On Thursday Feb. 25, the group responsible for the Generic Good Morning Message famous for its racist joke last year about College President Jim Yong Kim ("E-mail on Kim stirs controversy," Mar. 5, 2009) sent one containing an offensive and disrespectful joke parodying Christianity and Jesus Christ.
For those unfamiliar with the Stations of the Cross, it is a prayer (primarily in the Catholic Church) in which people all over the world walk a route in their church marked by 14 images of the Jesus' last hours on this earth before His Resurrection. The writers of the GGMM subjected this ancient prayer tradition to crude mockery by attaching an insulting paragraph to each of the stations.
For instance, under the station "Jesus Meets His Mother," they wrote, "Man, wouldn't a virgin birth be some shit? I mean, wow. That shit would HURT!" That is just one small snippet it gets much worse from there.
This isn't the first time the GGMM has slipped in anti-Christian messages. Writing about a girl he met a few years ago on a Catholic community service trip, one of the GGMM authors goes on to recount in explicit and derogatory language that was not only anti-Christian, but flat out misogynistic how he had sex with her and her friend, and how her two best friends had sex with his two best friends etc. He later used this to deride the Catholic camp as a failure, writing, "And wasn't that the worst possible scenario? The opposite of what our parents expected? Weren't we supposed to go away and come back celibate until marriage, if not for life?" It's safe to say he missed the whole point of Catholic-led service work.
There are many factors that could partially account for why there was no reaction against these blitzes. Not many people, for example, receive the GGMM, and those who do probably receive the message because they are the type of people who enjoy reading offensive material. However, I think it is true that, in general, this campus is much less inclined to respond to attacks on religious groups than it is to comments that, for example, are perceived to be racist or sexist. Even comments that could only with great difficulty be construed as racist or sexist are often emphatically denounced by the majority on campus, while explicit and vicious attacks on religious groups provoke indifference at best.
Racism and sexism are issues talked about on this campus non-stop, and nearly every term there is some sort of discussion or panel on those issues. Yet there has been no attempt by the student body to address the maliciously anti-religious comments that are relatively commonplace on campus. This is not a problem unique to Christianity. As Adrian Wood-Smith '10 pointed out last week ("Faith Under Fire," Mar. 1), the Muslim community at Dartmouth is also treated with near-hateful contempt in some forums. I am not saying that people ought to be limited in their use of free speech by others, but I do think they should restrain their own speech according to minimum standards of tolerance and decency.
I have no particular interest in seeing Christianity obtain a protected victimhood status. Nothing bothers me more than people who seek to limit the exercise of free speech by throwing around the word "offensive." If the people who write the GGMM want to continue mocking Christianity, they are free to do so. But I think they would be wrong. Mocking Christianity, or for that matter, any religion, is a weak and cheap move it is an easy way to avoid seriously considering its claims. If you can trivialize and laugh at religion, you have made it easy for yourself to ignore it and to remain unchallenged by its message.
But if the lives of people like Mother Theresa or St. Francis of Assisi tell us anything, they tell us that Christianity is something we ought to treat with the utmost seriousness. The Passion of Jesus Christ if it is truly what Christianity claims it to be is the most revolutionary and the most importance occurrence in all of human history. It is not something that should be laughed at lightly. It is highly offensive for Christians that it should become a framework for lewd, degrading, disgusting mockery.
We can do better than such cheap shots and base mockery. For a campus that considers itself to be highly tolerant and truly intellectual, it seems we still have a long way to go in learning to apply those valued qualities to our discussions of religion.
