“Pornography” had been the planned Sightings topic today, thanks to a column in Christian Headlines (April 20) by best-selling author and radio broadcaster Eric Metaxas. He celebrated the fact that “wonder of wonders, America’s leading news sources” were awaking from their long slumber and were treating pornography as a public problem. He made reference to Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Huffington Post and other media outlets and showed that recently authors treat pornography as a profound personal and cultural problem. Metaxas, who represents an evangelical viewpoint, had criticized “mainstream media” for having avoided the issue(s). We checked our own e-files.

Sightings can hardly be described as harping on pornography. We find only one column devoted to it, June 2, 2002, in which I wrote in a mood of disappointment that mainline Protestant and other churches rarely touched the issue. Among the important reasons for silence was the concern over how to balance broad cultural coverage with Protestant support for free expression. The column ended with few notes of hope for change, and we turned back to other topics. Also, I can't be considered an expert, for whom Groucho Marx—some say—spoke, and many others have been quoted as saying, this time in respect to a lack of qualifications to comment: “I don’t even own a pornograph.”

As last week went on, a new topic, also alphabetisable in the “P” column, was the death of Prince. In this case, I also had to plead lack of familiarity, this time with the sound and career of the genius singer and composer who died suddenly last Thursday. When a son who shares Prince-ean locality, in Minneapolis, e-mailed me that “Prince” had died, I first thought of Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, who had been much in the news. Mistaken identity.

Quickly, those of us not addicted to Prince’s kind of music came down from our high-culture-classical-music lofts and were treated to many hard-to-avoid TV summary treatments, and multi-page media coverage of Prince’s career. Along the way, we learned that Prince was a believer, a sometimes door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness with an Adventist past and an ecumenical range of connections. (Even the Vatican had kind words to say of Prince upon his passing.)

This is not the week to question his faith. But the TV and press coverage dealt with another side, one which also suggests why some of us back off from analysis and criticism: Prince’s whole career included songs, programs, features, and gestures which, while not being formally and explicitly pornographic, were strongly suggestive and seductive. So Prince often blurred the line between the merely erotic and the explicitly pornographic.

A good sample of some probing: Wesley Morris on the front page of “The Arts” Section of the New York Times Saturday headlined his appraisal: “Prince Knew What He Wanted in a Song: Sex, Lust, and You.” Morris writes that Prince outdid Elvis Presley in “hotness.” He succeeded because he knew that “You,” meaning “We,” wanted and want “Lust,” even though that noun is secure in the “Seven-Plus Deadly Sin” list of most faiths most of the time.

(Metaxas offers evangelical advice in resources for those who struggle with pornography, at www.Breakpoint.org, and, we might add, there are resources in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.)

Confession: I don’t think that I remembered that it was Prince whose lyrics decades ago had disturbed the Second Lady of the United States, Tipper Gore, enough that she organized means and media to counter Prince. She was much derided for that, and the culture moved on to blur further the lines between free expression, concern for human dignity in matters sexual, and, as Morris reminds us, “Lust” and “You.” Here we are.

Resources:

Metaxas, Eric. “Pornography: Media Finally Waking Up to What Christians Have Warned about for Years.” ChristianHeadlines.com, April 20, 2016, Columnists.

Luscombe, Belinda. “Porn and the Threat to Virility.” Time, April 11, 2016.

Friedersdorf, Conor. “Is Porn Culture to Be Feared?” Atlantic, April 7, 2016, Politics.

Marty, Martin E. “Pornography and American Protestantism.” Sightings, June 10, 2002.

Pareles, Jon. “Prince, an Artist Who Defied Genre, Is Dead at 57.” New York Times, April 21, 2016, Music.

Neffinger, Veronica. “Singer Prince, Dead at 57, is Remembered for Musical Influence.” ChristianHeadlines.com, April 22, 2016, Blog.      

Waxman, Olivia B. “The story of Prince and Those ‘Parental Advisory’ Stickers.” Time, April 21, 2016, Newsfeed Celebrities.

Morris, Wesley. “Prince Knew What He Wanted: Sex, Soul and You.” New York Times, April 22, 2016, Music/Critic’s Notebook.

Image Credit: msr / flickr creative commons.

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Author, Martin E. Marty, is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His biography, publications, and contact information can be found at  www.memarty.com.

 

 

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