I have just finished watching the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale on SBS. Based on Margaret Attwood’s 1985 novel, it is set in the Republic of Gilead in what was once the United States. The birth rate has dropped dramatically and some fundamentalist Christians called the Sons of Jacob seized control. The few fertile women, who are left, including the narrator Offred, are kept as handmaids to have children for the leaders of the new regime. This is based on Genesis 30 where Jacob’s wife Rachel cannot have children, so she arranges for her handmaid Bilhah to have sex with her husband and have children for her.
Offred says she is 33 years old (Margaret Attwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Vintage Books, London, 2010, p 153). How Messianic. When she was seven or eight years old, she saw a documentary about World War II, 40 or 50 years earlier (p 154-155). She would have seen this documentary around 1985 to 1995. This means The Handmaid’s Tale was originally set between 2010 and 2021, or about now.
The production of the television series began in April 2016, when it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to be the next President of the United states. After Donald Trump’s election, many on the Left are saying that The Handmaid’s Tale has become more relevant, as though this is the sort of thing fundamentalist Christians want to do to women.
Elisabeth Moss, who plays Offred, has said that after Trump’s election, “But then in my country things got very, very relevant, much closer to home than we could have ever anticipated.”
Some have accused The Handmaid’s Tale of inciting hatred against Christians;
Margaret Attwood had a cameo in the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale
In the same article Attwood wrote, “The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive regime on the planet.” This would mean secular regimes, not just religious ones. The handmaids system was set up to deal with the fertility crisis and declining birthrates. This begs the question, how would a secular totalitarian regime have responded and treated the few remaining fertile women?
Attwood also wrote, “So many different strands fed into”The Handmaid’s Tale” – group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn of the SS and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy .. the list is long.”
“I must confess that the face-hiding bonnets came not only from mid-Victorian costume and from nuns, but from the Old Dutch Cleanser package of the 1940s, which showed a woman with her face hidden, and which frightened me as a child.”
All these influences went into The Handmaid’s Tale and resulted in a form of fundamentalist Christianity which does not resemble any existing Christian group. They are not Catholics because they execute Catholic priests(The Handmaid’s Tale, p 53). They are not Baptists, which make up a large portion of the Religious Right, because they are fighting the Baptists in the Appalachians (p 92). They do not sound like Protestants at all because they have banned the hymn Amazing Grace (p 64). No one ever actually goes to church. They have machines which play recorded prayers for people (p 175-176). Who are these people and how could there have been enough of them to take over the country?
Christian groups do not usually name themselves after the Old Testament Patriarchs. Just because someone did something in the Old Testament, Christians do not try to copy it today. The whole idea of Jacob having sex with Rachel’s handmaid showed a lack of faith in God and not trusting in His timing. It seems odd that his group would call themselves the Sons of Jacob since four of the sons of Jacob had handmaids for mothers.
“I don’t consider these people to be Christians because they do not have at the core of their behavior and ideologies what I, in my feeble Canadian way, would consider to be the core of Christianity, and that would be not only love your neighbors but love your enemies. That would also be ‘I was sick and you visited me not’ and such and such … But they don’t do that either. Neither do a lot of people who fly under the Christian flag today.”
If The Handmaid’s Tale had been based on the beliefs of an existing Christian group, there would something for women to worry about. The fact, that Attwood had to invent a religious group and incorporate many non-Christian influences, suggests that The Handmaid’s Tale is not that relevant in Trump’s America.
“The president doesn’t want to impose his traditional sexual morality because, for starters, he doesn’t have any to impose. His critics are mistaking a thrice-married real estate mogul who has done cameos in Playboy videos and extensive interviews on “The Howard Stern Show” with [Puritan leader] Cotton Mather.”
Elisabeth Moss is also a Scientologist. She says the fictional abuses of the Sons of Jacob are relevant to contemporary America, while ignoring the real documented abuses of her own “church”.
