I wonder how many other bloggers like me emailed the Evangelical Alliance to say something about the Jerry Springer The Opera controversy? It is interesting that an organisation like the EA waited till the wave of email and blog protest which started just a matter of days ago to release this statment- did they jump or were they pushed?
Still I am not going to complain about that, as at least they have responded to the groundswell of public opinion and done so in an excelent way. I know there strategy is often to go for behind the scenes influence so although this has only now appeared on their website I am sure that they were engaging the BBC on this issue before it hit the blogs and the email boxes.
It is suitably well thought out and based not on hearsay but a first hand visit to the very performance recorded for TV.
The full report can be accessed online, here are some excerpts:
“Complaints have focused on the extraordinary amount of swearing in the production, on its graphic portrayals of sexual disorder, and on its apparently blasphemous content. While we at EA take such concerns seriously, we are acutely aware of the pitfalls of condemning material like this without having seen it. We are also aware that our own insistence on freedom of speech in evangelistic contexts might seem hypocritical if at the same time we call for censorship of programmes and productions merely on the basis of hearsay, or anticipated rather than genuine offence. Even where offence is genuine, we have recently questioned the government’s plans to introduce a new law of incitement to religious hatred, specifically on the grounds that it may curtail freedom of speech, and restrict the fundamental right of one person to critique another’s convictions, whether religious or not. With all this in mind, I attended a performance of Jerry Springer – The Opera at the Cambridge Theatre, London on Wednesday 23rd December, a few days after it was recorded for the forthcoming BBC broadcast……
In Springer’s original show, the worst sorts of swear words are bleeped; mainline religion is rarely the focus of ridicule, and there is little pretence to intellectual depth. By contrast, Lee and Thomas’ musical version is both massively more foul-mouthed and quite transparently blasphemous but also more clever and more literate. Indeed, the very professionalism and artistry which has won it so many awards make it the more disturbing phenomenon from a Christian point of view……”
The gory details are all described and it clearly the author was not impressed with the affair. I wonder if he wrote it before the tsunami, as I think one issue I havent seen addressed is the fact that the tsunami makes all this even more inappropriate given the current emotional climate.
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