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Sunday, June 14, 1998

Religious and artistic freedom and truth vs. lies

By GINA R. DALFONZO / Scripps Howard News Service

Members of the New York theater community are celebrating a victory for freedom of speech. Artistic integrity has once again triumphed over the vicious attacks of the radical right-wing extremists.

All is well in the land of the free and the home of the brazen. That's what we've been hearing ever since the Manhattan Theater Club reversed its decision to cancel production of Terrence McNally's play "Corpus Christi."

That decision, which raised the ire of artists and reporters across the country, had been made because of security concerns after the theater company and McNally received several death threats.

"We should all be horrified by the specter of a vigilante political group shutting down a play by threatening to exterminate the audience," wrote Diane Carman of The Denver Post.

Granted. Unfortunately, however, the anonymous callers have made it easy for the artistic community to ignore the real issues at stake by lumping all their opponents together as terrorists.

It didn't matter that the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which has been leading protests against the play, deplored the threats. Angry playwrights and editorialists pinned the blame to the Catholic League -- which, unlike the callers, declared its opposition under its own name -- so it is now receiving death threats as well.

How's that for free speech? Such disregard for the truth perfectly illustrates the point that McNally and his friends are missing. This is not an issue of censorship. What Christians want to see is respect for our own right to free speech, for our beliefs, and for the truth.

No one with any sense or any decency wants to see McNally thrown in jail for writing a play or a theater bombed for producing it. No one with any knowledge of our Constitution has disputed the theater company's right to stage the play, although the federal government should not use our tax dollars to fund a theater that shows such offensive material.

However, Christians have as much right to use legal and reasonable means to attempt to persuade the theater not to show the play as McNally has to try to persuade them to show it. The right to free speech applies equally to both sides. Christians don't deserve to be vilified and dismissed as a bunch of ignorant nuts. We want nothing more than a fair and just hearing of our concerns.

Those concerns are that McNally's play is an act of blatant disrespect toward Christ and toward His followers. The New York Times reported that the play tells the "story of a Jesus-like figure" who has sex with his apostles and is crucified as "king of the queers" in a manner with the potential to offend many people."

Did McNally really expect believers in Jesus Christ to accept this travesty without a fight? Probably not. Controversy is usually good for ticket sales.

"A play that made Hitler a hero or Martin Luther King, Jr., a villain would not be produced," wrote Bill Reel of Newsday. "And thank God for that; vile untruths don't deserve to be taken seriously, never mind staged. ... Artistic freedom is not intended to protect and encourage big lies. We expect and demand a decent respect for each other."

Most members of the artistic community consider themselves well ahead of the rest of us when it comes to showing "decent respect" for various racial, religious and social groups. Artists may not always approve of outside standards being applied to their work, but, to their credit, they normally apply a rigorous standard of their own in such cases.

The fact that they are failing to do so in this case reflects badly on the state of the arts in our country today and is troubling other groups besides Christians.

Rich Hinshaw of the Catholic League reported to The Washington Times, "Jews and Muslims have called us to say this kind of blasphemy is harmful to all religions." Terrence McNally would do well to study the example of another playwright who dealt with the life of Christ more than half a century ago. While writing her radio play cycle "The Man Born to Be King," English writer Dorothy L. Sayers battled the British Broadcasting Corporation, clergymen, the press, and the public over her use of modern language rather than "Bible talk."

Sayers, however, was trying neither to offend Christians nor to use Christ for propaganda purposes. She insisted on artistic freedom for the reason that great artists have always desired it -- to present truth in a manner that would make it real to her audience.

"If a blunt phrase or an ugly word can show the listener exactly what it was that man did to God," she wrote to the Bishop of Winchester, "ought we to mind if he recoils in horror? And if we are blamed, shall we be the first or the greatest to be blamed for startling people with the truth?"

The need to express and to hear the truth is the reason that this country's founders guaranteed us the right to free speech in the first place. The arts provide a unique and powerful way of exercising that right, and artists who deliberately twist the truth for their own purposes are, in their own way, abusing it.

Although we may have no legal recourse against such abuse, Christians do have the right to speak freely in protest. To say that McNally has the right to free expression and his opponents don't would truly be a blow to the cause of freedom.

(Gina R. Dalfonzo is a writer and staff assistant at Family Research Council.)