Madonna and Madonna: The Politics of Finding God in the post-modern world
by Inayah Inam
Still from ‘The Rapture’ (1991)
Michael Tolkien’s 1991 film ‘The Rapture’ follows a telephone operator stumbling on an evangelical sect in an office break room, who believes ‘The Rapture’ (Judgement Day) is near. The film shows how the Christian desire for salvation still surrounds us today, despite the tendency to depict our age as secular. Contemporary Christian sentiments are underpinned by political contexts, embedded in wider political phenomena such as decolonisation and globalisation. An interesting site to look at how religious sentiments are underpinned by such politics are religious apparitions because of their nature as crossroads between several political actors in the church such as church’s institutions, followers and correspondent geographical areas; a church’s core and periphery.
In ‘Mother Figured’ (2015) De La Cruz writes about religion in postcolonial times. She recounts the incidence of the ‘Marian Apparitions’ after World War II in the Philippines and traces the legacy of a hierarchical (and elitist) Catholic Church, resistant to legitimising these divine miracles as they did not fit the established and Eurocentric framework of legitimate miracles. One of the first apparitions, The Lipa miracles (1948), during which the Virgin Mary appeared to a nun in the Carmelite Monastery Teresita, can be read as a post-colonial critique of church, state and the supernatural. What constitutes the extra-ordinary or ‘divine’ in this case of this apparition raises ideas about what constitutes religious legitimacy and gendered ideas of ecclesiastical credibility. De La Cruz particularly elaborates on the gendered experiences of devotional subjects, and the invalidation of Teresita’s claims by the church. Teresita’s testimony was dismissed as “pure imaginations” (2015:255). I argue the discreditation of Teresita’s claims were patronisingly discarded on the grounds of misogyny and sexism.
However, an apparition’s effects are not totally determined by the church. Although their legitimacy may be established by the church’s hierarchy, they can also be understood as ‘spectacles', having effects on the collective imaginary at a grassroots level. De La Cruz notes that in another set of apparitions in the Philippines, the ‘Agoo Apparitions’ of 1993, the material spectacle of the weeping Mary Statute captured the public devotional spirit with an onset of religious devotees and curious onlookers who descended on the town. This phenomenon transcended usual social divisions deeply marked in Philippines’ everyday social life, as it attracted working-class people alongside “Filipinos of the highest status and celebrity” (De La Cruz 2015: 2). The upsurge in religious mobilisation and participation notably at Mass and devotional practices alludes to the potency of the religious spectacle and the symbolism of Mary as “a transcendent figure with a singular identity (2015:7). This finds parallels in other ‘unifying’ and universal religious figures which carry political capital as well as religious capital. For instance, this is the case in Islam for Imam Mahdi, a messianic figure reported to be a ‘saviour’ who will be sighted near the end of times. News of potential sightings of this figure gathers attention widely in the Islamic world and there have been multiple claimants to the title. The sighting of these religious apparitions should be examined particularly as a ‘postmodern phenomenon’ (Vasquez, Manuel A, Marquardt Marie F. 2000). According to Pelikan (1996), almost 50 apparitions have occurred since 1980, in places as diverse as the USA, Nicaragua, Brazil, Rwanda and Australia. The proliferation of Marian apparitions can be situated in the “complex process involving the global creation of the local” (Featherstone and Lash, 1995: 4), whereby traditional local religious practices and dis-courses enter large-scale dynamics like worldwide Church politics, such as the Vatican's New Evangelization project, all of this being mediated by globalised media like Internet and TV.
Madonna in her controversial music video ‘Like a Prayer’
De La Cruz’s examination of Christian apparitions in the Philippines remind me of a similar controversial event on the other side of the world which garnered the disapproval of the Catholic Church - Madonna’s 1989 “Like A Prayer” music video which depicted a black man being wrongfully arrested for the murder of a white woman. Madonna, witnessing the falsity of the accusation, prays to a ‘black saint’ resembling the individual and later frees him. The video engages in a vigorous spectacle of religious ecstasy, interracial love, and anti-racist politics. The lyrics “When you call my name, It's like a little prayer, I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there” are riddled with innuendos and present an over-frenzied, feminine display of religious passion. Although Madonna’s reputation as a controversial popstar who relishes in the publicity machine of outrage and provocation was bashfully fun in the Western media, the subject matter still offers a mirror to the Philippines’ mediatisation’s of religiosity in 1990s.
Funnily enough, Madonna’s Rebel Heart World Tour in 2016 which stopped in Manilla, was described as the “work of the Devil” by a Catholic newspaper. "Why is the Catholic Philippines the favourite venue for blasphemy against God and the Holy Mother?” (2016) is what a Filipino archbishop at the time Ramon Arguelles posted on the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines' official website. I think the irony can’t be overstated when a Filipino Catholic institution attacks a performer called ‘Madonna’, who adopts the name of Mary Mother of Jesus for her art. Thus, Madonna’s, much like Teresita’s, devotional display, deeply embedded in a gendered dynamic, is being left out by what is defined as ‘religiously legitimate’ by the Catholic Church. However, if as devotional displays Teresita’s and Madonna’s acts are deemed ‘illegitimate’ they remain, despite their controversy, in the public imagination.
These religious displays that straddles an uneasy balance between institutional delegitimization and public visibility bring to the fore the question on truth, typical in the postmodern era. As De La Cruz notes, “how important is the truth?” (2015:145). The hierarchy of Catholic devotion in which at the top lies the Vatican’s approval and at the bottom is conspiracy or fiction, syncretic or folk embodiments of Catholicism exist in an uneasy ambiguity. This tension between sanction and scepticism, demonstrates the reality where due to critical media and political discourse, objective truths and absolutes are not so easily accepted. Online mediums, the proliferation of social media, allow people to debate, discuss and form narratives where everything is just a matter of subjective perspective. The church who didn’t validate Teresita’s apparition’s, nevertheless fed into the culture of folk catholic mysticism in the Philippines, as part of a wider experiment in religious ‘glocalization’ (Vasquez, Marquardt 2000). If religion is being re-imagined, re-localised and re-constructed for those originally ‘compliant’ masses who are modern subjects of a globalised world, where does the line end for experiences ‘worthy of belief’?
Bibliography
DE LA CRUZ, D. (2015). Mother figured : Marian apparitions and the making of a Filipino universal. Chicago, [Illinois], The University of Chicago Press.
FEATHERSTONE, M, LASH, S, (1995). Globalization, Modernity, and the Spatialization of Social Theory: An Introduction, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds) Global Modernities. London: Sage.
PELIKAN, J J. (1996) Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
TAN, L (2016), CNN. Archbishop warns Filipinos vs. Madonna concert: 'Avoid occasions of sin'. Available online, https://www.cnnphilippines.com/entertainment/2016/02/24/Madonna-Rebel-Heart-tour-Manila-boycott-CBCP.html, accessed online 14 December 2022
VASQUEZ, M. A, MARQUADT M. F. (2000). Globalizing the Rainbow Madonna: Old Time Religion in the Present Age. Theory, culture & society. 17, 119–143.