luke couldn’t bear this detail either; in his version, Jesus’s last words are “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” Luke 23: 46).

Mark makes a point of telling us that Jesus’s disciples failed him repeatedly in the end, and failed even to be present at his death. This is shocking. Only some women who had followed him from the Galilee remained: Mary Magdalene, his mother Mary (she is called “the mother of James and Joses,” but since Mark earlier tells us that these were names of two of Jesus’ brothers, Mark 6:3, this seems like a coded reference to Jesus’s own mother), and Salome. These three women stand with Jesus until the end, then presumably also witnessed the centurion’s conversion to the correct view of things.

They also saw an unknown man who was favorably disposed to Jesus’s teaching, Joseph of Arimathea, take responsibility for Jesus’s corpse, and arrange for it to be buried in a nearby grave. That is why it was these three women who returned to that gravesite the next day to dress out Jesus’s body properly, as they had not had time to do the day before, in the whirl of violent Roman events.

That is when they find the stone at the mouth of the cave rolled away, and a mysterious man inside who informs them that “he is not here,” but rather has gone on ahead of them, returning to Galilee. They are ordered to return with this amazing news to the disciples, and especially to Peter, “but they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16: 8).

That is how Mark’s Gospel originally ended; all of the most ancient manuscripts end there. It isn’t the case that Mark doesn’t know of Jesus’s rising; in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus himself predicted it three times. Mark knows of the rising, but Mark does not want to show it to us. That’s Easter Sunday Christianity, not the Good Friday version. Mark’s Gospel is designed as a tragedy, and it ends as one.

(By the way, when Paul reminds his audience in Corinth that he has reported what was reported to him, he makes no mention of these three women. According to Paul, Jesus appeared after his rising to Peter, then to the twelve [whether this included Judas is not clear], then to five hundred people all at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and then in the end, to Paul himself on the Damascus road, First Corinthians 15:3-8).

Of course the main question is, Why? Mark’s Jesus expires with that question on his lips. Why would Mark tell the story this way? Who is he trying to convince? And how could he think this brutal story would be convincing to anyone?

There are several answers to this question, but the first one Mark answers pretty clearly in the passage with which I began. Mark thinks this way of telling Jesus’s story, the Good Friday version, will be convincing to Romans. The centurion who witnessed Jesus’s death did not need to see his rising to be convinced. Jesus’ death convinced him. The Roman audience Mark had in mind was schooled on Greek tragedy, and was very familiar with the idea that certain kinds of outrageous suffering can actually be redeeming. Salvation, in these peoples’s view, was through suffering, not from it.

Jesus’s unique suffering is what Mark urges us to consider, and never to forget.

If you tell the story of Good Friday merely as a prelude to Easter morning, then it is impossible to feel its raw power. Mark takes us as close to catastrophe and the heart of human suffering as a writer can go. Mark leaves us there, insists that we look more closely at the details of the thing. Really he is trying to make us feel it, ever and anew. That seems to be what the yearly commemoration of Jesus’s dying meant to Mark and his followers. And clearly, his Gospel is also a warning to anyone who confidently concludes that martyrdom is the surest path for the follower of Jesus to secure salvation. It was not easy for Jesus, Mark insists; it will be not any easier for you. All of Jesus’s disciples failed him in the end, every one. Romanticizing death, whether Jesus’ or his followers’, is the most tragic mistake the Christian community can make, in Mark’s judgment.

Good Friday Christianity was one important aspect of the early Christian movement, and it remains an important undercurrent in many more contemporary representations of Christian witness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke in these tragic tones when imprisoned by the Nazis; he wrote some remarkable letters in the Good Friday spirit before he was killed in prison. Dr. Martin Luthe King Jr. Preached a remarkable sermon in the spirit of Good Friday the night before he was assassinated. Cornel West, echoing his amanuensis, has made Good Friday Christianity, spiced with a liberal dose of his tragicomic blues sensibility, the very centerpiece of an activist, Afro-American Gospel. Such a liturgical sense of the Gospel’s tragic heart is alive and well in the Greek church, these days more than most.

Good Friday is celebrated — or rather, commemorated — in somber ritual tones in churches the world over, for the western churches it takes place this week, and for the eastern churches on the next. Mark is its premier evangelist. On Good Friday, if on any day, it is Mark’s shattered and shattering Gospel that demands close Christian attention, before we move up and away from it to the joyous epiphany of Sunday morning. Good Friday Christianity puts the agony in the ecstasy, insisting that there is no other way.

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By Kenny Smith, Religion Bulletin

In his recent comments on the Fox News Channel’s FOX & Friends morning show, Geraldo Rivera claimed that the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was equally the result of (i) an “overzealous and irrational” neighborhood watchman (George Zimmerman) as well as (ii) Treyvon Martin’s ethnicity, gender, and attire. By appearing in public as a dark-skinned and hoodie-cloaked male, Rivera suggests, Trayvon unwittingly (and unwisely) presented the neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, with a highly ambiguous object. On one hand, Trayvon was merely a boy (age 17, though in fact he appeared considerably younger) eating Skittles while walking home; on the other hand, he was a black male donning garb associated “with robberies, muggings, and confrontations,” which sensible others (read middle-class whites) seek to avoid. 

For Rivera, the latter reading of Trayvon is clearly the most compelling: if black and Hispanic males wish to “stylize themselves as gangsta wannabes,” then they should expectto be “perceived as a menace,” as such perceptions represent “an instant, reflexive action” on the part of others (again, read whites). “Trayvon Martin,” Rivera passionately concludes, “was an innocent and wonderful kid,” who “did not deserve to die,” and “if he did not have that hoodie on… that nutty, irrational guy would not have responded in that violent and aggressive way.” 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTMyb15bfAE

There is of course a great deal to be said about this utterly horrific event, and this post in no way seeks to trivialize its moral, legal, and cultural significance; quite the opposite, in fact. For the Trayvon Martin case brings to light one of the ways in which American culture has come to imagine (and in this case, violently respond to) some perceived embodied identities. 

In thinking about this case, my attention is drawn back to our recent spate of posts regarding the symbolic function of zombies in contemporary American culture, and to the popular TV series, The Walking Dead (TWD), especially. Over the course of two seasons, the show’s characters, as well as audiences, have gradually transitioned from intense revulsion at seeing zombies (who appear to be people but no longer are) summarily executed (often shot in the head at point blank range), to a sense of empowerment and celebration as “walkers” are “put down” by heroes and heroines who narrowly escape being torn apart and consumed. More, the show’s characters have increasingly come to deal with perceived ambiguities as to who is a zombie and who is still a human being by means of lethal force, evident in Andrea’s overly hasty shooting of an injured Darrell limping back to the farm (whom she mistakes for a zombie), and who is a threat as opposed to a viable community member, evident in the group’s willingness to summarily execute other human beings deemed to be dangerous. 

My point here, obviously, is not to compare Trayvon Martin to zombies or George Zimmerman to television heroes. But rather to suggest that the progression of character (and audience?) sensibilities evident in TWD powerfully mirrors American attitudes as to how identities are decoded, categorized, and reacted to. What Rivera implicitly frames and defends as understandable–the “instant, reflexive” perception of a dark-skinned, hoodie-wearing, male, walking through an affluent, gated, residential neighborhood as a “menace” that “allows” the “irrational and overzealous” neighborhood watchman to shoot him–is disturbingly close to the brink TWD characters approach, one in which the world is comprised of true human beings (those like us) and “zombies” (those not like us). 

Was Trayvon Zimmerman’s imaginary zombie, that which only appears to be a full human being, but is in fact a subhuman being intent upon violence and brutality against others, that ultimately ought to be “put down,” shot at point-blank range? Does the hoodie transform the smiling dark-skinned teenager into a “walker” in Rivera’s conceptual world? Again, such comparisons are disturbingly close to the mark and, given the misanthropy, racism, bigotry, and misogyny obvious in many popular appropriations of the “killing zombies” motif, they are chilling indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TceD2Il3QFA

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Originally posted at Religion Bulletin, March 26, 2012.  Follow Religion Bulletin on Facebook. 

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About the Author:  Lizabeth Lyon-Brown is a Religious Studies major (philosophy minor) at Georgia State University.  Her focus is on ethics, pre-Christian, and early-Christian Europe (500 bce to 500 ce).  She plans to pursue a Master’s and Ph.D. in Religious Studies, possibly in Europe.

By Lizabeth Lyon-Brown, Georgia State University

Is it possible to have a new religious symbol in the 21st Century?  How about this Image:  Take three circles, two are the same size but smaller than the third.  A circle is a clean and even symbol that translates into every language, nationality, and religion.  Now take those three circles and place the two smaller ones on top of the third at the 10 and 2 positions of a clock.  Those three circles together, in this new symbol, now bring to mind Mickey Mouse, Disney, and all that goes with it.  Other ‘legitimate religions’ would balk at the thought of a new secular religion and religious symbol.  They would denounce Disney as an illegitimate religion.  But even the three most populous religions have their detractors.  David Chidester defines religion as: an arena of human activity marked by the concerns of the transcendent, the sacred, the ultimate – concerns that enable people to experiment with what it means to be human. [i]   Using this definition of religion, I will show the many ways Disney functions, for millions of people around the world, as a religion.  Universalizing many stories taken from all walks-of-life.  Making this a human story.

The date is the end of the Twentieth Century and the beginning of the next.  The place is Anywhere, America and the home belongs to the average Joe.  The father comes home and prepares to watch college basketball, he checks CNN on his laptop for pre-game news and reads an article about the “Cinderella Story” player that is going to “The Ball.”[ii]   He watches the game and “Cinderella” wins.  Afterwards, the player is interviewed.  When asked what he plans to do next, he answers, “I’m going to Disney World!”  The father jumps up and down with joy and excitement.

Disney has so permeated every part of American life that it seems natural for it to be included in a national news article about a college sports team.  Disney becomes an expected response to the question: what comes after an achievement?  Americans go and pay homage.  They go to Mecca.  They go to their religion’s holy ground.  They go to Disney World.

