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“I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.” -- The Mikado

1:

Can you have a "sequel" to a "fairy tale"?

If a fairy tale is a story which ends "and they all lived happily ever after" then the answer is "no", you cannot have a sequel to a fairy tale. Because we have just defined "fairy tale" as "a story which cannot have a sequel".

This is not to say that Cinderella and the Prince did nothing for the rest of their lives. Doubtless they held elegant balls and launched ships and made speeches to the nation at Christmas. It is even possible (let us hope) that Princess Ella used her new-found power to improve the lot of abused scullery maids up and down the country. I suppose they became King and Queen eventually; and I suppose the Prince must have been sad when the King died. But to live happily ever after means to live as happily as anyone can, not to never have a single bad day.

Eventually, Queen Ella and King Charming must have got old. We don't want to see that. We can take it for granted. I think the King probably dies first. The Queen is sad for a bit, of course, but she is a pious lady and believes that they'll be together again in Heaven. She lives on for a few years as a very contented widow, taking the title Queen Mother, and dies at a very advanced age surrounded by children and grandchildren and one very small great grandchild. Which is as happy an ending as anybody gets.

That's why we use the term "fairy tale ending" to mean "everything came out fine in the end". Because everything doesn't usually come out fine in the end in real life.

Because stories lie to us and we shouldn't read them, particularly not to children.

Because stories arbitrarily stop before Prince Charming contracts typhoid fever and Cinderella crashes her golden coach in a tunnel in Paris.

Because a story is a thing made of words, and a fairy tale is a particularly beautiful but particularly artificial creation precisely because it is closed off, finished, complete in itself.

As a matter of fact, the Cinderella story doesn't begin with the words "once upon a time". It begins "There was once a rich man whose wife lay sick..."  But that's still a beginning.

Stuff must have happened before Cinderella's mother got sick and her father married a nasty widow with two beautiful but wicked daughters. (It is only in the most vulgar versions of the story that Cinderella's sisters are ugly). But that's where the story starts. You could say things about Cinderalla's life with Baron Hardup before the Baroness got consumption (I assume it was consumption) but they wouldn't be part of the story. They might be part of a different story, but that story wouldn't be worth telling, because right up until her mum died, Cinderella was a perfectly ordinary little girl. (Grown ups sometimes read books about perfectly ordinary little girls to whom nothing interesting ever happens, but that's because they are too old to know any better.) Unless, I suppose, you think that Cinderella was a special little girl from the beginning. That the very moment she was born, a chorus of Fairy Godparents sang to the world that this was the Chosen One whose destiny was to marry the Prince, establish an alliance between House Hardup and House Charming, establish a dynasty, bring peace to the land...

But that's a different story. And it's turned "Cinderella" into a different story, and not such a good one. "Cinderella" is the story of an ordinary little girl who falls in love with a Prince.

(Cinderella was different from other little girls because she was lucky enough to have a fairy godmother. So I suppose you could tell the story of how her godmother came to be a fairy, and if she remembered to send a card for her confirmation, and whether the Vicar minded. But so far as I can see it was normal to invite fairies to Christenings in those days. Things only went wrong if you forgot. And anyway, in the Grimm tale it's the spirit of Cinderella's mother in Heaven who arranges the miracle. That's a much better story.)

So that's the answer to my question. Yes, you can continue telling a fairy story after you have said "and they all lived happily ever after." And yes, you can extend the fairy story backwards and say what happened before you said "once upon a time". But what you would be left with would no longer be fairy tale.

2:

If you are briefed to write a new story about an already existing character, there are two questions you could ask.

a: What was fun about this character to start with? So Let's create more stuff which is fun in just that way!

So if you are creating new Spider-Man stories, it is your job to think of better wisecracks than ever before; ways for Jameson to be meaner than every before; and an animal themed bad-guy who is more ridiculous and more scary than anything Steve Ditko and his assistant ever dreamed up.

If you take this approach, the audience will say "What the hell was the point of that? We already have loads of good Spider-Man stories!"

b: Let's suppose this character and their situation is perfectly real -- what would follow logically and realistically from that?

