Religious revival, or just the Freedom Clause

Glenn Reynolds seems worried about "signs of a revival in religious interest." We just celebrated Easter and fretted over whether Terri Schiavo life signs should have been terminated, and then the Pope, who most people feel was a saintly man who helped bring about the end of the Iron Curtain, expired. So naturally, there's a lot of religion in the air.

I think that we're nearing a climax of the steady progress of causes like those espoused by the ACLU which, coincidentally or not, seem always to oppose most religious views. The gay marriage issue may have pushed it too far.

Now NBC has launched a miniseries called Revelations. I thought it might be interesting. It reminds me a lot of the old Millennium series in which Lance Henriksen played a profiler tracking down serial killers. It was an attempt by the creator of The X-Files, Chris Carter to follow up his big hit. It started out quite well, but Carter had to hand it off to some less talented producers who allowed it to veer off into a lot of silly stuff from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I've been a fan of Lance Henriksen since I first saw him in Aliens, but he's seldom been allowed to play heroes.

Anyway, Revelations stars Bill Pullman as a physics professor whose daughter is murdered by a satanist and is sought out by an Oxford-trained nun who is searching out signs of the Second Coming. It disappointed me with its depiction of religion as some kind of eerie superstition which sees miracles in mysterious shadows that seem to be cast by Jesus' crucifixion and evil as something like what was in The Exorcist. It's kind of an eery program which doesn't promise to resolve anything, but suggest that there's more in heaven and earth than we can learn by reading Scientific American. Being a believer, I felt kind of betrayed, although I shouldn't have expected anything better. The things that happen in this show are what I call Catholic miracles, like those visions of the BVM witnessed by young girls. Joseph Smith, the prophet who Mormons believe was the instrument God chose to restore the original Christianity as taught by the original apostles, taught that visions were given to convey knowledge and that angels don't just appear and stand there. They are messengers who deliver instructions and teach. So all these people who see the face of the Savior in the stripped paper of a billboard, or, as happened in Salt Lake City, where people saw the face of the Virgin in the stump of a tree branch that had been cut off, fail that test.

Mormons arent mystics. The miracles we believe in are less dramatic--they don't produce the feeling of being one with God, the Universe and everything. They're much more subtle, and usually leave room for doubt. Joseph Smith described the effect of the Holy Ghost as feeling intelligence come into your mind, ideas and insights that occur seemingly out of nowhere. The only reason this matters, is that it has been foretold that one of the signs of the times before Christ's return is many false prophets.