The Curious Rise of Anti-Religious Hysteria is a very thought-provoking essay at spiked.com by Frank Furedi, a self-described secular humanist. (Thank you, Scott Gilbreath, for highlighting this!) Rather than trying to summarize his thesis in this lengthy piece, I will simply list a few excerpts I found interesting.
As a secular humanist who is instinctively uncomfortable with zealot-like moralism, I am suspicious of the motives behind these doctrinaire denunciations of films with a religious message. Such fervour reminds me of the way that reactionaries in the past policed Hollywood for hints of blasphemy or expressions of 'Un-American values'. Replacing the zealotry of religious intolerance with a secular version is hardly an enlightened alternative.
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Others continue to attack religious organisations for trying to exploit films with a religious message or motif. There is a double standard at work here. After all, films and propaganda are inextricably linked. AIDS campaigners, for example, embraced films such as Philadelphia – in which Tom Hanks played a dignified man dying from AIDS – for the positive way they promote their cause. Currently gay organisations are celebrating Ang Lee's gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain for its affirmation of gay love and identity. 'Using' films to promote a cause is hardly the prerogative of religious movements.
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The religious right is often said to be mobilising and gaining support around values that appeal to a primitive and simplistic electorate. That is why even a kids' film like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe can provoke such hostility. The liberal elite's unease with religion is often motivated by the fear that it will become even more isolated from the public unless it can engage with the 'big questions' they are apparently asking. It is also concerned that unless it can project a positive vision on to society, people will become influenced by value-driven 'extremists', by religious and political organisations that are hostile to the status quo. In short, religion is seen as a powerful force that appeals to those apparently simple people whom sophisticated members of the elite cannot reach.
Such beliefs are underpinned by the patronising assumption that, unlike educated urbane people, ordinary members of the public need simplistic black-and-white answers about the meaning of life. In private conversation, some in the liberal elite discuss the masses – or 'rednecks', Nascar dads, tabloid readers, etc – as being crass, materialistic, simplistic, racist, sexist, homophobic.
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This trend for blaming the rise of theocracy on ordinary folks' apparent penchant for simplistic black-and-white solutions shifts the focus from the elite's failure to promote and uphold a positive vision of the future on to the alleged political illiteracy of the masses. That is why discussions of so-called fundamentalist movements often contain an implicit condemnation of the people who support them – and why the alleged creations of fundamentalist culture are implicitly condemned as immoral. It is the insecurity of the Anglo-American cultural elites about their own values and moral vision of the world that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion. There is a powerful element of bad faith here: many leftists and liberals denounce those who appeal to moral values as being inferior, but they are also envious of them. So when the 'progressive' Rabbi Michael Lerner criticises his fellow liberals for their 'long-standing disdain for religion' and for being 'tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underline the move to the Right', he is implicitly paying homage to the power of persuasion among his fundamentalist opponents (4).
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There is now a new genre of pseudo-religious political books written by the spiritual mentors of the left. Lerner's Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul succeeds in combining the platitudes usually associated with third-rate self-help books with the mumbo-jumbo generally associated with dogmatic religious tracts. However, when it comes to banality, Jim Wallis' God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It beats his competitors to the post. This motivational text became an instant bestseller as Democrats looked for ready-made moral formulae with which they might connect with common people. Wallis, billed as a left-wing Evangelical, is critical of the secular dismissal of religion and offers moral values to the disoriented liberal.
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At the end of the day, politically motivated calls among liberals and the left for morality are not so far from the way in which Christians 'use' The March of the Penguins or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are cynical gestures driven by political calculations rather than by a moral inspiration that comes from the soul. What is particularly cynical is that these attempts to construct a 'moral dimension' are always aimed at others: those who apparently need 'simple' answers and 'meaning'. Such a cynical view of the public was clearly spelled out by William Davies of the London-based Institute for Public Policy research. 'The liberal, secular left has somehow to find ways of supplying citizens with emotional and metaphysical comforts even when it does not itself believe in such things', he warned (6). This provision of so-called metaphysical comforts serves the same function that adult-invented cautionary tales play for children. Which takes us back to Narnia: clearly the problem is not the comforts provided by CS Lewis, but the way in which they're branded.
A final point. The very term 'metaphysical comforts' suggests values built by calculation, instrumentalism, manipulation and cynicism. Morality marketed by people who do not necessarily 'believe in such things' is unlikely to set the world on fire. That is why they resent and hate the Narnia film so much. For all its faults, the movie attempts to transmit a powerful sense of belief, bravery and sacrifice. Such sentiments are alien to a cultural elite that regards the expression of any sort of strong belief as another form of that dreaded fundamentalism. Envy, bad faith and instrumentalism: these are the raw materials that fuel today's anti-religious crusade.
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