Christian doctrine summarized
Today’s news brings us reports that the Church of England’s gentle attempts to frontload the new Star Wars movie with a one minute long advert for their brand of authoritarian fantasism have fallen flat, in what everyone (even Richard Dawkins, apparently) is calling a defeat for free speech. In a stunning moment of unexpected bravery from our corporate overlords, the bosses of three different cinema chains have told the CofE to get fucked. Rather than being horrified by this slow slide into oppression, I am very happy, and extremely angry that the CofE felt they had the right to pull this nasty piece of totalitarianism on the British public. Before you start hyperventilating, dear reader(s), let me explain …
I’m not an easily offended man, I think, and I think I’ve been on the record as supporting free expression for all religions. I’m an atheist but I don’t subscribe to the “Militant Atheist” school of “thought”, which holds that religion is a childish emotional prop and that society should and will grow past it. I respect individual religious belief, I think religions should have freedom in public life and I’m not especially bothered by the special place that some religious institutions hold in public life – e.g. the christian churches of various denominations in various nations, Islam in Turkey, etc. In the modern era I really don’t see religion as a big threat to our continued progress towards enlightenment, and I have no problem with its open expression and with its historical contributions being recognized. I’m also, I think, on record here as saying I suspect that a lot of the militant atheist spokespeople are sexist, racist bigots who are especially fond of using their atheism as a cloak for their obvious anti-Arab or anti-Islamic racism, and I don’t think that their aggressive tactics do atheism any favours. To the extent that atheism is a movement (it’s not) we don’t need these people as our chief representatives. However …
The Church of England, because it has a huge and privileged position in the British intellectual world. It is the establishment church, meaning the head of the church is also the head of a nuclear-armed state. It owns most of the publicly-run schools, and I can personally attest to the way it used those schools to exclude other religions from discussion, to misrepresent them and to force us to learn and recite its doctrine. It gets free public air time for Sunday worship and special events that no one else gets, and its religious events are the key public holidays, during which time it gets almost untrammeled access to both state and private television and radio. Despite this near constant exposure of a large portion of the population to its propaganda message, and despite the fact that the major media organizations treat the corrupt content of that message with kid gloves, it is still losing the intellectual battle with atheism, agnosticism and who-gives-a-fuckism. So, having lost that battle, and aware of that, they are now going to start forcing adults who have graduated from their schools and escaped their slimy clutches to sit through a minute of unbridled power worship before they can enjoy some actually good fantasy.
Why should we put up with this? Why should I be forced to endure that horrible piece of authoritarian “poetry” when I have already been forced to recite it every morning for the first 17 years of my life? If I am not voluntarily reciting it then there is a simple reason: I think it sucks and I don’t want to. So don’t make me read it again, if I never have to read that horrible little cry for help ever again in my belief-free existence I will be a happy man. And most importantly, what gives the church the arrogance and sense of superiority to think that it’s okay for them to afflict me with this crap during my daily activities? Every time I go to a hotel in the English speaking world I’m given a free bible [another public service extended exclusively to the christian church by private companies], hasn’t the church worked out that if I wanted to read that prayer I would?
Most people understand that if you have told someone something a certain number of times and they still don’t believe it or don’t want to hear it, it’s time to stop yelling at them. Apparently the luminaries at the head of the Church of England have yet to learn that lesson, and think they have some special right to lambast us with their brand of patriarchal authoritarianism just once more, because that one more minute will get us back. The thought of sitting there, waiting to watch something I really want to watch, while for one minute this old man lectures me on how much I should love a god I don’t believe in, makes me so angry. It’s a direct reminder that these evil old men still own my society; an attempt to force me back to being my 8 year old self, shivering and powerless in assembly hall while I wait to be free of their pointless rituals. How dare they do this?
Some random dude at the Guardian is complaining that the real reason the cinemas refused is because they’re scared the illuminati might force us to listen to a muslim prayer in the future, and then they’ll be forced to play it if they also play the christian one. For me personally a passage from the Quran is largely meaningless, and if I listen to it it won’t make me angry because I have no historical association with Islam (though I guess this depends on the prayer they choose!) But for the record I think that Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and everyone else should steer well clear of my precious pre-Star Wars advertising time. I also really want to hope that this is not the reason the cinemas said no, but rather that they, like me, are horrified at the thought of allowing any church to preach to us for a minute before a movie. I’m glad they don’t need the money that badly!
