C L O S E R – Cruci-Fixion Lane

And in case you find your maker perhaps you’ll plead for us a bit (Procal Harum – Crucifiction Lane)

When I was about thirteen and still lived at my parents farm, we had these people living in our neighbourhood. They also had a farm and their dad was still living there. He was an old nice men, perhaps a little bit forgetting things and telling wonderful stories that were obviously not true such as the one with the giant purple hare with a two by three udder…. He saw this hare in the old farmhouse that was now used as a place for their cows. In this farmhouse above the entrance on the inside their was also a big Crucifix. It was big and old and was hanging there a long time. So long that even the spider webs across the Crucifix were covered not only with dead flies but also with dust. Nevertheless, it was important to him he told me once when I took it off to have a closer look. You never he said what could happen in the future, perhaps he would need Jesus. It was holy for him, it wasn’t a dusty wooden thing covered with fly shit and dead flies, it was a hopefull promis for the afterlife; a life that was real for him since he was 92 at that time.

It is not surprising then that the program “God doesn’t exist” (God bestaat niet) was considered a blasphemy for example because of the following picture:
(Yes that is a naked black woman being crucified). This blew over and now we have in the Netherlands a row over the upcoming concert of Madonna, also about a crucifixion scene:

Watch the video with Madonna’s Live to Tell crucifixion scene:

According to Madonna this is a means to appeal to the audience to donate AIDS charities. Nothing wrong with that cause of course. Madonna probably feels the same and said “I don’t think Jesus would be mad at me and the message I’m trying to send,” in New York Daily News. Not everyone is inclined to believe this, such Thomistic:

Let’s face facts: Madonna has built her career mixing pop songs with visual imagery which has promoted sexuality at odds with Chrsitian values. She has posed naked for photographs throughout her career, and many of these pictures have glorified deviant sexual acts. She has a large homosexual following and, although she is not homosexual, she has frequently identified herself with homosexuals and homosexuality. She has, form the beginning of her career, mixed religious imagery with blasphemy [her Like A Prayer video, her movie Truth or Dare (which depicted her Blonde Ambition Tour) and even her recent album “American Life” where she has sung “there is no resurrection”]. Madonna is an apostate Catholic who has serious issues with the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. She has been quoted as saying the following:

“Crucifixes are sexy because there is a naked man on them.”

“Nuns are sexy.”

She has also suggested that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were sexually intimate (and this was in the early 1990’s, long before “The Da Vinci Code”).

Madonna has attempted to portray herself as having become softer and more spiritual, and I have heard many Catholics talk about this with hope that she is experiencing a conversion.

Hopefully, Madonna will come back home to the Faith she has abandoned and openly mocked. However, she will need to publicly retract much of her career and admit that her actions were blasphemous and that many of her works (like her “Sex” book, which she reportedly quietly regrets) which led countless souls into sin and darkness.

Once she has done such things, and renounced her denial of the Divinity of Christ and His Resurrection, I will be more inclined to listen to her speculations about what Jesus would think of her behavior.

This case brings not only to attention the way religion is portrayed in modern culture and mass media, but of course also how it is done and by whom and how people react to that. The reaction above is similar to some of the reactions after Dutch(!)-Somalian Hirsi Ali showed Submission I for the first time. Then to was said that the movie was a case of blasphemy and the fact that made it was that she was an apostate (also in the case of her book the caged virgin). I’m not sure of the argument of apostacy has played a role in the complaints made by the orthodox christian political party (SGP) against the Madonna concert. Minister of Justice Donner last night told on Dutch TV that he could not forbid the concert although he would like too. In his view to step on something that is holy for many people is not the way and to provoke by insult in order to start a discussion is the wrong way.Or let me point to Chokri Ben Chikha a young Tunisian-Belgian author, actor and singer. He wrote a play and dance act about cultural differences to draw attention to the difficulties of young immigrants who are discriminated against by the natives. The play is called “Our Lady of Flanders” (Onze Lieve Vrouw van Vlaanderen). He is criticized for making fun about anti-semitism and for the following picture that was the poster for the play:

The criticism about this and about him (as a ‘muslim’ non-native) was to be expected.
Important to note is that on the one hand The Netherlands has become one of the most secularized countries in the world: there are not many ‘Christians’ left and for a lot of people the meaning of religion in society has decreased. In fact many people celebrate all the freedoms Dutch people have fought for in the 1960s, such as women’s emancipation, gay emancipation and, yes, liberation from religious constraints. On the other hand several ‘new’ religions have evolved in the Netherlands such as new age forms of religiosity, Hinduism, and Islam. Because of this process of secularization however, the role of religion in the public debate is no longer as self-evident and many people are opposed to a possible role for religion to play in politics and society. Accordingly visible and public manifestations of Islam such as mosques, headscarves, and Islamic schools are criticized. The argument is put forward that public display of such religious rituals is tantamount to an attempt to force these ideas and values upon others. At the same time many religious people experience the ban on public expression of the religious and its restriction to the private domain while the public domain is exclusively reserved to the secular, as threatening and as a personal attack. While the ‘secularists’ fear going back to the narrow-minded 1950s.This ‘Madonna-affair’ but also the Cartoon-crisis plays within that context and refers to an important cultural change: the growing visualization of culture. Now this visualization of religion is an interesting thing that probably will be more important in the future. Our culture is getting more and more visualized by mass media also the internet: with the increasing use of fast internet it is easier to make and distribute movies (see youtube for example). Secular and religious people will use this visualization for their own ends. This means not only religious symbols in the public sphere but also a competition over the meaning, importance and interpretation of those symbols and of course who has the right to use and interpret them. Interesting times ahead!