Scrubs on Abortion

I don't watch Scrubs, but all the cool kids tell me that it's a very funny and important (popular) show. So I was surprised to see this clip on YouTube.

The point I'd like to make is that I don't find this depiction of Jesus troublesome.

Congratulations to the producers and writers of this episode for taking on what could have been a flaming train wreck and making a well placed point. (Jesus doesn't negotiate.)

Hollywood Just Don't Get It

Here are two stories that do not bode well:

First, file this under the heading "HOLLYWOOD JUST DON'T GET IT" from Comingsoon.net:

The Prodigal Son Works at Ikea?

Variety reports that Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment have made a deal for Prodigal Son, a romantic comedy that Gigi Levangie Grazer will write with Mimi James. Brian Grazer will produce.

The story revolves around a workaholic single woman who is set up on a date by her mother. Her date, a handsome, kind and caring carpenter who works at Ikea, turns out to be Jesus Christ, who's returned for Armageddon and settled in contemporary Los Angeles.

"It's a love it or hate it idea, but we're not aiming to offend," Gigi Grazer told the trade. "He won't be having sex. It'll be a disarming romantic comedy, a story of unrequited love, sort of like 'Splash.'"

Yow! Is this the price we pay for the de-mythologizing of Jesus!? It may be 'way past time to retire the Jesus, My Soul's True Love-type P&W songs and return to Onward Christian Soldiers. This kind of stuff makes the GodMen thing look reasonable.

Brian, two thoughts:

One, Christians worship Jesus 'cause He's GOD, not 'cause he's the lovable home handyman*

Two: If Jesus is coming back for Armageddon, that's pretty harsh. How does he get by with hanging out at the Ikea? Doesn't he try to warn people of the wrath to come? Or is Brian's version of Jesus not comfortable with that whole "judgmental" thing?

Is this the absolutely lamest idea since Korah, Dathan, and Abiram called out Moses?

The second story is like unto the first:

WEINSTEINS COURT CHRISTIAN CROWD

Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who, while heading their former company Miramax, infuriated conservative Christian activists with films like Kids, Priest, and Dogma, have announced that they are forming a new company to distribute faith-based movies. They said Wednesday that they have signed a production deal with Christian film producer Impact Entertainment. Executives of The Weinstein Company also said Wednesday that they plan to release six theatrical films per year and an additional number of direct-to-DVD productions.

Oh, man. It's those "direct-to-DVD" productions that put the cherry on the Sundae.

Jeffery Overstreet describes some of my reservations:

Since the Contemporary Christian Music has done so much to sidetrack Christian musicians so their music doesn't accidentally end up in arenas where the world might hear it... why not create Contemporary Christian Cinema? That way, faith-related films can play to those who already agree with their messages, and to those who don't want to bother with the challenges of mainstream movies. Meanwhile, mainstream audiences can put even more distance between themselves and films that openly wrestle with issues of faith. They'll spot the "faith" label, feel a shiver run down their spine, and move on to something else.

Walls and boundaries. That's what we want. Neat and easy labels and categories. All the better for judging other people, for staying where we are, for complimenting ourselves on our choices.

Every group that is disaffected from the mainstream produces it's own art that speaks to those disaffected. This is not always a bad thing. This ghettoizing allows fledging artists to find an audience and allows unsophisticated audiences to find art that speaks to their exclusion from mainstream culture. This can nurture artists at the beginning of their careers. But ultimately it is a dead end for the artist and the sub-culture itself. It develops its own vocabulary and conventions, its stereotypes and bogeymen that those outside that group find more or less incomprehensible or excluding.

A sub-culture needs to speak to the mainstream culture and to do so it must speak in a way that is relevant and accessible to that mainstream culture. Artists need to avoid sneering at people who cannot "read" their art because that are not current on the sub-culture's shibboleths.

So, please let us have more Christians engaging in our culture, being salt and light; but please, no "very special" versions of Bible stories.

Two More Blows Against the Theocracy!!