I would like to thank Xenu Overlord of the Galactic Federation for my Emmy wins
The Handmaid’s Tale is not real. It is upmarket science fiction satire, a feminist 1984. Nevertheless, perhaps the series was bad timing. The United States have become a deeply divided society. Both conservatives and progressives are mistrustful and increasingly paranoid. They demonize the other side which they think is out to oppress them. Conservatives think it is inciting hatred of them. Progressives think it is a dramatization of the right’s women’s policy. It has arguably only made this situation worse and feeds their paranoia and political delusions.
This is a photo of Andrew Marin, a Christian, hugging a gay man in his underpants at a gay pride parade in 2010, as part of the I’m Sorry Campaign where Christians held up sign at gay pride parades apologizing for the way the churches have treated homosexuals in the past.
Some Christians might be offended at the suggestion that we should apologize to sinful homosexuals. The fact, that they are sinners (like everyone else) is irrelevant if we need to apologize to them (Matthew 5:25). Christians have judged and condemned them and demanded that they repent often without dealing with the sin in their own lives. Many Christians expect gays to remain celibate while looking down on single people in the church and treating them as second class Christians.
I have argued here that the underlying cause of homosexuality is idolatry, expecting to find wholeness through homosexuality rather than relationship with Jesus. However, many Christians are just as guilty and find their wholeness and value through their heterosexual marriages and also their careers, success and possessions. This is also idolatry.
I also wrote here that most homosexuals appear to have grown up in the church, yet we have turned on them for their sin while not dealing with our own. Most Christians would not condemn people for their non-homosexual sin the way they condemn homosexuals. I have argued here that their attitude is not so much based on the handful of passages in the Bible which deal with homosexuality. They are cultural and psychological in origin.
I wrote this series of posts hoping to encourage real tolerance on both sides, that is, tolerating those we think are wrong and not hating them and wanting to take their rights away. A few weeks ago the Bible Society in Australia had a similar idea. They released a video showing two members of the Liberal Party, Andrew Hastie, a Christian and opponent of gay marriage, and Tim Wilson, a gay supporter of gay marriage, having a polite civil discussion on gay marriage while drinking Coopers beer.
I would have thought this was true tolerance and diversity in action, showing that people can still be respectful and get along, even if they think the other person is wrong – the assumption that our liberal democracies are based upon.
Instead, this was too much for some supporters of gay marriage. Some hotels in Melbourne and Sydney said they were going to boycott Coopers. A few days later Coopers issued an apology (for being part of a video which supported tolerance, respect and free speech) and proclaimed their support for gay marriage.
When I think about all the misery and suffering, which alcohol has caused Australia, health problems, sexual assaults, domestic violence, addiction, car accidents and vandalism, I find it hard to take hotel owners seriously when they claim to have a social conscience.
While writing this post I learned about the case of Felix Ngole, an African Christian student doing a Masters in Social Work at the University of Sheffield, who was expelled because he had posted comments opposing gay marriage on Facebook, which only his friends would have seen.
Twenty years ago politically correct postmodernism warned that belief in moral absolutes leads to intolerance because it leads to supressing other points of view. Critics would argue that just because one believes in moral absolutes, one does not necessarily oppress others. One can show true tolerance towards them.
Now, a new generation is more likely to do what postmodernism warned about and seeks to supress those they believe are wrong. they may be right – real homophobia and other forms of discrimination are dangerous and harmful. However, those, who carried out the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Communist purges and the Inquisition, all believed they were right and they were protecting the community from dangerous and harmful people and ideas.
A previous generation boycotting businesses because they think their owners have harmful anti-social beliefs
I believe that in the future in the name of tolerance and diversity there will be greater restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. This does not mean that Christians should keep fighting the culture wars. The persecution which some Christians have experienced over gay marriage is still minor compared to what many Christians in the Third World suffer. The early Christians had a different attitude to persecution. They went “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His shame” (Acts 5:41). This is a striking contrast to the “How dare they persecute us” attitude and victim mentality which many Western Christians seem to have.
In the New Testament suffering and persecution were considered a good thing. It was a sign of God’s love for His people, an opportunity to depend on God more, to grow and become more Christ-like (Romans 5:1-6, 2 Corinthians 10:7-10, Hebrews 12:5-12, James 1:2-8). This is what is truly important, rather than having a comfortable and successful life or whether or not heterosexuals can keep their monopoly on marriage.
