How Far is Too Far?

Michael Savage, a strange Lenny Bruce-Pat Buchanan hybrid, has as a major theme of his 8,000,000-listener strong radio show “The Savage Nation” the argument that our anything-goes cultural attitude leaves us in the position of the Weimar Republic. If we continue down the road of the ever-more-transgressive art and culture of the “Porn Belt,” he argues, we will eventually inspire a Fascist response from the “Corn Belt.” While this thesis is clearly hyperbolic, it brings into focus some interesting issues.

While bad taste should certainly be legal, should it also be rewarded? What are the ethical parameters of acceptable cultural expression? One rule of jokes is that it is ok to make fun of the strong but not the weak and that generally it is ok to make fun of people and things that deserve it. So, for example, in the USA circa 2006 it is measurably more decent to make fun of White people than it is to make fun of Black people. Measured by net worth and global reach, the Catholic Church would certainly qualify as strong. But Madonna strapped to a Las Vegasy cross still strikes one as somehow wrong. We know that the Islamic equivalent would induce extreme violence. In our “PC” universe, we have learned that insulting people based on status is harmful, and if Madonna had made her dancers put on traditional Black face there would have been a response adequate to stop or modify her show.

So what are the pros and cons of mocking the Church? With the Inquisition and both Gay-burning and pedophilia on its rap sheet, it might seem worthy of abuse. And often religion does serve the powerful by substituting supernatural concerns for natural ones. But both the legacy and the present reality of Catholic Church, and of Christianity in general, inveigh us to temper our disdain. A good argument can be made for the proposition that our rightly revered modern concepts of individual rights and individual dignity, and therefore our important institutions of Feminism and legal racial equality, owe their lineage to the Greek concept of citizenship as historically channeled through the Christian idea of the soul. The values of secular humanism owe a lot to the Christian idea of “goodness.”

Presently, religion serves many functions, and not all of them are bad. Marx called religion the sigh of an oppressed creature, Durkheim held that it was our way of honoring our society, and Feuerbach argued that God was a picture of our own consciousness. There is truth in all of these characterizations. On a more practical level, religion means a lot to a lot of people and helps them to lead authentically ethical lives. So by what calculus do we form an opinion about the crucifixion of the material girl? If we use the criteria that transgression, even if funny, should be both serious and taken seriously by the transgressor, Madonna gets an F grade.