Lining up to be Cool Like Jesus

Posted on April 3, 2004 in Myths & Mysticism

Please join me in a long sigh for the phenomenon which David Graham of the Toronto Star observed:

Now, celebrities, including Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Ashton Kutcher and Pamela Anderson, have been spotted wearing “Jesus is My Home Boy” T-shirts and baseball hats. The shirts and caps appeal to religious and fashion types, explains Chris Hoy, a partner in Teenage Millionaire, the company that sells the shirts. “We were looking for pop icons of the 21st century and Jesus topped the list.”

Perhaps I should keep my commentary short and sweet like Yule Heibel has about our “newest” “Nail-Up — er — Pinup Boy”. Or should I just point to this poster from this site? Or this t-shirt that resides at electioneering.net

There are those — mostly iconoclasts such as Yule; rogue Christians like Blagustine and doug; and agnostics like myself — who see Hollywood’s Jesus teenybopperism as a plague upon our consciences. Too many American Christians run right along with the idolatrous herd, skewing Jesus as the 21st century’s macho man. What happened to the lamb being led to the slaughter?

Nobody likes to think of himself as kebab.

The elite have seized one of the poor’s most precious and effective symbols of hope and turned it into an idol, a peculiarly American idol. Wrap the cross in Red, White, and Blue. Send out the troops! Avenge the crucifixion! Armagaeddon, here we come! But what we don’t get is that the we are the Beast, we are the anti-Christ, we are the ones who simonize and follow in the footsteps of the Roman occupation. We are Gog and Magog. We are Simon Magus. We are Nero.

The trouble is that we don’t know how to read myth. We go by the letter, look well past our persons, and can’t see the spirit pointing at us.