Hollywood’s religion lesson

What can Hollywood teach Main Street America about religious principles and morality? Now, now – don’t laugh. I’m serious.

Not much, ordinarily, but sometimes – as with miracles – life’s best lessons come from places we least expect.

Last week, the British newspaper The Sun reported that Hollywood actor Jim Caviezel, of “The Thin Red Line” and “Frequency” fame, refused to shoot a sex scene for the film “Angel Eyes” with a topless Jennifer Lopez.

“I just said, ‘Look, put a top on her. I’m gonna keep my shorts on, she’s gonna keep hers on. Get the camera and shoot around it.’ And that’s out of devotion, love and respect to my wife,” a very Roman Catholic Caviezel told the paper.

“J-Lo” and the film’s executives were described by the paper as “stunned.” I’m sure they were; after all, what man in his right mind would refuse to do a nearly-nude love scene with Jennifer Lopez?

How about a man who believes such sexual behavior – even when it’s called “acting” – is really little more than inappropriate promiscuity, old-fashioned or not.

“I don’t expect anyone else to agree with my views. But I wouldn’t be where I am today, I wouldn’t have had the courage to do what I’m doing now, if I hadn’t had the direction of something greater than me,” Caviezel said.

“I have a hard time getting naked on film. I don’t believe in it,” he added. “I don’t think it’s right. In my faith, I’m taught that abstinence is important.”

Contrast this moral stand with the decision of a federal judge last week, who ruled that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer begin meals with a prayer because to do so allegedly violates a constitutional principle that, in reality, never existed – except in the small minds of some federal judges.

“The primary effect of this practice has been to compel students to participate in a state-sponsored religious exercise,” wrote Judge Norman K. Moon, in his ruling. “Because the prayers are drafted and recited at the direction of the Institute’s superintendent, the result is that government has become impermissibly entangled with religion.”

“Impermissibly entangled?” The “government?” I thought VMI was a school, not a government, and as such free to formulate its own policies – including, I might add, the right to practice religion freely, as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

To be fair there are a number of arguments that can be made from all sides of this issue – to allow prayer, to ban it, to let the students decide (though, in a military setting, the latter is probably not an option).

But what is obvious to me is that the federal courts are increasingly hostile toward any expression of religious morality in public, whether it comes from a college that accepts federal funds or a local church group that wants to set up a Christmas display in a town park.

This trend is not only disturbing, but it’s highly contradictory. How, in America, is it possible to guarantee “freedom of religion” by banning it? I just don’t get that.

In light of these two examples, Americans are left with quite an irony. When an actor is giving the nation a morality lesson and a federal court is denying a basic right, it’s time for Congress and the Supreme Court to get up off the sidelines, get back into the game and get us back on track.

A little noise from “we, the oppressed,” never hurt, either.