Madonna and Playboy Bunny

For research during seminary I thumbed through many issues of Christianity Today. Often I would get sidetracked by interesting articles. One of those articles was written by Richard J. Mouw, now president of Fuller Seminary. The article tried to understand the unlikely union of two recognizable symbols, the Virgin Mary and the Playboy bunny. What follows is a summary of the article:

Close to forty years ago, Mouw saw coupled upon an automobile the Virgin Mary and the Playboy Bunny. This experience threw Mouw into a "frenzied attempt to absorb it into [his] theology." Perhaps the uniting of these symbols was to provide an epiphany, a window into the "Spirit of the Age." Assuming that something was to be gleaned from this odd pairing, Mouw began interpreting. Maybe this was cause to rethink H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture paradigm since here was the "Mother of Christ" and the "Pet of Hefner standing in relatively stable confrontation within a single organism, with neither one being quite dominated, or transformed by, or exalted at the expense of, the other." Or perhaps this was emblematic of the evolution of the twentieth-century woman, from the servant Mary to the autonomous Playmate. And, in Hegelian terms, this thesis and antithesis were dueling to beget a synthesis that points "to some middle, even transcendent, way that at once embraces and rises above the conflict." Possibly this was to be interpreted more broadly as a "prophetic-priestly clash," Mother Mary embodying traditional morality and the bunny representing the New Morality.

Having delved into several possible meanings, Mouw concludes that this is "a case where the medium is the message." These meaning-rich emblems are nullified by their substance, that is, "they are fashioned by...the same plastic-and-cellophane culture, a culture whose very plasticity allows for the real possibility that Madonnas and Bunnies are mass-produced in the same factory." Mouw believes that such a culture sucks out the power of the sacred and profane to judge each other. And so it is that images constructed of such material can peacefully get along.

I found this to be a very illuminating--it even has worked its way into one of my dissertation chapters. Mouw's cause for concern has only multiplied since he wrote this in 1970.