Sunday Readings And Cancel Culture
Is self-censorship keeping ahead of the cutting room fanatics?
I wrote this piece for an Irish Catholic publication called ALIVE and decided to post it here as it maps interestingly, I think, onto a brilliant piece which Mary Harrington posted today on her Substack. Mary posits the idea that some individuals, influenced by their gender characteristics, interalia perhaps, are happier being lead rather than leading and that a relationship based on the leader/led dynamic is not necessarily oppressive but on the contrary works by mutual consent to suit the interests and inclinations of both parties. She argues that this is one of the asymmetries that our culture, hierarchy loathing and obsessed with egalitarianism, is suppressing in the mainstream only for it to erupt in the dom/sub world of BDSM.
Mary’s piece is the second part of a three part series on Renaud Camus and the concept of replacement/replacism. She has stood down her paywall for these three amazing articles.
My piece begins:
The Second Reading for Sunday, 26th August, the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time this year, was obviously expected to cause some disquiet among the faithful, in certain quarters at least. These days publishing houses hire 'sensitivity readers' to ensure that potentially offensive language, characterisations or themes are carefully edited lest some protected group or their advocates take exception. Ephesians 5:21-32, which sets out the reciprocal duties of husbands and wives and which St Paul uses as model to help us understand both Christ's relationship with his Church and the true nature of marriage appears to have drawn out sensitivity readers among some Irish liturgical gatekeepers.
In the church where I read the Celebrant alerted the Sacristan to ask all readers to use the leaflet rather than the lectionary because part of the reading in the lectionary was 'crossed out'. I found this extraordinary and more than a little intriguing. Taking the leaflet with me to the lectern, I was more than a little shocked to find heavy black marker completely obliterating the first five or so lines where St Paul urges wives to submit to their husbands. I was happy to read the unabridged version from the leaflet and took some pains to give each section of the text its due measure so as to draw out the balance of obligations which is key to understanding the passage.
An even more curious example of sensitivity on the same Sunday was reported via a family member, who happened to attend Mass in neighbouring diocese. Here, there was no tampering with the lectionary but the leaflets used by the congregation omitted the same first problematic lines.
Whatever one may think about the provenance of the Letter to the Ephesians and the points it makes, this kind of editing is so crude it defeats its own purpose. With the redaction, the focus is now entirely on the husband's part in the relationship. Nothing at all is said about the wife’s. If the aim of the edit was to clear the text of perceived or real misogyny, it has arguably only made matters worse.
An even more curious instance of cancel culture on the same Sunday was reported via a family member, who happened to attend Mass in neighbouring diocese. Here, there was no tampering with the lectionary but the leaflets used by the congregation omitted the same first problematic lines.
How long before the sensitivity readers take the only logical course here and omit the entire passage? After that, what else is up for review?
The fact is there are many passages in Scripture that challenge and unsettle and read as ‘problematic’ or worse for those reading through the lens modern secular dogmas. It was always so, as the wisdom of the world cannot make much if any sense of the ‘foolishness’ of faith, as St Paul significantly cautioned.
It is possible to interpret Scripture to ‘prove’ it acquiesces in, if not condones, slavery and many forms of killing including infanticide. If we are to be editors rather than custodians of Scripture to appease the spirit of the age, we will be kept very busy indeed.
Recently a Finnish member of parliament and a Finnish pastor were both charged with hate speech for respectively writing and publishing a defence of biblical teaching on sexuality. They were fortunate to be acquitted but such cases, which we read about more and more frequently in the public press, have a chilling effect on Christians of all denominations. This is no doubt the intention in dragging people through the considerable expense and stress of investigations and legal proceedings that have a low chance of success. Meanwhile of course our legislators are at work on hate speech legislation to make it easier to secure convictions in such cases.
To return to the text at issue here, Ephesians 5, 21-32, the idea of voluntary submission to the will of another, unlike involuntary submission to the will of the State, is considered anathema to secularists. However, the idea of Christ’s sacrificial, self-denying love, itself another form of submission, is equally alien. In comparing a husband’s love to Christ’s, St Paul is setting the highest bar of all. Only such love can elicit the kind of submissive response that Paul sets out here because the ‘obedience’ called for is the obedience that is due to Christ himself.
We would do well to ponder the ‘problematic’ passages and explore their complexity and depth instead of taking the red pencil, or in this case, the black marker to them. Here we can follow Mary’s example when she pondered many things of greater complexity than Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. It is not just in the light of our limited life experience, less still the ideologies of the age, that we read Scripture. As Christians, we read Scripture with a humble, thoughtful and listening spirit that acknowledges God knows our nature better than we know it ourselves.