From the top please!

How did this new religion start?  Well, let us take a step back in time, and start at the beginning.  Mickey Mouse made his 1928 debut in Steamboat Willie.  It was the beginning of a love affair that has endured to this day.  In 1937, the first of the European fairytales followed in the form of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  Before Walt Disney died in 1967, he had produced seventeen feature length animated cartoons.  Of those seventeen, fourteen were based on European fairy or folk tales.  These stories were not told in their original forms.  They were homogenized, or universalized to make them simpler for the children, less frightening.

While these stories were simpler, they had one common theme: the triumph of good over evil.  These fairytales, from Snow White, to Cinderella, to Sleeping Beauty, all paint a picture of fantasy.  They are part of what is sacred in the world of Disney.  They help tell the Disney myth.  These original animations are a part of Disney religious texts.  Of course, these texts are a bit different from the usual books written about “thou shalt not”, as the Disney mythos is “written” in the movies. 

The Disney narratives have similarities; they are all stories of being true to yourself, good triumphing over evil, and being good, kind, and forgiving.  All values American’s would want to instill in their children in the 1940s and 1950s, the timeline in which these movies were made.

The narratives were made available to the public at large, in a way that might not have happened had Walt Disney not made his films.  The public acquired a familiarity with the stories, albeit in a simpler version, and because of this, a completely new world opened to the public.  These stories played over-and-over at the movie theater and they were incorporated into books, allowing parents to read the narratives to their children at night.  And, in case the movies and books were not enough, Walt Disney had the first park built in southern California, which opened in 1955.  With the second, larger and more expansive park built in central Florida in 1971.

I’ve got some swampland for sale, cheap!

With the land purchase in central Florida, Walt Disney was able to make Disney World just as he had always imagined.  The transformation began with swampland and through the magic of Walt Disney’s creative vision, “the popular culture capital of America”[iii] materialized. 

Like Mecca and other sacred pilgrimage sites, Disney World is separate, set apart from the rest of the world.  You have to travel to get there.  When entering the property, there is a liminal transition, allowing you entrance into the beginning of the magic.  You leave your car, the last part of your original self, in the parking lot and board a tram that takes you to either a monorail, which travels around the lake or a boat that traverses the lake.  Both forms of transportation moves you through liminal space and toward your final destination—the entrance to the main park.  It was a pilgrimage just to get this far and once through the last stage of liminal transition, there is now only one-way to walk: straight down Main Street, USA.

One thing you will notice while walking down Main Street, USA (in any one of the parks) is that you will see every possible building except a church.[iv]  This was done on purpose.  According to Bob Thomas, “Walt considered himself religious, but he still admired and respected every religion.”[v]  That meant leaving overtly religious symbols out of the parks and the movies.  While visitors may not encounter a Christian cross, Jewish Star of David, or any other popular religious symbol, they will see, if they look closely, the hidden Mickey’s[vi]. 

Throughout the park, visitors will find the religious symbol of Disney–Mickey Mouse.  The flowers are arranged to bloom in that shape; the fences along the pathways proudly display Mickey’s familiar face; the artwork found on many walls and buildings include hidden Mickey images; the signs outside the stores and restaurants all include the iconic Mickey Mouse form.  Some are easy to spot, while others tease passersby with their implied presence. 

If this were a church or a synagogue, would it be that unusual to see religious icons everywhere?  To see it’s mythos displayed on the walls in story forms for the masses to read about?  In many churches, visitors encounter important biblical stories artistically displayed on the walls or in the form of stained glass windows.  These visual sacred narratives help people to learn, from an early age, the important stories of that particular tradition. 

For Disney, it is no different.  They display their myths on their walls.  Their religious symbols are incorporated into the overall landscape of the park.  These symbols, like the artist’s renderings in churches and synagogues, transmit Disney’s mythos—sacred narratives—to children and adults alike.  This transmission is not done through marble, stone, or stained glass but through the modern medium of animation.  But are they really that different?

The participants in the rituals that take place around Disney World are fully enveloped in the Disney religion.  They have transcended the everyday hustle and bustle of the world, and are living every moment within the fantasy created by Disney.  They are surrounded by the symbols and the myths of the religion.  They have entered into sacred space.  These participants come from, as I said earlier, Anywhere, America.  Nobody knows which participant is a bank president, a landscaper, a stay-at-home mother of three, or a university professor working on her fourth book.  Everyone who journeys to Disney is treated as a prince or princess, no matter their age.  This universalizing aspect helps the participants to relax into their ‘roles’ and helps sustain the fantasy for everyone.

Cher Krause Knight, in her article on Disney World and pilgrimage, discusses how the movements of Disney visitors are controlled and how that optimizes the pilgrimage experience.  She continues with,

There is an intellectual and moral uniformity of conduct and thought among the pilgrims, whose goals and moral ideals are higher than in the everyday world.  At Disney, these goals and ideals are nothing short of universal niceness and total world peace, in a Disneyfied context, of course[vii] (page 34).

The pilgrims want to follow the rules set forth by Disney; rules that, time-and-again, play out and are experienced in and through Disney movies.  Follow the rules, as the characters do, and you too can live happily ever after, at least for as long as you are here—in sacred Disney space.

Eventually all pilgrims must return home.  Slowly retracing the steps outward, passing through the same transitions that now, reintroduce them back into the ordinary world.  They reemerge, changed in some way.  The average American family takes with them fond memories of their Disney experience and commemorates their visit with their own “everyone must have their picture taken from here” family photo.  Families are changed through their Disney experience.  They retain, forever, those cherished memories and will reminisce about the time they spent there.

Where to now?

EuroDisney opened in 1992 to mixed reviews but after many behind the scene changes, including a name change, Disneyland Paris found firm footing on the road to success.  It is here that Walt Disney returns the reimagined European castle—a Disneyfied castle—complete with narratives, myths, and the Disney religion.  A new European Disney Mecca.

European pilgrims are akin to American pilgrims.  Disney was not new to Europe, as many Europeans had journeyed to Florida in search of the Disney experience.  The creation of Disneyland Paris was, in some ways, a homecoming—a return to the land where the stories began—where the inspiration for Cinderella’s Castle is just a day’s drive away.[viii] Visitors still have the pilgrimage-like experience.  They negotiate liminal space through different transitions.  They move from profane space to sacred space and ultimately end up at Main Street, USA.  The icons are the same, Mickey’s face still smiles on all visitors, and the myths are unchanged.  Yet the visitor is in another country, another continent.  The experience is pure Disney, as it is in California or Florida.  Time and space seem to stop and yet bend at the same time.  Time exists only through the change of seasons and the seasonal Disney parades that follow the march of the calendar.  The uniqueness, the sameness that pilgrims encounter, regardless of which park they visit, unifies the feelings of all those that choose to experience the religious overtones of Disney.  Yes, the stories that were originally told by the Europeans are coming back to them in a different form, but for the pilgrims at Disneyland Paris, there doesn’t seem to be a negative care about it.

A new religion?

Since its inception, Disney has given immense joy and happiness to children and families from all over the world.  It has done so through its theme parks and movies—movies that offer a type of mythos to its audience, with leading characters such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White all portraying images of people following the rules and ultimately triumphing over evil.  Disney is a Mecca to which pilgrims travel but it is not a single sacred place.  The varied locations allow pilgrims to choose their destination, but in all, they are sure to encounter the three simple circles that form the now famous Mickey head and the possibility of a new religious icon. 

Almost 15 million pilgrims traveled to California in 2009 to visit Mickey Mouse.  That same year more than 41 million visited the various Disney themed parks in Florida, with over 17 million visiting Mickey Mouse specifically.  Tokyo Disney saw 13.5 million visitors in 2009, and Disneyland Paris welcomed just under 13 million, while Hong Kong received 4.6 million.[ix]  These numbers are interesting in light of the world’s economy.  There are always certain things that people cannot live without.  Religion is one of those.  These numbers seem to indicate that many find joy and comfort in the Disney stories, myths, and movies.

Forty-five years after his death in 1966, Walt Disney’s company, his dreams of magical cities, and his beloved Mickey Mouse have endured.  Mickey Mouse seems stronger than ever these days, as visitors to Disney parks are expected to reach 100 million in the very near future.  Walt Disney dreamed of bringing happiness to children;[x] most anyone would say he has succeeded. 

Disney’s success has transcended the simple animated stories with which it began.  Disney has become so much more; it has grown into a myth of its own making, reaching people worldwide.  Pilgrims travel to the parks to experience and participate in a special fantasy, one that escapes the bounds of time and space, and pay homage to Mickey: the Mouse that started it all.  The pilgrims wait patiently in long lines, entertained along the way by classic movies, to have their individual photos taken with the iconic Mickey Mouse.  These photos are taken home, framed, and looked back upon with fond memories.  Future visits produce more photos, which are hung next to the first ones, recording the physical changes of the pilgrims and noting the unchanged, timelessness of Mickey who is forever joyful and welcoming.  Time stands still for Mickey.

In the end, it is up to the reader to decide.  Does Disney have the attributes of a religion?  Does it function like a religion?  Would a churchgoer see it as a religion?  The pilgrims who visit the parks year-after-year, do they see it?  Or, is Disney just another corporation?  Maybe the answer is a little of both?

