The e-mails pulled no punches. "The BBC plans to broadcast Jerry Springer's 'The Opera' [sic] immediately after Christmas. The BBC concedes that the intended broadcast 'pushes back the boundaries of taste and decency'. Nevertheless, the show is scheduled to be transmitted without any cuts . . . I have read the write-up in the Radio Times which seems to confirm the content of this programme. This is surely a matter on which we will want to protest in the strongest possible terms. You might like to consider taking action as suggested."
The Christian uprising against the BBC's broadcast of Jerry Springer - The Opera is only one recent example of protest in the name of religion against art. The e-mail round robin that canvassed protests against Jerry Springer explicitly made the link with the violent demonstrations by Sikh groups in Birmingham that chased Gurpreet Bhatti's Behzti off-stage, to a governmental reaction of abject complacency. Jewish groups condemned anti-Semitism in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi, which depicts Jesus and the disciples as homosexuals, has brought out the denunciatory crowds ever since its New York debut in 1998, and was still doing so in Scotland last month.
Even children's fiction is contested. There were reports that the filmmakers adapting Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials were to drop references to God so as not to offend the religious right in America. Pullman has insisted that the film will remain true to his vision, but in his most recent statement he equivocated like a Jesuit about the books' condemning fundamentalism, not God as such; not quite the impression he has always given.
On the other hand, Pullman's bête noir, C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, is likely to see sequels that play down Lewis's explicitly Christian eschatology: its publishers are as keen not to offend secular readers as the filmmakers are not to alienate the red states.
In some cases, these controversies pit one set of believers against another: some Jews against Gibson's blend of the synoptic gospels and the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich (although many socially conservative Jews supported the film), for example. And when Christian groups condemned the Sensation exhibition by young British artists at the Brooklyn Museum, notably Chris Ofili's portraits of the Virgin Mary that incorporated elephant dung, it was noted darkly that the exhibition organisers and Charles Saatchi were Jewish.
In other cases, though, competing faiths have pulled together. Gurdial Singh Atwal, one of the leaders of the Sikh protests in Birmingham, supported the Jerry Springer protestors, telling the BBC that "nobody has the right to make a mockery of any religion or any culture at all". And whenever campaigns are waged for a work of art to be prosecuted for blasphemy, a Church of England bishop can be relied on to opine that the protection of the blasphemy laws should be extended to other faiths as well.
The secular liberal response is anguished, because these cases throw into opposition two liberal values: the protection of minorities and freedom of speech. (Or they appear to: as in the Behzti case, often they arise out of minorities' internal conflicts.) In
Britain, at least since the Salman Rushdie affair, publishers and the arts establishment have tiptoed around Muslim sensibilities in particular. But there seems to be a new insistence on the part of Christians on getting in on the act. The evangelicals behind these protests seem to be engaging in competitive victimhood. If Sikhs can have a play they don't like removed from the stage, they ask, why cannot Christians prevent an offensive broadcast? Why is Christianity the only faith that is seen as fair game?
But this is surely to take the argument from the wrong end. Christian protests against art are unnecessary; they are bad theology; and they are counterproductive.
For Christians to make a fuss about Jerry Springer - The Opera, or any work mocking their faith, is irrational. Clearly, the mockery has not weakened their own faith (the opposite, if anything). That any supreme being worth the name would object to it is inconceivable. The notion that any wavering agnostic might stumble upon the broadcast and be turned away from Christianity as a result is highly unlikely.
It is hard to divine what view Jesus would have taken of being guyed in Jerry Springer. But some clue may be gathered from the Beatitudes: "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake." Moreover, Jesus's preaching used parables and analogies to make points indirectly: it is hard to reconcile his techniques with the dull, blunt literalism of some of his followers.
Calls for censorship are counterproductive in two ways. First, they actively repel the liberal, secular elements of society whom evangelicals, on their own lights, should be seeking to win over. Second, arguments that religious beliefs should be protected from insult are actively dangerous to evangelicals. As more thoughtful religious commentators have noted, plans to protect the sensibilities of the various faiths run the risk of making any sort of polemical evangelism illegal. Better, one might think, for Christianity to take its chances in as free a marketplace of ideas as possible, and trust that the truth will win through.
Imagine, for a moment, that evangelicals had made a thoughtful response to Jerry Springer rather than a reflexive one. They might then have found a way to use the very offensiveness of the broadcast precisely as a way to demonstrate in their response the Christian values of humility, service and love. Instead, they have portrayed themselves to society as hyper-sensitive authoritarian bullies, precisely the caricature that has repelled so many.
But if the religious thrive on a feeling of persecution, so do artists. They have shouted censorship in response to what in some cases is no more than a consumer boycott. (Violence and intimidation are a different matter, of course.) On Millian grounds, no liberal society should forbid behaviour that is offensive to others without causing any actual harm, and to that extent the BBC's decision to show Jerry Springer must be right. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the controversial elements of the opera are present only to produce a lazy frisson in the audience. In a society as secular as the UK, mocking religious pieties has power only parasitically.
Over the course of history, much of art in the broadest sense (most great paintings, most great classical music, much poetry, much architecture) has drawn its power from religious faith - not the self-righteous, self-congratulatory easy faith of the would-be censors, but the kind of brave faith that constantly wrestles with doubt and disappointment and emerges triumphant.
Now that art has lost this, all it has to replace it is the power to shock. And shock is as poor a tool for changing minds in the hands of artists as moral outrage is in the hands of evangelists. Moreover, shock at blasphemy is a wasting asset. As Larkin asked: "What remains when disbelief has gone?"
In politics, the hardest problems to mediate are double-minority problems. (Israelis are an embattled minority in the Middle East but Palestinians are an embattled minority in Israel; similarly in apartheid South Africa or Northern Ireland.) The interface of religion and art has arrived at a similar impasse. Christians see themselves as a minority holding out against a world of secular materialism. Sikhs and Muslims and those of other faiths, in the west, have the same reaction. But equally, liberal secularists look to the rise of assertive fundamentalism, visible in different forms in the US and in the world of Islam, and see themselves, in the formulation popularised by Richard Dawkins, as a handful of "brights" in a world of "dims". We are far from having seen the last of these battles, and farther than ever from any sign of a sensible accommodation: for too many of the participants, the joy of outrage has become the whole and only end.
