The Right overreacts to SNL's 'Djesus Uncrossed'

So were you offended by “DjesusUncrossed,” Saturday Night Live's riff on Quentin Tarantino's latest film?

I wasn't, but judging by the reaction of the nation's culture warriors, I should have been. Once the sketch aired last weekend, the Internet erupted with the predictable cries of foul. Fox News ran an opinion piece by Todd Starnes melodramatically claiming “NBC Declares War on Christians.” Michael Farris, chancellor of of Patrick Henry College, called it the “worst possible attack on the person and character of Jesus Christ.” Seriously?

For its part, the American Family Association, in its official statement, essentially consigned those involved with the sketch to the flames of hell.

Something is missing amid all this outrage: a sense of perspective.

SNL crew will discover one day they were closer to the truth than they knew with "DJesus Uncrossed." http://t.co/sqfeQijF

— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) February 18, 2013

“Saturday Night Live” hasn't stayed on the air the past 40 years for its biblical scholarship. It is a variety show built around short comedy sketches. Comedy works on its ability to surprise us, and the strength of its surprise often lies in the unexpected juxtaposition of unrelated ideas, especially if the link breaks a taboo.

That is why we laugh at a faux commercial for edible Pampers. This is why it was funny to listen to a Eddie Murphy and a reggae band sing about killing white people, at an American Legion fund-raiser. The images are too bizarre, too contradictory, too exaggerated. They make no sense. So we laugh.

In the case of “Djesus Uncrossed,” the writers at Saturday Night Live link the excessive and gratuitous violence of Quentin Tarantino's movies – “Django Unchained” and “Inglourious Basterds” specifically – to the figure of Jesus. The joke requires viewers the recognize the jarring disconnect between the violence of “Djesus Uncrossed” and the essential pacifism of Jesus in the gospels.

Quentin Tarantino's movies routinely make a spectacle of violence. Compare that to Jesus, who went peacefully when he was arrested, rebuked his disciples when they raised arms, and told his followers “Do not resist an evil person.” Pairing Jesus with Tarantino's love of violence isn't blasphemous; it's humorous. It works because we know that Jesus isn't the kind to cut someone's head in half.

The joke would fail if the writers didn't count on us to respect Jesus as a peaceful man. Where's the blasphemy in that?

Is the issue that Saturday Night Live used the likeness of Jesus in a manner that doesn't match the preapproved evangelical manner? That's a narrow attitude to take. Christianity has provided the framework for Western thought for nearly 1,700 years. In America its influence predates the founding of the Republic.

With that sort of legacy, it's only natural to use the language and the symbols of Christianity to communicate and to critique Western thought, civilization and art.

Is the issue that Saturday Night Live portrayed Jesus specifically in a violent manner? Perhaps it is. Either way, I think we have deeper problems than “Djesus Uncrossed.”

Years ago, some people complained that Jesus too often was being portrayed in popular culture as a hippie sort of flower child, powerless and weak, the sort of guy who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach.

The Jesus pushed by the Right has the opposite problem. The Right too often has used Jesus to stoke up people's anger, to justify invading Iraq and other Muslim countries, to marginalize gays and lesbians, and even to deny women access to contraceptives. This Jesus is no milquetoast; he's the guy who's going to kick sand in your face at the beach.

The difference is that Saturday Night Live portrayed the vengeful Jesus as a joke, while the Right is completely serious about theirs. Who's committing blasphemy now?

Starnes asks rhetorically why Saturday Night Live never pokes fun at Judaism – I guess he never saw“Harry Hanukkah Saves Christmas” – and never tells jokes about Islam. I'd wager it's not because they're afraid of offending Muslim viewers, nor because they hold a special regard for Islam, as much as that it's rude to pick on the little guy.

Because the truth is, in America at least, Islam remains a minority religion, with only about 2.6 million adherents in a nation of 300 million people. For all the complaints of the Religious Right that Christianity in America is under siege, Christianity remains the dominant narrative of our culture. Christmas is a federal holiday, not Eid al-Fitr. Everyone in America knows what Easter celebrates; I doubt you'll find one Christian in 10 who knows what Shavuot is, or what its relationship is to the Day of Pentecost.

The Religious Right loves to play the persecution card. The message it has been hammering for years is pretty simple: Be afraid. There's a war on Christianity, and we're losing. Liberals are attacking God. Our culture, our heritage, our legacy, are all under attack.