• [i] Chidester, David, Authentic Fakes: religion and American popular culture (University of California Press 2005) page 1
• [ii] http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/04/01/final.four.cinderella.sweep/index.html?hpt=C1
• [iii] King, Margaret, “Disneyland and Walt Disney World: traditional values in futuristic form” Journal of Popular Culture V. 15, 1 (summer) page 117.
• [iv] Douglas Brode, From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney created the counter culture (University of Texas Press 2004) pg 106.
• [v] Bob Thomas, Walt Disney, An American Original (New York; Hyperion, 1976) 194 – 195
• [vi] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Mickey
• [vii] Cher Krause Knight, “Mickey, Minnie, and Mecca: Destination Disney World, Pilgrimage in the Twentieth century” Reclaiming Spiritual Art (1999), Galileo
• [viii] http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&rlz=&=&q=paris+to+neuschwanstein&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl  ix] http://www.scottware.com.au/theme/feature/atend_disparks.htm
• [x] http://www.disneydreamer.com/walt/quotes.htm

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By  Kenny Smith

As Lauri Lebo noted in her March 23, 2010 Religion Dispatch post, “although most Christians assume that the ideas and practices surrounding the Easter holiday are native to Christianity, Easter’s historical origins in fact lie in the pre-Christian, pagan religious worlds of Northern Europe. “The word ‘Easter,’”  Lebo explains, “is actually the name of an ancient, heathen goddess who represents fertility, springtime, and the dawn.”  Contemporary Pagans, Wiccans, Heathens, Druids, and other such communities working to re-create, preserve, and practice various pre-Christian traditions (whom I will group together here under the term “Neo-Pagan”) agree entirely! Popular websites such as Covenant of the Goddess, Witches Voice, and Witchology, discuss the ancient roots of the Easter holiday as grounded in Germanic goddess-figures alternately known as Eostre or Ostara.  Some have also begun to suggest that we “not forget the REAL reason for the season!,” and work to “Keep the Eostre in Easter.”

Now, we know that new and alternative movements, over time, typically grow more and more like the larger culture in which they live.  A good example of this process (which scholars refer to as “accommodation”), can be seen in the Unificationist Church (popularly known as the Moonies).  As Barbara Bradley Hagerty reported for NPR, with its membership “dwindling,” the Unificationist church has brought some of its teachings into greater alignment with the larger Western culture. For example, although marriages with the Unificationist community have been traditionally (and controversially) arranged by the movement’s founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, parents have now been granted the authority to arrange marriages for their own children. While past generations of converts were expected to sacrifice their careers and dedicate their lives to laboring on behalf of the church, personal achievement and financial success are now explicitly encouraged: “[t]oday, the church wants college valedictorians, not dropouts… [it] wants the second generation to fit into society — not fight it.”

This raises a very interesting question about the direction in which American Neo-Pagan traditions are headed. When we think about  Christian communities insisting that the Christmas holiday be configured in explicitly religious terms, rather than, a more secular holiday defined by bright and colorful lights, decorating a tree, giving gifts, the myth of Santa Claus, and spending celebratory time with fiends and family, images of a religious militancy seem as if they are not that far behind. Indeed, while I sometimes grow weary of Christmas shopping, I always dread the shrill religious voices demanding that I observe a Christmas defined along certain pre-approved, sectarian lines.

Are American Neo-Pagans taking on some of these characteristics in their gradual accommodation to the larger culture? Can we expect increasingly shrill Neo-Pagan voices demanding adherence to sectarian understandings of Eostre over and above all competing others?  I would argue that this is unlikely to be case, and that efforts to “keep the Eostre in Easter” differ significantly from those to “keep the Christ in Christmas.” This is so for at least two reasons.

Firstly, the positionality of Neo-Pagans within the broader culture differs radically from that of most Christians. While Christian communities often perceive themselves as a persecuted minority, as living in a time when all things Christian “are being discouraged and swept away,” this is a very difficult argument to sustain. As numerous sociological studies have shown, most Americans (72%) continue to self-identify as Christian, and most seats of political, economic, and social power are filled by those who see themselves as Christian. One suspects that, within some Christian communities, “being persecuted” has come to be mean “no longer enjoying an hegemonic presence” in American culture.  Neo-Pagans, however, occupy a very different position. While their numbers continue to grow at impressive rates, if grouped with all other “new movements,” they only represent approximately 1.2% of the adult population. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-03-09-american-religion-ARIS_N.htm) Consequently, they are much more likely to experience not only discrimination in various forms, but social invisibility.

Secondly, unlike most Christian communities, Neo-Pagan traditions are not at all evangelical. They do not assume a mandate to make their worldview everyone else’s worldview, and so they do not actively seek converts. To the contrary, many such groups rebuff those who seek to join them and require the completion of lengthy periods of study (a year and a day is not uncommon), tests of competency, initiations, and group consensus as to the appropriateness of applicants, prior to admittance. In such contexts, rates of attrition may run as high as 90%.  Neo-Pagan traditions, then, tend to regard their own teachings and practices as suitable only for a small number of persons with particular interests and temperaments.

Taken together, these differences suggest quite varied frames of reference for Christmas and Eostre purity concerns. Christians who seek to police the ways in which Christmas is conceptualized and lived are hoping to reestablish clear cultural control. For many, this is not simply a matter of preference, but a cosmological and eschatological necessity.

For Neo-Pagans, who are better understood as a religious species recently returned from the brink of extinction, and who practice a largely esoteric religious craft, Eostre purity concerns represent an act of resistance and a struggle to assert one’s cultural identity within a culture where such Neo-Pagan identities are often demonized or unrecognized.

Still, when we consider the sustained rates of growth with this community, the diffusion of its symbols into popular culture (e.g., in the Harry Potter novels and films), and the tendency towards accommodation over time, one wonders whether Neo-Pagan traditions might come to resemble more closely the dominant religion in ways that could shift Eostre purity concerns in a different direction. In my own research with Wiccans, more than a few have expressed concerns about precisely this issue. “I’m not sure I would be comfortable,” a Wiccan priestess remarked to me several years ago, “if Wicca became the dominant religion in our culture, the way Christianity is now. I’m not sure I would it would remain ‘Wicca’ anymore.”

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By Louis A. Ruprecht, Religion Dispatches

On November 2, 1984, Velma Barfield became the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962, and the first to be executed in the State of North Carolina after the nationwide moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976. She was 52 years old.

For those of us who had worked on her clemency petition, it was a devastating blow. Then-Governor Jim Hunt was running for a seat in the US Senate against arch-conservative Jesse Helms. Inexplicably, Barfield’s clemency hearing had been scheduled just six days prior to the election. Helms made it a campaign issue, of course, suggesting that, were the Governor to grant Barfield clemency, then his true liberal stripes would be clear to everyone.

By contrast, even the staff at the Women’s Prison in Raleigh had written in support of Barfield’s petition; her work in counseling and religious instruction behind bars even earned her praise from the likes of Billy Graham. Everyone agreed there was no stronger clemency case on death row in the state.

But the governor’s peremptory meeting with those who presented the clemency petition lasted little more than half an hour, and it was clear to us that his mind was already made up.

The Barfield execution came back to life in the following spring, in the form of a letter from an eloquent if quirky citizen of the State of North Carolina; one who was opposed to the death penalty for religious reasons. He had calculated the approximate cost of executing Velma Barfield—not just the lethal injection, but the years of legal wrangling as well. According to his calculations, and given the current population of the state, exactly one cent of his own tax payment had been used to execute Velma Barfield—so he enclosed a check to the North Carolina State Tax Commissioner for 1984, in which he had withheld that suspect penny.

As you might imagine, the state took a different view, taking issue especially with this self-imposed tax break. Their point was that you do not get to pick and choose which state services you are willing to pay for, not even for religious reasons.

Especially not for religious reasons, since there are so very many of them.

The cash-strapped State of North Carolina spent a lot more than one cent to get that penny back. As they should have done, though this citizen’s symbolic point had been made quite eloquently by then.

No Picking and Choosing

I have returned many times to that story as I have listened to Catholic churches, Catholic institutions from hospitals to universities, and two Catholic presidential candidates all insist on what that poor guy from North Carolina was asking for: a religious exemption from paying for state services to which he was opposed on moral and religious grounds.

The state’s answer was simple in the spring of 1985: you don’t get to pick and choose the services you pay for, regardless of the reason.

This case raises an issue of considerably sharper interest, I think, given the Catholic Church’s consistent opposition to the death penalty, to preemptive wars (especially those conducted primarily through interdiction), to abortion, and now, we are told, to contraception.

So why has there never been a similar stink about Catholic exemptions from death penalty provisions? Why no such tax withholding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And why is the state bending over backwards to accommodate these religious sentiments about contraception, rather than some others?

One explanation might be historical: what a difference a generation makes. After thirty years of hammering away at the need for the secular state to accommodate religious objections to virtually every damn thing it does, the state is backpedaling and the Church is on the offensive. From 1979 to 2012, politicized Christianity isn’t just taking its place at the table, it’s trying to rewrite the menu. Anti-feminism has loomed large in that effort.

Clerical Hysteria

Which brings me to a second explanation, one that is not historical so much as it is hysterical. I mean that quite literally.

Hysteria is a term that derives from the Greek word for the uterus, and this is indeed a battle over women’s uteruses: over what goes in them and what stays out. The death penalty and international warfare simply do not energize the sex-obsessed American electorate the way that women’s sexual autonomy does.

What is the problem with contraception? It enables women to be sexually active without paying the price, as it were; the massive biological and sociological and personal costs that may come with unwanted pregnancy and bringing such pregnancies to term.

The end of the sexual act is procreation, from the Catholic perspective; sexual pleasure or expressions of love and affection are not legitimate ends if they are detached from the procreative intention. Contraception enacts that detachment. Moreover, by separating the sexual act from the intention of conception, contraception encourages women’s sexual promiscuity—so goes the Catholic thinking.

Rush Limbaugh’s tirade to this effect, for all of its bile, well describes what is at stake in this debate, for some people. The fact that men’s sexual promiscuity does not register as a concern of equal standing for such persons is itself quite telling.

To my eye, the most significant thing that has happened between 1979 and 2012 has been the significant and at times studied erosion of feminist achievements in mandatory, state-sanctioned equality. I’m talking about the basics here, the principal First and Second Wave achievements:

political equality, symbolized by a woman’s right to vote and to hold political office; and

economic equality, symbolized by the ideal, if not the reality, of equal pay for equal work.

