BLASPHEMY AS MARKET STRATEGY.
By Paul Merkley.
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Most adult Canadians – but boys, more than girls – will recall with enthusiasm the comic books published by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. There was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and many others.
Think, therefore, for a moment, what we are being told about our popular culture when we see that the owners of D.C. Comics have thrown in their lot with the despisers of Christianity, in confidence that the commercial bottom-line will benefit.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s campaign to make allegiance to the God of the Christians impossible for intellectuals and self-respecting elitists is now being promoted among comic-book readers.
It is essential to note here that comic books are no longer being produced for nor promoted for children. Nor is there anything “comic” about them any more. Commercial advertisers understand that the juvenile audience is now gathered around the television set. This tectonic shift leaves the comic-book format available for the entertainment of adults—mainly males – whose intellectual and moral development atrophied at age 14.
Lots of consequential things follow from this revolution, but only one interests me here—and that is that the producers of today’s comic books are providing their audience with content deliberately designed to capture and advance the contempt that they imagine that this adult audience has for Christian faith.
We know that business men have armies of deep-thinkers at their service, ready to provide scientifically-validated market-strategies. These self-confident souls are now offering up to their employers proof that explicit, muscular contempt for God, and for Christian faith in particular, is today and forever into the future a secure, winning strategy for commercial success.
DC Comics is planning to release, starting March 6th, a six-episode comic-book series entitled “Second Coming.” In it, Jesus Christ stumbles mindlessly at the side of a heroic character – a character as brilliant as “Jesus” is clueless. He is “Sun-Man, the Last Son of Krispex.”
Indeed, celestial heroes of this sort were worshipped throughout the Roman Empire at the time that the Gospel came into the world, presenting a message totally incompatible with this popular “paganism” of the day.
Think what it tells us about the mindset of the business-men who own D.C. Comics. Assuming that any one of them ever had any loyalty to the content of Christian faith, these persons have been persuaded, for the sake of the bottom-line of the DC Comics company, to set this behind them so that they can participate in this aggressive, abusive campaign. It is clear that in this company the very notion of blasphemy does not occur.
In short: they believe that for themselves individually, there is more to gain, than to lose by turning their backs on Christ and standing in the chorus of His mockers.
For a look at the mindset that governs among these prosperous despisers of Christian faith I am led to the website of “Bleeding-Cool” https://www.facebook.com/bleedingcoolnews which describes itself as “an internet news site, owned by Avatar press, focusing on comics, TV, film, and games. On this site, Mark Russell.. the proud author of the comic-book under review here and ready for release in March, summarizes the story-line as follows: God was so upset with Jesus’ performance the first time he came to Earth (since he was arrested after barely beginning his task and crucified so shortly afterwards) “that God has kept him [Jesus] locked up since then.” Now Jesus comes back as the bumbling, clueless roommate and side-kick of “a powerful superhero, named Sun-Man.”
In case the subtler points of my complaint against D.C. Comics may elude my readers, I suggest that these readers try to imagine the response to a comic-book hero— equally dense, similarity at-a-loss about getting around in the world of His Creator, but presented as identical to Prophet Muhammad. Put simply: DC comics, for all its wealth, could not afford the cost of protecting the lives and properties of its employees from the deadly wrath of our Muslim fellow-citizens, which would immediately rise to a level comparable to the wrath that swe[t away the Twin Tower. Apart from all other considerations, these knuckle-dragging artists know that the perpetrators of blasphemous material like this are kept safe by the apathy and the indulgence indifference of the generality of nominal Christians.
In an essay published here some months ago (https://thebayviewreview.com/2018/04/09/beyond-blasphemy
I wrote of the successful campaign of an ice-cream company in Toronto – Sweet Baby Jesus — to turn profit for its investors by promoting its ice cream under the banner of explicit contempt for Christian faith. So far as I can determine, the effort of some serious Christian people to persuade these deep-thinkers to give up their display of contempt for Christ has failed. (See “Sweet Baby Jesus ice cream parlour faces backlash over name,” Toronto Star, March 25, 2018.) The company still operates, although for some reason the ownership has changed. Its adverting still turns on winning masses of Torontonians to step up to the counter and say out loud that they would like a “Sweet Baby Jesus.” There is no way of addressing the teen-age clerk behind the counter that does not require this act of blatant blasphemy.
The inevitable conclusion here is that the people who have established themselves as experts in the work of merchandising upon which our general prosperity depends have proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, that people generally welcome an opportunity to indulge in blasphemy against Christian faith. In short, ice cream tastes even better when you get to ask out loud for “Sweet Baby Jesus.”
Or perhaps (a consideration even more depressing), perhaps the generality ice-cream consumers like the generality of comic-book readers, are no longer aware of what blasphemy is.
Which must also mean that the notion of “God” and the significance of “Jesus Christ” likewise escapes them.
In which case, we are in the post-Christian age, with no way back.
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