When ultra-Christian French fundamentalists attack

October 31, 2011 By

We joke about the overuse of “fundamentalist” to describe people that reporters don’t like, but I think we need a special award for whatever happened in this Associated Press report filed from Paris:

The city of Paris is filing legal complaints against a group of fundamentalist Christians who have been protesting a play currently showing at the municipal theater, claiming it is blasphemous, the mayor said Friday.

Riot police have been called in to chase off demonstrators bearing crosses loudly protesting in front of, and sometimes inside, the Theatre de la Ville since the Oct. 20 opening of the play.

“Sur le Concept du Visage du fils de Dieu” (“On the Concept of the Son of God’s Face”), by Italian Romeo Castellucci is a provocative story centering on a young man caring for his aged and incontinent father. A portrait of the face of Christ looms large onstage throughout and projectiles are ultimately thrown at it.

Each night, police have had to defend the theater from a group of ultra-Christian protesters — organized by the group Renouveau France — who turn up with crucifixes and banners denouncing “Christianophobia,” determined to disrupt the show.

Emphasis mine. We’ve discussed the problems with describing French Catholics as “fundamentalists” already. So by now, any GetReligion reader worth his salt could recite the Associated Press stylebook definition of “fundamentalist,” right? Right:

fundamentalist: The word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. In recent years, however, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians.

In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself.

Way to ignore your own style guidelines, AP. So does the AP story tell us more about which sect of Protestants this “ultra-Christian” group belongs to? Guess what: these ultra-Christian French fundamentalist Protestants called Renouveau France aren’t even Protestants. I’m going to go with Wikipedia here but Renouveau France is described as “a French far-right nationalist political party affiliated with the European National Front, founded in November 2005. Renouveau français politically defines itself as nationalist, Catholic and “counterrevolutionary” — in this case, reactionary opposition to the principles of the French Revolution of 1789.” Like all good fundamentalists, they’ve “warned against the “parliamentary system”, and the “fundamentally Masonic, secular, and cosmopolitan Republic.” Just like George Marsden described, am I right?

Also, what in the world does “ultra-Christian” mean? Is there some use of the phrase with which I should be familiar? It’s almost as if the reporter meant to describe “ultra-Royalists,” which sounds more like what the group is going for. While the mayor is quoted as using the “f” word, the story failed to put the group’s action in the context of a long line of right-wing royalist Catholic groups.

On that note, the protests involve, it seems, a few different far-right Catholic groups. The AP credits Renouveau Francais while The Guardian credits Institut Civitas:

Italian theatre director Romeo Castellucci has responded to Christian protests against his work by offering to “forgive” those who disrupted performances in Paris last week.

On Thursday, members of the Institut Civitas group interrupted a performance of On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God at the Theatre de la Ville, brandishing placards with the slogan “Stop Christianophobia”. The performance resumed after protesters were removed by police.

The following night, despite increased security, audience members were pelted with eggs and oil as they entered the theatre, according to French news agency AFP.

In a statement, Castellucci paraphrased the words of Christ, saying: “I forgive them for they know not what they do … I forgive them because they are ignorant and their ignorance is much more arrogant and damaging because it involves faith.”

This is the same group that, with the Bishop of Avignon, collected some 80,000 signatures to prevent the town council from staging an art exhibit that included Andres Serano’s ‘Piss Christ’. All this would be helpful information to include the next time we read about “ultra-Christian” French “fundamentalists.”

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Journalism, Pop Culture, World
  • Will

    To yet again misquote Buckley:

    Q: How do I keep from being “ultra-Christian”?
    A: Try being ultra-anti-Christian.

  • John

    Interesting article…just one question. There are still actual Catholics in France? I was under the impression the country was thoroughly secularized, a religion-free zone. (Not being snarky, BTW. Just somewhat confused….)

  • Dave

    The word is not used simply to denote people the reporter doesn’t like. It generally means folks from the religious right who are prepared to cross serious boundaries — of civil society in the case of these theater invaders, of civility in the case of the Family Phelps — to make their point.

    What journalists are doing wrong is to dip into the vocabulary of religion for a term that means both more and less than this. What journalists need is a noun or adjective that denotes the subject. “Ultra-Christian” might be a first, unfortunate stab at it.

  • SouthCoast

    Would the linguistic opposite of “Ultra-Christian” be “Infra-Christian”? (Neologisms have consequences!)

  • Bern

    Something is certainly being lost in translation. Here’s my favorite line in the piece:

    Commentators backing the play contend it is not intended to offend Christ

    Sounds like someone’s French-English dictionary is on the fritz.

    I’m beginning to wonder if the AP shouldn’t just ban adjectives altogether, as they tend to describe more about the writer than the written of.

  • http://www.magdalenesegg.blogspot.com Rev. Michael Church

    John: France is a legally secular state — as is the US, although “secularism” has quite different meanings in the two counties. But its population is heavily Roman Catholic.

    Diocesan records claim that (as of 2005) something like 75% of French citizens were Catholic. These records certainly don’t reflect self-identification. But a 2007 poll showed that 51% of French citizens self-identified as Catholic (versus 31% who self-identified as atheists, 4% Muslims and 3% Protestants).

    Mind you, only half the 51% said they believed in God, and only 10% of the total respondents called themselves regular churchgoers, so make of the numbers what you will. But yes, France still has plenty of Catholics.

  • Fred Slimp

    The problem may stem from the use of terminology drawn from the French reportage on the events in question. If you view the French reportage you hear repeated use of the phrase “des fondamentalistes chretiens” or “des fondamentalistes catholiques.” I suppose the French term is borrowed from the American english “fundamentalist” which has specific temporal/cultural significance that the French simply don’t understand. Then the frenchified usage comes back to us in translation. It happens all the time between French and English since 1066.

  • AmaniS

    I agree with Fred about the use of fundamentalists in other languages.
    I can not fault the AP for translating a word that is used in most of the French reporting.
    I hear the same in most of the German news casts when talking about fundamentalists Christians and Muslims. Somehow the term has seeped into other languages.