But when the sexual equality of men and women is at issue—not sexual sameness, let’s be clear about that, just sexual equality—then the howling starts, and churches start withholding their money and support.

The debate is, in this sense, hysterical. And there’s a pretty simple solution to it. If you want to run as a Catholic hospital or a Catholic university and not offer the full array of health care services to women as mandated by the state, then don’t implicate yourself in any federal or state funding. Not one penny.

All the World a Stage

Now, I admit that this argument must seem overdrawn at first glance. There seems to be a fundamental difference between a citizen and/or organization withholding taxes for state services with which they do not wish to be identified, and a citizen and/or organization being asked to provide those services themselves.

The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by people. Catholic institutions are claiming an exemption from the obligation to provide such services because they are religiously opposed to them. They are engaging in a selective opt-out, just like the guy from North Carolina.

I am not convinced that any of the charities, hospitals or universities involved in this debate are truly independent religious institutions that receive no federal dollars. An institution’s tax exempt status alone casts that into grave doubt. And these institutions seem not to recognize that one way for the state to insist on its way, and for them to gain their administrative freedom, would be to abrogate that curious tax exemption for an institution as wealthy as the Catholic Church in a time of real fiscal crisis. But clearly, this would lend itself to the very Big Brother vision of the federal government that created this controversy in the first place.

Instead, President Obama, ever the patient compromiser, attempted to create a new distinction, one of limited practical usefulness but great symbolic value, suggesting that insurance providers would be paying for these services, not the institutions themselves.

And that is when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sensing weakness, intensified its position, indicating that it is not just opposed to being asked to pay for such services, but that any of the Catholics for whom they speak would be asked to provide them. This is fascinating; the Catholic Bishops now appear to be claiming the right to opt out of anyprograms with which they disagree. Here is their response to the president’s proposed compromise, in their words:

[this] continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions.

It’s not just about the money; it’s about Big Brother. And so:

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government.

So the problem is not with government per se, just with the president. This is why it is so rhetorically critical for them to refer to “Obamacare” rather than the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” thereby conveniently forgetting that this was a law passed by the Legislative branch of the US Government, not an Executive Order.

Now, it is perfectly within the Bishops’ rights to petition the US Congress to change a law, or even to vacate it and to start over, as it is their right to question the constitutionality of a law in the courts.

But that is why I began with the story from North Carolina. The question that should be asked is why the US Catholic Bishops are exerting so much energy and money and time on the matter of contraception, with no similarly public cries of outrage against the death penalty, state-sponsored torture, or the two preemptive wars in which the U.S. has involved itself for fully a decade.

Clearly there is a lot more to this debate than the First Amendment. It has to do with one of the most powerful patriarchal religious organizations in the world—be sure to recall that the bishops are all men, every last one of them—placing itself squarely in opposition to women’s sexual equality and autonomy.

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An intriguing excerpt from Gregory L. Reece’s upcoming book:  “Creatures of the Night: In Search of Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves and Demons.” 

The sound began down deep in his chest, rose to a growl in his throat, and then forced its way between his lips as a snarl. The coarse silver hair on his neck bristled. His ears, covered with the same silver fur, twitched. There was a burst of air from his nostrils, a snort of warning and territorial claim. The muscles in his arm began to twitch. His head snapped quickly to the left, then to the right. Thrown back against my seat by a sudden change in direction and speed, I instinctively clutched at the door handle of the mini-van, my eyes darting between the oncoming traffic and the hairy form in the driver’s seat. His reactions to the traffic were quick and aggressive – canine reactions, lupine reactions. For just a moment I was terrorized, speeding down the highway with a werewolf at the wheel.

***

I had lunch with Wolf at a local “meat and three” restaurant.  Unlike Warren Zevon’s  London werewolf, we didn’t have beef chow mein or pina coladas (and Wolf’s unruly fur was far from “perfect”),  but instead ordered meat loaf, tomato pie, and iced tea. Throughout the meal Wolf was uncomfortable in his straight-backed chair which offered no place for his (invisible) tail. Other than that he seemed completely at ease in his own skin, more than happy to talk to me about his wolf-nature and the werewolf community of which he is a part. 

Werewolves, Wolf explained, are by their nature mostly solitary creatures, joining packs only occasionally for woodland gatherings known as Howls. Wolf is one of the elder weres in an annual gathering known as the Southeastern or SEHowl, billed as one of the largest and longest running Howls in the country. Mostly, however, the werewolf community is found online, in chatrooms like The Werewolf Café (werewolfcafe.com) and The Werelist (werelist.net).  Online, Wolf often plays the role of an expert, or at least as someone who has been around for a while, knows a lot of other werepeople, and is not afraid to state his mind and share his personal experiences. 

Wolf traces the origins of modern werewolves to the late twentieth century, when some people began realizing, as children, that there was something different about them. They lived life more intentionally, paid more attention to what was going on around them, were more empathic, and felt as though they did not quite fit in with the people around them. On the other hand, they identified very well with various nonhuman animals – often to the point of conceptualizing themselves as nonhuman. (thetheriantimeline.com)

These individuals should not be thought of dysfunctional misfits, however. According to wolf

On the average, they got along well with their families, they had friends, they succeeded in school, many worked for themselves, many worked for others, and they were happy and well adjusted. But they were unique, as far as they knew, and they kept their differences a secret.

Then, in the early 1990’s, with the birth of the internet, this diverse group of individuals began to find each other. An online group, alt.horror.werewolves, founded as a forum for fans of werewolf movies soon became a forum for the discussion of members’ personal lives and experiences.  As Wolf puts it, “The Weres had found each other.”

***

Though always careful to emphasize that his theories are his alone and that he does not speak for the therian community as a whole, Wolf does not hesitate in sharing his own personal understanding of the modern werewolf phenomenon. He believes, for example, that present-day therians are genetically linked to the European werewolf community of the middle ages and that population and environmental pressures may have resulted in the reawakening of this long-hidden hereditary strain.  

         Wolf writes,

Before the Werewolf Trials of the later Middle Ages when thousands of mentally ill or simply despised people were tortured to death by the Inquisition for being “werewolves”, there really were people known as “werewolves”. Far from being insane, they were respected in their communities. They even had a special position in the church – they were called the Dogs of God and Saint Peter’s Wolves.

Wolf finds evidence for the existence of these holy werewolves in some of the ancient legends themselves, but especially in the records of the Inquisition regarding the trial in 1692 of the Livonian werewolf Thiess as recorded by Carlo Ginzburg in his The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983). 

According to Ginzburg, the elder Thiess confessed freely to the charge of being a werewolf.  He also claimed that he once suffered a broken nose during a battle with a peasant named Skeistan, who happened to have been deceased at the time. Skeistan was a witch and had risen from his grave along with other witches to carry seed grain into hell in order to curse the community’s crops. Thiess, as a werewolf, had battled to stop this travesty, and had been hit in the face with a broomstick by the witch. Thiess also claimed that such battles took place three times each year, on the night of St. Lucia before Christmas, at Pentecost, and on the night of St. John. On these nights

The werewolves proceeded on foot, in the form of wolves, to a place ‘beyond the sea’: hell. There they battled the devil and witches, striking them with long iron rods, and pursuing them like dogs. Werewolves, Thiess exclaimed, ‘cannot tolerate the devil.’ (29)

When the judges demanded to know why Thiess and the others would transform themselves into dogs and journey to hell, he explained that they went in order to bring back from hell those things that had been taken there by the witches, livestock, grain and other agriculture fruits. To fail in their task would mean a lean year for the harvest and hunger for the people.

The judges in this account seemed quite shaken by this strange testimony. They apparently had great difficulty in understanding werewolves as being on the side of God and opposed to the devil. Thiess kept insisting however, that

werewolves were anything but the servants of the devil. The devil was their enemy to the point that they, just like dogs – because werewolves were indeed the hounds of God – pursued him, tracked him down, and scourged him with whips of iron. They did all of this for the sake of mankind: without their good work the devil would carry off the fruits of the earth and everyone would be deprived as consequence. (29)

Ginzburg argues that judges’ understanding of werewolves as servants of the devil notorious for destroying livestock was incompatible with what seems to be an older concept of werewolves as servants of God. Thiess, he argues, represents an older understanding of werewolves in which the dogs of God battle witches and devils in defense of a bountiful harvest. In addition to the evidence of Thiess’s advanced age, and the assumption that he acquired his beliefs about werewolves at an early age, Ginzburg also notes a mid-sixteenth century tale of a young man of Riga who fell to the ground during a banquet. One of the witnesses recognized the man as a werewolf. When he revived the young man related that he had left his body to battle a witch that had been flying around in the shape of a red-hot butterfly. 

This was an ancient belief, then. But . . . under pressure from the judges, the original positive qualities of the werewolves began gradually to fade away and become corrupted into the execrable image of the man-wolf, ravager of the livestock. (31-32)

Wolf VanZandt believes that the ancient dogs of God, the hounds of St. Peter, are once again on the move, called for what purpose he is not yet sure. Modern therians may be the new hounds of God, when their struggling consciousness finally comes to shake off the false histories that they have been taught. Hundreds of years of false consciousness must fade away for the werewolf to once again hear the call to battle with the forces of evil. All the horrible tales of old were told from confused or sinister motives, but the truth remains, hidden even in the ancient legends and tales. The wholly other within the werewolf breast is the presence of the divine.

 **********************

About the author:  Gregory L. Reece, Ph.D

Greg holds a Ph.D in Religious Studies from the Claremont Graduate University with a specialty in philosophy of religion and theology, an M.Div. from the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, a B.A. from Samford University, and an A.A. from Martin Methodist College.

His studies in philosophy of religion, particularly his work on irony and religious belief, have led Greg to explore religion from its more idiosyncratic border regions rather than from its more stable centre. In pursuit of an understanding of religion, he has attended an Elvis Impersonator contest in Las Vegas, celebrated the birth of the King of Rock and Roll in Memphis, attended UFO and Tesla Technology conventions, had his molecules rejuvenated via the alien technology of the Integratron, visited Roswell and Area 51, had a close encounter with the extraterrestrials known as the Tall Whites, explored an underground cavern rumored to lead to a subterranean civilization, hunted Bigfoot outside of Paris, Texas, attended a Satanic mass, interviewed vampires, been trained in the art of exorcism, and gone hiking with a werewolf.

