David QuinnA new ‘secular prudery’ wants to ban religion from public view, writes David Quinn
There is a probably legendary story told to the effect that back in Victorian times people were so prudish about sexual matters that it was the habit in some Victorian households to cover the legs of pianos in cloth so they would not remind people of women’s legs.
This is on a par with the story that in the Middle Ages theologians would concern themselves with questions such as, ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ In fact, no-one to the best of my knowledge has ever found that question being genuinely discussed by anyone.
Both of these stories are almost certainly satirical, intended to show up the undoubted prudishness of Victorian times and the fact that some mediaeval scholastics did spend too much time on very obscure metaphysical questions.
Fast forward to today, however, and we need not come up with exaggerated stories to show how extremely prudish many of us have become about religion, and the extreme aversion many of us have developed towards any public display of it whatsoever. This is the new secular prudery.
Examples
Two examples occurred in the last few days. One is the revelation by the historical advisor to Downton Abbey that the makers of the period drama banished any mention of religion from the series despite the fact that it is set almost 100 years ago when Britain was much less secular than it is today.
The second is the decision to ban from major cinema chains like Odeon and Cineworld a Church of England ad showing people saying the Lord’s Prayer for fear cinema-goers in England might be offended.
The Daily Telegraph last week noted that the Crawley family, the aristocratic owners of Downton Abbey, are never shown going to church services (except funerals and weddings) and are never shown saying Grace before meals, even though both of these things would have been common among the aristocracy, and indeed among a large part of the general British population in the 1910s and 1920s when the series is set.
The paper reported: “The man tasked with ensuring the historical accuracy of the series has revealed why Downton does not do God. Alastair Bruce, who serves as the show’s historical advisor, said that executives in charge of the series had ordered producers to ‘leave religion out of it’, for fear of alienating an increasingly atheistic public.”
Bruce reveals that the programme-makers even fretted about including the word ‘abbey’ in the title in case it might offend viewers.
The Church of England ad was banned for similar reasons. It shows people from various walks of life, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, saying the Our Father. It runs to about a minute.
The Church of England wanted to show the ad during the run of the upcoming Star Wars film.
Digital Cinema Media (DCM), the company that banned the ad from most cinemas in England, justified its decision on the grounds that it might offend those of “differing faiths and no faith”, and that it bans all political and religious advertising.
To be honest, I am slightly more sympathetic to the decision of DCM than to the stance of the Downton Abbey makers because I am not sure how I would feel about having to sit in a cinema watching an ad promoting atheism.
That said, maybe cinemas should go right ahead and show ads promoting religion and atheism and see how cinema-goers react.
In addition, many ads that are inflicted on us in cinemas (and elsewhere) are either in poor taste or in the case of State-sponsored ‘health promotion’ ads are implicitly selling us an ideology, especially in respect of sex.
The new ad for Eir, the company formerly known as Eircom, manages to include a not-so-subtle plug for gay rights when at the point in the ad when it announces its ‘new beginning’ we see rainbow flags superimposed over people’s faces.
Objectively speaking, which is more objectionable, a company like Eir whose business is telecommunications using an ad to effectively plug a political message, or the Church of England, whose business is religion, encouraging people to pray?
However, I doubt if a single one of the 734,000 people who voted ‘No’ in the marriage referendum would think to call up Eir or their local cinema to object, whereas you might get some atheist cinema-goers calling up the relevant body to object to an ad about prayer.
Why is this? It’s because atheists these days tend to be more bolshie and self-confident and are more inclined to make a fuss just as a certain type of kill-joy in the past would make a song and dance if anything remotely hinted at sex whether in a book, a play or on our screens.
This brings to mind the old Hays Code which set out how Hollywood movies should be made in the decades between 1930 and 1968. The code ensured that Hollywood movies would always be very coy about sex (and about swearing, drugs, ridicule of the clergy etc.) so as not to offend movie-goers, or ‘drag down’ public standards.
Today, we seem to have a sort of informal Hays Code in effect with regard to the depiction of religion on our screens.
Basically, it must either not be shown at all, or else it must be depicted in a very unflattering light.
There are exceptions, which actually prove that modern audiences might not be as prudishly secular as all that. The recent science fiction movie, The Martian, had a couple of fleeting (and positive) references to religion and so did another popular science fiction movie, Gravity.
But both of these movies are American. You would be extremely hard-pressed to find favourable mention of religion in British or Irish-made movies or TV dramas. Much more common are extremely unfavourable references.
You have to wonder what your average Muslim living here in the West makes of all this. We preach ‘tolerance’ at them from all corners, and rightly so. But then they see how we regard religion. They see how hostile those who control the commanding heights of our culture are towards it and how they seek to banish it increasingly from public view.
The attitude of the makers of Downton Abbey towards religion and the decision to ban the Church of England ad from most English cinemas show the new ‘Hays Code’ in effect. It is a code that is becoming ever stricter in the name of the new secular prudery.