Faith should lead us to reach out to other people and to forge connections with them. If the most it inspires someone to do, is to tell you to be afraid, do yourself a favor.

Tune them out. Their attitude is the most offensive thing of all.


Copyright © 2013 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Using humor against thuggery

Not so scary now, is he?

Want to stop an evil man cold? Don't fight him. Laugh at him.

Resistance gives evil people respectability and emboldens their followers, which in turn increases their respectability. Worse, you risk making a martyr of him to his followers. That's a problem, because everyone admires a  martyr. This is true even with the worst of leaders. People still talk about Adolf Hitler with a sort of ironic awe — he was the most evil man alive, he was a brilliant strategist, he was this and that — when the truth is the guy was freaking nuts and belonged in a room with padded walls.

No one follows or respects a walking punchline. It's possible to defang the cobra without taking a swing, if you know how and where to hit them. The cobra won't like being laughed at, and it may bite you, it's true -- but no one who heard the joke will ever fear the cobra the same way again.

Evil exists, and people have a shocking propensity for evil, but only in comic books do we find evil megalomaniacs with much frequency. In the real world evil men are pudgy, are terrible planners, boast about skills that they don't have and often are compensating for all sorts of inadequacies.

The governed often prop up the govern-ers and make their government possible. All that is needed for evil to fail and to fall is for their followers to stop following. Even men like Hitler, Hussein, Milosevic and Ronald Reagan* couldn't do their great evil without the willing partnership and service of people who generally would be considered good-natured, but for their appalling willingness to go along.

So mock evil leaders and evil people without mercy. Identify the weakness in their supposed strength, and make them seem as ridiculous as they really are.

We'll all have a good laugh, and these people will become the punchlines they deserve to be.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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* That's a joke, son. A punchline. A laugh. You gotta stay with me, boy. I keep pitching them, and you keep dropping them. You gotta keep your eye on the ball. Eye, ball. Eyeball. That's another joke, son. I made another funny.

fighting back

The best weapon against a bully isn't your fist; it's your tongue.

I had an awful time with bullies growing up. I didn't get beat up during lunch; I got beat up in science class while the teacher was in the room, and twice in gym class when the teacher's back was turned. This was in addition to the nonphysical bullying that went on nonstop, day after day, week after week, and year after year from kids like Stacey Hummert and Sean Cole, down through Matt D'Ambrosio and Bill Girhiny.

When I fought back with my fists, it made it even worse.

My mother and my teachers gave me the same bad advice that every bullied kid gets -- don't stoop to their level, ignore them and they'll stop -- and it had the same efficacy for me that it had for every other kid who tries it. It didn't work at all. I had to suffer through it for years until I finally got away.

I still deal with the toxic environment of Penn-Trafford public schools thirty years later.

Looks kind of silly, doesn't he?

A couple years ago, when my oldest daughter started dealing with bullies at school, I remembered what my mother had told me, and I promptly shoved that advice aside. I told her that ignoring the bullies only will turn you into a wounded animal that they'll circle even more.

So I taught her how to disarm their barbs by getting everyone to laugh at the bully. It's absolutely humiliating to the brute, and if you do it really well, everyone remembers the joke long after they forget the insult. No one likes to be ridiculous, so the bullies in her class have learned to leave Evangeline alone.

Laughter works against other monsters too. Bin Laden once said that he would welcome martyrdom but fears being made ridiculous. You may recall that the U.S. Department of Defense made great strides against al Qaeda in Iraq with the release of a video that showed an overweight al Zawhiri fumbling with a gun, uncertain how to use or hold it.

Would Muqtada al-Sadr be a threat to the stability of Iraq if everyone was telling jokes about him?



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Someone's not getting it. Is it me, or him?

That sound you hear is me, beating my head against the metaphorical wall.

Why on earth do I bother trying to explain the morality and sensibility of pacifism to someone who states up front that he considers it to be adolescent narcissicism? Why am I putting the time and effort into explaining that while violence may sometimes be justified -- someone is attacking my wife or kids, for instance -- it never can be considered a good thing, and that even a "just war" is by nature less moral than conscientiously placing yourself in the line of fire rather than claiming the life of another person?

Why is it that only Christians seem incapable of grasping the essential nonviolence of Jesus?

I have a headache...

the moral power of pacifism

We're at war right now, and the choices continually set before us are to increase the violence, or to abandon Iraq to its own violence.