Greg’s fancy degrees and weird adventures, while incredibly interesting, have not provided him with steady employment. For that he works as a technical writer and consultant, providing human resources support to municipal governments and colleges. He occasionally teaches courses in philosophy and religion at Birmingham, Alabama colleges.

Greg lives at Brookehouse, a big, old home in the Montevallo, Alabama historic district, along with his wife Kristen, his son Sam, and his daughter Olivia. In his spare time, and when he is not making plumbing repairs, he likes to build robot, spaceship, and ray-gun sculptures from junk he finds at the thrift store.

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Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Nerd

“TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The death toll from severe storms that punished five Southern U.S. states has jumped to 269.” 

This is the opening statement from Weather.com‘s article, “Tornadoes Cut Path of Destruction,” which documented the devastating tornadoes that hit Alabama on April 27^th, 2011. 

The article itself did not surprise me… but the comments from the website’s respondents most certainly did. What I found most intriguing was the theological language being used on this modern media site, one explaining scientifically natural weather phenomena and includes no reference to any theological agenda.  Here are just a few examples:

God loves us so much and He is trying to get our attention one more time before He judges the earth. He wants us to live and not die. Wake up, people.

I pray God’s protection during this difficult time. May He give us His peace, comfort, and strength.  Romans 12  

Many such comments were directed towards those affected by the storms, letting them know that people were praying for them and the affected region. However, there were a few indicating that those people spared from the wrath of the storms felt that God had spared them for a reason. Other remarks used thick theological language indicating that these disasters are signs from God, of the ‘End times,’ and have been sent by God to call Americans to repentance. 

Representing another audience entirely, some challenged these theodicies. Theodicies offer religious justification and explanation for why evil (deadly tornadoes) exists in the world: if God is all knowing (knows that innocents are being killed), all powerful (has the power to intervene to protect said innocents), and is all good (loves his human creations), then why doesn’t he intervene and stop such disasters, which often happen to good, God-fearing folk? Of course, some commentators anticipated this tough theological problem, and either worked to resolve it, or berate those who might raise it in the first place, insisting that:  

God is the only reason more weren’t killed.  Be thankful it wasn’t your family. 

Don’t get upset people. Just pray for this very lost person! 

I wonder if that was what the people thought when Noah built the ark?  I believe!:  D and I am so glad he is preparing a place for me.. Sure don’t want that smoking place, do you? 

Yes, hopefully [people] like you, low life ass crack scum, will go first……I’ll pray for that. 

Wake up in hell and I think u will change your mind. 

Dear Lord, Please bless the people who walk with the breath you gave them and down you with it in the same. These people need a guiding light as they have become lost in their path. Please protect their families as they are lead into Hell by the sinners of the lands. In your name we pray, Amen.

God does exist. He wants America to repent of their sins and turn to Him. John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” 

Satan has turned many against God, including many of the posters on here. Questioning the existence of God is EXACTLY what Satan wants you to do…Satan …causes all the bad in the world, not God. Stop blaming the one who gave you life and put the blame where it really belongs!

These responses seem to be drawing on various starting assumptions about the nature of God: 

• God does exist and He is using natural disasters to chastise certain people so they will repent and return to God;
• God is the source and catalyst of natural disasters, but is also the reason more people were saved;
• God is sending these disasters as signs of the ‘End times’;
• Satan (the originator of evil) challenged God’s authority and now stalks weak humans attempting to destroy their faith in God; those who pose non-religious explanations for such events are themselves lost sinners in the grip of Satan and are headed for Hell unless they repent and believe.

The source of my wonder here is the eagerness to assign these natural disasters to an all-loving supreme being, the loathing directed at nonbelievers, and the medium through which these ideas are being conveyed. While these views are as old as monotheistic belief itself, what I find surprising is the social platform through which commentators offer such a stark and uncompromising theology… The Weather Channel.

Weather Religion?  

The connection between religion and weather is actually not as unusual as it may appear at first glance.  Many of the earliest theorists have argued that the origin of religion lies in its relationship with the natural world. Max Muller, a 19^th century German linguist and one of the “founding fathers” of the comparative religion, argued that, “all religions, primitive or otherwise… have their origins in the personification of natural forces and objects and the ‘myths’ that arise from these personifications.” 

This view, Naturism, holds that, 

humans gain a sense of the divine from natural phenomena: sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, thunder and lightning, storms, the seasons, animals, and plants. Faced with such an inspiring, mysterious, frightening, and awesome natural world, humans endowed nature with supernatural qualities. (Rodney Stark, 24-5) 

Some scholars have supported sociological, anthropological, and psychological analysis of what they claim is the human creation of the supernatural and religious, via the personification of natural phenomena. Other scholars, however, have advocated for a view of ‘religion’ as a separate category all together. For these scholars, religion is separate, and human experience of the sacred is a ‘real’ experience, and not merely a byproduct of language, social construction, human anxieties, or psychological dysfunction. 

Mircea Eliade, an adamant supporter of the categorical separation of religion from other disciplines and oft labeled ‘high priest’ of the ‘history of religion’ model mentioned above, opens his hallmark work, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, by praising the work of a German scholar by the name of Rudolf Otto: 

Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience… Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood what the ‘living God’ meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers- of Erasmus, for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in divine wrath. (8-9) 

Otto rejected the idea that the ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ is necessarily moral or rational.  For Otto, the ‘numen’, the ‘holy’ minus moral and rational aspects, is awe-inspiring, mysterious, terrifying and ‘wholly other.’ Due to the ‘wholly otherness” of Otto’s ‘numen,’ all language falls short to accurately express it in its totality.  

Despite the limitations of language, humankind has borrowed the imagery it has used to describe the most mysterious, terrifying, and ‘wholly other’ phenomenon humans have encountered—nature.  Otto’s description of the divine as terrifying and ‘wholly other’ and Muller’s view of religions as originating in the personification of natural forces, although hardly comforting, do seem to find some resonance in the Hebrew Bible’s description of the holy and powerful god of the Hebrews, Yahweh. 

The Jewish Weather-deity? 

Walter Gerhardt Jr. in his article, “The Hebrew/Israelite Weather-Deity,” presents a persuasive argument that the Hebrew God “is expressed in Biblical literature as an “allegorized idiom” of the weather phenomena” (130).  According to Gerhardt, the Hebrew God, known as YHWH, “is the personification of environmental forces and energies of weather indigenous to the Sinai/Edom and Syro-Palestinian geographic locales” and is often described using “the precipitive elements of the rainstorm” (130). Gerhardt presents Moses’ encounter with the deity on the holy mountain as an excellent example of this, emphasizing the dense cloud shrouding the mountain (133). Gerhardt highlights how YHWH thunders from heaven and “scatters lightning” (138). 

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible, known the TaNaKh to Jews and the Old Testament to Christians, is chock-full of disastrous natural events as well as sometimes contradictory explanations for them. One need look no further than Genesis to find stories where natural disasters are being attributed to the God: Noah and the flood, the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, are two of the most commonly referenced events. In Exodus, Moses encounters God via a startling viewing of a burning bush, represents Him before the Egyptian pharaoh, witnesses ten horrific plagues used to motivate the pharaoh to relent, experiences the parting of the ‘Red Sea’ which in turn “saves” the Hebrew slaves but wipes out pharaoh’s army, and negotiates the terms of the covenant with the Hebrew deity while on a holy mountain surrounded by a lightning storm. 

Luther’s God of Lightning 

The Hebrew Bible, noted above, is not just a sacred text for Jews but for Christians.  Christianity, historically, grew out of an apocalyptic and messianic sect of Judaism in the 1^st century, Common Era. The earliest followers of Jesus believed him to be the ‘messiah,’ a long anticipated political and religious savior meant to overthrow the Romans and restore the ancient kingdom of Israel. These earliest followers came to this conclusion about Jesus’ identity by finding what they interpreted to be prophetic statements in the Hebrew Scriptures. Early Christianity inherited the Hebrew Scriptures and added their own writings about Jesus and the early church to them to make their own Bible. So, it is worth asking whether the weather-deity of the Hebrew Bible persisted as Christianity developed out of Judaism. 

Christians inherited not only the scriptures of early Judaism but also many of the theodicies buried in the scriptures themselves which give various justifications for why ‘evil’ exists.  The book of Job itself provides numerous explanations, though none are conclusive, as to why disaster had befallen Job and his family, although the text states that Job was blameless in the sight of God.  The book of Job ends with the Hebrew God appearing to Job in a whirlwind, another destructive weather-related phenomenon. 

Such stories have not been lost on prominent Christian theologians, such as the architect of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. Luther suggested that his own entrance into monastic life was driven by a terrifying experience he had during a violent thunderstorm. Protestant Christianity has been deeply marked by Luther’s description of how the Christian God used nature to His own ends. As Craig Martin writes on Luther’s perspective in an article titled “The Ends of Weather: Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology” found in The Journal of the History of Philosophy: 

… He also interpreted “fruitful weather” as proof of God’s love for humanity.63 Thus, in the Sermons on Luke 21, while rare events were ominous or apocalyptic, fair weather might signal God’s protection.”(275) 

Many Protestant Christians today, especially those of an Evangelical nature, like many Christians found in the South Eastern United States, still hold to this correlation between nature disasters and God’s will.

Evangelical Christians in the South

According to a survey given by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, regarding the “most religious states” in the U.S. (based on four criteria: “the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God”), Southern States consistently lead the states in self-claimed religiosity.  According to their data: 

“More than eight-in-ten people in Mississippi (82%) say religion is very important in their lives… In some other Southern states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina, at least seven-in-ten people say religion is very important in their lives.”  

