Magazine covers and the millennium

Magazine covers and the millennium

After enormous build-up, and earlier concentration on the Y2K computing bug, news outlets seem to be turning millennial attention to the meaning of the year 2000 itself.  In November 1999, a number of mass-market magazines featured issues with cover stories on Christianity, and the significance of the turn of dial to 2000.  Four of the most notable were the 1 November issues of Maclean’s and Newsweek, and the 29 November issues of The New Yorker and another Maclean’s.  Also, Life’s December issue (on display through November and slated to come off the stands by 13 December), featured a cover titled “2000 Years of Christianity:  The Meaning of the Millennium.” What did these magazines offer in terms of content and style? $Visuals        IInclusivity       6Conclusions       VSelf-revelation        &References

Inside both issues of Maclean’s were photos from around Canada: the 29 November issue included singing teens at the Christian Life Assembly in Langley, B.C., a priest distributing communion at a Coptic church in Toronto, congregants kneeling at Revivaltime Tabernacle in Toronto, photos of Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic, a Catholic laywoman and a priest in Havre Boucher, Nova Scotia, a full-immersion baptism of a woman at a B.C. Christian Life Assembly, a female Anglican deacon outside her church in Saskatchewan, and a photo of Anglican bishop Matthews inside Edmonton’s Holy Trinity Church.  The only non-photographic representation was the iconic Jesus used on the cover and on the first page of the feature (identified only as having come from “SIPA”).  The resulting impression is of religion as practised across the country, by young and old, women and men.  The 1 November issue had photos and illustrations of clocks, plans of Greenwich’s Millennium Dome, revellers in New York’s Times Square, a survivalist in his bunker, and a still of Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times."  There are two ‘religious’ photos:  a gathering of pagans in robes at Stonehenge, and a parade of American millennialist Christians in Jerusalem, none from Canada.

The implicit conclusion is that Christianity is no longer as vibrant as in earlier centuries.

Life is primarily a magazine of photos and illustrations, and its December feature doesn’t buck the trend:  16 illustrations are incorporated in the “200 years of Christianity” article.  With two exceptions, they are all reproductions, from a c. 525 Ravenna mosaic of Moses receiving the law to a  1174 creation of the heavens from Monreale Cathedral in Sicily, to Goya’s “Scene at the Inquisition” (c. 1808).  The final two are colour photographs of Pope Paul VI embracing Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964, and another of white-clothed Pentecostals in North Carolina in 1998. The feature is accompanied by a graphical time-line from 27 B.C. to 2000.  It may be argued that this emphasis on visual art from early Christianity through to the 1800s suggests a number of things:  perhaps that Christianity is basically a historical phenomenon with little contemporary expression, and certainly that there exist no modern visual representations of Christ (or at least none which they wished to feature).   The implicit conclusion is that Christianity is no longer as vibrant as in earlier centuries, and that Christ is most faithfully represented in paintings hundreds of years old.

While emphasizing older art (Floris (1565), Giovane (16th cent.), and many from the 15th century, including  Signorelli and Memling),  Newsweek also moves the clock forward, featuring stills from Bergman’s “Seventh Seal,” and “End of Days,” a recent film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as art by Edward Hicks (1840-45) and covers of recent books.  A sidebar article titled “Millennium Madness” by John Leland uses two colour photographs, including women with eyes closed and clearly emotional who are described as members of the New Hope Revival Church in Georgia, and a bearded man dressed with a head covering identified as Alfonso Bottiglieri in Jerusalem.  The overall suggestion is one of a continuum of representation and belief.

...the collection as a supposed representation of believers seems focused on the strange and slightly horrifying...

The most striking and strangest use of visuals is the photo essay by Richard Avedon in The New Yorker.  Long shunning photographs for cartoons and line drawings, the magazine now describes Avedon as its “first staff photographer.”   To be fair, the 15 photographs entitled “Revelations” are described as a “work in progress,” which is just as well, as they hardly are reflective of the “portfolio of believers around the world” promised by the front cover.  Instead, its subjects come from India, Italy, Spain, England, France, or Constantinople.  Thirteen of the black and white pictures feature men, with only three women identifiable (one a nun in reformed habit in Paris, the other two heavily veiled “Muslim women” in Varanasi, India).  While remarkable in and of themselves, the collection as a supposed representation of believers seems focused on the strange and slightly horrifying:  a Naga holy man adorned only with weights attached to his scrotum, a “mendicant” in Calcutta missing a forearm, a masked and bloodied participant during Good Friday flagellation in Spain, the burning of bodies on pyres in India, and another mutilated body of a young Tibetan refugee, held by an adult whose own head is obscured.  While there are formal portraits of the Dalai Lama, the Ecumenical Patriarch and Archbishop of Constantinople, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Cardinal Antonetti, the overall image of the faithful would seem to be less than attractive.

