Enough With the Secular Saints
By Sohrab Ahmari
March 27, 2018
What does a decent society owe to the victims and survivors of major disasters and mass violence?
That’s the question posed by the Parkland massacre and the emergence of the March for Our Lives movement in its wake. For too many liberal activists and their media allies, the answer has been to instantly elevate victims and survivors to the status of civic or secular saints, whose victimhood supposedly renders their opinion on public affairs unimpeachable. This is a grave injustice—to the victims themselves and the rest of us.
In an online essay Monday, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead compared Emma González, the Stoneman Douglas senior-turned-March for Our Lives leader, to Joan of Arc—a literal saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Mead reflected on the facial similarities between Gonzalez and Renée Maria Falconetti, the actress who played the French saint in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent-film masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Dreyer’s Saint Joan, Mead argued...
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https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/enough-with-the-secular-saints/