If you take this approach, it is your job to pretend that no-one apart from you has ever written about Spider-Man before. And to suspend your disbelief and assume that there really was a 15 year old boy with insect-like powers in 1960s New York, and that he really did decide to become an urban vigilante in his pyjamas. What would really have happened?

If you take this approach, the audience will say "What was the point of that? It had absolutely nothing to do with Spider-Man."

Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn was the product of the First Approach. It does all the stuff that Star Trek does on the TV, only more so. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was arguably the product of the second approach: granted that there were such a person as Batman, it asks, what affect would he have on the world? What would the authorities think about him? What would happen when he's too old to carry on?

There are, of course, other approaches as well. Maybe the existing stories were told by unreliable narrators and you are going to reveal that the "real" Conan was a wimp and a braggart and the "real" Sherlock Holmes was a fool. Maybe you are going to tell an origin story in which some unrecognizable character gradually turns into the famous one. (This appears to be the only approach Hollywood now permits. An origin myth for Paddington Bear, forsooth?) And, of course, you might very well decide to slap the character's name on some entirely unrelated property and affect incredulity that anyone ever thought that your Tarzan character would have anything to do with some book by Edgar Rice Borroughs.


3:

In 2001, Marvel Comics did a thing called Ultimate Spider-Man which may have been the last comic I unreservedly loved. (*) The idea, in case you have forgotten, was to do create a new comic, unconnected to the Marvel Universe and 40 years of Spider-Man continuity which would sort-of kind-of retell Spider-Man from scratch, as if it were happening right now, and sort-of kind-of make sense. Spider-Man was no longer a thirty year old college lecturer and photo-journalist married to a supermodel who had experienced the tragic deaths of his entire family, several fiances, and defeated the Mad God of Titan. He was Peter Parker, a 15 year old school kid who was just about to have an unfortunate mishap involving a spider.

The cool thing about this was that it didn't matter if you hadn't read Spider-Man for a decade and didn't know that Peter had sold his soul to Satan in return for the clone of his second dead girlfriend not having been sleeping with the resurrected clone of his worst enemy. You could go back to reading about the young kid whose got superpowers and hasn't figured out how to use them. Which is what was cool about Spider-Man to begin with.

But within within a year — within five years — this new Ultimate Spider-Man was not really recognizable as Spider-Man. He was a pretty much an unrelated character in a similar costume some of whose villains had some of the same names.

Not because the writers hadn't been true to the original brief. They had been. "Let's suppose that Spider-Man is a real kid, in the real world...what would happen?" they asked.

And the answer, of course, was Stuff. And if you a trying to tell a realistic story once Stuff has happened, it can't un-happen. The character grows and mutates and evolves and become a different character.

In the end they killed him off, which I suspect was the plan from the beginning.


4:

Opera-buddy sometimes refers to the Great Underpants Question.

How is it, she asks, that the Famous Five can go on camping holidays that seem to last the whole summer long and never once change their underwear? If we assume that the underpants washing happens off stage, who does the laundry?

This matters more in some universes than in others. It doesn't break genre too much to assume that, from time to time, Frodo and Sam find a bit of water to bath in; and when that happens Sam takes the opportunity to do a bit of laundry as well. (I am not sure if people even wore underwear in Middle-earth. We are all a lot more sensitive to bodily smells than people were in the days when the Queen had a bath once a month whether she needed it or not.) And there are lots of stories in which underwear and laundry and other boring smelly things simply don't exist. Winnie-the-Pooh would be one example. Hamlet would be another.

I think that the the point of the Underpants Question is that it is perfectly okay not to ask it. But once you have asked it, you can't unask it. If, on just one occasion, we decide that we can't go and ask questions about the mysterious foreign gentlemen in the big house because we’ve been sleeping in tents for four days without a change of clothes and smell to high heaven; then we can’t say in the next chapter "oh, everyone was locked in the mysterious foreign gentleman's cellar for three days without needing to go to the loo, but that’s fine, because it’s not that kind of story."

