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Notes from the PMZ (The Post-Modernism-free Zone)

Valerie Kane

. . . Last fall, when The National Catholic Reporter announced its contest in search of a new image of Jesus for the third Christian millennium, yours truly predicted that the winning portrait would be, politically correctly, of a black woman. Now that the winner has been announced, I humbly admit to having been wrong. The "New Jesus" is an adolescent black male whom the artist only modeled on a woman. Looking something like Michael Jackson before his many rhinoplasties, this new Christ appears barely able to rescue a kitten from a tree much less redeem the world from sin. According to The Daily Record, a London newspaper, the creator of "Jesus of the People", a Ms. Janet McKenzie of Island Pond, Vermont, said that her goal "was to be as inclusive as possible." Might I remind Ms. McKenzie that Christ Himself beat her to a now-fashionable multiculturalism when he commanded the apostles to "go ye forth and teach all nations"? Sister Wendy Beckett, the British art expert turned BBC and PBS superstar, selected the winner from a juried shortlist, calling it a "haunting image of a peasant Jesus . . .looking out on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with confidence." Since Jesus Christ was not a peasant but a skilled laborer, a craftsman, a CARPENTER!, and was also so learned of Scripture that he held temple-goers in His thrall, we can only assume that Sister Wendy doesn't know history as well as she does art. On the other hand, in light of her mistaking a certain pique in the New Jesus' expression -- my guess is for being depicted against a pink background for "confident sadness", can we hereafter believe anything she may say about the Pietà? Ms. Pattie Wigand Sporrong, a jury member, claims that "Jesus would have liked this contest. It didn't have a lot of boundaries and barriers." It also didn't have a lot of truth, Ms. Wigand Sporrong, such as the fact that Jesus Christ was not some allegorical Everyman but a Jew who lived in the time of the Roman occupation of the Holy Land. By removing Christ from His historical context, you have moved Him one step closer to myth. (There, where one need not accept the fact of Him, one need not grapple with whether or not He was who He said He was, the Messiah; ultimately, one, sighing relief, need not wrestle with faith.) However, I'm grateful to you for giving example of one of the great afflictions of contemporary Christianity -- the notion that is entirely malleable. You advocate dispensing with "boundaries", which will render the faith indefinable by dogma and revealed truth. In their place, you enshrine one's personal freedom to believe or do as one chooses, worship one's Higher Being -- or the moon, for that matter -- and retain the right to call oneself a Christian.

Finally, I would ask Ms. McKenzie, Sister Wendy, and Ms. Wigand Sporrong to consider whether the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. ought to be depicted as say, an Asian to oppressed peoples in China? Surely, the African-American community would be outraged, and justifiably so. Indeed, now might be a good time for these women to recall the Reverend King's eloquent plea that a man be judged "not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character." For lo these two millennia, Jesus Christ has managed to change lives around the the world without your help, ladies. Moreover, He's done it as a white male. Deal with it.

Speaking of contests and feminized depictions of the Savior of the World, Jonathan Petre reported in the Electronic Telegraph last year that the fifteenth annual international "Tough Guy" competition was slated to be held in the UK on January 30, 2000. Some seven thousand men and women had signed up to carry crosses weighing up to fifty pounds over a two-thousand yard course. Billing the event as the "Year of the Jesus Warriors", the organizers proclaimed that "Jesus Christ was not meek and mild. He is the toughest Tough Guy of all time." (Take that, Sister Wendy.) But Monsignor Kieran Conry, identified only as "a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church", criticized the competition for "exploiting and trivialising the Christian story. They are associating Christ with ideas of masculinity and aggression, when He was far from the ultimate 'tough guy'. He never resisted arrest or tried to defend Himself during the trial." Oh, I don't know about that, Monsignor Conry. I happen to think that that was an extraordinary display of grit, especially when He knew the torture that awaited Him. And considering the manly way he toughed it out, Monsignor, given a choice of braving a dark alley with you or the Lord, I would choose Him every time.