Category: Guest Column
Another “Sightings”
Machine Gun Preacher
— Martin E. MartyPreachers, pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams number in the hundreds of thousands in the United States. They minister at the borders between what get tabbed “sacred” and “secular” realms, and as such cannot go unnoticed in public media. Some critics in the culture wars complain that they too often do get unnoticed. But most representations of them in movies and on television evoke, in the minds of those who have positive regard for clergy, George Bernard Shaw’s often paraphrased saying that there are two tragedies in life: not getting what we want, and getting what we want. “Not getting what ‘we’ want,” whoever “we” are, used to be represented in comments that ministers, especially Protestants, usually came across as namby-pamby and culturally marginal types as if labeled “Handle With Care.” They often appeared begowned and silver-coiffed, viewed over the groom’s shoulder, saying, “I now pronounce you. . . You may kiss the bride.”
Everyone who knew, or was, a full-of-life cleric, resented that cultural posture. In today’s world, however, most clergy representatives on film are not suave mainline clerics, beloved Irish-American priests, or wan and thin play-it-safe rabbis. Today, with the rise of presumably Protestant born-again studs, manipulators of people, and takers of the law into their own hands types, we see images of law-breakers with macho swagger. Those observations are background comments to this week’s version of the sometimes robed swashbucklers, in a film called Machine Gun Preacher. It was hard to evade reviews last weekend; two which found me were in our local Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune.
We don’t need to review the reviews or condense all details of the plot. The regular run of characters surrounds the Reverend Sam Childers: his ex-stripper wife, here “stuck with platitudes such as ‘God gave you a purpose, Sam Childers.’” The movie is based on a book which is based on a (presumably) true life story of a convict who gets violently born-again, thoroughly baptized, and self-licensed to pick up a gun and fight in defense of children in Sudan. Childers built an orphanage there, we are told and shown, and evidently does some good things for the kids. But that’s not what the movie is about. To compete today, it has to be violent, and is.
Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune deals with the scene in Sudan, personalizing it along the way. Here is how he voices the Gospel: “Staring down an enemy, he seethes: ‘The Lord I serve is the living lord Jesus. And to show you he’s alive, I’m going to send you to meet him right now!’ Blam! Another enemy, smote.” What does the viewer get to see in a plot plotted for today’s American market? Ebert in the Sun-Times, on the Reverend gun-slinger: he “is nothing but a one-dimensional rage machine.” So the preacher and the film-maker “can’t wait to get to the ass-whipping part of this inspirational story, [which] lacks any real sense of how Childers underwent his staggering transformation.” Well, “he isn’t the first to go to war in the name of the Lord. . . He’s born again, yes, but he seems otherwise relatively unchanged. . . He seems fueled more by anger than by spirituality.” Until next week’s violence-in-religion movie comes along, “Machine Gun Preacher” invites some pondering: is this preacher what we wanted? And, if so, who are ‘we’?
References
Michael Phillips, “Machine Gun Preacher: Man of God, Carnage – 1 ½ Stars,” Chicago Tribune, September 29, 2011.Roger Ebert, “Machine Gun Preacher,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 28, 2011.
Betsy Sharkey, “Movie review: ‘Machine Gun Preacher’,” Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2011.
Mel Valentin, “Movie Review: Machine Gun Preacher,” Very Aware, September 30, 2011.
Movie Review Intelligence, “Machine Gun Preacher, Weak Reviews, Key Cities,” September 30, 2011.
Sightings
Sightings
September 12, 2011Cretan Partisans
— Martin E. MartyWe Americans are not as smart as the ancient Cretans, at least in one very important respect. There were good reasons to ponder their example this weekend during the solemn observances of 9/11 after ten years. Ordinarily the mission of Sightings is to relate signals from current mass media to the concerns of “public religion,” and documenting our column with reference to some article or program. This week we will not be doing so, not because documents are few but because there are so many. I didn’t need “Search” keys or instruments to find a document; the 9/11 signals found me.
Many of these were loaded with “public religion” meanings, as citizens mourned, argued, expressed resolve, disguised their fears, politicized their reminiscences, and mourned again. We who comment “religiously” in the public realm were supplied on line and in print with ideas for conferences, programs, talks and, yes, sermons. Gathering thoughts about them I found myself using three mental shelves. The one, already mentioned, can be marked “mourning.” Thinking about the hundreds and thousands of lives of victims directly “hit” by the event naturally prompts mourning. We may not have ritualized mourning well, but we mourned.
The second shelf could be labeled “Defense Strategies,” on which most of my sources and I, especially I, are not equipped to make proposals. The empirical situation occasions a “Pretty Well Done” response. Fearful and tentative as we are and have to be, religious or not, in the face of our enemies and crazy people, we can begin responding with a nervous “we’re still here” boast. Yes, nutty individuals have taken a few post 9/11 victims and their presence, along with the threats of malevolent and armed enemies, and they continually cause and will cause us to remain mindful, without prompting, of dangers.
Then there’s the third shelf for sorting responses, and here is where the ancient Cretans come in. I ran across them and the relevance of their obscure record a half century ago when looking up the word “syncretism” for doctoral work, and it has stayed with me ever since. While there are competitive etymological clues, the one which wins derives from Plutarch’s Moralia, and which got a new boost from Erasmus’s Adagia of 1517-18. With Plutarch and Erasmus as back-ups, one can be bold. Plutarch coined synkretismos, referring to the way the always contentious, divided, and warring-among-themselves men of Crete responded when enemies threatened: they forgot about their squabbles and formed the “Cretan federation.” Erasmus quoted himself in a letter, arguing that “Concord is a mighty rampart,” as those squabbling Cretans did when they needed rampart but which many Americans have not yet learned.
Back to 9/11—did you think we left it behind? (We never may!)—w may have learned from it something about how to mourn and to defend, but on “federating” like the Cretans did, we are nowhere. Instead of uniting across the boundaries set by squabblers, citizens squabble more. Yes, there are interfaith and ecumenical movements, but every church, synagogue, and mosque I know is doing anything but find “concord.” Name one denomination—can you?—that is not threatened by partisanship from within. Now ponder partisanship: Can you remember or do you know of any decade more torn apart by actions and factions among and within parties—care for tea?—than our ten years have seen? Cretans, Plutarch, Erasmus: note that we are slow learners!
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.