In the Roman Empire it was technically illegal to be a Christian. Christians were considered dangerous and socially irresponsible and disruptive because they would not sacrifice to the local pagan gods and risked bringing the wrath of the gods down on the community. It is similar to the way today many consider Christians to be harmful to society because of their “intolerance”.
The early Christians did not respond with an ancient version of the culture wars. They showed grace and forgiveness to the pagan society which despised and persecuted them, so much so that the pagans actually wanted to join this hated minority and eventually they won over the Empire.
I am not suggesting that this is easy. it is unnatural. Part of me still wants to fight the culture wars, but arguing with our political opponents is not going to advance the Kingdom of God. It is not easy to forgive and love our enemies and persecutors. We need to turn to Jesus for the grace and strength to do this, like we need to turn to Jesus in our struggle with other sins, including sexual temptations. Jesus suffered and died for their sins just as much as he did for ours. He wants to see them saved too so we can all spend eternity together in Heaven. That must be our goal too, rather than putting all our energy into opposing gay marriage.
In the United States the two sides of the “culture wars” are the politically correct Left and the conservative Right, which includes the Religious Right of evangelical Christians, and the war is over moral and social issues, such as gay rights, abortion, the arts and more.
Australia has fewer practising Christians than the United States, so we are not likely to see the emergence of a Religious Right with a similar influence as in the United States.
Our version of the culture wars is nowhere near as bitter as the United States’. For example, Bob Brown, the former leader of the Greens, Australia’s third largest political party, is an atheist homosexual and 99% of Australian Christians couldn’t care. If Bob Brown were in American politics, some fundamentalist Christians would accuse him of being the Antichrist.
I used to be more interested in Christian involvement in politics and the culture wars. I have always been disillusioned with both sides of politics in Australia which would not represent the wishes of those who elected them. I used to identify with the Far Right of Australian politics (or the “freedom movement” as they like to call themselves), but without the racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
I had hopes that a new genuinely conservative political movement would emerge in Australia which would introduce reforms like Citizens’ Initiated Referenda or Voter’ Veto which would ensure that legislation which did not have the support of the majority of the voters could be overturned in a referendum.
The only mainstream political party I identified with was the National Party. When I was in first year university in 1983, I used to graffiti “Joh for PM” on the desks. Joh Bjekle-Petersen was the controversial National Party premier of Queensland for many years. In 1987 there was a “Joh for PM” campaign which ended in disaster and kept the Coalition out of government. I can’t help but think I’m somehow responsible for this and the idea from my graffiti somehow made it to Queensland.
In 1994 to 1996 the National Party set up in Tasmania and I was President of the Esk Branch and State Chairman of the Policy Committee. The Tasmanian Nationals imploded and failed spectacularly at the 1996 State and Federal elections. Part of the problem was that some people were treating the party as a career move. They would not have been good enough to get preselected for the Liberal Party, so they were trying the Nationals. They were more concerned with promoting themselves, rather than promoting the Party and co-operating with other members whom they viewed as the competition. This attitude was even more worrying since there were so many Christians in the Tasmanian Nationals.
I used to be interested in conspiracy theories. Being a member of the National Party helped break their hold over me because it enabled me to see how politics really worked, rather than the simplistic view that everything is part of a conspiracy and nothing happens by accident. In the Nationals I met and had conversations with several Federal politicians. It should take a high level of intelligence to be part of a conspiracy to subvert democracy and install a world government and some of these politicians simply did not have the intelligence to part of such a conspiracy.
After all, do all the people, who believe George W. Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks, really think he could have managed to avoid blurting out that he did it?
Since 1996 there has been One Nation, Australia First, Tasmania First, Katter’s Australia Party, Palmer United Australia Party and the Jacqui Lambie Network and similar parties which took votes from each other and failed to achieve any long term results.