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IInclusivity
Although most issues were ostensibly centred on Christianity (with the exception of The New Yorker, which was headlined as being more broadly about faith), each magazine included references to non-Christian beliefs.  This suggests a strong recognition that although the year 2000 is a marker of Christian time-keeping, others live on during the same time.  The 1 November Maclean’s issue featured stories including mentions of pagans, Babylonians, Islam, Judaism, traditional Chinese religion, secularism, Shintoism, Hinduism, ancient Mayan, and North American indigenous religions as well as various types of Christianity, including mention of an Anglican priest/Elvis impersonator named Elvis Priestly.  The Newsweek coverage includes Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and various cults, while Life only mentions Islam, Judaism and Hinduism in passing.   Titled “The Future of Faith,” John Updike’s essay for The New Yorker mentions various Christian denominations, as well as “New Age” religiosity, Islam, feng shui and Hinduism.

...opening up ... and hunkering down... setting up shop... and relocating...

In describing the past, present and future of Christianity, it is most important to notice which Christian denominations the features include.  Life, adopting a chronologic, didactic approach, discusses the Reformation and the schism with the Eastern rite, resulting in Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox churches.  Writer Robert Sullivan describes Christianity as “traveling and morphing, opening up (Unitarianism) and hunkering down (Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism), setting up shop (Mormonism in Utah) and relocating (Baptists moving from England to Rhode Island and ultimately finding fertile soil in the South)” [Sullivan p 59].  He also includes Dutch Reformed churches, Scottish Presbyterianism and Lutheranism, Pentecostalism (described as the fastest-growing type of Christianity),  and Anglicanism.

Newsweek’s issue on millennialism, while concentrating on the Book of Revelation (part of the biblical canon in some Christian denominations), also includes discussion of Jewish and Muslim apocalyptic beliefs and a note that Hinduism and Buddhism believe in cyclical and not linear timelines.  Including a Newsweek commissioned poll carried out by Princeton Survey Research Associates, statistics from “Americans” in general are included, without specifying whether or not the participants were Christians (e.g.  40% of U.S. adults believe the world will end in a Battle of Armageddon between Jesus and the Antichrist).  Woodward, in tracing the history of millennial prophecies and prognostications, includes Catholicism, the Protestant groups arising from the Reformation (Lutheranism, Puritanism), as well as those particularly American groups like the Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, which have been established with understandings of Christ’s return which differ from other Christian communities.  There is considerable time spent discussing Christian fundamentalist versions of the apocalypse and the rapture and how these beliefs affect the prism through which one may view political movements.

Maclean's “Jesus at 2000” makes a point of discussing the ecumenical activities planned to celebrate Christianity’s second century, including bell ringing on 1 January, and an interdenominational prayer assembly in Ottawa on 26 May.  D’Arcy Jenish includes a quote from a Vatican official, indicating that the millennium is not just big news for Catholics or even Christians, but “for the whole of humanity.”  Catholics, Anglicans, Pentecostals and United Church members  figure centrally in the Maclean’s stories, with United Church, Baptist, Mennonite, Presbyterian, Gospel and Community churches also mentioned.  Anthony Wilson-Smith, a Maclean’s columnist, devotes a whole page to the crisis facing Quebec’s Anglican church, titled “Stopping the Bleeding.”

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6Conclusions
The Maclean’s 29 November promise of an article on “Jesus at 2000” was a bit of a misnomer, as the feature actually concentrated on the current state of Christian belief and community in Canada, rather than the thinking around the person of Jesus at 2000.  One might, for instance, have expected a concentration on work by academics involved in the Jesus seminars, or other theological and scriptural studies.  The 6 December  1999 issue of Time, also titled "Jesus at 2000" adopted a much more creative point of departure, featuring a retelling of the annunciation, Jesus' temptation in the desert, the transfiguration, last supper, agony in the garden and resurrection by Reynolds Price, a novelist using archaeology in his reimagining.   But insofar as Jesus may be considered alive within and by Christian communities, this may be nit-picking.

