Religion: The Girl

Like many another civilization before it, the U.S. is acquiring its goddess. Writing in the current issue of the Protestant biweekly, Christianity and Crisis, Harvey Cox of the Division of Evangelism of the American Baptist Home Mission Societies identifies her as The Girl.

“Miss America,” he writes, “stands in a long line of queens going back to Isis, Ceres and Aphrodite. Everything from the elaborate sexual taboos surrounding her person to the symbolic gifts at her coronation hints at her ancient ancestry. But the real proof comes when we find that the function served by The Girl in our culture is just as much a ‘religious’ one as that served by Cybele in hers.” Just as the Virgin in the 12th and 13th centuries sustained the ideals of the age, “so The Girl symbolizes the values and aspirations of a consumer society. (She is crowned not in the political capital, notice, but in Atlantic City or Miami Beach, centers associated with leisure and consumption.)” Not that Baptist Cox identifies The Girl with the Madonna. “In fact she is a kind of anti-Madonna. She reverses most of the values traditionally associated with the Virgin—poverty, humility, sacrifice. In startling contrast, particularly, to the Biblical portrait of Mary in Luke I: 46-55, The Girl has nothing to do with filling the hungry with ‘good things’ but hawks an endless proliferation of trivia on TV spot commercials. Reversing the directions of the Magnificat, The Girl exalts the mighty, extols the rich and brings nothing to the hungry but added despair.”

An ironic element in the cult of The Girl, thinks Cox, is that “Protestantism has almost completely failed to notice it, while Roman Catholics have at least given some evidence of sensing its significance.

In some places, for instance, Catholics are forbidden to participate in beauty pageants, and this is not entirely a ruling inspired by prudery. The irony is seen in the fact that it is Protestants who have traditionally been most opposed to lady cults while Catholics have managed to assimilate more than one at various times in history …”

If The Girl functions in the U.S. as a kind of goddess, Cox reasons, then Protestant theologians should be on their guard against this new idolatry. “Why has Protestantism kept its attention obsessively fastened on the development of Mariolatry in Catholicism and not noticed the sinister rise of this vampirelike cult of The Girl in our society?”