In Poland, Catholics go to war against Behemoth’s Nergal — for giving Satanism a voice

Catholic leaders in Poland took Nergal to court after he tore up a Bible on stage. Nergal won, but the fight isn’t over.

Catholic leaders in Poland, which has been a stronghold of Catholicism since World War II, have been on the warpath. Their target? Adam Darski, also known as Nergal, frontman for the Polish metal band Behemoth.

In 2007, a group called the All-Polish Committee for Defence against Sects circulated to political leaders a list of bands the committee claimed “promote Satanism.” The committee and its leader, Ryszard Nowak, hoped leaders would ban performances by these groups. They didn’t.

That same year, during a performance in the Polish city of Gdynia, Nergal destroyed a Bible and called the Catholic Church “the most murderous cult on the planet.” As he tore up the Bible, he said, “they call it the Holy Book. I call this the book of lies. Fuck the shit, fuck the hypocrisy.”

You can view the act, at roughly the 45-second mark, in this video:

You can’t hear about this without thinking of Sinead O’Connor tearing up a photograph of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992. Even in America, where such acts have been protected for centuries, O’Connor’s move touched off a major controversy that damaged her career permanently.

The All-Polish Committee for Defence against Sects took Nergal to court over the Bible-tearing incident, claiming he “offended religious feeling.” On August 18 of this year, a Polish judge ruled that Nergal’s destruction of a Bible during a show was a form of artistic expression consistent with Behemoth’s style.

In a statement on the band’s web site, Nergal wrote, “I’m so glad to see that intelligence won over religious fanatics in my home country. Tho there’s still so much work to be done to make things right. But I’m sure that I’m on the right path to ultimate freedom! The battle is won, but the war ain’t over. Heil Satan!”

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Darski is starring in The Voice of Poland, a reality-TV show in which celebrities assist in the search for an outstanding singer. That offended Bishop Wieslaw Mering, head of the diocese of Wlocawek in northern Poland, who urged Polish television to pull the program from the air:

“A blasphemer, Satanist and lover of evil incarnate has the screen of public television at his disposal, and thus he will be able to spread his poisonous teachings more easily,” the bishop declared in a statement. “Non possumus! [This cannot be!].”

The Association of Catholic Journalists has circulated Mering’s statement.

Freedom of speech is a very new protection in Poland; censorship was abolished in 1990, while freedom of speech was officially added to the constitution in 1997. Freedom of religion, however, has been guaranteed by law in Poland since 1573. Of course, the same freedom of speech that protects Nergal’s right to criticize the Catholic Church also protects the Catholic Church’s right to criticize Nergal, his on-stage performances, and his negative views on Catholicism.

This whole situation is a reminder that, to many, Satanism is not a legitimate faith; it is one to be scorned, maligned, and silenced. Fortunately, Nergal is not backing down from the limelight. Particularly in his role on The Voice of Poland, he dresses pretty much like an everyday guy. Such visibility on what is likely to be a widely viewed television program, for someone who is a known Satanist, will hopefully show viewers that Satanists are normal, everyday people.

Readers, do you know any Satanists? What, if anything, have you learned about Satanism from spending time with them? Have your feelings on the faith changed because of it?

EDIT: As of October 17, Adam Darski has been forced to leave Voice of Poland. Read the update here: http://backwardmessages.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/satanic-singer-booted-from-polish-reality-tv-show/

The Harry Potter debate: When is magic evil, and when is it a miracle?

Does Harry Potter’s use of “evil” sorcery to defeat evil make him good? Or evil? Even the Vatican can’t decide.

As I mentioned last week, the Vatican has had a change of heart regarding the occult overtones in the Harry Potter multimedia franchise. After years of claiming that the young wizard’s tale would lead impressionable readers to practice witchcraft and sorcery, someone in Italy must have noticed that that wasn’t really happening.

In a review of the final film in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reported, “evil is never presented as fascinating or attractive in the saga, but the values of friendship and of sacrifice are highlighted.” Another critic noted, “the saga champion[s] values that Christians and non-Christians share and provide[s] opportunities for Christian parents to talk to their children about how those values are presented in a special way in the Bible.”

The Catholic Register also has positive words for the film, though the critic is uncomfortable with some of the language surrounding resurrection.

However, it’s unclear whether this positive spin on the Harry Potter world trumps such statements as then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2005 letters discussing how the wizard’s saga contains “subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.”

There’s also the statement from the Vatican’s chief exorcist, Rev. Gabriele Amorth, who said, “You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a likeable wizard, but you end up with the Devil … By reading Harry Potter a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil.” Again, this is a statement from a half-decade ago; has Amorth changed his mind?

Michael D. O’Brien, author of Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture, argues:

To believe that the Potter message is about fighting evil is superficial. On practically every page of the series, and in its spin-off films, evil is presented as ‘bad’, and yet the evil means by which the evil is resisted are presented as good.