I don't think either option is particularly moral.

Violence begets violence. A country's defeat in one war leads to harbored resentment and anger that simmers and stews into the next generation, where it erupts into new conflict fueled by indignation over past crimes against the nation. During this new conflict, new wrongs are committed, new seeds of anger and hatred are sown, and in time, a new conflict will arise from the pains and wounds of the current one.

That's not just pretty rhetoric, it's ugly reality. The Hundred Years War, World War II and the current conflict in the Middle East all grew from previous conflicts. A war -- even a so-called "just" war -- fundamentally violates every dream God has for humanity and settles for a quick, dirty and easy solution instead of the far more difficult one of working toward peace.

Nonviolence of the sort espoused by leaders like Mahatma Gandhi in India or by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in the South is painful and hard to live by. It also begets violence, because it involves defying evil men without ever raising a hand to them. A police officer smashes your head for burning government papers, you go ahead and burn them anyway. They sic dogs on you for trying to vote, you go down and vote anyway.

Stanley Hauerwas correctly points out that nonviolent resistance has a moral force to it that war and fighting lack. We all like to feel that we're basically decent people. How many times can you see a peaceful demonstrator get cracked on the head before you're appalled? How many times can you hit such a demonstrator until realize that you're not such a decent guy after all, especially when he never does anything more offensive than getting back up?

Sooner or later, you crack and you stop, ashamed. That shame leads to repentance and a change in behavior, without a sense of being the wronged party and thereby fostering a need to harbor resentment.

I call that the moral high ground. Don't you?

For the most part, "bad people" exist only in our imaginations. Doctor Doom makes a great supervillain, but in the end he's unbelievable, not only because he refers to himself in the third person, but because he simply is evil for the sake of amassing power for its own sake.

You can see this with some of the historic abuses in police departments. Activisits will appeal to the officers' sense of shame, empathy and guilt, to no avail. The targeted officers have all sorts of arguments -- safety, orders, the requirements of enforcing the law  -- that they feel justify their abusive actions.

Going hand in hand with that is a sense that the activists are self-righteous, hate or least don't support police, or don't have all the information that the police themselves possess. After all if they did, then they would stop being so naive, and would understand why the police have to engage in the regrettable but necessary actions that they do.

But if you bring a person face to face with what they're really like -- get them to the point where they see how unreasoning and hateful they're being -- many of them will change.

Good people do not always need to use force to stop bad people from hurting other people. It's simply not true. There are other ways, and they are costly, and they are not as easy as demonizing your opponents and blowing them up or shooting them full of holes, all the while getting more opportunities to demonize them when they keep killing your people as they defend their homes from foreign demons.

Guns liberated Auschwitz and violence ended slavery, it's true; but does that mean that only guns and violence could have? I don't buy it. That's an argument from silence, that since nothing else was tried, nothing else would have worked. Oppression continued in the South long after the Civil War with share cropping, Jim Crow justice, segregation and racial violence. That alone should tell us how successful the war was at ending racial injustice.

Certainly the example of unions and strikes demonstrated that it is possible to foment great social change without killing -- as does the example of Jesus, who also showed that great change often requires being killed.

War is a complex, ugly thing, and I'm certainly not suggesting that simply declaring an armistice will make everything better. But for the long-term stability not just of Iraq but the entire region, we need to find a peaceful way to resolve the conflicts we have begun, that does not involve simply bludgeoning people into compliance.

It won't be easy, but in the end, peace is the only way.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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War is easier than peace. That doesn't make it just

I'm tired of hearing apologists for this war in Iraq. We're there, we're committed, but we cannot call it just.

This is not about the individual decision to serve during wartime. There are some who answer the government's call to take arms against another nation during wartime, and that's a matter of individual conscience. But war is such a fundamental abrogation of God's intent for the human race, that no war can be considered just. It is not in heaven.

Hitler invariably comes up in these discussion, with the question "What could you do to stop someone like him, that doesn't involve military force?" And my honest answer is, I don't know. I don't know what response makes sense against something as mindlessly evil as the Third Reich.

And yet, I can't see a way for the Romanians to overthrow a totalitarian government with all the firepower, and yet they did, in 1990.

I can't see a way for blacks, shoved to the margin of American society in the 1950s, to step forward and secure their right to vote, guarantee equal protection under the law, and thwarting a society built on racism and segregation, without resorting to violence,and yet they did.