The U.S. Religious Landscape survey, also from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, estimates that 50% of the U.S.’s Evangelical Protestant Christian population lives in the Southeastern region of the country.  

Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestant Christians make up 49% of Alabama’s state population (the national average is 26%).  Mainline Protestants represent 15%, historically black Protestants make up 18% and Catholics only make up 6% of the states’ population (while nationally they represent 24% of the population).  Jews, Orthodox and other Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, separately, at most, represent 1% of the state’s population.  A group labeled “unaffiliated” make up 8% of the state’s population. 

An article in the Christian Century titled “Most don’t blame God for disasters,” presents the following statics based on a poll by Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service after the devastating earthquakes and tsunami in Japan: 

“Nearly six in ten evangelicals (59 percent) believe that God can use natural disasters to send messages—nearly twice the number of Catholics (31 percent) or mainline Protestants (34 percent) who so believe. Evangelicals (53 percent) are also more than twice as likely as the one in five Catholics or mainline Protestants to believe that God punishes nations for the sins of some citizens.”(14)

Why the Weather Channel?

Now, the most compelling question of all… why the Weather Channel.com?  Why are these comments showing up in an unlikely platform?  Why did these respondents feel the need to post such overtly religious comments on such a seemingly “secular” website?

 The reasons may be multifold. The Weather Channel’s website specifically does NOT offer theological reflections on natural events. While science is often credited with telling us how the world works, religion has often presented us with reasons, adequate or inadequate, for why the world works as it does. The desire of respondents to find meaning, and not just logistical analysis of how weather works, may be why they felt the need to provide meaning to these disasters. 

However, while the Weather Channel does not specifically offer theological explanations for natural disasters, this doesn’t mean that the site doesn’t attempt to capitalize off of the deep-seated desires of the population to feel “in control” over weather events. 

Monitoring the conditions which might lead to dangerous weather does not equate to controlling the weather but scientific analysis and advanced technological weather-monitoring equipment which result in weather ‘forecasting,’ may be feeding the same desires for control that religions have often offered to the population. 

Nicole Fleetwood, in her article “Failing Narratives, Initiating Technologies: Hurricane Katrina and the Production of a Weather Media Event”, explains how some viewers may be turning to various technologies to feel in control, which I would argue is one of the desirable characteristics institutionalized religion offers:

“On some level, meteorological technologies give the power to predict the future. We are able to witness the storm as weather media event from its inception as tropical storm to its naming to its levels of categorization to its arrival. The detailed sophistication afforded the viewer promises to lower our risk by increasing preparedness. Marita Sturken argues that computer visualization technologies, such as Doppler radar, ‘are used to convey the sense that weather-tracking technologies can actually help to control the weather itself.’” (772) 

Perhaps the reason the Weather Channel’s website has become a platform for commentators to process grief, send condolences and prayers, and work through theological concerns is due to the fact that the meteorological technologies, like religious and spiritual theodicies, provide some sense of control and order in times of chaos.

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By Maureen Dempsey, RNC-OB

Just what exactly is a slut?  According to Rush Limbaugh, because Sandra Fluke thinks that all insurance providers – even those with a religious objection – should provide coverage for contraception, she is a slut.  “She wants us to pay her for having sex,” Mr. Limbaugh claimed, “what does that make her?  A slut, right?  A prostitute.”  To Mr. Limbaugh the word slut signifies a bad woman – a woman with no value.  And sexual activity is the criterion that Mr. Limbaugh is using to determine value.  Does she have sex? Yes?  Then she is bad.  No sex?  Then she is good.  

The word slut has always signified a woman of low value in the English language.  However, the definition has narrowed over the years.  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a massive etymological work that not only defines words, but also provides examples of early uses of words.  The OED defines slut in two distinct ways: “as a woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance,” or “a woman of a low or loose character; a hussy.”Historically, a woman could be judged a slut by either her untidiness or her sexuality. Both definitions of the word slut – untidy woman or sexual woman – imply a system in which a woman’s worth is determined by her potential value (either as a housekeeper or as a wife) to a man.  

When a man uses the word slut, he is evoking a world in which women are not full citizens.  He is declaring his power. He is demarcating his territory.  He is asserting that he has the privilege to determine the worth of that woman.  Why is Mr. Limbaugh so threatened by Sandra Fluke that he must publicly disparage her?  Because prescription contraception shifts the power away from men by temporally moving the decision to use birth control away from the sex act.  This is important because when the use of birth control has to be negotiated at the moment just before the sex act, the likelihood that it will be used goes down. 

The use of a condom requires a man’s consent.  Women can use prescription contraception without a man’s consent.  This simple fact is at the heart of the current hullabaloo over contraception.  It is the real reason that no women were allowed to testify in the congressional hearing on birth control.  It also inspired the attempt to require a trans-vaginal ultrasound before abortion.  

In the last few weeks, the question of contraception coverage has been portrayed as a religious issue, a financial issue, and a moral issue.  But the real issues here are power and impotence.

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By Kenny Smith, Emory University  

In Austin, Texas, yet another “Jedi Camp”offers training for youngsters.  In San Francisco, adult Jedi demonstrate advanced light-saber fighting skills. Exactly how much Jedi-based social production does it take to constitute a “religious movement,” anyway?  

Down the road in Houston, neighbors continue to bring devotional offerings to an oak tree in one man’s yard, in which they claim to see the Virgin Mary. Fortunately, said resident has no plans to take the tree down and violate their religious freedom to come onto his property.   

While the Church of Later-Day Saints of Jesus Christ has been busy baptizing dead Jews (such as Anne Frank) into Mormonism (and apologize for it), one website offers to make dead Mormons gay, since “sadly, many Mormons throughout history have died without knowing the joys of homosexuality.” 

Glenn Beck, apparently, now self-identifies as Catholic as well as Mormon, since “Catholic” means “a person of faith” who stands up to government oppression.  

Verging on incoherence, a spokesperson for the Santorum campaign temporarily denounced President Obama’s “radical Islamic environmental policies.”  Speaking of which, one (billionaire) Santorum supporter argues for a more traditional and cost-effective solution to the contraception-debate: “have girls put an aspirin between their legs,” while one longtime evangelical (Chuck Colson) compares government requirements to provide insurance coverage for contraception to Nazi attempts to exterminate the Jews.  

In Sweden, a self-identified vampire and cannibal are to be married, presided over by a priest form the Church of Satan, despite the fact that both are “permanently confined to the high-security Karsuddens psychiatric facility for crimes that shocked the country.”   

One state legislator in Delaware is said to have taken a knee and “Tebowed” after his sponsored bill passed successfully through the chamber.  

Seven members of Michigan’s Hutaree militia are on trial for conspiring to kill a police officer (and bomb his funeral procession). Defense attorneys, though, argue that the Hutaree were preparing for war against the biblical anti-Christ, not the federal government. Since when did militias draw this fine of a distinction?  

At the Monroe Institute in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, ordinary folk learn to tap the mind’s hidden powers, up to and including voyages out of the body. 

While half way between the celebration of pre-Christian, spring-based holidays such as Imbolc (Feb. 2) and Ostara (March 21), modern-day Pagans and Wiccans recall the pagan roots of St. Valentine’s Day.

For busy Christians on the go, some churches offer Ash Wednesday drive-throughs, while others bring the sacred ritual out into the streets.  Elsewhere, this same approach is being tried out by funeral parlors, with drive-through viewings of loved ones, though not so much the “bring the viewings out in the street.”

In one northern Italian town, wives have forbidden their husbands from patronizing a new brand of racy coffee bars offering “sexpressos.” 

The son of Hollywood director Oliver Stone is said to have converted to Islam (as a Shiite, not a Suni), and plans to make a film (to be shot in Iran) about the 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi.  

In North Carolina, some Baptists are arguing against a constitutional amendment that would rule out the possibility of same-sex marriages.  

In Tennessee, “a former FBI agent who claims mosques in nearby Nashville, Tenn., have no legal right to exist” has been hired to train local police “about Islam and the threats of terrorism.”  Sounds fair and balanced to me.  

It’s been two weeks, and Niki Minaji’s performance at the Grammys, “in which she confessed to a priest in Anglican dogcollar, was tied to a Catherine wheel, danced with some scantily clad altar boys, knelt in prayer and, at last, was exorcized,” is still surreal.

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Maureen Dempsey, RNC-OB

Friday morning, on the Huffington Post, the first story to catch my eye was this: “David Albo, Virginia Lawmaker, Says Wife Wouldn’t Have Sex Because Of Transvaginal Ultrasound Bill.”  As I clicked on the headline, I thought, this is going to be good.  And the gentleman from Fairfax didn’t disappoint me.  I watched a three-minute video of Mr. Albo describing to his fellow delegates how he tried to seduce his wife with a combination of red wine and the Redskins on big screen television.  They were on the sofa, he was snuggling up to her while changing the channel, things were heating up…when he inadvertently stopped on MSNBC and saw his name plastered across the 46-inch screen and heard his colleague, David Englin, repeatedly using the term “trans-vaginal.”  After a few minutes of this, his wife excused herself and went to bed alone. 

Mr. Albo obviously went to some effort to plan the description of this failed seduction.  He set the stage visually.  At an appropriate time in the story, he played some sexy music.  However, when the moment came for him to describe what he and his wife saw and heard on the TV, his story telling technique fell apart.  He couldn’t bring himself to say the word, “trans-vaginal.”  He got part of the word out and then the rest of the sentence dissolved into incoherent gibberish.  “Trans-V this and Trans-V that,” he said next, using a guttural tone of voice – the kind of voice people use when they think they’re saying something dirty.  

Now I was confused.  What had turned off Mr. Albo’s wife?  Originally, I had thought it was her solidarity with other women – her disgust at the thought that the state might require this unnecessary, uncomfortable, and invasive procedure.  But now I wondered if she wasn’t just disgusted at the blatant use of the word, “vagina.”  I decided to see if I could find any other information about this story online.  The first retelling of the story I found, at www.dailycaller.com, referred to “the unfortunately named, ‘trans-vaginal ultrasound.’”  Apparently the Albos aren’t the only people uncomfortable with the word vagina. 