Admittedly, I am on the other side of the aisle from O’Brien. Not only do I not believe magic is evil, I don’t even agree that the magic depicted in Harry Potter is intended to represent literal sorcery. Was Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus sorcery? After all, he says some magic words and Lazarus comes back to life after four days in a tomb:

41 So they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying.
Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said,
“Father, I thank you that you listened to me.
42 I know that you always listen to me,
but because of the multitude that stands around I said this,
that they may believe that you sent me.”
Lazarus, come out!

43 When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
44 He who was dead came out, bound hand and foot with wrappings,
and his face was wrapped around with a cloth.
Jesus said to them, “Free him, and let him go.”

I may get in trouble with Christian readers for saying this, but honestly, the only reason this isn’t considered evil sorcery is that it’s presented as a miracle — in the same collection of stories that says sorcery is evil. Yes, the Bible is full of contradictions; arguably this is one of them.

So, here’s the question: is O’Brien right? Is the good vs. evil message in Harry Potter “superficial”? Is the use of “evil” to fight evil the real message of the saga? What do you think?

And the latest moral panic is … books?

Andrew Smith’s “The Marbury Lens” is among the young-adult books in WSJ writer Meghan Cox Gurdon’s crosshairs — she says it’s inappropriate for teens.

In what rulebook, operations manual, or parenting guide is it written that children and teens are pure, innocent, and morally untainted? Where is it written that they never have sexual or violent ideas, aggressive feelings, or fears inspired not by media fictions but by real life or their own fertile imaginations? The idea that kids are blank slates, happy and pure of thought until corrupted, is at the root of every child-related moral panic, from the crackdown on comic books to in the 1950s to the current outrage over … young-adult books. It doesn’t seem like we’ve come very far, does it?

Last month, Wall Street Journal writer Meghan Cox Gurdon penned a screed decrying the current state of young-adult fiction. It’s a state she describes as, “Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things.”

In the course of her article, Gurdon goes after a number of YA books, describing their content in lurid detail (almost echoing Justice Scalia’s recent descriptions of the gore and violence contained in youth literature dating back to the Brothers Grimm). These concepts, she argues, threaten “a child’s happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.”

Personally, I’m wondering whether it has dawned on her that reading accounts of teens’ dire straits might a) shine a light on the fact that far too many children experience trauma, or b) that reading about such experiences might actually help readers develop that “tenderness of heart” toward such experiences that Gurdon is fighting for. It doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind; instead, she posits, “books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.”

Fortunately, Gurdon’s piece opened a dialogue. One of those dialogues was with Lauren Myracle, author of “Shine,” one of the books on Gurdon’s blacklist. Myracle and Gurdon chatted last week on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and Myracle responded to Gurdon’s claims:

Do books normalize dangerous behaviors? My answer would be people aren’t dummies. Some are, but most aren’t. Kids aren’t, either. I think that kids are, again and again, not given enough credit for being smart and for being critical thinkers.

(Remember when the Harry Potter books came out, and religious leaders were convinced they’d inspire kids to become demon-worshipping wizards? The Vatican is now championing the final Potter film.)

YA author Frank Portman, author of King Dork and Andromeda Klein, chimed in on his own blog. He writes:

For Meghan Cox Gurdon, a book that fails to advance, or even merely complicates, that agenda, let alone actually impedes it, is a bad book, worse than useless, unsuited to the task at hand, which is, essentially, social engineering.

But, of course, that’s not at all how or why people read novels. In fact, some of the best novels, like other forms of art, were created with precisely the opposite agenda in mind: to rile, to irritate, to provoke, to test, to undermine conventional assumptions and to discourage conformity. I’d even go so far as to say that the books that have meant the most to me over the years, “young” and otherwise, have been the ones deliberately constructed in order to make the parent’s job harder.

Portman also goes after the anti-Gurdon movement, which tagged many missives on Twitter with the tag #YAsaves. Young-adult fiction, Portman points out, isn’t there to save lives any more than it’s there to make parents’ jobs easier. It’s there to be art. To be fiction. For teens who enjoy reading. End of story.

What’s the darkest thing you’ve ever read in a young-adult fiction book, and how did it affect you when you read it? Share your tales in the comments.

Watch out, Wiccans; the Catholics are after you

Photo by Flickr user Fernando Gonzaga.

Once again, the Catholic Church is worried about the souls of teenagers. Apparently the idea of teens turning to Wicca (prompted, allegedly, by too much Harry Potter) is so abhorrent that the church in Britain has published a guide to converting witches to Christianity.

The guide, called Wicca and Witchcraft: Understanding the Dangers, is written by Elizabeth Dodd. Alas, Amazon isn’t offering a “look inside this book” feature for the title, but other news outlets have quoted a few handy phrases from the book, such as:

Recognition that Wiccans are on a genuine spiritual quest can provide the starting point for dialogue.

