Last week, Parade magazine published Internet-exclusive outtakes from an interview with enduring pop icon Elton John. In it, the English singer talked about, well, just about everything: love, drugs, fame, commitment, friendship, HIV and … Jesus.
“I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems,” John told interviewer Dotson Rader. “On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East—you’re as good as dead.”
Jesus, gay? Pretty shocking, right? But here’s what’s interesting about this quote. It wasn’t that long ago—maybe 10 years or so—that such speculation about Jesus’ sexual identity would have seemed even more scandalous and provocative. But when Plugged In’s staff talked about Elton John’s perspective on Jesus, it didn’t seem culturally scandalous so much as it seemed like another example of a celebrity remaking Jesus in his own image.
Celebrities (and many others) have a narcissistic penchant for latching on to some aspect of Jesus’ teaching or identity and reshaping it to fit their own perspective on the world—never mind if their assertions are counter what we see in Scripture. It’s a common enough phenomena, in fact, that the Washington Post’s “Under God” blog recently ran a poll featuring nine such comments about Jesus from people such as Jane Fonda, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Elvis, John Lennon, Heidi Montag, Bob Hope and Archie Bunker.
The more our Plugged In staff talked about John’s quote, the more we felt that the real story here is not so much his comments about Jesus’ sexual preference—unscriptural and unsupportable as they are. No, the real story is that in our postmodern, spiritually syncretistic culture, celebrities’ outlandish statements about Jesus are so common they hardly seem newsworthy at all.
That said, opinions like Elton John’s do matter in a culture that invests celebrity with so much authority. But we would do well to remember that those opinions generally say more about the person voicing them—in this case, a high-profile singer who’s been out of the closet a long time—than they do about who Jesus actually is.
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