The story of Carrie Prejean supposedly losing the Miss USA pageant because she infuriated an attention-starved celebrity blogger with an inarticulate answer about same-sex marriage is so last week, but thanks to a Christian culture industry that rarely misses an opportunity to feast on the notoriety of anyone resembling a headline-grabbing “pro-family” culture warrior, the Prejean story rages on.
Keen observer of Christian culture David Sessions explains why this is a problem for Christians who are interested in serious dialogue about cultural issues in a recent article on Patrol Magazine:
In its ever-eager search for sympathetic pop icons and cultural martyrs, the Christian world reacted predictably to Prejean’s rambly gay marriage answer: with a showy open-winged embrace. No cosmetically enhanced pageant star has previously been thought deserving of a place on the stage at the Dove Awards, the biggest Christian music event of the year. (In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine a walking cleavage exhibit like Miss California being avoided as altogether inappropriate.) But because she had, a mere matter of days before, accidentally expressed political solidarity with the Christian right—a fact that has nothing to do with Christian pop music—she found a red carpet unrolled at her feet, leading all the way to that glittery stage in Nashville. Her presence at that and other Christian gatherings was met with a hero’s welcome, despite her “martyrdom” not really costing her all that much.
Not that one should ever expect theological or political seriousness from the Christian culture industry, but it’s impossible to measure how damaging spectacles like this are to serious Christian efforts to have a voice on cultural issues, whether it be improving relationships with the gay community or politely insisting that our nation’s legal definition of marriage is not something to be altered lightly. Evangelicals’ overnight construction of a pedestal on which to display Miss California immediately invoked comparisons to Anita Bryant, the Christian singer who vigorously campaigned for legal discrimination against homosexuals in the 1970s, and was widely credited with galvanizing support for Harvey Milk. In other words: besides being a public-relations disaster, it’s as much a Pyrrhic “victory” as Proposition 8 and Proposition 6 before it.
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