Why is vagina so hard to say?  Why is it “unfortunate” to use the term vaginal to describe a medical procedure that occurs in the vagina?  Why does the gentleman from Fairfax use a special, bawdy tone of voice when he refers to “trans-V this and trans-V that?”  Why is this story even funny?  I have a theory.  I do not know Mr. Albo personally.  But he and I attended high school in Virginia at roughly the same time.  I think I knew guys like him.  A smart guy, a funny guy, a mostly proper guy.  He couldn’t say vagina because what he was really talking about was pussy.  He was telling a story – an ironic story, a bawdy story – about how he didn’t get any pussy because of his involvement in some notorious pussy-related legislation.   

This is important because when men who can’t say the word, “vagina,” get together with other likeminded men to discuss contraception, the discussion ends up being about sex, about pussy, rather than about women’s health.  I encourage all men, but particularly those involved in the legislative process, to practice saying the word, “vagina,” every day.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

It is hard to be anywhere in New York and not hear the name of Jeremy Lin. His accomplishments are impressive, and his story is compelling, but he also has clearly filled a void in the New York media world, at least where the struggling Knicks are concerned. 

The anomalous highlights of his meteoric two-week career are well known: a Taiwanese-American point guard who played college basketball at Harvard, one whose masterful timing in the pick and roll nonetheless failed to generate sufficient interest to earn him a starting role on any of the three teams who considered fielding him. 

At least until February 4^th, when the desperate New York Knickerbockers (then 7-15) decided to shake things up yet again, and started him. Lin played tenaciously and intelligently, and he led (if that is the right word) the Knicks to the first of seven straight wins, the last of which came with a buzzer-beating shot of his own against the struggling Raptors (9-21) on Asian Heritage Night in Toronto (“Be my VaLINtine” posted one eager fan). The Knicks’ streak came to a groaning halt last Saturday night with an 89-85 loss to the New Orleans Hornets at home in Madison Square Garden.  I heard those groans loud and clear in the New Jersey bar where I watched the fourth quarter. 

Given his religious commitments, comparisons between Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow were inevitable, I suppose—the up and coming star with some obvious technical flaws but great heart, the spiritual adept turning a struggling franchise around with repeatedly dramatic and last-minute victories they seem virtually to will into being. 

Enter David Brooks who, in a column drafted after the Knicks’ VaLINtine victory, curiously referred to “the Jeremy Lin Problem”.

Brooks refers to “a religious person in professional sports” as an “anomaly,” which seems rather odd to anyone who has witnessed the prayer circles before and after most professional football games, or the finger-to-the-sky salute after most home runs in baseball, but let that lie. It is the reasons Brooks finds the marriage of religion and sport “anomalous” that are worthy of consideration. 

For Brooks, there is an inescapable moral tension between what he calls “the ethos of sport” and “the ethos of faith.” By “faith,” he explicitly limits himself to the three scriptural monotheisms, so we might well wonder if what he really means to underline here is an apparent contradiction between pagan virtue and Christian virtue. 

Reading on, we discover that this is precisely what he means to do. 

The pagan virtues of the athlete, he tells us, are fierce competitiveness, personal ambition, pride, self-assertion and self-dramatization, a willingness to do anything to win.  By contrast, the virtue of the religious person may be captured in one word: humility. 

In other words, you can’t connect the Sermon on the Mount to the gridiron. 

Except that you can.  If you have never read the Sermon on the Mount, and just recall those memorable lines about the meek and the poor being blessed and inheriting the earth, then it’s easy to forget that Jesus in this same Sermon tells his hearers that if their hand or eye offend them, then they should cut them off or pluck them out.  Many a professional athlete engages in precisely that sort of ascetic self-denial throughout their relatively short careers. Religion, very much like professional sport, is a hard code.

But the key for Brooks is this: “[The athlete’s] primary virtue is courage–the ability to withstand pain, remain calm under pressure and rise from nowhere to topple the greats.”  He then casually throws out the conclusion that explains what this essay is really all about.  This athletic ethos, and this list of pagan virtues, is what ultimately explains the contemporary world of corporate, academic, and political life. 

Yowza. Let’s try to break that down. 

For Aristotle, that great summarian of pagan virtue, courage was indeed a headline virtue. It is the first virtue he discusses at any length in the Nicomachean Ethics and it has been remembered ever since as one of the so-called cardinal virtues.  Most of Aristotle’s examples in his discussion of courage come from the battlefield rather than the Olympics, however. 

It was Thomas Aquinas’s great achievement to suggest, and then to display how, pagan and Christian virtues were not necessarily incompatible. The point for Aquinas was to take the virtue of courage off of the battlefield, and to explore its essential qualities in other social arenas… like martyrdom. 

But Paul, himself reputed by the tradition to be a very early Christina martyr, repeatedly used athletic metaphors in describing the life of Christian faith (“I have run the good race,” he suggests most memorably, “I have fought the good fight”). Later Christians, already in the late first and second centuries, regularly referred to the martyrs as Christian “athletes” (it’s a Greek word, after all). 

Why does Brooks fail to see this? Why does he want to drive such a wedge between pagan and Christian virtue? Is he simply suggesting that Wall Street, the modern university and the US Congress cannot be Christianized? 

No, what Brooks misses is that Jeremy Lin is the member of a team, and that the virtues are social phenomena, not individual ones. 

Now, it is the case that there were no team sports at the ancient Olympics; Greek athletes competed ferociously, and they competed alone.  But team sports are the dominant feature of modern sport, and they are an essential feature of modern life. The key for a point guard like Jeremy Lin is not to score on every trip to the basket; the point is to enable someone on his team to score.  He is a brilliant passer as well as a deft reader of set screens and posts. His virtue is his ability to bring a flagging team together. 

That is what modern sports are centrally about. That is why we encourage young people, boys and girls alike, to play them. Sport is a school for virtue, and virtues like courage do not belong strictly to the athlete or to the Christian. They are supposed to belong in every social arena, regardless of confession or creed. 

That is the story embodied in the fledgling careers of Jeremy Lin, of Tim Tebow, of a hundred other athletes whose names we know, and the thousands more whose names we do not. It is primarily a story about teamwork, selflessly working toward common ends and aims, the demanding code of individual excellence married to our moral responsibilities for one another. 

And that is the story the current Republican ethos, an ethos that Brooks’s columns represent quite eloquently, seems most consistently to miss.

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By Kate Daley-Bailey

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (the Gospel of Luke 10:25-37) is probably one of the best- known parables from the Christian New Testament.  In the U.S. the phrase ‘good Samaritan’ is commonly understood to describe someone who has gone out of their way to help another.  This phrase has been thoroughly secularized and one need not be a Christian to know its meaning.  You voluntarily carry your elderly neighbor’s groceries… you are a ‘good Samaritan.’ You clean up someone else’s litter on the side walk… you are a ‘good Samaritan.’

In the second grade, I was recognized as the most conscientious student in the class… and you guessed it… I was awarded a certificate for being a ‘good Samaritan.’ But wait… who exactly are the Samaritans and why did my second grade teacher think I was a particularly ‘good’ one?

Who are the Samaritans?

Stephen L. Harris in his text, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, describes the Samaritans of first century Roman occupied Judea as a sect of Jewish people who “recognized only the Mosaic Torah, but not the prophets or other biblical writings, as binding Scripture (67).”  

According to Harris, there was a great deal of animosity between the Samaritans and other Jewish groups due to the Samaritan’s acceptance of only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as scripture.  Not only did the Samaritan scripture differ from that of the standard Jewish version but the Samaritans also embraced Mount Gerizim, rather than Mount Zion, as God’s holy place.  

During Jesus’ time, the Samaritan Jewish identity was hotly contested… so much so that “Jews in Judea regarded the Samaritans as an alien people who practiced a false version of the Jewish religion (67).”  Harris also notes that according to some biblical verses (such as 2 Kings 17) the Samaritans were viewed as the descendants of “Mesopotamians whom Assyrian conquerors settled in the area during the eight century B.C.E.- and therefore not ‘authentic’ Jews (67).”  Harris states that this description of the Samaritans’ origin, although historically inaccurate, was a widely held belief among the various Jewish sects in Judea during the first century CE. 

Jesus and His Historical Context:

Historically speaking, Jesus was a Jew.  He had Jewish parents, went to the Jerusalem Temple, knew Jewish scripture and often quoted from them, and celebrated Jewish holidays such as Passover.  The name Jesus is actually the Greek version of his Hebrew name—a variation on the name Joshua.  The majority of Jesus’ followers, according to the four gospels of the New Testament, are patently Jewish.  I am illustrating this point because there is a tendency among some Christians to see Jesus as outside of his Jewish context and thereby miss the impact that many of his actions and sayings would have had on his primarily Jewish audience.

The Parable:

According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is approached by a Torah scholar (a man very learned in Jewish law) and asked what he must do to inherent eternal life.  Jesus returns his question with another question: “What is written in the law?  What do you read there?”  The scholar quotes from the written Torah: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus affirms the man’s answer but before he leaves he wants Jesus to clarify who his neighbor is… who does this category include?  Instead of directly answering the man, Jesus tells him a parable, a common didactic literary tool used by Jewish teachers to have listeners work through their own questions.  The parable illustrated is the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which reads as follows:

30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.  33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.  34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.  Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

After telling the parable, Jesus turns back to the man and asks “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”  (New Revised Standard Version, 1989)

Unpacking the Parable:

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho, in Jesus’ time, was a notoriously dangerous stretch of road.  Particularly hazardous because bandits would often lie in wait for travelers.  The unfortunate man in Jesus’ parable fell victim to a band of robbers and they striped him, beat him and went away leaving him half-dead.  The injured man is anonymous. The parable presents three new characters: a priest, a Levite, and finally a Samaritan.  According to Brad Young’s book The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation, the priest and Levite both “serve religious functions in the temple” and did not “follow the oral interpretation of the Torah” which means they were probably associated with a particular group of Jews in the first century known as the Sadducees (106).  These Sadducees were very concerned with ritual purity and followed the written Torah injunction (Lev. 21:1) that they not touch a dead body which was understood as ritually contaminating.  The priest and Levite’s actions were dictated by their strict interpretation of ritual purity laws.  If the man is dead, then they risk ritual contamination by touching a corpse.

