Controversial art: can the critic love their neighbour?

What to do when confronted with contentious culture.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Two people run though a darkened art gallery towards a body lying amongst photography paraphanalia

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code.

Sony Pictures.

In the wake of the controversy over the Olympic opening ceremony, based as it was on a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Christians as to what was being portrayed, you may be perplexed or confused by the different ways Christians respond to controversial art or media portrayals that are perceived to be an attack on core Christian beliefs. If that is you, here are some thoughts as to why it is that Christians react in a range of different ways.

Our responses are always underpinned by depth of relationship with and commitment to Jesus, the one who has turned our lives upside down and filled us with his Spirit. Our sense of what it is that Jesus has done for us and what it is that relationship with Jesus means to us is the determinative factor affecting our response when we perceive the One we love and who loves us to have been maligned or mocked.

For some, we feel a need to stand with or defend Jesus whenever we perceive that he is under attack, and we have seen that instinctive response apparent in reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony. However, instinctive emotive responses run the risk of pre-empting more reasoned or reflective responses. That has certainly been the case here, as what many Christians perceived to have been a parody of the Last Supper was not actually that at all. Instead, the sequence was a portrayal of the feast of Dionysius, so had nothing to do with the Last Supper at all.

Christians, as here, are often too quick to make allegations of blasphemy without actually understanding what is being portrayed. I have, unfortunately, seen many similar examples within my lifetime. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinemas, while Christian organisations, like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse, lobbied for those films to be banned.

God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

However, interestingly, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets, churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

The protests against such films often did not tally with the content of the films themselves and displayed a lack of understanding of them, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, a former Dean of King’s College London, has said of Life of Brian, “those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were ‘embarrassingly’ ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message”. Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced that stereotype.

As a result, the Church had to learn again that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites and the like that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised, making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. These created a conversation with the wider community that was far more constructive than the kind of knee-jerk reactions we have seen to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Some of these knee-jerk reactions derive from a sense, in the West, that the dominant place Christianity used to have in society has been eroded leading some to think that our values and beliefs are under threat. This reveals an underlying insecurity which it is surprising to find in those who believe that God is all-powerful and in control of human history. God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

Indeed, the reverse is the case, as, in Jesus, God deliberately entered human history to experience human life in all its facets, including real mockery and suffering, to show that such experiences are not defining and can be transcended through love and sacrifice. Such a God does not require those who follow to become defensive themselves when the path of mockery is actually the path to resurrection and renewal.

Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life.

So, what might a more constructive and productive response to controversies entail? Taking time to reflect and to understand what it is we are experiencing would be a much better place to start. The Olympic opening ceremony was a celebration of French culture, which highlighted images from the Louvre in particular. Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is in Italy and does not include a blue Dionysius. With some reflection and investigation, that would quickly have become apparent. Similarly, the scene to which Christians objected in The Last Temptation of Christ was just what it said on the tin, the last temptation Jesus faced. It was a temptation that he rejected, and the film was all the more powerful as a depiction of the incarnation as a result.

Then, we can see that what the Christ who embraced human life through the incarnation calls us to is a charitable hermeneutic (how we interpret), when it comes to receiving, understanding and commenting on the culture around us. Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.

With the beautiful secret of a charitable hermeneutic, we might, perhaps, look again at the Olympic opening ceremony and appreciate the intent of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, when he said that religious subversion had never been his intention: “We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.”

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Politics

7 May 2025

4 min read

Assisted dying is not a medical procedure; it is a social one

Another vote, and an age-related amendment, highlight the complex community of care.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Graffiti reads 'I miss me' with u crossed out under the 'mem'

Sidd Inban on Unsplash.

Scottish Parliament’s Assisted Dying bill will go to a stage one vote on Tuesday 13th May, with some amendments having been made in response to public and political consultation. This includes the age of eligibility, originally proposed as 16 years. In the new draft of the bill, those requesting assistance to die must be at least 18.

