In 2008, I visited an artist couple in their home near Minneapolis, US. They had bought it for $4,000 in 1971. It was beautifully and elegantly appointed, complete with several of the woman’s paintings and her husband’s sculptures. It was lit tastefully and had plenty of thriving plants and fresh flowers.
A truly lovely home. Yet it had its odd features – an unexpected alcove, a peculiarly shaped room, a part of the floor raised for no clear reason. If you looked at it from outside, though, those peculiar features made sense. Because from outside, you would never call it a home. You would say it was a church. That is what it looked like, down to – or up to – the spire. In fact, that is what it is. Or was.
Indeed, as I learned later, in the late ’60s this church’s congregation began dwindling. For whatever reason, many people moved away. Eventually there were too few parishioners to justify its existence, so it shut down and the edifice was put on sale. Not many people wanted to buy, and live in, a church, but this couple did. They got it for what, even in 1971, was a throwaway price. And today, it’s a little startling to enter this apparent church and find a home.
What is blasphemous?
Startling, but blasphemous? Offensive? Does it hurt religious sentiments?
The reason to ask those questions, of course, is a happening in Mumbai where a pub in Goregaon, has used church-inspired themes to decorate its interiors.
These include “various Saints and religious items from the Holy Book Bible”, stained glass images of “Jesus holding a leather bag” and “Moses holding a computer tablet”. Why, “even the messages inscribed on the benches are from the Holy Bible”.
Those are quotes out of a press release from the Archdiocese of Bombay.
The Archdiocese and another apparently Christian organisation have decided that the pub has offended that old sawhorse – “religious sentiments” and the pub has since removed the imagery that was considered offensive.
What is inside the pub is outrageous and blasphemous, they think, and so they want it shut down and the owner arrested under Section 295 A of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with “Deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious belief.”
Is it futile to ask what is blasphemous about Moses holding a computer tablet? Or what is offensive about inscribed messages from the Bible? I mean, the most recent pithy aphorism that St Andrew’s church in Bandra, Mumbai, has offered for public consumption says, “Honk if you love Jesus. Text if you want to meet him.”
Leave aside the wisdom in that advice, but if you take it literally, it does carry an unspoken assumption that Jesus is textable – that he is carrying a cellphone, in other words. If it is all right for a church to put that image in our minds, why is it blasphemous for a pub to show us Jesus holding a leather bag?
I mean, how should we react if someone says things from the Bible, or does things inspired by it? Is saying “Blessed are the meek” an offence to Christianity? If you decide to forgive someone who sins against you, have you committed blasphemy?
Fragile religious sentiments
The press release even complains that “the seating arrangement in the bar is that of church pews”. Well, with varying degrees of accuracy, you could say that of school classrooms, or railway waiting rooms, or college messes in this country. Do all those offend religious sentiments under Section 295A?
No they do not. And that is the simple answer here.
If my questions seem ridiculous to you, it is because they are. Yet they are no more or less so than the protests against this pub. The way I see it, Jesus wandered the hills and deserts of Israel to talk to those who cared to listen about his teachings. Not to have them hidden away in a book – one that wasn’t written yet anyway – and preserved there, as if in amber, for evermore.
So when some among us shout “blasphemy!” at someone else’s use of Christian symbols, or quotes from the Bible, or images of revered figures, another quote from the Bible comes to mind:
“The Lord said, ‘These people draw near with their words and honor Me with their lip service. But they remove their hearts far from Me. And their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote’.”
— Isaiah 29:13
That is the measure of the reverence in all this assumed offence, in these fragile “religious sentiments”.
Back in Minneapolis that evening, I dined with the artist couple and several others. Several spoke to me about this house of God that had turned into a house for two ordinary humans. No one seemed even slightly offended by the idea. Instead, and without exception, they marvelled at the beauty of the home and the warmth of our hosts.
No, I didn’t think of Jesus then. But it might just have been the kind of evening that once prompted Jesus to remark: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”