Blasphemy Is Boring

Two random examples of recent pop culture blasphemy: Jon Stewart brags about eating pork on Passover, Maynard James Keenan sings that "Christ is comin', and so am I." My objection is not that blasphemy is wrong, but that blasphemy is boring. The exception is blasphemy against Islam, simply because the phenomenon is much more recent, thus not done to death/resurrection. Islam is ripe for satire precisely because anything that hasn't already been satired is ripe for satire. The same is not true of Judaism and Christianity.

Jon Stewart is the latest in a long line of tradition-spitting Jews beginning with Spinoza (who also took on a Gentile name), and needless to say he is no Spinoza. Even Maynard's little wordplay is derivative, arriving over a decade after Al Jourgensen's riff that "the fathers who write that eternity is used to fight the sword / have filled you up with the devil's cock and he'll come in the name of the lord." The fact that artists and entertainers rely so much on religious imagery, even in the negative, is a tribute to its power. The story of Christ is compelling, no matter your belief or unbelief, and the allure of the chosen people is so strong even African-Americans pretend to be the original Hebrews. (I have no problem with blacks converting to Judaism, but to pretend they are Semites and I'm a Khazar is a little rich.)

I don't ask that entertainers try to live up to the example of Christ and turn the other cheek when it comes to the mock-worthiness of much religion (Leo Strauss argued that the Enlightenment never proved religion wrong, only mocked it to a standstill), but that they at least try to live up to the example of Voltaire. When I listen to Maynard James Keenan's umpteenth song about Christianity being an opiate for fools, I am drawn to the conclusion that anti-Christianity is the opiate of creatively bankrupt dimestore intellectuals. When I listen to Jon Stewart bragging about eating pork on Passover, I hear a pathetic man tied in a parasitic relationship of loathing to his ancestry. The greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment did not just seek to bash religion to death; they also sought to revive Greco-Roman virtues as a substantive substitute. There is no substitute substance to the modern pop culture blasphemers; there is only a relativist, history-blind dedication to the ephemeral. I don't believe they are the only two options, but if I did, I'd choose religion over blasphemy simply because, in these times, the former is less obnoxious.