I can't see a way for Mahatma Gandi to drive the British out of India without inspiring an armed uprising, and yet he did.

War is easier than peace. It allows the mighty to triumph and to get what they want. It forces the lesser party to acquiesce, swallow their pride (and even their dignity), and admit the superior claim of the other party.

The mindset that tells us "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" is one that seeks peace by putting another's needs first, It calls for placing yourself in the position of weakness, and risking real and serious loss. It requires trying to understand enemies, listening to their needs, and putting them ahead of yourself and your own interests.

War is "just" only to the extent that bombing cities, killing civilians, and blowing up men and women because we disagree with their leaders can ever be said to be just. It always comes with the generational renewal of old injuries and grudges, and it takes its pound of our flesh from our souls. Even David, called a man after God's heart, was barred from building the Temple because his hands were stained with the blood of war,

War happens because we're willing to surrender the dictates of conscience to Caesar's rage and do his bidding.

It's our responsibility to say no more. The human conscience is not for sale. War is unjust, and we will not support it.

Praying for peace, not for victory

I'm not praying for our troops.

That's not exactly true. I am praying for our troops, just as I'm praying for Iraq, and for the members of the insurgency there. I'm not praying for coalition troops to visit a crushing defeat on the heads of their enemies, and I'm not praying that President Bush will bring our troops home tomorrow, nor that he'll announce a timetable for a withdrawal from Iraq.

And I'm certainly not praying that the quagmire we've turned Iraq into will continue as it has been, sucking in more lives every day as neighbor turns upon neighbor and the holiest, most sacred and most mundane duties become life-endangering.

What am I praying for then? If you rule out a decisive victory, a sudden or gradual withdrawal, and the perpetuation of the mess we've made of Iraq, what is there left to pray for?

I've realized something over the last few days: War is outside the nature of Christ. Completely outside. Not just this abominable mess where people are raping young women and destroying families to cover it up, where suicide bombers are blowing up religious services, where one person cuts off another one's head and calls it a righteous act, but war itself -- where one member of the family of Man fires a weapon at another member in hopes of ending his life -- is a horrible abrogation of what God intended his creation to be. It is outside the nature of Christ. It is not what God desires for his creation.

The prophets, looking ahead to the Kingdom of God, saw a time when the nations would lay down their swords and shields, when we would beat our weapons into plowshares and study war no more. They saw it coming from far off, and they rejoiced to see it, if only at a distance. I realized today that I've been doing the same thing, waiting for a pie-in-the-sky time when the poor would receive the Kingdom of Heaven, when the meek would inherit the earth, and when peace would come.

There's no need to wait. The Kingdom is here. It's now. It's arrived.

Speaking to the stunned congregants of his hometown, Jesus declared, "'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

"Today this scripture is fulfilled in your presence."

If we believe that the Kingdom of God is incarnated in the person of Jesus, and if we also believe that Christ is in us and we are become the Body of Christ, then there is no need for there to be war, poverty, hunger, or other such afflictions among us. They are there because we allow them to be, because we accept that they are a part of life, and because we have failed to engage the world around us and address the root causes of these problems.

Peace — note that I did not say appeasement — is not easy. It is far harder to maintain the peace than it is to go to war. Peace requires understanding your foe, meeting his needs and making sacrifices yourself, something we are woefully unprepared or unwilling to do.

Peace, not war, is God's dream for the Middle East, just as it is his dream for every tribe, nation and language.

I'm not praying for victory in Iraq. I'm praying for peace.




Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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confronting tyranny

Pacifism has a moral strength to it that having bigger guns or a more dedicated military outfit lacks.

Nelson Mandela and the other giants of South Africa were able to overcome Apartheid and systemic discrimination; Mahatma Gandhi was able to defeat the British Empire, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the others were able to triumph over white America because they stood their ground and allowed themselves to be beaten, not once but repeatedly. Their calm, self-sacrificing moral sanity threw the insanity of their oppressors into stark relief, and brought the issue to the point that their own, oft-ignored voices finally were heard.

I think it was Romania back in the early 1990s that showed a determined and wholly unarmed populace was able to overthrow a despotic communist government with all the guns.

You say it doesn't work with Hitlers or Stalins or Arafats or Mao Tse-Tungs. I say, in the end, it's the only thing that does work.