Sweet Jesus!

America’s Catholic League, which describes itself as the country’s ‘leading Catholic civil rights organisation’, is up in arms over ‘one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.’ Could it be something like the use of a crucifix as a dildo in The Exorcist? The suppression of the Christian right to worship and organise churches in countries like China? No, it turns out that this ‘assault’ is that an artist has created a 6-foot naked model of Jesus out of milk chocolate.

Quite how anyone’s civil rights are being violated by this strange creation, due to be exhibited at a New York gallery during Easter Week, is hard to tell, but still the Catholic League has denounced it and called for a boycott of the gallery and the hotel that houses it. The gallery’s curator has received angry emails and phone calls and says he is ‘in the process of trying to figure out what we’re going to do next’ – hinting that the exhibition might be cancelled, and emphasising that the timing of the exhibition is ‘just a coincidence’.

The Catholic League, despite being a ‘civil rights’ group, has effectively launched an attack on the First Amendment of the American Constitution protecting freedom of expression, which traditionally encompasses artistic expression. Catholic League president Bill Donohue branded the chocolate Christ ‘hate speech’, a ‘direct, in your face assault on Christians’, and warned that ‘[a]ll those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended - otherwise they may have more than their heads cut off’.

So, making a chocolate sculpture is ‘hate speech’, but veiled threats of violence are fine. Despite the supposedly favourable comparison to ‘extremist Muslims’, the Catholic League is no more respectful of civil rights and basic liberties than are the Muslins Donohue disparages. Criticise ‘Sweet Lord’ for being bad art all you like, but trying to subordinate artistic expression to the moral outrage and offended ‘sensibilities’ of hyper-sensitive religious types is a sure way to stifle the creativity, inventiveness and free-thinking necessary for any vibrant society. We’ve seen this in the UK time and time again – be it Christians wanting to ban Jerry Springer - The Opera on TV and in theatres, Muslims trying to stop the filming of Brick Lane, or Sikhs attacking the theatre that staged the controversial play, Bezhti. In almost all these cases, we saw institutions caving-in (kudos to the BBC for resisting): supermarkets refusing to stock the Jerry Springer DVD, the Birmingham Rep suspending Bezhti, Brick Lane being filmed elsewhere.

Here’s hoping that the New York gallery defends America’s First Amendment tradition, defies the protests, and attract more visitors than ever – the likeliest and best possible outcome of the Catholic League’s outraged spluttering.

Lee Jones