5:

I read the first couple of Timothy Zahn books with enthusiasm, and kept reading the old Marvel comics out of bloody minded loyalty. But I never properly bought into the Star Wars "extended universe".

Of course we want more Star Wars stories; but of course novelisations and sequels are only ever going to be novelisations and sequels. There is no Aristotelean mean between "All you have done is told the exact same story as A New Hope all over again only less well" and "What the hell did that even have to do with Star Wars?"

George seemed to have recognized this in the early days, when he was still talking in terms of a IX or XII part history of the Skywalker clan. Star Wars 2 is not a sequel, he kept saying, it's a different story set in the same universe.

Dispatches came to me from the extruded universe from time to time — Han and Leia were married, with twin children; Chewbacca had died. Luke had got married: to a lady named Mara. Later on it turned out that Jedi were celibate, and always had been. I assume this was covered. Although there were occasional smiles of recognition, this was not a setting I recognized or had much desire to visit. Shadows of the Empire was quite interesting, if a little preoccupied with underpants. Too much Stuff had happened. Each book added a Clone of the Emperor, a New Empire, an Invasion of Cybernetic Cockroaches or a Galactic Civil War. Each book made Star Wars, my Star Wars, my Journey of the Hero to save the Universe from the Emperor's Ultimate Weapon smaller and smaller.

An on-line Star Wars resource tells me that Mrs Skywalker was an agent of Palpatine and "a Force Using operative in her own right". That Anyone can type the words "Force using operative" and still believe that you are talking about Star Wars eplains why I never bought into the Extended Universe. (And now it has been decanonised.)

6:

I suppose this is why the great poets invented Tragedy.

The story of Cinderella and Prince Charming is over because the story teller has declared that it is over: he can't stop someone else from writing, or everyone else from imagining, a story in which they feud and quarrel and then decide it's fairest on the kids if they have as amicable a separation as possible. But the story of Romeo and Juliet is much more satisfactorily over because they are perfectly and irrevocably deaded.

(*) Nova. I positively like Nova. But it's only doing Ultimate Spider-Man again, in the "official" Marvel Universe which seems now to be distinguishable from the Ultimate universe only by checking Nick Fury's skin colour. The point of the the Ultimate Universe was that it was more realistic and less comic-booky than the Marvel Universe, but in the last decade the Marvel Universe has stopped trying to be comic booky. So Nova is a pretty good run on "what if a young lad got crazy superpowers in an otherwise realistic universe." So is Ms Marvel. So, obviously, was the original 1960s Spider-Man. 







If you are interested in fairy tales, you should totally buy my game.

If you enjoy my writing, the best way of encouraging me to write more is to buy my book.

(The second best way is to buy the Kindle version.)

How to Make the Bible Mean Whatever You Want It To Mean - A Very Boring Note

It has been suggested to me that I should have quoted the eucharistic passages from the Gospels more fully. 

It may be that the "revolutionary Christ" theory involves rejecting the "bread and wine" section wholesale (since it seems to come from Paul) and retain the other material as more "authentic".  You could certainly make out a case that Luke's version is a composite of two different versions (note that the wine is passed round twice.) 

This would leave us with something like this. 

MATTHEW

When evening came Jesus was reclining at the table with the twelve...While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: "Take and eat, this is my body. Then he too the cup, gave thank and offered it to them, saying "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it answer with you in my father's kingdom. When they had sun a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

MARK

When evening came Jesus arrived with the twelve...While they were eating, Jesus took the bread, gave thank and broke it, and gave it to his disciples say, "Take it: this is my body." Then he took the cup, gave thank and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many" he said to them. "I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God"

LUKE

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them. "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you the truth, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. After taking the cup he gave thanks and said "Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes." And he took bread, gave thank, and broke it, and gave it to them saying: "This is my body given for you: do this in remembrance of me." In the same way after the supper he took the cup, saying "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you."

Leaving us with: 

FRASER:  

When evening came, Jesus reclined at table with his twelve disciples. And he said to them. "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you the truth, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my father's kingdom. Do this in remembrance of me." When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

If still don't get why he rejects 1 Corinthians as a Paulist invention by holds on to "do this in remembrance of me" as coming from the original left-wing Jesus.

