Stanley Fish and Gay Jesus
So I saw the Terrence McNally play Corpus Christi tonight. The play offers a rather conventional version of the New Testament Gospel with one exception: all the characters are gay, and the setting is Corpus Christi, TX. So in addition to performing miracles, teaching his disciples and being crucified, the J-Man (here called "Joshua") and his comrades attend gay nightclubs, bless civil unions and (wait for it...) Joshua himself has occasional rolls in the hay with Judas. So of course the play has been protested and boycotted by Christian groups, represented in my case by two attractive young ladies carrying "Hell is real" signs outside the theater.
At the same time, I have been getting reacquainted with your friend and mine, Stanley Fish, this time through his 1994 collection of essays There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (And It's a Good Thing, Too). In it Fish reiterates his favorite themes--that platitudes like "free speech," "tolerance," "merit," and "equality" are always already loaded with dilineating boundaries that exclude on some level undesired elementst; that abstractions are harmful and pragmatic "adhoccery" helpful; that everything is politics and politics everything; that liberalism is impossible because people can never free themselves from inherently contradictory value systems.
And to be quite honest, I'm a sucker for Fish. He's frustratingly convincing, and his philosophy starts creeping into all my everyday judgments. (Coincidentally, he would say that this is impossible, that "meta-thought" about beliefs and epistemology never actually alters our real-world decision-making, and here I find him quite wrong.)
So to get back to Big Gay Jesus, I kept thinking about several contradictions in the play that its author probably overlooked in his somewhat self-righteous work. First, on a nitpicking level, the characters, including Joshua, very happily drink and get drunk, but later Jesus tries to stop Judas from doing harder drugs. Also, the only cigarette smokers in the play are its villains, Satan and Judas. So some "vices" are protected, while others (those typically proclaimed verboten by bourgeois America) condemned.
This is small potatoes, though, compared to the "big" issues of religion and homosexuality. As you might expect, Josh and the twelve constantly reiterate that God loves everyone, that the Gospel is really about acceptance and tolerance, not exclusion, and that the authorities (here largely in the form of Roman Catholics, who don't get much love) are hypocrites and not "true" Christians. "But that's simply not so," a more conservative Christian might say. "God loves everyone, but we can't practically accept murder, theft, and sin in general. And homosexuality is a sin. Therefore, we love you too, but you simply can't go on with this homosexuality stuff. Give it up." (And, I might add, they could very conveniently point to a scene in the play where Jesus convinces Philip, a male prostitute, to give up his profession. "Go, and sin no more," is the message, one which fundamentalists repeatedly say to gays.)
Just to push the point a bit further (the point being that you can't actually love everyone), what if someone rewrote the play but inserted polygamists into all the gay roles? Or NAMBLA members? Or bestialists? (Hello, Edward Albee!) There are certainly gays who would protest to such practices, for a variety of different reasons, usually based on matters of health, consent, human reason, animal cruelty, etc. But these terms themselves are up for grabs, just as homosexuality is.
This is the aporia that Fish's reasoning leads us to, unfortunately. Just to be clear, I have my own reasons for supporting gay rights and condemning the others, but one can see the kinds of arguments that can be made from a pramatic point of view. I would simply close by saying that McNally is mistaken if he thinks he is revealing to us in Corpus Christi the "true" nature of Christianity or the "real" message of Jesus. There is nothing in "Christianity," as an essential concept, that either forbids or tolerates homosexuality. Christianity can be as gay as its followers allow it to be. But this is largely a matter of winning hearts and minds through a complicated system of social practices, media saturation, personal experience, language, etc and not theologically arguing with the picketers outside, whose ranks will (hopefully) grow smaller as they are phased out from or ignored in the discourse.
At the same time, I have been getting reacquainted with your friend and mine, Stanley Fish, this time through his 1994 collection of essays There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (And It's a Good Thing, Too). In it Fish reiterates his favorite themes--that platitudes like "free speech," "tolerance," "merit," and "equality" are always already loaded with dilineating boundaries that exclude on some level undesired elementst; that abstractions are harmful and pragmatic "adhoccery" helpful; that everything is politics and politics everything; that liberalism is impossible because people can never free themselves from inherently contradictory value systems.
And to be quite honest, I'm a sucker for Fish. He's frustratingly convincing, and his philosophy starts creeping into all my everyday judgments. (Coincidentally, he would say that this is impossible, that "meta-thought" about beliefs and epistemology never actually alters our real-world decision-making, and here I find him quite wrong.)
So to get back to Big Gay Jesus, I kept thinking about several contradictions in the play that its author probably overlooked in his somewhat self-righteous work. First, on a nitpicking level, the characters, including Joshua, very happily drink and get drunk, but later Jesus tries to stop Judas from doing harder drugs. Also, the only cigarette smokers in the play are its villains, Satan and Judas. So some "vices" are protected, while others (those typically proclaimed verboten by bourgeois America) condemned.