With all due respect to those involved, I doubt that an alternative political party will be able to emerge in Australia to save us from the Liberals, ALP and Greens. Many (most?) voters in Australia are disillusioned with the major parties, but they keep voting for them because they want stable government rather than a minority government or a coalition of smaller parties or independents which might actually represent the interests of their electorates.
This is arguably for the best since political solutions, trying to turn the clock back to a world which no longer exists, are not the answer to the problems facing Australia and the United States.
Some people accuse the Religious Right of wanting to set up a theocracy where Christians run the government and impose Christian values on the rest of the nation. This may be true for some, but in his book God’s Politics Jim Wallis (not to be confused with Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby) suggests they are more likely to be concerned about protecting their children from the moral decline in society (Jim Wallis, God’s Politics, Lion Hudson, Oxford, 2005, p 322-324)
The problem is real. Western society is in moral decline, but their solution is wrong. After all, the Religious Right has been around for over 30 years in the United States, but they have not succeeded in stopping abortion, family breakdown, the gay agenda, pornography and other problems. In fact, they are getting worse. It is not working.
Jesus did not found a political movement. He did not give us a political ideology called “family values” which the church is to impose on society. Jesus gave us good news that although we are all sinners, we are forgiven and reconciled to God through his death and resurrection.
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight.” (John 18:36) Does “fight” include the non-violent, but confrontational and bitter, struggles of the culture wars?
Instead, the Religious Right has turned Christianity into one side of a political debate. They seem to have forgotten that those on the other side are not the enemy, but, like themselves, sinners who need God’s grace and mercy.
Unfortunately, many of them are rejecting Jesus, but not because they are rejecting the Gospel. They are rejecting the right-wing moralist political agenda which many Christians are promoting as Christianity. I saw an example in the 2005 documentary Protocols of Zion where, about 14 minutes in, the interviewer Marc Levin was speaking to two protesters at a rally in New York who said words to the effect of, “If George W. Bush is a Christian, I would rather go to hell.”
Do the Religious Right think Jesus is pleased with their political activity if it causes people to reject the salvation made possible by his death? Are any political goals worth turning people off the Gospel?
There have been other periods of moral decline in the West, such as the early 18th Century and early 19th Century. The churches did not try to rectify these declines by getting into politics and passing laws. They repented of their sins and turned back to God, resulting in the First Great Awakening of the 18th Century and the Second Great Awakening of the 19th Century. They experienced revival and large numbers of non-Christians were converted and then society was transformed, returning to Christian values.
The pattern for revival is explained in this passage, “When I shut up heaven and there is no rain, or command the locusts to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people, if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will from heaven, and forgive their sin and heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:13-14)
Jesus said Christians are supposed to be the salt of the earth (Matthew 6:13), the preserving influence on society. If society is in moral decline, that is because the salt has lost its flavour. The Church is in moral decline because it has turned away from God.
During the 1960s and 1970s Western society began to decline morally again. This time, instead of humbling themselves, confessing their sins and turning back to God, the evangelical churches in the United States went into politics to pass laws to stem the rising tide of immorality.
They formed the Moral Majority, whose name did not exactly inspire humbleness and repentance of their sins, and which suggested their opponents were the immoral minority.
The doctrine that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world (John 17:36) and that we are “aliens and strangers in the world” (1 Peter 2:11) seemed to have been forgotten as Christians were defending their pre-1960s world against the new world of the “secular humanists” and progressives.
They gave credence to the lie of their “secular humanist” opponents that political solutions are the answer to society’s woes, not the transforming Gospel of Jesus.
If we look at First Century Jerusalem, who would be the equivalent of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right? Would it be the early church described in Acts or would it be the Pharisees?
