Whenever I’m surfing, I keep an eye out for wholesome web content I can pass along to my gentle readers so they too can nurture their delicate sensibilities. When I find unashamed discussions of masturbation, I despair that things have gotten out of hand. When bloggers are only too willing to talk about perverse acts of sex, I worry about moral rectitude. When I read frank online conversations about feces, I feel that we aren’t getting enough moral fiber in our spiritual diet. So it came as a great relief to discover a thoroughly wholesome, thoroughly Christian web site that I wouldn’t hesitate to forward to my grandma (the Baptist grandma, not the one who used to hook in Des Moines).
Pay a visit to objectiveministries.org. Check out the profiles of its pastor/contributors—stiff 80’s-style yearbook photos that reek of wholesome family values. Or how about the witness stache—a pdf mustache bearing the words “Ask me about Jesus” that you cut out and stick up your nose. And you can always support an expedition to Africa where they hope to capture a live pterosaur for return to an American early-Earth Creationist museum. And … you’ve probably figured out by now that it’s a parody site.
Through objectiveministries.org I made a couple discoveries. The first came when I emailed the URL to friends. Even though I had included graphics of the witness stache and the pterosaur hunt, my friends still read it straight. They responded with “scary” and “un-friggin-believable”—the usual response you get from a liberal-minded religious type who encounters the sometimes outrageous and oft-times outrageously reactionary claims of some fundamentalist Christians. Lurking behind their responses is a stereotype – an overweight ignorant Luddite who’s too stupid to think for himself and so relies on the words in an overused black book. So quick was the leap to this image that my friends didn’t notice that I had explicitly underlined the parody. Part of the success of this parody is that it plays to our prejudices and, if we take this fact seriously, allows us to engage in careful discernment both about our own beliefs and about our response to the other.
Such discernment has led me to rethink my own response to fundamentalism(s), particularly as it concerns the stereotyped commonplace that fundies interpret the Bible literally. I remember a professor of mine, Roger Hutchinson, commenting that we overestimate the extent to which fundamentalists interpret things literally. At the time, I didn’t get the force of his statement, but I think it begins with the idea that “literal interpretation” is an incoherent phrase.
Nothing can be both literal and an interpretation. In fact, nothing can be literal. Period. Literal points to an ideal text which can speak for itself without a mediating consciousness to render its meaning. Fundies point to the ten commandments as such a text. Libbies point to the prohibition against coveting your neighbour’s ass (or is it your neighbour’s wife’s ass) and say the ten commandments is an historically contingent text like any other. It’s all interpretation. Even the fundie claim about unmediated text is just a gambit in the interpretive process. All that remains is to duke it out armed with competing interpretations. Parody is a legitimate response to the fight for interpretive dominance.
The other discovery came when I clicked on some of the links. Once I had figured out the joke, my brain was stuck in “parody mode” and I was reading everything as parody. I didn’t even notice that the links go off site to “real” fundie web sites. Moving from the joke to the object of the joke was seamless. I couldn’t tell the difference. What does it say about the fundie point of view that it is indistinguishable from parody?
But then I was struck by another thought. Maybe this has nothing to do with fundamentalisms. Maybe all religious points of view are indistinguishable from parody. Maybe those who identify as liberal are equally susceptible of stereotypes and are equally deserving of ridicule.