Nick Cave defeding religion



By itself, this is not news, unless you've been listening to his records with the sound off. Nick Cave is a believer, albeit one who is shyer about it in interviews than he is on CDs. Anyway, at Salon, the interviewer asked him why his religiosity isn't more apparent in interviews:

I asked him if he was surprised that his religious beliefs were so rarely mentioned in articles about him. "I know that the editors talk to the journalists before they go and say, 'Don't get him going on about God,'" he said. "The concept of God in America is very different than it is in England. Because we see the horrendous outcome of religion as being an American thing, in which the name of God has been hijacked by a gang of psychopaths and bullies and homophobes, and the name of God has been used for their own twisted agendas. So that if you mention God, or a belief in God, in England, it's almost automatically associated with that kind of thinking. Religion's gotten a really bad name."

I don't know. Religious passion did some pretty nasty things in Europe too, Nick. From Auto da fe's, the Inquisition, witch trials, pogroms, the Borgia and Medici Papacies, the crusades, Mary I (Bloody Mary), the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (when the French Catholics slaughtered thousands of French Protestants), the wars between Irish catholics and Irish protestants to the slaughter of the Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, the history of religion in Europe has been written in blood. Need I add the biblical justifications thrown out over the centuries in support of the slave trade? The name of God was hijacked by psychopaths, bullies, and homophobes long before Jerry Falwell showed up (I'd say they got hold if it a few minutes after the idea of a God first showed up, recognizing its potential to wreak useful havoc). In many ways, Falwell and Pat Robertson are part of religion's grand tradition of unleashing horrendous violence to aid the already mighty. Religion didn't get a bad name from them. It's had a bad name for a long time--a bad name it richly deserves.

Posted: Wed - November 17, 2004 at 11:12 PM        

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