Perverse Gods

By Crispin Sartwell

 

The perversity of celebrities - Michael Jackson's being perhaps the most extreme example - is the basis of whole regions of the economy and is fundamental to our blessed way of life.

     One rather charming dimension of this perversity is religious. In Hollywood, you can't throw a brick without hitting a Scientologist. The latest convert is Katie Holmes, exploring her spirituality in the context of her relationship to Tom Cruise, last spotted jumping up and down on Oprah's sofa as he proclaimed his infatuation.

    Cruise himself is something of Scientology fanatic, reportedly setting up a worship (or whatever) center on the set of his most recent film, War of the Worlds.

    Meanwhile, as Madonna promotes her pop Kabbalism with the help of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, it's an obscure matter as to whether Michael Jackson has converted to the Nation of Islam from his family's devotion to Jehovah's Witnesses.

     And of all these sects it would be hard to determine which had the most perverse belief system. It depends, I suppose, on whether you like mad scientists performing insane genetic experiments (the origin of white people according to the Nation of Islam), or the idea that blood transfusions contaminate the soul (Jehovah's Witnesses), or that red string wards off the evil eye (Kabbalism), or the assertion that each of us is inhabited by a thetan yearning to breathe free (Scientology).

    These beliefs appear arbitrary, to put it mildly, and it's hard to imagine how any of them could receive any rational justification whatever. But they are no more arbitrary and perverse than the beliefs of any religion. Indeed, the perversity of religion is one of its most compelling aspects.

    The great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was as devoted a Christian as it is possible to be. And he very seriously asserted that the reason Christianity was the best religion was because it was the most ridiculous religion. At its heart, said Kierkegaard, was this paradox: the eternal God has appeared in time and died. It's not that this is puzzling or hard to explain; it is baldly contradictory.  It is logically impossible for Christianity to be true.

    Thus, for Kierkegaard, you are not going to be able to have true Christian faith unless you are capable of completely destroying and transcending your own rationality. And to do that, you must believe with absolute passion. The people who betray Christianity, for Kierkegaard, are those who try to justify it or make it sensible, from the Catholic theologians who tried to find a reasonable approach to the idea that God is both three and one to "creation scientists" who assert that the Bible is a scientific theory.

     But even if Christianity is distinctive in resting on a series of outright contradictions, it is hard to imagine that it is ultimately any less rational than Scientology, for example, with its combination of mythology and pseudo-science, its alien infestations and enlightenment meters.  So perhaps Scientology would be regarded by Kierkegaard as sufficiently perverse to be worthy of the attention even of the great Katie Holmes.

    But the real leap of faith is our own fascination with Katie Holmes: we love or at any rate ogle obsessively the perversity of famous people, and thus encourage and reward that perversity. The more insane the belief system, according to Kierkegaard, the more worthy it is of belief.  The more insane the celebrity, the more worthy she is of our attention. 

    This of course has a religious flavor: we worship our crazed demi-gods in virtue of their beauty, their power, their wealth, and of course their craziness. The spectacle of perversity - religious, sexual,  sartorial, psychological - is a kind of multi-layered religious practice in which we worship the mad worship of others.

    The basic impulse behind religious practice is adoration. But no one can adore what they fully understand or what is typical. You can adore only what challenges your impulse and ability to comprehend, only what appears alien or arbitrary, what resists or exceeds your attempts to explain it.

    That is why, if Christianity could be rendered fully rational, Christ would no longer rouse you to adoration.  And if Tom Cruise could be rendered fully rational, we would no longer track his love life through the pages of US Weekly.

     And so I say to Katie Holmes: rise, Katie Holmes; rise from pre-clear to Clear, from Clear to Operating Thetan. Me, I just like to watch.

 

Reputed celebrity Scientologists include John Travolta, Courtney Love (Courtney Love?),  Kirstie Alley, Beck, Jenna Elfman, and the extremely late Sonny Bono.