Fanatics

The other night The Redhead and I were watching Law & Order: SVU. I prefer the original series, but SVU is a pretty decent drama. In the first few minutes of the episode they had surrounded an apartment building and some fugitives were holed up inside. After a minute or two they stormed the building and found a bunch of dead children and biblical quotations written on the walls of the apartment. “Oh, no,” I thought, “it’s one of those episodes again.” Sure enough, the rest of the show proceeded to tell the tale of a radical Christian cult involved in murder, child rape, fraud, and a variety of crimes.

The show itself wasn’t bad. It had some interesting themes like brainwashing and the Charles Manson-eque idea of controlling other people that were rather intriguing. But it also did a very good job at painting Christians as raving lunatics and fanatics that would use their misguided beliefs as reasoning for terrible crimes. That kind of thing annoys me. It seems like people actively participating in religion are one of the few segments of society we can still make fun of. Nerds, minorities, and disabled people are off limits. Overweight people too. But religion? That’s completely open season. And by no means is Christianity the only world religion open to this criticism—I’ve seen similar television shows, movies, and books take the same cheap shots at Islam and Judaism.

I guess the really interesting question is how did it get to this point? 200 years ago national leaders took great pains to avoid prejudice against all persons of different religious beliefs. Separation of church and state was intended to protect the right to believe what you want. But somewhere between 1787 and 2005 the ideal of “separation of church and state” came to mean that you couldn’t believe anything at all. Don’t get me wrong—there are some silly (and occasionally tragic) acts committed in the name of religion. But the mainstream media apparently doesn’t feel the need to avoid stereotyping. Why should the media worry anyway? They’re just a bunch of fanatics anyway.