Easter Songs

How To Make The Bible Mean Whatever You Want It To Mean (2)

I promise this will be my last post about Giles Fraser. He writes substantially the same column every week, so I could continue writing substantially the same rebuttal indefinitely. And writing about this kind of thing forces me to adopt an attitude of piety which must be hysterically funny to anyone who knows me personally. I sure you would all rather be ignoring another Star Wars piece. 

But I did think his last one was a good example of the total intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal position, so I am going to have one last go at showing what my problem is with the guy.

There are a number of different ways of reading the New Testament. But I think it would be quite a good idea for anyone setting themselves up as an Expositor to pick one, say what it is, and more or less stick to it. At one time, I attended a Charismatic "house" church. They had a pretty clear approach. The Gospels, they believed, were accurate written accounts of stuff that really happened. They were also the inspired and infallible word of God, but what God had mainly inspired the writers to do infallibly was to accurately record what had really happened. Any honest writer would have written much the same. Thus: “Many learned people have used human wisdom to invent some reason why St John tells us that the miraculous drought consisted of 153 fishes. But in fact, God’s word tells us this because it is the number they actually caught.”

At almost the other extreme, I expect that by now we have all read Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic. He thinks that the Gospels are stories — stories which Christians have instead of answers to hard questions about God and suffering. He says that he thinks that the story is true; but doesn't think that's really the point.

And obviously, people in olden times thought it was all allegorical. Five levels of allegory, only one of which was suitable for the Common People. And scholars have applied various criteria to try to construct (they admit that it's a construct) a figure called "the Historical Jesus". 

So: what is Giles Fraser's approach?

His latest piece is about Easter and Passover and Holy Communion. He thinks it is nice that Jews can be flexible about how they celebrate Passover, and that it's a shame that Christians are bound by strict liturgical rules when they celebrate the Eucharist. I get that. But when he starts talking about God and Jesus and the Bible and stuff, my head starts to spin, slightly. 

This year, in an unusual quirk of the calendar, Passover and Easter overlap, with the Jewish celebrations beginning on the day Christians call Good Friday. Though this is rare, it is unsurprising....

This is an odd way of putting it. For centuries Christians celebrated Easter on the date of the Jewish Passover, which ever day of the week it fell on. The decision that Easter Sunday should always fall on a Sunday, and that Good Friday should always fall on a Friday was made at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. Fraser believes that for the last sixteen hundred and ninety years, the thing calling itself "the church" has not being following Jesus but a "death cult" largely invented by Constantine and promulgated at Nicea. So it's mighty interesting that he is so keen on Easter being at Passover and a bit suspicious of the Nicean “first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox” formula. 

– not least because the last supper that Jesus ate with his friends the night before he died was a Passover seder. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he told them.

Allow me to improve the above: 

"...not least because three of the Gospels say that the Last Supper was a Passover seder. The other one very definitely says that it wasn't.  'Do this in remembrance of me' he told them, according to one of the four."

It's not Giles' fault that the four evangelists don't agree. Most academics and many clergy would counsel against harmonization. But if you are going to merge four different stories into one composite version, sheer honesty requires that you signal to your audience that this is what you are doing. "We have four stories about the Last Supper. They don't agree on every point. But what seems to have happened is something like this..."

“Remember: Jesus wasn’t a Christian. But for the Christians that followed, he was re-described as the lamb sacrificed at Passover. “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us,” says St Paul, taking his own Jewish theology of temple sacrifice and boldly, even offensively, applying it to a man who was strung up by the Romans as an enemy of the state."

This says a bundle. 

If Fraser is right here, John the Baptist never said "Behold the lamb of God..."; Jesus never said "the Son of man came to lay down his life as a ransom for many". If Fraser is right Jesus saw no connection between his own death and the Passover sacrifice. That was a wholly original idea, thought up by Paul. If Fraser is right, all the bits of the Gospels that talk about the Priests conspiring with Pilate to have Jesus killed — Judas and the arrest in the garden and the trial, pretty much our whole Easter narrative is fiction. This is not a matter of interpretation: Fraser is rejecting the story in the Gospels and offering us an alternative one. 

