Sleeping with God, eating chocolate Jesus, and popping Christ

Is is just me, or has there been a resurgence of deliberately provocative anti-Christian images in media and art?

Andres Serano's "Piss Christ" and Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary" were somewhat isolated incidents, separated by years.  But lately ...

• rapper Kanye West decided to portray himself as Jesus Christ on the cover of Rolling Stone
  
  
• comedienne Sarah Silverman decided that it would be funny if her TV show character slept with "God," portrayed as a 50-ish black man
  
  
• just weeks ago, sculptor Cosimo Cavallaro designed a 200 lb. nude, anatomically correct figure out of milk chocolate and posed as a Crucifix; he named his creation "My Sweet Lord"

Curiously it seems that three out of the five items I just mentioned were probably created by people with more than a passing involvement with the Roman Catholic church.  Were these creations simply immature pranks by artists who have developed a grown-up worldview that treats their religious upbringing with scorn and bitterness?

Consider the next case in point: Michelle Malkin reports on a Los Angeles art exhibit featuring a video game entitled "Christ Killa," in which the player blasts portraits of Jesus, religious icons and shrines, and "religious propaganda posters."

At first I was confused.  Was this meant to offend Jews? ("Christ Killers" has long been a favorite anti-Jewish slur.)  Then I got the joke.  This has to be a parody of the goofy "Left Behind" video games, or more accurately, a parody of the games as they were portrayed in the hyperventilated criticism that they received.

I'm getting a little tired of the cliched "try doing this with Islam" responses of conservatives to these deliberately provocative stunts, but there is a point to be made.  Radical Islam, particularly its 'death cult doing the will of Allah' aspect, certainly has plenty of material for satire.  But outside of those Danish cartoonists, no one seems to be interested in exploring them.

I'm also going to refrain from the tired "help, help, we're being persecuted" meme of the Christian "Religious Right."  Instead I'm going to ask, why the sudden influx of symbolism that is purposefully designed to upset Christians or to strip the divine from Christian beliefs?

Maybe the leftist-secularists (the "Bush derangement syndrome" and "post-election stress trauma" crowds) have just reached their breaking point.  It's kind of sad, really, that only seven years was all it took to do them in.

Maybe we just need to pray for them.

Comments

[Charlie]

I like what you've said here, Mike. I watched the Sarah Silverman video and was going to disagree with you about it, but now I'm not sure. In a way, I think it's terrific, because it makes a point about God that much of our modern, casual-sex world understands too well -- God wants a relationship with us, but all we were looking for was a one-night-stand. We're embarrassed to find the guy still hanging around when we wake up in the morning and we'd just like Him to go away.

I was about to call it insightful, but now I think it was more likely an accident. She hit on something but she's too spiritually obtuse to know it. I spent some time reading some of Silverman's lines from her "Jesus is Magic" show and she seems to get her humor by mocking everything, which leads me to wonder if she was only mocking God in the video rather than sharing an insight.

Maybe what all of the God-mocking suggests is that liberalism no longer believes in the Sacred, so mocking God is no different than mocking Bush or Cheney.