The sooner the Church of England is out of schools and television altogether the better. It’s a dying institution that is propped up by the state and the buttresses of history, but its days are numbered. This desperate, mean-spirited lashing out at non-believing adults needs to be stopped early, and rather than seeing this decision as “nonsense on stilts” or some kind of blow to free speech we should recognize that it is a huge victory for modern values over superstition and authoritarianism. Well done those British cinema chains, and shame on the Church of England for thinking that such a move would ever be okay.
Compromise and Conceit 
November 23, 2015 at 3:39 pm
I’m on your side as afar as atheism etc goes, but I don’t have the background to feel any animus towards the CoE.
I wonder if, without that background, you would feel the same way? The CoE is buying ad space. The cinema chains reject the ad on the basis that people may be offended. How would they know? They are prepared to offend many (me, for instance) by advertising tasteless dreck, bad food and lifestyles that degrade the planet. They would not turn away an ad for beef for fear Hindus and vegetarians (who, together, probably outnumber active members of the CoE) might be offended. Or an ad for luxury holidays for fear the poor might be offended.
I’d like to know on what basis they make this judgement before I endorsed it.
November 23, 2015 at 3:54 pm
It could be that my experience of being preached to by the church when I was a kid is part of it – Australian schools were so blessedly free of this religious intrusion and so much more secular that I guess for people raised entirely in the Aussie school system it’s all a distant issue (I was only at Aussie schools for 4 years so I don’t know what it’s like to be raised in such a wondrously advanced setting). Just the memory of all those interminable, stuffy lectures in cold halls doesn’t make me angry, but the sheer chutzpah of these old fogies coming back to have a second go at me now that I have escaped their icy grip really makes my ire rise. It indicates to me that they think they have some special grip on my conscience. Also the further insult of having an organization that had me as its captive audience for years and still gets preferential treatment in all manner of public fora claiming to have been censored because they had their stupid prayer rejected makes me really angry. They preached at me for years and still do whenever they get the chance (the Archbishop of Canterbury gets to give a special VE day address, for example, as if cloaking our wars in religious vestments has ever been a good idea) and yet now they want to claim censorship because a cinema refuses to let them steal another minute of my precious time …
I guess the difference between other ads and this CofE ad is, besides this captive audience thing, that other ads are performing a service. Trailers at cinemas are often in and of themselves entertaining, and other ads are there to tell you about something you could do but don’t have to do. To be sure I could do without the ads too, and would probably happily pay a premium if I could avoid them – but sometimes adverts are useful to some people. I guess what I’m saying here is that I’m happy for the open marketplace of ideas to waste my time when it’s purely aimed at getting me to buy stuff, but I’m not happy at all about having my time wasted by ideologues and religious people trying to turn the marketplace of ideas into an ideological or spiritual battleground – especially when they’ve already had my ear for way more time than they deserve, and for free at that.
I would add that ordinary advertisements are not aimed at your inner thoughts but I guess in a limited way many of them are (e.g. ads that make you want to buy diet products or whatever). But those people didn’t have me as a captive audience for free in my school days or during national holidays, and don’t also happen to be our national religion. So I’ll give them a partial pass.
November 23, 2015 at 6:43 pm
There’s a moment in a Discworld book where someone protests “But this is tyranny”, to which Lord Vetinari replies “I’m a tyrant. It’s what I do”.
The faustus “You can’t advertise that because I don’t like it” school of vetting would have its merits….
November 23, 2015 at 6:53 pm
Well, since this is the internet, just to be clear here, my “should” in this post doesn’t mean “quick, pass laws to stop these bastards!” Rather, I mean that the crusty old men who thought up this brainfart should have stopped and asked each other “should we do this? Or is it going to actually piss a lot of people off and make us look dumb?” and then when the cinema told them where to go, they should have thought “Wait, just exactly how much state and corporate support do we get for our message?” before they complained about being censored.
Just because you can do something in god’s name, doesn’t mean you should. But then, I wouldn’t expect an organization that requests exemption from the human rights act to be well-versed in shoulds and shouldn’ts …