*Hey, Brian if your Jesus hits his thumb with his hammer, what does he say?

Build Your Own Theocracy

In a previous post, I quoted Rick Garnet on the conservative conspiracy:

...he can only report that they advanced their cause in those years by founding magazines and think tanks, seeking funding for both, associating with conservative forces within the Catholic Church, and forging ties between conservative Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.

This is all very cunning, I expect, but I believe the customary term for such methods is "democratic politics"

There is a very readable column in The Nation about Progressive Democrats trying to emulate this consarned, newfangled technique:

The time had come for the donors to think differently about how to spend their money, just as conservatives had done forty years earlier when they launched a counteroffensive against liberalism and pushed the Republican Party far to the right. The meeting was led by Rob Stein, a former official in the Clinton Administration, who'd spent the last year and a half developing a PowerPoint presentation vividly mapping the rise of the conservative movement. He'd convened the meeting to encourage progressives to emulate the conservative funders by investing in the "guts" of politics--leaders and ideas and institutions that would last beyond one election. A month later the Democracy Alliance officially came into existence, as an exclusive collective of donors and one of the progressive community's most ambitious undertakings yet.

So, are we a theocracy yet?

But, give them credit, Rob Stein and Ari Berman (the article's author) are aware that it's more than just the forms they need to find:

Almost two years along, the Alliance's 100 donors have distributed more than $50 million to center-left organizations and activists--a lot of money, yet still largely symbolic given the deep pockets of its members. Even as the donors pour millions into a new political infrastructure, however, problems have emerged that mirror many of the problems of the Democratic Party today and the progressive movement in general.

The first is determining what, exactly, the group stands for and wants to accomplish. Unlike the money guys who underwrote the right, members of the Alliance seem to lack strong ideological conviction about what the future ought to look like. And they do not have the militant perspective of outsiders eager to disrupt and overrun the party establishment. The right-wingers developed a core set of principles and stuck to them with an insurgent sense of persistence and aggressiveness. The wealthy liberals, in contrast, are still debating among themselves how to spend their money. Do Alliance members just want to be in the club or do they intend to change it? Do they want to stick with the party's stars--Bill and Hillary Clinton and their cadre of influential aides, who are preaching "moderation"--or are they ready to listen to new voices? Are they really committed, and prepared, to fund long-haul change?

So, is the Democrat's 2006 situation comparable to the Republicans back in 1964?

In 1964 the conservative wing grabbed the steering wheel of the Republican Party and swerved. They rejected the party's establishment and candidate (Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton ) and nominated Barry Goldwater. At the nominating convention, Nelson Rockefeller was booed when he tried to speak.

The conservative's reward? They took a monumental pasting in one of the most lopsided presidential elections in United States history. (Unmatched until Reagan swept 49 states in 1984.)

Conservatives saw that they were not connecting with the Main Street America. The institutions of communication (newspapers, radio and television) were either pro-Democratic or pro "Rockefeller" Republican.

So conservatives began to build the institutions that would allow them to speak to the American people. But they were not just trying to swing an election, they were communicating commonsense conservative ideas.

Of all the lessons from the right, the Alliance has forgotten arguably the most important: It takes both money and conviction to achieve victory. "It doesn't make sense to develop a strategy without a vision," says James Piereson, longtime executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, which was one of the key half-dozen funders on the right. "It's a mistaken analogy that conservatives succeeded because of our tactics. I always thought conservatives were successful because of the ideas we were trying to sell."

The final, most difficult lesson that must be learned from the Conservatives is that you have to distance yourself from your crazies. From the late 1950's, William F. Buckley and the Conservatives started purging the party of Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, and other extremist elements.

I don't think that the Democratic Party has the grit to show the Kos Kids and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists the door.

Specter of the Theocracy, Part VIII

Mirror of Justice, provides a snippet of an outtake of a review of Damon Linker's book " The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege."

