The issue of transubstantiation has been in the news recently, and I have a few things to say about it. I’m going to divide the material into two postings, partly for length, and partly because there are two distinct points I want to address, one public and one personal.
Let me summarise the events in question:
(1) A student at the University of Central Florida, Webster Cook, went to mass, took communion, and smuggled the consecrated host out of the church. He then told his friends about this.
(2) Many Catholics reacted with outrage. The student was accused of kidnapping, and a spokesperson for the local diocese described it as a “hate crime”. There were demands that the student be disciplined, or even expelled by the university (for what?), and (since this is America) he received death threats. Fearing for his life, Cook returned the wafer.
(3) A number of atheist bloggers and writers took exception to what they saw as a ridiculous overreaction to a trivial prank. PZ Myers put it bluntly: “It’s a frackin’ cracker, people.”
Wait, what? Holding a cracker hostage is now a hate crime? The murder of Matthew Shephard was a hate crime. The murder of James Byrd Jr. was a hate crime. This is a goddamned cracker. Can you possibly diminish the abuse of real human beings any further?
And PZ went on:
Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? … [If] any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage […] but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.
(4) Now the shit really hit the fan. There were demands that PZ should be fired, more death threats, and so forth. And Andrew Sullivan weighed in:
It is one thing to engage in free, if disrespectful, debate. It is another to repeatedly assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people. Calling the Holy Eucharist a “goddamned cracker” isn’t about free speech; it’s really about some baseline civility. Myers’ rant is the rant of an anti-Catholic bigot. And atheists and agnostics can be bigots too.
(5) To his credit, Andrew is always(?) willing to publish dissenting opinions when he receives them. In this case, they arrived quickly:
On Feb. 11, 2006 you posted the following, in relation to the Danish Cartoonists ridiculing Mohammed and Islam:
“The point is this: everyone is supposed to observe the religious constraints of one particular faith, regardless of whether we share it. And if we don’t observe Islamic etiquette … we’re lucky if we only get cursed and condemned. Get that?”
That sounds like a double standard to me. Are we supposed to be more deferential to Catholics than Muslims, when it comes to ridiculing what some of us see as silly and oppressive superstitions? I don’t recall you referring to the Danish cartoonists as “bigots.” The only difference I can see here, is that now it’s YOUR personal religion that’s being ridiculed. So of course that makes the offender a bigot.
Others offered “nuanced” support, while pointing out that:
the situation is further complicated by the fact that PZ Myers was in part defending another, [and] doesn’t the viciousness with which Cook was attacked (death threats, calls for his expulsion from university) mitigate PZ Myers response at least a bit?
(6) So how does Andrew deal with the charge? He rejects it:
My objection to PZ Myers – even as I defended his right to say whatever he wants and wouldn’t want him punished in any way – is not, in my view, a double standard. Printing a cartoon for legitimate purposes is a different thing than deliberately backing the physical desecration of sacred objects. I’d happily publish a Mohammed cartoon if it advanced a genuine argument, but I would never knowingly desecrate a Koran purely to mock religion.
Where to begin with this? Well first the blatant omission: there is not one word of outrage or opposition to the abuse of the term “hate crime”, of the death threats towards Cook and PZ, and to the generally disproportionate response by many Catholics. It’s good to know that Andrew “wouldn’t want him punished”, but he was much more forthright in his opinion of Muslims who threatened the Danish cartoonists, and towards those “moderate Muslims” who failed to condemn their violent co-religionists.
But the more blatant error in Andrew’s response is to imply that PZ was proposing to “desecrate” a “sacred object” “purely to mock religion”, and that the “physical desecration of sacred objects” cannot be a “legitimate purpose”. Says who? Why on earth does Andrew assume that desecrating an object is more significant than publishing a cartoon, or writing a book? Based on body-count, it would appear that Muslims disagree with his ranking. And PZ has no reason to respect either of those opinions, anyway. This is clearly a bit of “special pleading” by Andrew.
And why talk about “purely” mocking religion, when it was pretty clear that PZ was reacting to those who treated the failure to chew a freely-given wafer as being in the same category as, say, the killing of Matthew Shepard. Andrew is quick to attack those he describes as “Christianists”, even when to do so means vilifying their (presumably sincere) religious beliefs. (They may not be Andrew’s beliefs, but so what?) And he has spoken out against “grand-standing” on the question of flag burning, so presumably the desecration of an object of veneration can be a legitimate form of protest.
(And wasn’t it just a year ago that Andrew was telling us that among the “Things We Love About America” was “Penn and Teller burning the flag while celebrating American liberty”, apparently desecrating an object to make a point. But their real point was that freedom – and its ambiguity – are more important than mere objects, whether flags or crackers.)
UPDATE: Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, a commenter draws our attention to a 2006 piece by Andrew Sullivan about South Park, the Scientologists, and the Catholic Church. Quoth Sully:
We need those truths and benefit from those fantasies. A free society survives partly because the powerful are mocked, and their pretensions undermined. Religions, which guard their own illusions carefully, are particularly ripe for satire. And they should be.
Whenever one human being is claiming to tell the truth about the meaning of life he is making a very powerful claim — and in a free society he also runs the risk of getting a raspberry. Laughter matters because piety begets power.
Orwell once remarked that one reason fascism never took off in Britain was because the sight of a goose-stepping soldier would prompt your average Englishman to giggle. Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it.
“Giggles”? Sounds like mocking religion to me. And in fact Sullivan praises South Park’s bravery in exactly these terms:
The show is as offensive as it is inspired: the first truly post-PC television adventure. It is also brave. It doesn’t only skewer political ideology, it also aims square at religions. It has mocked Catholicism, Mormonism, evangelicalism and even featured a cartoon Muhammad as a super-hero.
(My emphasis.) I think I prefer Sully’06 to the current model.