What does it mean to say that Jesus death was "re-imagined" as a sacrifice? If it means "Christians realized that the true, objective significance of Jesus' death could best be understood in terms of Jewish temple sacrifice (even though Jesus may never had said so in quite those words)" then Fraser and us Evil Constantianian Death Worshipers are pretty much in agreement. But if he means "Christians thought up the idea out of their heads, and its a pretty idea, even though obviously it isn't true, whatever 'true' means" then I think Fraser is... Well.... Not Christian. Something else. A heretic, and quite a boring one at that. Unless I am and he isn't. Or we both are. 

But let's not worry about orthodoxy. The point is that Fraser's arguments do not work on their own terms. The liberal case never does. 

Pay attention, please. This next bit is quite boring. 

There are four Gospels. One of them doesn't really have a "last supper" and if it does, it definitely isn't a Passover. So we can put that one on one side. Let's compare the three which are left. The bits which envisage Jesus death as a sacrifice and were therefore made up by St Paul I have deleted: 

Mathew: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessed it, and break it, and gave it to the disciples, and said Take, eat, this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many for the remissions of sins."

Mark: And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them saying: eat, this is my body. And he took the cup and when he had given thank he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them: This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.

Luke: And he took bread, and gave thank and brake it, and gave unto them saying this my body which is give for you, this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup, after supper, saying "This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you."

The highlighted section "this do in remembrance of me", which Fraser thinks is the real deal, only appears in one version of the story: Luke's Gospel. If Fraser is correct that this is the important bit, then Matthew and Mark totally missed the point of what was going on. And, in fairness, Luke says, more or less in so many words, that he doesn't like the other Gospels and is offering his as an improvement on them. 

So: stripped of the Pauline additions you are left with something like: 

And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them saying: This do in remembrance of me. And he took the cup and when he had given thanks he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. 

That's what "really happened".

Except...except...except...

The oldest account of the Last Supper doesn't come from the Gospels. It comes from Paul. (Luke was a mate of Paul's — at any rate he wants us to think he was.) And what does Paul say that Jesus said?  

For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread: And when he had given thanks he break it, and said, Take: eat, this is my body, which is broken for you. This do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when had supped, saying This cup is the new testament in my blood, this do ye, as oft as ye drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup ye do shew the Lords death til he comes

How does Paul know about the Last Supper? He wasn't there. He did meet some of the disciples who were there, but he doesn't say that they mentioned it. He says he knows about the Supper because God told him. It's very hard for us to get our heads round the fact that for Paul the fact that he didn't hear about Jesus from eye-witnesses but from the resurrected Jesus makes things more reliable, not less. But he does. God told Paul that Jesus said that his death was a sacrifice and the wine and bread were in some way his blood and body. And God also told Paul that Jesus said "do this in remembrance of me". Presumably, Paul told his mate Luke and Luke put it in his Gospel. Very possibly the other writers knew Paul's version of the story as well. On what basis should we treat one part of Paul's version as simply what happened; and another part as something which Paul made up?

Fraser talks as if you can strip away layers of Christian theology about Mass and Sacrifice and symbolically eating Jesus’ body; and get to the Original Last Supper, which was just Jesus sharing Passover with his friends. But you can’t. If you scratch the surface of Matthew, Mark and Luke what you get to is Paul. If Paul was wrong about Jesus being the Saviour then everyone is wrong about everything and always has been. 

And then, further down, Fraser lays the cards which he has been palming very firmly on the table: 

For it remains the central task of the church to channel a story of massive emotional power, a story in which the freedom meal of Passover inspires an extraordinary act of non-violent resistance against the brutality of Roman occupation.