Okay, so far, so good. She also claims that 70 percent of Wiccans are young women seeking some form of spirituality. I’m not sure where she gets her statistics, but she doesn’t sound off the mark. But at another point, she says:

Whether spellwork is effective or not has no bearing on the psychological damage that can be done to a young person who is convinced that they have summoned the dead, or have performed a spell that has hurt or injured another.

Wait, what? Wiccans don’t typically summon the dead, and their core tenet is the threefold rule, which staunchly discourages people from casting harmful spells, specifically because the effort will come back upon them three times over.

And then, according to the Daily Mail:

Behind the glamour there [are] ‘grave dangers’ because of its link to the occult and the sinister movement championed by satanist Aleister Crowley, she said.

There are so many things wrong with this statement I don’t know where to begin. Crowley wasn’t really involved with the creation of Wicca, nor does Wicca really draw much from Crowley’s work. I’m not sure what “sinister movement” Crowley championed exactly. And he wasn’t a Satanist. The only semi-truthful statement here is that Wicca and the occult sometimes go hand in hand, but the only reason that would be seen as a “grave danger” is because divination and the like are forbidden by the Catholic Church.

So then we come to:

The use of magic, the practice of witchcraft, offends God because it is rooted in our sinful and fallen nature. It attempts to usurp God.

Well, at least that’s consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church, and it explains why, even if they recognize Wicca as a “spiritual quest,” they view it rather differently than, say, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, and so on. Those faiths don’t involve the use of magic, so the Catholic Church isn’t out to convert their followers necessarily. Wicca doesn’t get that kind of respect.

Unfortunately, such a guide is presumptuous. It assumes that conversion is the right thing (and that Catholicism is preferable). It’s true that many Wiccans are looking for spirituality. They’re often looking for a spirituality that gives them hands-on experience with the divine, rather than the mediated, top-down dogma they find within the Catholic Church. They may also be looking for a celebration of the feminine beyond the (admittedly very important) Virgin Mary. Teens, in particular, may break away from the church because they see it as hypocritical or judgmental. They want something welcoming and empowering, not harsh and off-putting.

Maybe it’s time to put away the how-to-covert guides and just sit down and listen to teens who are questioning faith. And give them real credit for that questioning — rather than blaming it on a fictional wizard.

Did you break away from the church you grew up with? If so, why? Where did your explorations lead, and how did your parents react to them (if they knew about them at all)?

“The Rite” priest claims Internet is causing increase in demonic possession

Image by Flickr user Joe Howell.

Since Anthony Hopkins’ new film The Rite is #1 at the box office right now, public attention has turned once again to the classic Catholic ritual known as exorcism. This happens every few years, as with the release of The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005 and The Last Exorcism in 2010.

It’s interesting that humans can’t really shake this idea that it’s possible for evil spirits to enter us and take over, as though we were puppets. Certainly some forms of mental illness (as well as tremendously bad moods or poor impulses) can feel this way. And for some reason we are especially attached to the idea of teenagers falling prey to the charms of the Devil.

That may explain why Father Gary Thomas, the real-life priest played by Hopkins in The Rite, is warning parents about the demonic dangers of the Internet. In his eyes, looking at Web sites devoted to the occult — everything from Tarot cards to séances — makes teens vulnerable to “demonic influences” and, ultimately, possession. Of course, the only cure for possession is exorcism, which is Thomas’ line of work, so to speak.

As usual, his claims are pretty much based on hearsay and/or anecdotes:

He said there were “no statistics” on how many people might be possessed but said there was a definite increase.

“What I can tell you is that there are more and more Catholics involved in idolatrous and pagan practices,” he said. “That’s really why there’s more demonic activity. There’s the absence of God in the lives of a lot of people.”

He added: “A lot of parents today have no critical eye of faith with which to even recognise the dangers their children are in. A lot of this is going on with the internet. There are lots and lots of demonic websites.”

Since Fr. Thomas doesn’t describe the symptoms of “demonic influence,” it’s hard to say objectively what might be on the upswing. It sounds like he’s talking about more than simply straying from the Catholic flock. But what exactly? Unusual behavior? Criticisms of organized religion? Heads turning 360 degrees? I can’t help but wish he’d been more specific, but I suppose that would make his Internet claims easier to debunk.

From my own observations of cultural behavior (specifically in the context of moral panics), the #1 cause for increases in anything is increased awareness of that thing. You know how when you buy a particular kind of car, suddenly you notice all the other people who own that same car? Now imagine you’ve just been told that demonic possession/influence among teens is on the rise, and the Internet is causing it. What are you going to see the next time your teen acts weird?

Here’s my question for readers today: Did you grow up in a religious household, or do you know someone who did? Did your parents (or the parents you knew) ever chalk up a kid’s bad behavior to “the Devil?” I’d love to hear those stories.