Call the Midwife

 

St. Hubert, staggered.

One might expect a TV series based on a convent and its charitable work, like the BBC’s “Call the Midwife,” to be favourable to religion. But that is a naïve thought. The world is not like that. One ought not to be surprised that, instead, it undermines religion.

Most people, after all, fear religion, at least in the modern day. That probably includes the writers on such a programme, and the bulk of their audience. I imagine they would lose their audience if they got too preachy and all. Just as most people show such great hostility to evangelical missionaries at their door.

Why? Whether they are deluded or not, a fair-minded person must realize that they are knocking at your door out of love, concern for your welfare. So why the anger?

One obvious tactic, if one fears religion, is to pretend to be religious, but debase it from within. This is the safest way, as an author, to approach a series set in a convent. 

This is the tendency Jesus rails against in the New Testament. This is his main opposition, pharisaism. “Hypocrisy”: a New Testament Greek word. It means to wear a mask. It means to feign religion without being religious.

I have seen this in academic departments of religion. It is held there to be clever to mock the faith of the faithful, the traditional codes and creeds, and those who take the Bible seriously. Those who do are simply unenlightened, not deep thinkers. I have seen this too in the upper reaches of the United Church. We have seen it in high Catholic prelates like Theodore McCarrick. We seem to see it now in the Vatican. 

One tactic of the hypocrites is to object to religious “extremism.” You see this in the media all the time. Which is to say, it is fine to give religion lip service, to maybe attend a Sunday service now and then, as long as you don’t really believe it, and don’t actually apply it in daily life. As long, in short, as you don’t follow the moral codes. Just keep it on the level of a reassuring bedtime story. Hallmark religiousity. Happy happy joy joy religiousity. Hell is empty and everyone gets to heaven religiousity.

A similar, although superficially opposite, tactic, is to exaggerate or falsify the demands of religion to make being truly religious seem unreasonable. Atheists love to demand, for example, that Christians turn the other cheek as they beat them up. 

Jesus said “my burden is light.” In contrast to the Pharisees, who pile unreasonable demands on the faithful.

A common gambit currently is to declare oneself “spiritual, but not religious.” What exactly does this mean?

Religion means “binding”: “binding back.” It is a commitment to a path of life, with obligations, like marriage. This is why people fear religion: it makes demands. It requires obedience to a higher power than self and selfish drives.

“Spiritual” people want numinous experiences, sure; we all want numinous experiences. We are born with a need for God, a craving for meaning. If we do not get it from religion, we will get it from somewhere: scientism, environmentalism and the worship of “nature,” millenarian cults like Marxism promising heaven on earth, aestheticism, alcohol, drugs, worshipping sex or another person or our animal desires. “Spiritual”

 people are simply acknowledging that craving in themselves that we all have.

But they don’t want any effort or commitment. They want it to just happen. If Song of Songs describes the quest of the soul for God, they are into hookup culture, one-night stands; thrillseekers. 

It is not, in the end, an honourable or a good path. God and holy things are not to be treated as a mere object for our pleasure.

In “Call the Midwife,” the elderly and senile Sister Monica Joan, inspired by the legend of St. Hubert and his vision of Christ as a stag, steals convent funds to buy a train ticket to the Outer Hebrides, thinking God will reveal himself to her there.

And she does encounter a magnificent stag, as she wanders through a small forest of dolmens.

What are the implicit lessons here?

First, to take religion seriously, one must be senile; senility gives her the excuse for such “childish” thinking.

Second, religious experience is not found in the convent, but in nature, and in a pagan setting—the megaliths.

Third, spiritual experience comes not from observing one’s commitments day by day, but by breaking them, and committing sins.

It is like advocating that full sexual pleasure can only be achieved by committing adultery.

The series has the Mother Superior refuse to publicly advocate legalization of abortion because, “when the interests of my patients conflict with my faith, I must go with my faith.” Suggesting that religion stands opposed to mankind, and against true morality. Christopher Hitchens could not have said it better.

The visit to the Hebrides is made an occasion to paint Free Church Presbyterians as pitiless legalists. A boatman refuses to ferry a doctor and nurses to where a lighthouse keeper’s wife is giving birth, on the grounds that it is the Sabbath.

This is of course in direct contradiction to Jesus’s teaching in the Bible. 

Matthew 12:

“9 After departing from that place, he went into their synagogue, 10  and there was a man with a withered hand. So they asked him, “Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath?” so that they might accuse him. 11  He said to them: “If you have one sheep and that sheep falls into a pit on the Sabbath, is there a man among you who will not grab hold of it and lift it out? 12  How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do a fine thing on the Sabbath.” 13  Then he said to the man: “Stretch out your hand.” And he stretched it out, and it was restored sound like the other hand.”

The sabbath is for man, not man for the sabbath.

Any devout Presbyterian would know this. A prime example of falsifying, indeed, as often as not reversing, religious demands to make them seem unreasonable.

When a Catholic priest appears back in London, he is of course an unctuous hypocrite engaged in an affair with his housekeeper, whom he abandons once she becomes pregnant. No question, there are Catholic priests who are like this, but when you feature only one Catholic priest in ten years, and this is the one, it is fair to suspect an intended message about Catholicism.

A nurse trainee forwarded to the convent from a Catholic orphanage suggests that a Catholic woman might resort to abortion as a way to avoid birth control. Another example of reversing religious doctrine to make it seem unreasonable. Catholic nurse trainee Corrigan, admitting a secret child born out of wedlock, explains that “The Catholic church is good at hiding things. Mistakes.”

The real problem with Catholics is, of course, that like Free Church Presbyterians, they tend to take their religion too seriously. Especially that bit about having moral obligations.

Another nurse, beaten up on the streets, spirals into depression, and is taken off to an asylum. 

The implicit message is that the religious are emotionally fragile, naïve about the world, and when faced with its harsh realities, religion is of no use to help them. Modern science, and electroshock, must intervene.

When St. Hubert saw the stag, he also heard this message: "Hubert, unless you turn to the Lord and lead a holy life, you shall quickly go down into Hell." 

They leave that part out. I wonder why.