Relationship to the Law

According to the Law, what is one required to do?  Some Jewish groups like the Sadducees accepted only the written Law and read these texts literally.  The Samaritans, who as we previously discussed, were often viewed as enemies of the Jews, ironically shared one characteristic with the Sadducees… they too only accepted the written Law.  Both groups rejected the oral Law.  According to Harris, the Pharisees “accepted not only the written Law contained in the Mosaic Torah but also a parallel oral law (65).  Harris explains this oral law as “intended to extend the laws of Temple purity to virtually every aspect of life” (65).  So this parable not only suggests that Jesus viewed even one’s enemies as one’s neighbors but also shows his affinity with the Pharisee’s reverence for both the written and oral Law.  The oral law, accepted by the Pharisees, prioritized the preservation of life over ritual purity.  Therefore, if there had been a Pharisee in this parable, we can guess what, given his view of Jewish law, he would have done in this circumstance… he would have done as the Samaritan did.

What is so shocking about this parable?

The audience listening to Jesus were Jews, as he himself was, and the man to whom Jesus was speaking directly was not only a Jew but he was very well versed in Jewish law.  It is likely that Jesus’ audience had heard a teaching like this before and were merely waiting for Jesus to fill in the details.  This might have been akin to hearing the opening lines of a joke you have told a number of times… only to find out that the person telling the joke had modified it.  The audience probably nodded their heads in agreement and gave each other knowing smiles as Jesus began the parable… of yes… the infamous road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the callousness of the priest and the Levite, and then the… what?  Jesus’ followers probably expected the champion of the story to be a Pharisee… after all… this group of Jews were required to follow the oral as well as the written law.  But Jesus changes the pattern and chooses a very unlikely candidate as his hero… a Samaritan.

Why did Jesus tell a Parable about a ‘Good’ Samaritan?

We have briefly touched on Jesus’ historical context and noted the significant historical tensions between Samaritans and other Jews living in Judea during Jesus’ time.  We might not be shocked to find Jesus, as a first century Jew in Judea, telling a story about a Samaritan to his predominately Jewish audience.  What is shocking is that Jesus makes the Samaritan the champion of his parable!  Not only were Samaritans seen as enemies of the Jews, they also followed the written Law (albeit a distinct version of it) and were not beholden to the oral Law. The Samaritan was not fulfilling a requirement placed on him by oral or written Law and given his status as outsider was probably risking his own life helping the anonymous man laying half-dead on the side of the road.

The Torah scholar to whom Jesus directs his parable is now asked which of the three characters in the parable “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers” and the scholar responds knowingly to Jesus’ question… “the one who showed him mercy.”  Keep in mind that this Torah scholar knows both the written and oral Law and appears to be in line with the Pharisaic view of the law.  He too may have expected the hero in Jesus’ parable to be a Pharisee if not Pharisee like.  He might have expected the man to act due to his lawful obligation.  Here, in this instance, the Torah scholar is the champion because he understands the underlying meaning of the cryptic parable.  The Torah scholar did not answer Jesus’ question by saying ‘the Samaritan.’ He defines the man by his actions and not is social, cultural, or religious status.

After telling the parable, Jesus turns back to the man and asks “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University  

Riding through some winter-soaked mountain villages in the hills of Corfu with a friend, I passed a gorgeous and surprisingly large Byzantine church, surprising to me because we were in the middle of comparative nowhere. 

 “What church is that?” I asked her.

 “The Church of Saint George,” she replied. 

And it suddenly hit me: these people invoke saint’s names the way Protestants invoke denominations. The Church of Saint George, the Church of Saint Spyridon, the Church of Saint Stephen, the Church of Saint Catherine, the Church of the All Holy Mother of God… all Orthodox churches, and all different too. 

On a casual drive through any major American metropolis, you’ll see a similar string of various and varying Christian churches. I’ll take my home city of Atlanta as an example. If you drive down the central section of Ponce de Leon Avenue, a Lutheran Church is followed by a Mormon Church, then a Melkite Church, then a Presbyterian Church, and then an Antiochene Church, all within under a mile. On Peachtree Street closer to downtown, the situation is even more dramatic: two Methodist churches, one Episcopalian, one Lutheran, one Presbyterian, one Catholic, one Baptist and one non-denominational, all within one city mile. 

This is actually a fascinating situation, the significance of which is easy to miss. Every one of these “denominations”—even ones like the Catholic and Orthodox churches that technically claim to be the church universal and not a denomination—is believed to have the right to a place on that public street. They belong on the street. That doesn’t mean that I, in my church on Sunday morning, have to believe that your church’s doctrines are legitimate; clearly, what is preached in these various pulpits on Sunday morning are incompatibles. But I believe in the legitimacy of the church’s presence on the street, whatever I may think of what goes on inside. We are neighbors, after all, and that’s just being neighborly. 

We tend to take this form of denominational pluralism for granted, and hence we often fail to realize historically how it came to pass, and politically what it means. Historically speaking, English and American (and other) streets began to look like this in the 1700s, after 150 years of seething religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics had burned a lot of the older streets to ash. By the early 1700s, it had become clear to most people that the fact of religious pluralism was not going to go away. Protestants and Catholics, most of them at any rate, no longer held onto the hope that one more argument, or one more pitched battle, was going to turn the tide in their favor. No more once-and-for-alls. Religious differences were here to stay. And the new political challenge was how to allow for and accommodate that pluralism, not to deny it or try to make it disappear. 

To see the power and the novelty of the religious rapprochement symbolized by the new  denominationalism, we need look no farther than that most eloquent spokesperson for the European Enlightenment, Voltaire. Exiled from France to England between 1726 and 1728, they were English streets like Peachtree that grabbed the philosopher’s attention. Here is how he described it in his Sixth Philosophical Letter: 

If there were only one religion in England, one would have to fear despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but they have thirty, and they live happy and in peace. 

“Happy and in peace”… that’s the dream of an effective secular politics that takes religious pluralism for granted. 

But now comes the twist. Something else had happened to England between the early 1500s, when the trouble and the beheading began, and the early 1700s when thirty different religions seemed like a happy compromise. Namely, England got richer. A lot richer. 

The British Empire and British Navy, sure. But think the East India Company. Think the global commerce that empires are designed to protect. To the eye of many a wealthy British burgher, religious wars were simply bad for business. 

I’d like to suggest that we see something similar happening in the United States in this election season. Until fairly recently, the field of Republican presidential hopefuls looked a lot like Peachtree Street in Atlanta: an evangelical Protestant who used to be Lutheran, who was born in Iowa and lives in Minnesota; a lukewarm Mormon who was born in California and recently returned from China; a lukewarm Baptist who was born in Tennessee and lives in Atlanta; a fiery Roman Catholic who was born in Virginia and lives in Pennsylvania; an evangelical “born-again” Protestant who was born and raised in Texas; a Mormon who was born in Michigan but who has lived and worked all over the place; a former Baptist who used to be Lutheran and later converted to Roman Catholicism, who was born in Pennsylvania but also lives near Atlanta now; and a nominal Baptist who was born in Pennsylvania, lives in Texas, and almost has to be an atheist to be consistent with his Libertarian philosophy. What power could be more absolute and unchecked than God’s, after all? 

Now that is one complicated American street. And sure, we’re down to just four candidates now, but the situation is no less complicated for the reduction: one lifelong Roman Catholic; one Roman Catholic convert; one Mormon; and one quasi-Baptist Libertarian. And let’s face it, we’re really down to two: a lifelong Mormon and a Roman Catholic convert. So who represents the religious mainstream of the United States? The point is, there isn’t one. There never really was. Because religious wars are bad for business. 

None of this is to say that religion does not matter, deeply so, to some of these candidates and to some of their constituencies. There are a great many evangelical and fundamentalist churches in which the idea that the Pope is Antichrist is preached on a regular basis, and these tend to be the same churches that argue forcefully for the view that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is an heretical Christian offshoot. But precious few of these churches argue that a Catholic or Mormon church does not belong on an American street. Their right to exist is fairly settled. 

Can a Mormon or a Catholic run for president? Of course they can. In this election cycle, they are being asked to run against a US President who was born in Hawai’i and lived in Chicago, who was not raised religiously, but who came to a fairly loose and undefined Christian faith that is Protestant in its basic tenets, and whose middle name (Hussein) leaves some still confused about his true religious identity. 

(Mitt, Newt, Barack… they’ve all got funny names this time around.) 

There is a lot more to this campaign than religion and a lot more to North American religious pluralism than doctrine. It’s about the right to happiness and the quest for peace. Both of which are good for business. 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan presided over a powerful new coalition that linked long-entrenched business interests with a conservative Christian social agenda. That coalition proved formidable for a decade. Since then, the Christian conservative members of the Republican coalition—those who are honest with themselves, at any rate—have begun to wonder if they weren’t being played all along. Whenever the chips are down (as they are now) and a choice between economic conservatism or religious conservatism is demanded, then the Party goes with business. 

Saint George or Saint Spyridon doesn’t really matter here. What we have learned since the South Carolina primary, and re-learned in Florida and Nevada, is what matters most in this moment of deep economic unsettlement. Mitt Romney declared an income of $21 million last year, the vast majority of it from investments. Newt Gingrich declared an income in excess of $3 million, the vast majority of it suspicious-sounding. 

In other words, these are very wealthy men who are very political and very, very well-connected. And this is what their Party represents.