MSPs have been given a free vote on this bill, which means they can follow their consciences. Clearly, amongst those who support it, there is a hope that raising the age threshold will calm the troubled consciences of some who are threatening to oppose. When asked if this age amendment was a response to weakening support, The Times reports that one “seasoned parliamentarian” (unnamed) agreed, and commented:

“The age thing was always there to be traded, a tactical retreat.”

The callousness of this language chills me. Whilst it is well known that politics is more of an art than a science, there are moments when our parliamentarians literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. How can someone speak of such matters as if they are bargaining chips or military manoeuvres? But my discomfort aside, there is a certain truth in what this unnamed strategist says.

When Liam McArthur MSP was first proposed the bill, he already suggested that the age limit would be a point of debate, accepting that there were “persuasive” arguments for raising it to 18. Fortunately, McArthur’s language choices were more appropriate to the subject matter. “The rationale for opting for 16 was because of that being the age of capacity for making medical decisions,” he said, but at the same time he acknowledged that in other countries where similar assisted dying laws are already in operation, the age limit is typically 18.

McArthur correctly observes that at 16 years old young people are considered legally competent to consent to medical procedures without needing the permission of a parent or guardian. But surely there is a difference, at a fundamental level, between consenting to a medical procedure that is designed to improve or extend one’s life and consenting to a medical procedure that will end it?

Viewed philosophically, it would seem to me that Assisted Dying is actually not a medical procedure at all, but a social one. This claim is best illustrated by considering one of the key arguments given for protecting 16- and 17- year-olds from being allowed to make this decision, which is the risk of coercion. The adolescent brain is highly social; therefore, some argue, a young person might be particularly sensitive to the burden that their terminal illness is placing on loved ones. Or worse, socially motivated young people may be particularly vulnerable to pressure from exhausted care givers, applied subtly and behind closed doors.

Whilst 16- and 17- year-olds are considered to have legal capacity, guidance for medical staff already indicates that under 18s should be strongly advised to seek parent or guardian advice before consenting to any decision that would have major consequences. Nothing gets more major than consenting to die, but sadly, some observe, we cannot be sure that a parent or guardian’s advice in that moment will be always in the young person’s best interests. All of this discussion implies that we know we are not asking young people to make just a medical decision that impacts their own body, but a social one that impacts multiple people in their wider networks.

For me, this further raises the question of why 18 is even considered to be a suitable age threshold. If anything, the more ‘adult’ one gets, the more one realises one’s place in the world is part of a complex web of relationships with friends and family, in which one is not the centre. Typically, the more we grow up, the more we respect our parents, because we begin to learn that other people’s care of us has come at a cost to themselves. This is bound to affect how we feel about needing other people’s care in the case of disabling and degenerative illness. Could it even be argued that the risk of feeling socially pressured to end one’s life early actually increases with age? Indeed, there is as much concern about this bill leaving the elderly vulnerable to coercion as there is for young people, not to mention disabled adults. As MSP Pam Duncan-Glancey (a wheelchair-user) observes, “Many people with disabilities feel that they don’t get the right to live, never mind the right to die.”

There is just a fundamental flawed logic to equating Assisted Dying with a medical procedure; one is about the mode of one’s existence in this world, but the other is about the very fact of it. The more we grow, the more we learn that we exist in communities – communities in which sometimes we are the care giver and sometimes we are the cared for. The legalisation of Assisted Dying will impact our communities in ways which cannot be undone, but none of that is accounted for if Assisted Dying is construed as nothing more than a medical choice.

As our parliamentarians prepare to vote, I pray that they really will listen to their consciences. This is one of those moments when our elected leaders literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. Now is not the time for ‘tactical’ moves that might simply sweep the cared-for off of the table, like so many discarded bargaining chips. As MSPs consider making this very fundamental change to the way our communities in Scotland are constituted, they are not debating over the mode of the cared-for’s existence, they are debating their very right to it.