This is small potatoes, though, compared to the "big" issues of religion and homosexuality. As you might expect, Josh and the twelve constantly reiterate that God loves everyone, that the Gospel is really about acceptance and tolerance, not exclusion, and that the authorities (here largely in the form of Roman Catholics, who don't get much love) are hypocrites and not "true" Christians. "But that's simply not so," a more conservative Christian might say. "God loves everyone, but we can't practically accept murder, theft, and sin in general. And homosexuality is a sin. Therefore, we love you too, but you simply can't go on with this homosexuality stuff. Give it up." (And, I might add, they could very conveniently point to a scene in the play where Jesus convinces Philip, a male prostitute, to give up his profession. "Go, and sin no more," is the message, one which fundamentalists repeatedly say to gays.)
Just to push the point a bit further (the point being that you can't actually love everyone), what if someone rewrote the play but inserted polygamists into all the gay roles? Or NAMBLA members? Or bestialists? (Hello, Edward Albee!) There are certainly gays who would protest to such practices, for a variety of different reasons, usually based on matters of health, consent, human reason, animal cruelty, etc. But these terms themselves are up for grabs, just as homosexuality is.
This is the aporia that Fish's reasoning leads us to, unfortunately. Just to be clear, I have my own reasons for supporting gay rights and condemning the others, but one can see the kinds of arguments that can be made from a pramatic point of view. I would simply close by saying that McNally is mistaken if he thinks he is revealing to us in Corpus Christi the "true" nature of Christianity or the "real" message of Jesus. There is nothing in "Christianity," as an essential concept, that either forbids or tolerates homosexuality. Christianity can be as gay as its followers allow it to be. But this is largely a matter of winning hearts and minds through a complicated system of social practices, media saturation, personal experience, language, etc and not theologically arguing with the picketers outside, whose ranks will (hopefully) grow smaller as they are phased out from or ignored in the discourse.
posted by to scranton at 11:18 PM
5 Comments:
This is a tricky issue. On the one hand, I'm tempted to say "Screw the fundamentalists. The road to emancipation for homosexuals is not going to go through organized religion, so stop trying to preach to the converted and debate with the dogmatic."
But isn't this a bit too extreme, I tell myself. What if this play does convert someone, maybe not by rational persuasion (recall Fish's persuaded white supremicist, or whoever), but through something else that actually will change one opinion in the battle over ideas? I certainly don't believe Jesus or God or Moses or Absolom stands clearly on one side or the other. I don't really care. The point is, though, that people strangely do care, and this play may somehow make a difference. If it does, then I couldn't care less what means it takes, or where it gets something right or wrong: I'm on board with its political message, and I'll ride that train all the way to Jerusalem. Toot, toot.
While I have not read this play, it seems to me that McNally simply took a risk. The problem, however, is that the crowd he attempted to reach is unreachable. The crowd he attempted to reach, for example, might see homosexuality similarly to how they perceive goat fuckers. They are both sins and shouldn’t be done. After seeking help, Bob won’t be fucking Billy, Billy won’t be fucking the goat, and everyone will be jolly and gay, (pardon the pun) according to the true Christian. But how interesting it is to compare Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia to McNally’s Corpus Christie. Goat fucking is not nearly as accepted as man on man fucking, and yet nobody tried to shut down Albee’s play. Sure, it was deemed controversial, but mostly in a complimentary manner. The only feasible answer I can come up with to this enigma is that Albee’s audience didn’t at all attempt to target a religious crowd. The only true test, I suppose, would be a revision in which either Sylvia the goat, or Martin, the goat fucker, is Jesus.
Ah, but isn't the fact that McNally made the main character Jesus just seem like idle provocation, like he was willfully changing the "target audence" to generate more spectacle? Its underhanded, and I think it does more harm than good because it seems like he's just trying to insult and provoke. I don't trust his motives entirely either, as I don't trust all sensationalists.
I really do think that McNally's motives were genuine: he thinks gays are included under the banner of Christianity and God's love and he set out to prove it, albeit in a rather sensational way. The problem is what the Sheriff refers to as the "target audience." Is the play going to affect those who do not already subscribe to its message? My original post was that if it does, it's not going to be by "proving" its theological points. It's going to succeed by introducing into the vernacular the new idea of gay Jesus and let that idea be bounced around and absorbed and normalized.
I don't think it's all that surprising that Corpus Christi would generate more heat than the Goat. Conservative Christians probably never heard about Albee's play, while all it takes is a Google search for "gay" and "jesus" for an internet-savvy pastor to find Corpus Christi and start the protesting. It's kinda like Rushdie and The Satanic Verses: you start fucking with religious idols, and the death threats are a fatwa away.
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