Lowbrow satire mistaken for cutting edge
The student newspaper at Montana State University recently ran some sort of sex advice column that featured a caricature of Jesus Christ flashing his butt in a tawdry come-on. The column itself is a weird mish-mash of incomprehensible pseudo-satire: Its content is nominally about “consent,” that great campus buzzword, but it also advises readers to ask “the Lord Almighty” before having sex with someone as well.
“[W]hat could be sexier than spending a long day at work or in class, coming home, and getting on your knees opening your mouth for the Lord,” the column asks. “Who do you think will protect you when you have sinful premarital relations? Because it sure as Hell not gonna be that condom you’ve been carrying in your wallet for four years on the off chance that you get luck [sic]. It’s gonna be that beautiful, sin-absolving love muscle.”
You have to admit, it’s hard to really find anything to actually get offended by in this column: The most biting, offensive satire is always the kind that makes sense, and a column that tells you to ask Jesus Christ (“that burly looking stud”) for sexual consent is not, in any real way, intelligible, or even one step removed from intelligibility. It’s just nonsense, a thing marked by non-sense: You get the feeling that the writers at the newspaper sat around desperately trying to come up with some way to ding Christianity, and after an hour or so, someone said, “Hey! How about we combine Jesus and sex? That’s always a winner!”
All of which is both trite and, in its own way, cowardly. Nasty burlesque of the Risen Lord aside, this kind of satire is not even bold or transgressive: It’s low-hanging fruit, an old and played-out joke that hardly causes a stir anymore. Christians are easy targets; Jews, too, continue to be easy marks for ridicule and scorn. It is notable that the one truly shocking and scandalous religious target—Muhammad, the founder of Islam—is so rarely invoked by satirists as to seem almost non-existent: It is almost certainly the case, anyway, that you will never see a student newspaper publish a sexually suggestive drawing of Islam’s prophet, not in one year or a hundred. Why do you think that is?
Here is some advice for those who think that the phrase “sin-absolving love muscle” is both clever and cutting-edge: It is neither. There is great reason to look into, and follow, the ancient Christian sexual values and mores; but even if you’re not up for that, you can at least refrain from mocking them in so stale and predictable a fashion. If we’re not going to practice good and upright sexual morality, let’s at least resolve to practice decent humor.
MORE: Consider Jesus Christ’s plan for sex and marriage
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.