The Bible says there is no moral majority. We are all part of the immoral majority (Romans 3:10,23), but some of us have faith that we are forgiven through Jesus’ death. Instead, it looks like the Gospel of grace has to compete with a conservative political message. In his book Beyond Culture Wars Michael Horton writes,
“Recently, I was being interviewed by a radio station, and a man called in who said he was looking for answers and had finally decided, after many years away from church, to give it a try again. He went to a conservative church and , according to his report, heard nothing but a political speech. These are the kinds of reports I used to hear conservative preachers use to show how liberals had turned the pulpit into a soap-box for radical politics. But now we are just as worldly, just as willing to embrace other gospels. Our own people cannot name the Ten Commandments, and yet we are outraged that they are removed from public halls; vast numbers of people in the churches cannot define the Gospel in terms of justification by grace alone through faith alone, while we treat the moral and political crises and solutions as ultimate.” (Michael Horton, Beyond Culture Wars, Moody Press, Chicago, 1994, p 122-123)
Horton also writes,
“The statistics demonstrate that evangelicals are about as materialistic, self-oriented and hedonistic as the unbelievers. It is an irony that at a time when evangelicals are the most worldly themselves that they would be at such a judgemental and even self-righteous pitch. If we are living no differently from the world, what is wrong with these very things we are complaining about. If the children of believers are watching more MTV than the children of unbelievers, as one poll suggests, should we not begin in our own homes before we poke our noses into the homes of those who are not even Christians? If we want to end abortion, why don’t we start by explaining the doctrine of creation to our own congregations, since evangelicals account for one in six abortions in this country?” (Beyond Culture Wars, p 167)
Banning abortion may stop the killing of the unborn, but that would not address the deeper problem of sin in the Church which has resulted in so many evangelical Christian having abortions. The culture wars are a case of Christians trying to take the speck out of others’ eyes, while ignoring the plank in their own (Matthew 7:1-5).
Tom Sine got to the real problem in his book Cease Fire,
“Ivan Illich wrote an education classic called Deschooling Society in which he coined the term “hidden curriculum”. What is the “hidden curriculum in a Christian family in which the kids all have their own CD players, TVs. VCRs, and phones, and, when they get to be a certain age, their own cars? With each succeeding generation, Madison Avenue, the media, and pop culture are gaining greater control over our youth.”
[This was written in 1995 before the rise of smartphones and social media.]
“Do you know what I’m talking about? Every Christmas looks like the department store blew up in the living room! In this “hidden curriculum”, the clear message to the Christian young is that “things” are what matter most. Generation X has gotten the message, and many, including the Christian young, have become disciples of a celebrity culture and devotees of the religion of instant gratification. We are losing them to the new shrines of worship in America, where too many Christian families go to do their devotion – the shopping malls.”
….
“I am convinced that we can’t just blame modern society for the growing sexual promiscuity of the young. part of the responsibility must also lie with Christian parents who have conditioned their young from the time they were infants to focus on meeting their own needs and desires and get the best they can for themselves. We are raising the Christian young with a driven, acquisitive individualism that affects every facet of their lives, including the development of their sexual behaviour and their moral values. It is very difficult for the young to discipline their sexual appetites when they are often encouraged to freely satisfy their consumer appetites with little discipline at all. they need to learn to just say no to all the seductions of secular culture, not just premarital sex.”
“For all the talk about the lordship of Jesus by evangelicals, the real message to the Christian young is to get their careers underway, their house in the suburbs (if they can afford them), and their upscale lifestyle started. Then, if have anything left over, they can follow Jesus like the older generation.”
……….
“What has happened is that we have sold the Christian young the wrong dream. Christian families, churches, and schools have all sold them the American dream with a little Jesus overlay.”
“The real secular threat to our families is not some pack of secular humanists out there trying to do in our families. The real threat is Christian parents who unwittingly allow the aspirations and values of Enlightenment secularism to order their private world and dictate the values they pass on to the next generation.” (Tom Sine, Cease Fire, Eerdmans, Michigan, 1996, p 233-235)
Amen.
Clearly, the culture wars are the enemy of revival. They appeal to pride and make those, whom Jesus loves and died for, the enemy to be defeated, and alienates them from the Gospel. They promote another Gospel (Galatians 1:8-9) of political solutions to society’s problems, rather than the Cross. They deny that sin in the lukewarm evangelical church is the problem. They divert our attention from the real solution to the West’s moral decline – for Christians to humble themselves, turn from their sins and the world’s lies, including its false solutions, and turn back to God. Then , revival, spiritual awakening and social transformation will come.
Malcolm Nicholson 