Is anything sacred?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2024
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One moment in the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris clearly touched a nerve: the tableau of mostly drag queens believed to be parodying Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’. Organisers have since denied this was the intention and apologised for the offense caused. Many commentators, including non-believers, declared it “blasphemous”, and “a denigration of Western culture”. While others, Christians among them, considered that response to be an over-reaction. Stepping back from the immediate and perhaps predicable outrage drawn along culture war lines, is the deeper question of what we consider to be ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ in a largely secular Western society. What, if anything, is sacred? Does the idea only make sense in relation to the concept of God? Does it have a moral function or is it more about personal spirituality? Maybe nothing is sacred, since categorising something as such puts it beyond scrutiny? Or can the concept be widened, even secularised, to take in, for example, the idea of ‘profaning’ the natural world or hollowing out the things we hold to be of value by turning them into commercial transactions? Are the concepts of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ still important? And if so, what role do they have in the 21st century?
Producer: Dan Tierney Assistant producer: Ruth Purser
Panel: Anne McElvoy Giles Fraser Ash Sarkar Tim Stanley
Witnesses: Melanie McDonagh Andrew Copson Fergus Butler-Gallie Francis Young
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.2 | Good evening. Goodness knows what the ancient Greeks would have made of the opening ceremony for what was their Olympic Games, reinvented this year by the French. |
| 0:13.8 | A centrepiece was a tableau of drag queens, appearing to restage Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting of Christ's Last Supper. We don't know what God made of it either, |
| 0:23.5 | though some say the fact that it rained Torrance all evening might not have been a mere coincidence. |
| 0:28.5 | There were plenty to take offence on his behalf, and not just committed Christians. Plenty |
| 0:33.1 | who felt it mocked the ultimate sacrifice at the heart of Christian belief, that it wasn't just |
| 0:38.0 | bad taste, but profanity. |
| 0:40.6 | Not everybody felt that way. |
| 0:42.0 | There were many who thought the ceremonies embrace of the self-described queer was an |
| 0:46.2 | important statement of inclusivity. |
| 0:48.9 | And the organisers have been trying not altogether successfully to maintain it had nothing |
| 0:53.6 | to do with the last summer anyway. |
| 0:56.0 | Nonetheless, it all raises an important question as to whether anything can be regarded as sacred |
| 1:01.2 | in what is a largely secular society. Without a god to take offence, is there any institution, |
| 1:08.5 | belief, idea or value that should be beyond criticism, beyond scorn? |
| 1:14.3 | Is nothing sacred? That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:17.0 | The panel and McClevoy, executive editor of the News and Commentary Site Politico, |
| 1:21.0 | Arsaka from the Navarra Media Group, the historian Tim Stanley, |
| 1:24.9 | and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser. You're an Anglican priest, |
| 1:29.0 | Giles. Would a mockery of The Last Supper upset you? It would and it did a bit. I mean, |
| 1:37.2 | not a lot, but a bit. But actually, I think people should be allowed to do it. I don't want to go |
| 1:42.3 | from my outrage about it to saying |
... |
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