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Monday, August 22. 2011

Reciting the Canon

Some years ago I remember watching a news program, an hour special actually, in which a woman reporter was doing a story on a Madrassah in Southeast Asia. Try as I might, I just can’t find it on the Internet. I can’t remember which country was in the piece, but it was close to India. Doesn’t matter all that much at the moment.

The reporter followed one young boy in particular as he went from his home to the school and then on to his studies. Or study. The primary subject being the Koran. According to the young boy and his adult handlers, he read only from the Koran so all of his language skills were built on and around that one book. We can assume there might have been some study in mathematics, or at least arithmetic.

What struck me was how resolute the young boy was about how the Koran was the infallible word of God and only the truest believers of Islam were promised the glory of Heaven. The other moment from the broadcast that stands out was when the TV crew accompanied the young boy to a beach, a really nice beach at that and the little boy pronounced all the women not wearing abayet and Nijab as sinners who would be going to Hell.

This was my thought at the part when they were on the beach: “What a waste of a beach.” It just didn’t seem right that a beach that nice wasn’t filled with bikini-clad women.

Ironically, Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is said to have some of the finest beaches in the world and Westerners flock to them by the thousands. They’ve been hit by the economic crisis as well so the travel prices might be really good right about now. But no sex allowed on the beaches!
 If you saw the second Sex and the City movie (or maybe the third?), you know how that can turn out!

Back to the madrassahs. The big focus on them of course has been their perceived ties to terror organizations. When you hear someone in the U.S. mention the schools, it is invariably about how a particular madrassah or group of madrassahs are being used to foment jihadi fervor and recruit young jihadists, schooling them from a young age to be martyrs.

Some people might be surprised to learn not all madrassahs preach and teach Jihadist philosophy. In fact, the word “madrassah” is Arabic for “school” and really isn’t as sinister as we’ve been led to believe. And there are madrassahs for girls as well, although that’s a secret in the Muslim countries that do allow girls to get an education.

What brought that program out of the depths of my memory was the viral video going around of a pint-sized Christian preacher of about four years of age, Kanon Tipton. He stomps around, waving his arms and shouting into a microphone, just like his daddy and granddaddy before him. His language is barely understandable and adults can be heard off camera prompting the little kid on what to say, so it isn’t exactly spiritually inspired.

People call it a gift. Really, preaching is a gift? I call it good showmanship because really, all little Kanon is doing is mimicking his daddy. And you know, little junior mimicking Daddy is pretty cute, it doesn’t matter — most of the time — what it is the child is mimicking.

But, what some of the adults in the room, pick a room, have to say about it is quite disturbing. On the Today program, when the little boy and his parents, Damon and Kandi, were interviewed, Savannah Guthrie called what the little boy was doing a “gift.” Why? Because video of little Kanon preaching became a Youtube sensation?

Yeah, people responded by the millions, but people do that, especially in this country, when kids are declared “precocious” and do cute things for the cameras. Youtube is filled with young children being precocious doing all manner of things. Some years back a famous comedian and comedic actor got in trouble for the precocious child in his short videos.

Will Ferrell and his landlady Pearl. The little girl, about 3 years old, comes to his door and starts yelling at Ferrell, using expletives like “bitch” and “asshole” and says she needs the rent money to get her drink on. She takes her beer, looks likes like a Hiney, and walks off. The videos are on Funny or Die and well, Ferrell should die because they aren’t funny, but, the little girl is precocious! Or so you would think.

But, the child doing adult things that are considered “blue,” well, that’s just not the sort of things we approve of with kids and gosh darnit, if it can’t make it on to America’s Funniest Home Videos, it just isn’t acceptable.

Why is it that the videos featuring small children always win on AFP? It could be a small child kicking some man in the nuts, the crowd roars with laughter, some kid dancing and acting to an otherwise adult-themed song, the crowd applauds with approval; and no matter how good the other videos may be, the kid always wins. Because, in America, it’s all about the children!
 Can we get a collective “aaawww”?

Especially if it’s toddlers doing some adult things — like mimicking Daddy the Pentecostal preacher! Kanon is no longer a toddler, he’s preschool age, but he’s still an internet sensation, so much so he and his parents get interviewed by the #1 morning news program in the world.

Mimicking Daddy isn’t a gift; it’s often funny and almost always heartwarming to see small children mimicking their parents, but some sort of anointment from God? I don’t think so, but then I don’t believe in the “God” espoused by Kanon’s religion. Or any god for that matter.

And this gets back to the connection I saw between the kids being indoctrinated into Islam and little Kanon and all the other small children mimicking adult preachers. Oh yeah, Kanon isn’t first or only child to do this and he’s no longer the youngest. He’s the cute one so he gets all the attention. Just look it up on Youtube and you’ll see a bunch of children wiping the sweat from their brows, doing the little hopping dances, arm raised in the air, microphone in hand, pounding the podiums, exhorting the assembled congregations to come to Jesus!

Here it is, the 21st Century, and we’re celebrating ancient mythologies that deny reality. In fact, we have a leading contender for the presidency who believes evolution and climate change are not real. And we have these small children being programmed to be not just Christians, but to be preachers.
 Hell, even our current president went from being an atheist to a Christian. But, at least he accepts science. Just wish he’d reverse the decision to wind down the space program. But that’s a different rant.

But there is hope! I’m reminded of Marjoe Gortner, the one-time child preacher turned actor and entertainer. It was the groundbreaking, Oscar-winning documentary about Gortner that brought him to the public’s attention. Called Gortner, it detailed the business of being a preacher and what a scam it had become, if indeed being a revivalist had ever been anything other than fraud.

Like the Tiptons, Gortner was brought up in the Pentecostal religion and like Kanon, Marjoe was declared a preacher at the age of four, at the time, billed as the youngest ordained minister in the world.

But since Gortner came to prominence in the 1970’s religion has made a revival in America. Reagan, sucking up to the Religious Right for their votes, gave that movement its impetus. Despite the excesses of the 1960’s and 70’s, a movement to a secular America was the right direction: less regulation of our personal lives, equality for all, especially women and gays, I actually felt some pride in wearing the uniform for such a society.
 It was hard to have pride after watching the colors being lowered for the last time over the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. There is and will always be a little bitterness over that.

We can only hope the revival of religion in America is over, that we will begin to follow the lead of our European allies in rejecting the mythologies of the distant past. But, videos of small children mimicking their preacher parents is bothersome at least, not cute. Troubling because there is this small minority of people who believe little Kanon and his contemporaries are getting their inspiration from a god. And they will use these children to push their oppressive agendas on the rest of us.

It’s a lot more than just kids being cute in front the cameras. Maybe Will Ferrell and his landlady Pearl aren’t so bad.

Posted by Tim Forkes in Religion and Society at 14:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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