All the articles recognize that while still the religion with the most adherents world-wide, Christianity is facing challenges,  ranging anywhere from opportunity to change to crisis.  The subhead for Maclean’s 29 November edition was:  “Christianity struggles to reinvent itself for the next millennium.”  Yet, by including stories of the dire need for clergy in the Catholic church through to mega-churches growing exponentially, all the articles suggest both positive and negative aspects to the future of Christianity in the next 1000 years.

One of the most striking similarities amongst the articles is the basic note of affirmation ending all the features:

“And who’s to say that John’s mythic battle between Christ and Antichrist is not a valid insight into what the history of humankind is ultimately all about?” [Woodward 74]

“‘People are coming because they believe, not for cultural reasons or out of habit,’ says Rev. Shirley Gosse.  ‘We may be fewer in number, but we’re greater in spirit.’” [Jenish 66]

“Our concepts of art and virtue, purpose and justification are so tied up with the supernatural that it is hard to foresee doing altogether without it.” [Updike 91]

“Institutions rise and some of them fall, sects drift from the core or toward it, seekers pursue the literal truth or spiritual fulfillment – all in answer to a man who called out 2,000 years ago.  All in answer to the challenge of Jesus.” [Sullivan 68]

"'Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart:  and ye shall find rest unto your soul' (Matthew 11).  Such a deep-rooted promise seems unlikely to relent."  [Price 48]

The basic message is that Christianity is a good thing, has lasted this long, and will continue in one form or another.

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VSelf-revelation
The articles themselves may be full of information about Christianity, but inclusion of some the authors’ own beliefs is noteworthy.  John Updike’s piece in The New Yorker is clearly meant to be personal;  “a churchgoer’s confessions” they certainly are, with discussions of his father’s staunch support of the local Lutheran church through to his own response to visiting churches in Italy, and finally, the inclusion of his grandchildren, some of whom, he notes, are not baptized.

On the editorial page of the 29 November issue of Maclean’s, there is a picture of D’Arcy Jenish and his editor James Deacon, and a synopsis of Jenish’s own upbringing as a Catholic, his “period away from the church,” and his renewal of commitment with the birth of three children.  This mini-profile appears under a headline of “Defending the faith.”  This degree of published self-identification is unusual for anyone reporting on religion.  It would be interesting to consider a reader’s response to “Jesus at 2000” depending on whether or not they read the personal info about Jenish first.

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&References
Richard Avedon, “Revelations,” The New Yorker, 29 November 1999, pp 92 – 107.

Barry Came with Susan McClelland, “Millennium countdown,” Maclean’s, 1 November 1999, pp 38 – 41.

John DeMont, “Belief in bricks and mortar,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1999, p 63.

Sue Ferguson (compiled), “The Christian World,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1999, pp 70 – 71.

D’Arcy Jenish with Susan McClelland and Philip Willan, “Jesus at 2000,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1999, pp 60 – 66.

John Leland with Anne Underwood, Matt Rees, Jill Jordan Sieder and Andrew Murr, “Millennium madness,” Newsweek, 1 November 1999, pp 70 – 71.

Susan McClelland, “Taking matters into her own hands,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1999, pp 64 – 65.

Susan Oh, “A cross-Canada celebration,” Maclean’s, 1 November 1999, p 41.

Reynolds Price, "Jesus of Nazareth then and now," Time, 6 December 1999, pp 38 – 48.

Robert Sheppard, “Caught up in time,” Maclean’s, 1 November 1999, pp 42 – 45.

Robert Sullivan with additional reporting by Daren Fonda, Mimi Murphy and Joshua Simon, “2000 years of Christianity,” Life, December 1999, pp 50 – 68.

John Updike, “The Future of Faith,” The New Yorker, 29 November 1999, pp 84 – 91.

Anthony Wilson-Smith, “Stopping the Bleeding,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1999, p 68.

Chris Wood, “The revolution,” Maclean’s, 29 November 1999, p 65.

Kenneth L. Woodward with Anne Underwood, “The way the world ends,” Newsweek, 1 November 1999, pp 66 – 74.
 

Joyce Smith is Research Director of Faith and the Media, and specializes in issues at the intersection of news and religion.  She holds English literature, journalism and religious studies degrees from the universities of Toronto, Western Ontario and Natal, and was a 1998-99 Rockefeller Research fellow at the University of Toronto's Centre for the Study of Religion.

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