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O, Come All Ye (Un)Faithful

Thursday, 13 Dec 2007 at 1:13 pm

I pass a group of magazine stands on my walk to the office every morning, the kind that dispenses free classified ads and similar local publications. One magazine usually captures my attention with covers of slinky sirens or similar eye-catching material. Until this morning, that never translated into me actually picking up a copy. This week’s cover story changed that: O, Come All Ye (Un)Faithful by Greg Beato with the caption “Atheists have been on a roll lately but the God squad still has better stuff”. Ever the consummate journalist, I decided to pick up a copy for the benefit of my loyal readers.

Thumbing through to find the article, I found the magazine to be exactly what I had always expected: pages and pages of augmented women pimping for night clubs, interspersed with one-page articles. The article (once I found it through the forest of silicone) surprised me with its content. It wasn’t one of the same stereotyped critiques that I’ve read too many times. Its basic premise is that while atheism makes the most sense, it has yet to catch up to Christianity on what people really want: kitsch.

No doubt the thought of atheist lip balm and atheist jelly beans is hard to reconcile for many freethinkers—one of the virtues of atheism is that not every aspect of one’s life has to be yoked to some clingy deity who feels totally left out if you don’t include Him in everything you do. Plus, there’s simply the logical disconnect: What do jelly beans have to do with atheism? Why not stick with books, rational arguments, reason?

If proponents of atheism want to make it more popular, Mr. Beato says they should follow the example of Christian entrepreneurs:

At last year’s International Christian Retail Show in Atlanta, Georgia, hundreds of vendors displayed a rich, vast Eden of Christian pop-culture products that were just as slickly produced, just as fashionable and entertaining as anything secular pop culture has to offer. Atheists, meanwhile, are still in the pop-culture Dark Ages—their T-shirts aren’t as visually appealing, their tchotchkes aren’t as diverse, their rock bands are not spreading their 110-decibel message of rational humanism. It’s time to evolve past the Darwin Fish and fill up the stockings of nonbelievers with atheist junk that is just as gloriously profane as the junk blessed by Jesus.

It makes an odd kind of sense to me. But perhaps atheists are catching up after all.

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6 Comments

  1. George said,

    December 14, 2007 @ 12:22 pm

    Oh ye unfaithful…. go watch The Golden Compass!!! hahahahaha and I know, I wrote almost the same thing on Trapped blog….

  2. Jonathan Blake said,

    December 14, 2007 @ 4:26 pm

    Hmm… maybe I’ll go see it tomorrow.

  3. Anonymous said,

    December 14, 2007 @ 6:38 pm

    And there’s always Black Metal, pretty much an entire sub-genre of music dedicated to mocking, shocking, belittling, and repudiating religion in general and Christianity in specific.

  4. Jonathan Blake said,

    December 14, 2007 @ 6:59 pm

    As I said recently, satire has its place. There is much in Christian doctrine and culture that I find ripe for satire. The tragedy of the situation is how earnest and sincere its adherents are. I’m often too kind-hearted to pull the trigger on full tilt Christian satire (and I’m probably not a very good satire writer). The Meming of Life recently had a post about satire which included this gem:

    VATICAN CITY — In an address before over 250,000 followers assembled outside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed his commitment to global religious unity, calling upon the world’s Roman Catholics to “build a bridge of earthly friendship” between themselves and the eternally damned.

    “We have been aloof too long,” the Pope told the throng of well-wishers who crowded into Vatican Square. “For too many years, otherwise pious, observant Catholics have not made enough of an effort to reach out to nonbelievers, reasoning that, since they would have no contact with them in the next life, there was little point in getting to know them in this one.”

    Satire keeps us from holding silly or repugnant beliefs by holding them up for derision.

    The best satire is deadly accurate, striking unerringly at its victim’s heart. I fear that much of Black Metal is clumsy anger and mindless posing.

  5. Anonymous said,

    December 16, 2007 @ 9:24 am

    I’m not sure about that. I think public perception of most Metal is pretty far off from what it is. Honestly, plenty of Metal bands make some of the most artistically adept and technically proficient music out there. It’s not necessarily the most accessible, though. When I think of “clumsy anger and mindless posing,” I think of punk more than metal.

  6. Jonathan Blake said,

    December 17, 2007 @ 8:14 am

    I’ve started to appreciate groups that I didn’t allow myself to enjoy prior to my change of heart. I’m relatively unfamiliar with the metal scene. Do you have any recommendations?

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