Madonna and religion
American singer-songwriter and actress Madonna has incorporated in her works references to religious themes of different religions and spiritual practices, including Christianity (she was raised Catholic), Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Kabbalah.
Madonna's personal views on religion have been complex and evolving; though she was cited recognizing Jesus' teachings and divinity, she has declared to disagree with institutional organizations, while her own spiritual observance was publicly criticized by various for being eclectic and uncontrite.
Madonna was among the leading public figures often considered an important medium for popularizing in Western countries, ancient spiritual traditions coming from Asia such as Kabbalah studies or yoga.
[20] Erik Davis, considered her case "the biggest metaphysical blast" in an article for Spin published in 2019, where he reviewed industry's artists that incorporated or practiced spiritual beliefs.
[23] Shalom Goldman, a Middlebury College professor of religion, quotes Madonna as having claimed to have studied all the women of the Old Testament but she was most drawn to Esther because "she saved the Jews of Persia from annihilation".
[58] Similarly, professor Andew Tomasello as cited by scholars David Rothenberg and Benjamin Brand, referred: Perhaps the first artist of our time and certainly the most successful to routinely employ facile images from many spiritual cultures and multiple religious traditions is the pop music star Madonna.
[23][61] Religious Jewish symbols and Hebrew letters featured in some of her works, and Madonna was seen numerous times, with the red string around her wrist to ward off the evil eye,[62] a trendy practice among celebrities during the Bush era, according to a Vice contributor.
[65] Feminist theologian Grietje Dresen, argues that Madonna seems to have incorporated very well her Roman Catholic education, in which the beauty, purity, and self-control of the 'immaculate' Virgin Mary are presented to girls as the standard of perfection.
[66] Author and professor Thomas Ferraro, cites celebrities such Mario Puzo and Frank Sinatra as examples of an "Italian pagan Catholic understanding of power", but he claims Madonna "gave it" a "long-awaited" and much "needed" female valence.
[88][90] Chief Rabbi of Safed (the birthplace of the Kabbalistic tradition), Shmuel Eliyahu in an open letter to Madonna, pointed out that her performances and public behavior were not in keeping with the values of the practice, "the enchanting wisdom you have so much respect for".
[114] In January 2023, Madonna sparked again outrage among Christian community after doing an all-female Last Supper photoshoot, and also for channeling Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows, on the first Vanity Fair's European "Icon issue".
[123] In 2008, Gail Walker from Belfast Telegraph brought the scandals that Catholic Church have rocked, and also commented that her "musings on the simple icons of her culture seem more a positive recognition of the emotional power of Christianity than ridicule of it".
During the Blond Ambition World Tour, she invited the clergy of Vatican to attend the concert and "judge for themselves", while stated that her show was a "theatrical presentation of my music, and like theater, it ask questions, provokes thought [...]" and that the moral also include "believe in freedom and in God".
[134] After her usage of Revelation 2:9's term of Synagogue of Satan, in the remix "Justify my Love" ("The Beast Within"), whom rabbi Abraham Cooper labeled as antisemitism, or "Jew as Devil", Madonna responded through her publicist according to the Associated Press.
[142] In 2008, American journalist Ricardo Baca commented how some even considered her as a "divine creation", describing Madonna for pushing trends, including religious ones over the past 25 years.
[143] Kate Racculia even referred in her novel Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts: An Adventure (2019), to the "altar of Our Lady Madonna Louise of Ciccone", telling part of the story of "Dex".
[152] In Language, Society, and New Media: Sociolinguistics by semiotician Marcel Danesi, is documented that the word "icon" is a "term of religious origin" and "arguably used for the first time in celebrity culture to describe the American pop singer Madonna".
[170] A similar situation occurred in Florida, United States circa 1995, when a bus featured an advertisement of Madonna over a Virgin Mary iconography and caused Catholic League's reactions.
[172] An assistant art professor from the University of Tampa, used Madonna and Elvis Presley in an exhibition displayed in Italy to show how popular culture "is becoming a religion for some people".
[10] According to medievalists Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan, in The Year's Work in Medievalism, 2002, Madonna is mentioned in Supernatural Visions (1991), where she is described as "both the incorrigible Whore of Babylon and the simple sinner".
Shaul Magid, a religious scholar, wrote in American Post-Judaism (2013), heard about rabbis in Reform and Conservative synagogues citing in their discourses, the singer, Homer, Plato, Buddha, Muhammad, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. or the Dalai Lama.
[181] Graham Howes, a sociologist of religion, explored in The Art of the Sacred (2006), the "altered" meanings, describing "a strong case could be made for the dominant imagery of contemporary Western culture being neither primarily visual nor verbal but essentially audiovisual —the singer Madonna, rather than the madonna—.
[186] Scholars in Queer Religion (2011), wrote: "Since Madonna's time in the media spotlight, we are several cultural cycles removed from the idea that traditional religious imagery points directly and unambiguously to the divine".
[189] In decrying Lady Gaga's mimicry of Madonna, Bill Donohue president of the US Catholic League acknowledges that "religious" symbolism already has an autonomous, secular system of meaning in popular culture.
[187] Catholic theologian Tom Beaudoin, whom described Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video as "irreverent spirituality",[190] argues in Virtual Faith (1998) that "pop music has become the amniotic fluid of contemporary society.
[202] Similarly, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music (2017) by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg, Madonna is credited with ushering Indochic, and the resignifications of Hindu symbols like the bindi and henna, practices like yoga, meditation and the language Sanskrit as "fashionable and cool" in her generation.
[207] By 2015, American educator and theologian Robert E. Van Voorst remarked Internet searches for "Madonna" and "Kabbalah" returning more than 695,000 hits on February of that year, and which led him to conclude it "remains strong".
[225] In Mediating Faiths (2016), Joy Kooi-Chin Tong wrote that Madonna, Microsoft and McDonald's, represented a "fierce competition" for religious leaders in Singapore to retain their followers' loyalty.
[236] Conversely, author of Transgressive Corporeality (1995), said that Madonna created "a religion of the simulacrum" by mocking the traditional meaning of the symbols of Catholicism, and reducing them to vehicles for the evocation of sexual feeling.
[238] The central dichotomy she inevitably invokes is that of the virgin and the whore [...] Indeed, many critics have taken her use of religious imagery to be a prime example of what Fredric Jameson calls "blank pastiche": the symbols are seen as detached from their traditional contexts and thus as ceasing to signify.
