Towards Christianity without authority : pluralism, skepticism, and ecclesiastical power in selected examples of humorous Newfoundland writing

Abstract

In recent decades in Newfoundland, a sustained interest in Christian symbols, stories, and values has been paired with increasing criticism of Christian religious institutions and agents. Newfoundland’s burgeoning tradition of professional humour has reflected this changing set of relationships to Christianity. This robust young humour tradition richly reflects the ongoing pluralization and secularization of Newfoundland culture, and abundantly exemplifies humour’s distinctive potential as a means of addressing potentially contentious or vexing issues. Yet, surprisingly, literary criticism has almost entirely avoided the prominent stream of Newfoundland humour that addresses the island’s religious legacy.This project aims to begin to correct this substantial critical omission, examining points of continuity among a number of works produced over the past four decades. It focuses on the works’ embrace of political and/or epistemological pluralism, typically married to religious skepticism and to misgivings about conventional arrangements of religious power. Chapter One provides an historical and critical context for the project, introduces subsequent chapters, and speculates on ramifications of the pluralistic current that runs through the works in the study. Chapter Two examines religious jokes in Newfoundland joke books. It emphasizes the jokes’ overall tendency toward (an often ambiguous) religious conservatism, as well as the books’ latent pluralism regarding interdenominational relations. Chapter Three focuses on journalist and playwright Ray Guy’s often fierce satire of Christian religious agents and institutions. It argues that Guy’s satire utterly rejects the legitimacy of religious authority in the civic realm, largely on the grounds that transcendent truthfulness is often invoked as a means of justifying otherwise objectionable power. Chapter Four explores the ecumenical religious humour of columnist and memoirist Ed Smith. It focuses on Smith’s playful efforts to harmonize Christian faith and practice with a measure of religious uncertainty presented as a necessary foundation for humane coexistence. Chapter Five examines Ed Kavanagh’s novel The Confessions of Nipper Mooney. Primarily, it explicates and examines the novel’s liberal favouring of the individual moral conscience, and the symbolic association of its religiously dissident and/or marginalized protagonists with elements of the Catholic tradition. Chapter Six discusses Berni Stapleton’s comic play The Pope and Princess Di. The chapter emphasizes the play’s presentation of symbols’ constant subjection to alteration and hybridization, and its cautious regard for valuable symbols (religious or otherwise) that nonetheless become destructive when viewed as sacrosanct.Chapter Seven concludes the study by considering the works’ participation in political, philosophical, and literary/dramatic movements that problematize long-established religious modes and support a secular-pluralist outlook. It reflects on the role of humour in movements for change and on didacticism and popular humour as features of publicly engaged literature; it discusses other works of Newfoundland humour that approach religious matters from similarly secular, though less overtly political, angles; and it speculates on some social implications of the ascendancy of liberal, pluralistic values, considering these Newfoundland works in a more general Canadian cultural context.