Lloyd Cooke stirred up a wasp's nest when he labelled the cultural wake for the great Herb McKenley 'pagan'.
"Our supposedly Christian nation," he wrote in "utter disgust and disappointment ... ought to express its strong disapproval of the use of our tax dollars to promote anti-Christian activities in our name".
The fundamental weakness in Cooke's argument is the presumption (double meaning intended) that Jamaica is a 'Christian' country. Even the Europeans who kept Africans in abject slavery here were, in the main, hardly Christians except in a very loose cultural sense, as the reports of the missionaries, to whom Cooke appeals, will attest.
Cooke lashes the pagan worship of ancestral spirits. His critics might want to point out, however, that the worship of ancestral spirits is also deeply embedded in elements of Christianity where the preferred label is 'the veneration of saints'.
clipped from: www.jamaica-gleaner.com