So I was out in L.A. last spring break and I met this crazy independent filmmaker in this coffeehouse and he was working on this insane idea for a horror flick, “Women V. Islam, Round 2: The Resuscitation”. His story line was all these women clawing back from the grave and none of them seemed too pleased with their menfolk, if you can imagine something so ridiculous. He had a bible with him, so I immediately realized I was dealing with one of these right-wing Christianist nut jobs. So I tried to reason with him in his own backwoods language. I told him dude, you can’t go making a movie like that. How would you feel if someone judged your religion in the same terms? Would Jesus judge people in the way you’re now doing? Haven’t Christians maltreated “their women” for years? Look, I told him, we have a guy in prison in San Francisco for this sort of stuff and had an embassy attack to boot. And then I got real condescending and told him we had to run four weeks of apologies “over there” for a film just like this. Did he want all that? And the guy got real kind of quiet and didn’t respond for a while. Now, this is where it gets interesting. He suddenly starts talking about his lifelong conversion from liberation theology as a Jesuit in Chile to a militant Marxist atheism. He’d lost his faith in a moment of despair during a solidarity movement against Pinochet. In other words, it turned out this guy wasn’t a right-wing Christian at all but just carried around a bible for camouflage – he hated Christians also. He was in L.A. (where else?) to meet and plan a global insurrection of Anarchic Atheists. Now I started to feel a bit awkward. I had just summarily judged this person as having one sort of religious prejudice whereas he really just plain old hated all religions. Moreover, as much as I despised his hatred of Christianity and Islam with every fiber of my being, I started to wonder whether his having been a prior Jesuit gave him the right to turn on religion just because he’d seen both sides of it. To cover my faux pas, I said I had always believed one could be equally loving of all religions or else equally hating of all religions but that one should never single out any one religion in particular. We sat and talked for a few more hours, and I felt like scales of my own personal lifelong prejudices were falling from my eyes. Then, when we were about to part, he looked at me stolidly and said he had, in truth, found one religion on earth – one religion – that still spoke to him with a purity and innocence of heart, that was not stained by cynicism nor subterfuge nor misogyny nor violence. And with that he got up and from his pocket he deposited on the table a parting gift: the Book of Mormon.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 07:18:37 +0000
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