I think that the reason that Matthew, Mark and Luke place the Last Supper specifically at Passover is to underline the theological point that Jesus was the Lamb of God. Fraser thinks that it was historically factually a Passover meal. It may have been that as well. I'm more inclined to think that John is the one who sticks to the original historical sequence of events. He, Fraser, then invents off the top of his head something which isn't remotely hinted at in the Gospels or Paul or any Christian source: the idea that this meal “inspired an act of resistance against the Roman empire”? 

What happens in the story is that Jesus is arrested; tried for blasphemy by the religious authorities; and his death warrant is reluctantly rubber stamped by the secular governor. Yes, the story says that the religious authorities say “oh, didn’t we mention, he’s calling himself a King, sounds pretty anti-Roman to me” and that Pilate snarlingly hangs a sign saying “Jewish King” on the gallows, but the story says that Pilate didn’t know who Jesus was, didn’t think that he’d done anything wrong and wanted to let him off.

In what way can Jesus be said to have engaged in "non-violent resistance"? What revolution is the Last Supper meant to have inspired? How did it mitigate Roman brutality? Please don't tell me that Fraser believes in that old conspiracy theory about Jesus arranging his own crucifixion with the idea that the sight of a crucified messiah would cause all the Jews to rise up in rebellion against the Romans, but that the whole thing backfired horribly and the survivors had to come up with a story to make a macabre cock-up look like a great victory. Bigger men than him have made asses of themselves over that one.

Into this story is folded a dramatic re-imagining of God not as some alien force hovering above us, but as a human being fully alive, yet prepared to give of his life in the battle against inhumanity and darkness.

The Creed says For us men and our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man. I agree we could lose the “men” part; and apparently biologists still get confused by the “down” part; but I think most of us understand what this is saying whether we believe it or not. Is "God is re-imagined as a human being" a Guardian-friendly way of saying the same thing, or does it mean something different? 

Fraser’s words could be understood to mean that he does not believe in the incarnation as a thing which happened (God became a man) but thinks of it in terms of a change in the way people decided to think about God. But if what happened was that humans said “Let’s stop using the word God to refer to the unseen force that made the universe and use it instead to refer to exceptionally good human beings, such as, you know, that chap who tried to start a revolution and got crucified, what was his name?” then I struggle to see why we are even bothering to talk about Jesus. 

Again. It is possible that "prepared to give his life in the battle against inhumanity and darkness" is just a less vivid and less dramatic way of saying that there was none other good enough to pay the price of sin, he only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in. But I very much fear that the "inhumanity and darkness" that Jesus gave his life for are merely the “inhumanity and darkness” of the nasty Roman empire — and by extension, whatever nasty political entity Fraser is worried about this week --  the City of London, fracking, the Internet etc etc etc. 

That would be my guess. I would guess that he believes that Jesus was a radical political thinker; that the Last Supper was in some sense a revolutionary call to arms; that the Crucifixion was in some obscure way an act of defiance against the political evil of the Roman empire; and that when Christians call Jesus "God" they are not saying that he is "God" — that would be ridiculous. They are merely saying something like "a radical lefty being tortured by a fascist state is in some sense the most admirable and praise-worthy thing it is possible to imagine."

Many years ago I attended a lecture by Don Cupitt at the University of York. Cupitt said nothing very interesting. When he had finished saying it, a friend of mine named Matt, who would have been leader of the Student Anarchist Society if the Student Anarchist Society believed in having leaders, raised his hand and said the following words. 

"I agree with nearly everything you have said this evening, but I do not understand why you put in terms of all this reactionary Christian bullshit."

I agree that you should respect and revere prisoners of conscience and people being killed for their beliefs. Many people think that in Mandela or MLK we find the best of the human race. Looking back at a story about how your community escaped from tyrants in the past is a very good way of inspiring them to escape from tyrants in the future. And I suppose it is just possible that letting a tyrant kill you in the most horrible way possible is a powerful way of winning the moral argument. (Me, I'm with Salman Rushdie on this one. I don't think letting the authorities torture you is the best form of revolution. I do think that that may be just what the authorities would like revolutionaries to believe.)

But all of that could be said in plain English. In a very real sense, what  do people like Fraser think is gained by putting it in terms of all that reactionary Christian bullshit?