...If I follow Linker's story—stripped, that is, of its bombast—it goes rather like this: There is a group of articulate and influential thinkers in America who believe firmly in liberal democracy and free markets and things of that sort, but who also believe that the principles underlying modern democratic order are derived from a long history of European Christian thought regarding human authority. They are, moreover, convinced that the notion of the inherent dignity and worth of every human being is grounded in something older than liberal tradition. They also think that an impermeable "wall of separation" between public policy and private faith is an extra-constitutional and misguided principle. They believe that the lives of the unborn ought to be protected in law, and that the Supreme Court's decisions pronouncing abortion a constitutional right are a collection of willful jurisprudential fictions. They regard the traditional family as a desirable institution, believe marriage to be the union of a man and a woman, and are somewhat anxious concerning the drift of modern culture towards an ever greater coarseness and ever more pronounced indifference to innocent life.

Now, whether one agrees or not, none of these convictions is, by any sane measure, "extreme"; they all fall well within one of the broad main currents of American political and social thought. Nor are any of the historical claims involved particularly fantastic (though Linker knows too little of the history of ideas to see this). Nor, surely, is it any secret that persons holding such views have supported George Bush in both of his presidential campaigns, and that some of them continue to offer him advice. Nor, as far as I can tell, has anyone among the "theocons" made any attempt to keep it a secret. If these men are in fact "radicals," they are far and away the most unadventurous radicals ever to have appeared on our political horizon...

When Linker actually describes the methods employed by the theocon conspiracy, it turns out that they consist principally in encouraging Christians to vote for conservative politicians who will use legislation, referenda, constitutional amendments, and court appointments to frustrate the secularist agenda. Moreover, though Linker speaks of the decade 1984–1994 as the period of the theocons "stealth campaign" to seize power, he can only report that they advanced their cause in those years by founding magazines and think tanks, seeking funding for both, associating with conservative forces within the Catholic Church, and forging ties between conservative Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.

This is all very cunning, I expect, but I believe the customary term for such methods is "democratic politics" (though I am prepared to be corrected on this)...

Precisely!

Specter of the Theocracy, part VII

News comes of the disintegration of the Christian Coalition:

Three state affiliates have severed ties with the Christian Coalition of America, one of the nation's most powerful conservative groups during the 1990s but now buffeted by complaints over finances, leadership and its plans to veer into nontraditional policy areas.

"It's a very sad day for our people, but a liberating day," said John Giles, president of the coalition's Alabama chapter, which said Wednesday that it was renaming itself and splitting from the national organization. The Iowa and Ohio chapters took similar steps this year.

Giles said he and his Alabama colleagues have "a dozen hard reasons" for the action but would elaborate on only one: a perception that the coalition's leadership was diverting itself from traditional concerns such as abortion and same-sex marriage to address other issues ranging from the environment to Internet access.

Giles predicted further defections.

There goes our chance to rule the world!

Theocons Triumphant

Big thanks to Taleena over at Sun Comprehending Glass for pointing out this great review by Ross Douthat on the current crop of "Theocracy Mongers." She quotes a few paragraphs and encourages the Constant Reader to, "As always, read the rest." This is good advice.

I have several friends who have ben reading and passing around Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy and gushing over its accuracy and truthfulness. Hmmm....

One of the life lessons that I have learned through the years is to check out what people in media and letters say against my direct knowledge of a subject. I recommend this as an exercise for the Constant Reader. Whether your area of expertise is arts, sciences, law enforcement, garbage collection, or enviromental law, read the general press coverage of events in that area and compare that coverage with your certain knowlege of the facts. Charitably, one can say that issues are often simplified to the point of being incorrect; uncharitably one cna say that the press wants first to sell a sensational story, facts be damned.

People Left, Right, and Center will curse the stupidity of the press when they are covering their own area of expertise, but will gullibly swallow the same stupidity when it is about some issue upon which they have little knowlege.

The Constant Reader knows of my contempt of the idea of an impending Theocracy.

But, as Taleena recommends, read the rest. Bonus point to Ross Douthat for linking Margret Atwood to Robert A. Heinlein.