Profile
Photos
Comments
@import url(https://graphics8.nytimes.com/css/article/screen/print.css);
The Public Editor
The Perilous Intersection of Art and
Religion
LATE last month, while the presidential election and the meltdown of the
economy were dominating the news, a revival of a play portraying Jesus as a
sexually active gay man opened with little notice for a two-week run at the
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in Greenwich Village.
When Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi” was first produced in New York 10
years earlier, the Manhattan Theater Club said there were threats to burn down
the theater, kill the staff and “exterminate” McNally. The play was canceled,
but then reinstated after an outcry from other playwrights and the theater
community. With protesters and counter-protesters in the street, the audience
had to pass through metal detectors.
This time, there were no protesters and no metal detectors, but The Times’s
coverage of “Corpus Christi” — a sympathetic review and an article linking the
uproar a decade ago to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in
Colorado — hit a raw nerve with the group that organized the demonstrations
against the play in 1998.
Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil
Rights, called “Corpus Christi” a “vile play” and charged that The Times liked
it “not for artistic purposes but for its assault on Catholicism.” He urged his
members to write to the public editor, and more than 150 did.
“I am outraged that The Times would review such a disgusting and revolting
play,” wrote Brian Tennyson of Lakewood Ranch, Fla. Others accused The Times of
regularly ignoring the sensibilities of Catholics and even church-bashing, and
said it would never treat other religions the way it treats Catholicism.
It is tempting for a secular and culturally liberal newsroom like The Times’s
to dismiss such objections, especially because many appear to have come from
people who neither saw the play nor read in full what The Times said about it.
No self-respecting newspaper is going to avoid writing about a controversial
work of art because it might offend some segment of the public. That would go
against everything a newspaper stands for — examination of anything that happens
in the public square — and Donohue told me he agreed that The Times should have
covered the “Corpus Christi” revival. He just did not like what the newspaper
said about it.
A number of Catholics I spoke to expressed outrage or embarrassment at
Donohue’s methods. “He overreacts; he caricatures the things he objects to,”
said Paul Baumann, editor of the independent Catholic magazine Commonweal, who
himself gave “Corpus Christi” a negative review in 1998. “He raises the
temperature in the room in a very unhelpful way.”
I found Donohue’s language overheated, but I wound up thinking that he had
put his finger on an interesting issue: how a newspaper like The Times, which
devotes great space and energy to covering the arts, should deal with the
frequent collisions between art and religion. The argument, as it did with
“Corpus Christi” 10 years ago, often gets framed as a First Amendment fight
between those championing freedom of speech and those seeking to stifle speech
they object to. But lost in all of that can be the deeper story of the spiritual
and religious tensions that gave rise to the art in the first place and the
sensibilities of religious readers who may be struggling with aspects of their
own faith.
Peter Steinfels, the co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and
Culture and a religion columnist for The Times, said much of “the arts over the
last century or so have been adversarial” to the church and traditional
morality, creating a problem for secular media. “Corpus Christi” fits squarely
in that tradition. Set in Corpus Christi, Tex., where McNally grew up, it turns
the story of Jesus and his disciples into a parable about the persecution of
gays. Along the way, it pushes what have to be hot buttons for many Christians.
Jesus is born in a shabby motel room; loud, abusive heterosexual sex takes place
in the room next door; Joseph is a boorish, profane carpenter; Mary isn’t much
of a mother; Jesus discovers he is gay and has sex (not on stage) with the young
men who become his disciples; he performs miracles, officiates at a gay wedding,
is ultimately betrayed by Judas and is crucified.
Ben Brantley, the Times theater critic, was not impressed in 1998, calling
“Corpus Christi” about as “threatening, and stimulating, as a glass of chocolate
milk” and a “lazy” piece of writing. Donohue did not object to that review.
Jason Zinoman, who reviewed the revival for The Times, seemed to find it a bit
more appealing, saying “there are moments of hard-won sentiment that will win
over the biggest skeptic.”
Zinoman called the play “an earnest and reverent spin on the Jesus story,
with some soft-spoken, gay-friendly politics thrown in.” Donohue was infuriated
because he said no play that depicted Jesus as sexually active, whether with men
or women, could be “reverent.” Zinoman defended his description. He said the
play was “very faithful” to the plot of the New Testament. But he said it had a
“point of view. It’s certainly pro-gay-marriage and it’s intolerant of prejudice
against gay people.”
But homosexual acts and same-sex marriage are against the teachings of the
Catholic Church, and it seems to me that failing to acknowledge that central
tension is almost failing to tell readers what the play is about. In it, one of
the disciples quotes Scripture as saying that it is “an abomination” for a man
to lie with a man, and “they shall be put to death.” The Jesus character, named
Joshua, calls it “a terrible passage” and quotes instead, “And God saw
everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.”
Had the review acknowledged, even in passing, why the play could be
disturbing or challenging to many Christians, even those who do not agree with
the teachings of the Catholic Church, I think it would have left Donohue no
ground to stand on, and he told me he would not have complained.
A few days earlier, an article by Mark Blankenship noted that “American gay
culture” marked a “doubly somber anniversary” on Oct. 12, the death of Shepard
and the final preview performance of “Corpus Christi” in 1998 after weeks of
protests and bomb threats. He said the events were seen as “stark reminders of
lingering homophobia.”
Gregory Wolfe, the publisher and editor of Image, a journal devoted to art
shaped by religion, said: “It is possible for a conscientious Catholic to
protest the depiction of Jesus as a promiscuous gay man and not be homophobic.
To think this way is perhaps to be in a complex and ambiguous position, but I
would venture that millions of sincere Catholics find themselves in just such a
position.”
Blankenship said he meant only to single out those who made death threats and
he was not suggesting that all those offended by the play were homophobic.
In a different context recently, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The
Times, told me that he believes The Times is a liberal newspaper “in the sense
that a liberal arts college is liberal — generally secular in outlook,
disinclined to take things on faith, nondogmatic, tolerant of and curious about
a wide range of views and behaviors.”
I think that is a good definition — and that editors need to be sure that the
wide range includes the views of the
religious.