COMMENTARY: The Ethereal Girl’s Cheap Grace

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) As Madonna soared out of Israel on her private jet earlier this week, she left behind her trademark trail of controversy and chaos. Secular Israelis were intoxicated by her five-day trip to the Holy Land; Orthodox Jews were repulsed. Palestinians protested. And Israeli police arrested two of her brawling […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As Madonna soared out of Israel on her private jet earlier this week, she left behind her trademark trail of controversy and chaos.

Secular Israelis were intoxicated by her five-day trip to the Holy Land; Orthodox Jews were repulsed. Palestinians protested. And Israeli police arrested two of her brawling bodyguards who had assaulted photographers outside her hotel.


By Sunday evening, the entertainer famous for commandeering the spotlight by any means necessary seemed downright tired of the attention. Reporters noted that her voice trembled as she spoke at a fund-raising dinner for the American foundation that promotes her New Age version of Kabbalah, a strain of Jewish mysticism. The singer who now answers to “Queen Esther” said she represents no particular religion and is only “a student of Kabbalah” who wants to “put an end to chaos” in the world.

As she did in Israel, Madonna has spent most of her career adding to the world’s chaos, not ending it. From her early days of mocking the Catholic faith, to her later forays into sadomasochism and the onstage kiss she shared with barely legal Britney Spears last year, the forty-something pop diva has built her fortune on scandal and sleaze.

So it’s no surprise that the Orthodox Jews at the Western Wall did not roll out their welcome mats when the self-professed Boy Toy pulled up in her SUV one night to join them at prayer. And it’s no wonder devout Jews question the sincerity of Madonna’s newfound faith, since six years of Kabbalah studies apparently have had little influence on her outrageous public behavior.

Madonna’s purported transition from Material Girl to Ethereal Girl has all of the hallmarks of her previous spiritual kicks, and few signs of authentic conversion. Once again, this sometime-devotee of Catholicism, Anglicanism, Hinduism and now, Judaism, has latched on to a faddish form of a venerable religious tradition.

Her new spiritual home is the Kabbalah Centre of Los Angeles, which peddles a Jewish mysticism unmoored from Judaism’s monotheistic roots and biblical morality. It is a trendy spirituality, popularized in the 1960s by an American rabbi and now sold to celebrities whose most obvious sign of religious commitment is the red string they wear around their wrists to ward off the so-called “evil eye.”

Like so many Americans today, Madonna has turned her back on traditional religion and morality, opting instead to make her own rules. Her meandering spiritual search suggests that her self-referential beliefs have repeatedly failed to satisfy her. But like legions of her fans, she is unwilling to fully embrace a religious tradition that makes real demands _ demands that go beyond wearing a new bracelet or making a brief quasi-pilgrimage overseas.

Madonna wants spirituality without religion and salvation without repentance. She wants cheap grace. And try as she might, she cannot find it.


She cannot find it because authentic spirituality is always rooted in conversion, commitment and community. It always comes with strings attached _ not the strings of a bracelet donned for good luck but the strings of objective moral standards that require the believer to conform her life to God rather than the other way around.

The holy women whose names the singer bears knew this. Queen Esther was a devout Israelite who risked her life to do God’s will, and plead to the Persian king on behalf of her people. Her faithfulness helped deliver the Jews from genocide, and they celebrate her memory each year during the feast of Purim. Christians also consider Esther an example of great holiness, and the early church fathers saw her as a biblical forerunner to Mary, the mother of Jesus, who Christians consider a model of purity and obedience to God’s will.

Through the millennia, Esther and Mary have been revered by their respective traditions for doing God’s will and following God’s rules rather than their own. Their character was shaped not by feel-good spiritual fads but by revelation and religious tradition. And the faithful say that their reward was peace _ a peace that passes all understanding, a peace that seems to have bypassed their famous namesake.

Perhaps Madonna realized that something had eluded her when her trip to Israel concluded on the same notes of chaos and controversy that follow her everywhere. Perhaps someday, after so many years spent on the fringes of Judeo-Christian tradition, this aging star will experience the joy of embracing full-fledged religious commitment and worshipping someone greater than herself _ a joy that Queen Esther and the true Madonna probably knew well.

(Colleen Carroll Campbell, a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, is author of “The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy,” Loyola Press, 2002).

MO/JL END

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