LOL Interwebz: Clones, Emoticons, Big Macs, and Other Sacred Stuff

Every Thursday in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.”

I still remember the first time I heard that particular aphorism. My mother said it to me back in the mid-’90s, when I asked her to explain why human cloning wasn’t a totally-radical-to-the-max idea (because that’s how we talked in the ’90s). At the time, the possibility was on everyone’s mind thanks to a certain sheep, leading to a widespread moral panic that I simply couldn’t understand.

What was the harm in having my own clone? It would be hilarious at parties, and it was second only to hoverboards as a requisite harbinger of the coming futuristic utopia! And besides, her response meant nothing at all. “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should”? I wasn’t arguing we should do absolutely everything we were capable of. I wasn’t saying we should strip-mine Mount Everest, or dig up the dead and turn them into cyborg butlers, or carve Dane Cook’s face into the surface of the moon. I just wanted a clone!

It’s a terrible aphorism, really. Certainly true, but it provides no reference for which of our capabilities we should engage, simply an acknowledgment that it’s not all of them. No better as a moral guide than “Only punch certain people in the face.”

What my mother could have said was that Christianity teaches certain things are sacred—human reproduction among them—and therefore shouldn’t be trifled with. (There are obviously other concerns about human cloning, but the sacred is rarely a bad place to start when formulating an ethic.) Protestants tend to be really bad at thinking this way, though. We assume what we do with our bodies, our possessions and our public spaces is irrelevant to “spiritual concerns.” You can see this in how we have a thousand different flavors of Bibles and churches—anything is cool, as long as it gets someone to crack open a Bible or visit a church, right? Those are all just “externals.”

Well…

If you have any doubt that there exists a line where the sacred becomes profane, all you need to do is spend a few minutes in the evangelical corners of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, which have both become unofficial spokesmen for my mother’s aphorism. By providing free money to anyone capable of convincing people their idea is a good one, both sites function as unspoken salutes to the proposition “If you can, you should!”—and the things Christians have come up with lately seem particularly susceptible to that attitude.

One such (recently failed) project is “The Bible Translated into Emoticons,” which is exactly what its way-too-on-the-nose title promises. Hollywood-area photographer Kamran Kastle was asking for 25 grand to rewrite the Bible in those little pictures you use when you’re texting. And never mind that emoticons can only be said to be a language in the same sense that grunts and pointing are a language; never mind that he wasn’t even using actual emoticons, but rather 5,000 symbols he just made up; never mind that the emoticon translation is gibberish without a parallel English Bible to translate them for you—nah, the real spectacle here is Kastle’s hubris.

In an interview inexplicably conducted by Vice, Kastle assured his doubters, “I’m going to contact the following people to help me translate the bible into emoticons: Mel Gibson, Mark Burnett, the Pope, Russian President Vladimir Putin, [and] Denzel Washington”—because what could be more assuring than the possible involvement of some guy who looks pretty good topless on a horse? If there’s still doubt in your mind that Kastle’s emoji Bible would be awesome to the extreme, though, he’s provided some sample verses on the Kickstarter page, including Romans 10:13 (“For whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved”), which in his version becomes a picture of a woman raising her hand, a picture of a jaundiced Jesus, and a rainbow. Clearly the man is a poet, as his rendition manages to iron out all possible depth from an ancient, sacred text (“call,” “Lord,” “saved”—yep, I get it) while still leaving it entirely unintelligible (couldn’t these symbols just as easily mean “If you raise your hand in Sunday school, you’re gay”?).

It’s probably reassuring that Kastle only managed to raise $105, or about 0.4% of his goal.

More commercially viable, which probably makes it even more crass, is a currently active Indiegogo campaign to put McDonald’s Restaurants in churches across America. Why exactly this even needs a fundraising campaign is unclear (there’s no church with a million bucks who would want a McDonald’s? McDonald’s isn’t looking for the real estate?), but the reasoning (such as it is) is there: church attendance is down, and what better way to bring it back up than to offer people the exact same cheeseburgers they can already buy on pretty much every street corner in the world?

Aside from the fact that this idea is at best a Band-Aid on the problem of low church attendance (I somehow doubt most ex-Christians left due to a lack of Filets-O-Fish in the narthex), it also bears the unfortunate name of “The McMass Project,” a name that should alienate both Catholics (who hold the Mass as salutary and sacred) and Protestants (who have no idea what a “Mass” is) equally. And in case you’re thinking the sacrilege there is unintentional, they’re also promoting the endeavor with the hashtag #Feast4Jesus, as if it should be obvious that the ancient ritual of feasting on the Savior’s flesh and blood, metaphorically or otherwise, was incomplete until they thought to chase it with a Big Mac and a McFlurry.

“It’s time for churches to engage with entrepreneurship,” they write on their Indiegogo page, helpfully demonstrating that they haven’t got the whole “God and mammon” thing down.

I‘m not sure if it’s comforting or not to think that sacrilegious ideas like these have always been with us and have only been held up for public scrutiny recently because poorly catechized people now have Internet access. For good or for ill, though, they’re now our banners, proudly flying before us to announce to the world that Christians can’t be trusted with anything sacred, ever. If we can do it, we will, even if it means offering the purest gifts of God as strange fire to the twin deities of populism and corporatism.

But maybe I’m being melodramatic. If there’s a consoling thought to this, it’s that the sacred doesn’t need our help to retain its sacredness. “Unless the Lord build the Golden Arches, they labor in vain who build it,” or however that verse goes. And as of this writing, the emoticon Bible has failed spectacularly, and McMass is poised to do the same. While I bear no ill will to the originators of the ideas, I’m glad to see their sacrilege restrained.

After all, while a church with a McDonald’s in it might have the same novel appeal as my own personal clone, the cost to our collective perception of the Body would hardly be worth it.

Image via The McMass Project’s Indiegogo page.