<% IssueDate = "3/15/04" IssueCategory = "Viewpoint" %> GayToday.com - Viewpoint
Viewpoint

'The Passion' of the Culture Wars


By Robert N. Minor

The Passion of the Christ is fanning the flames of the Culture Wars in the United States The divide over Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ is as passionate and cavernous as any of the other divisions of the so-called "Culture Wars" in America. To the battles over full acceptance of LGBT people, women's reproductive choice, displaying the Ten Commandments in government buildings, faith-based funding, and all the others, add the battle over this new contribution to pop culture.

This isn't surprising. Back in 1901, humanitarian, Christian theologian, missionary, and medical doctor Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus demonstrated that the Jesus one finds when one reads the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament tells us more about the seeker than history.

Since then, a gung-ho salesman wrote The Greatest Salesman that Ever Lived, the era of hallucinogenic drugs produced The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and now the decades of slasher movies, video game violence, and blood-spewn, angry masculinity-seeking-its-revenge pictures, give us a picture of a Jesus graphically, often in slow motion, tortured, ripped-apart, and slowly killed, that could be "Lethal Weapon VI: An Angry Masculine God Tortures His Son."

At first glance, what Gibson has done is to select the last twelve hours of Jesus' life as portrayed in three chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, one of the four canonical New Testament accounts. But he has to turn verses that don't emphasize such torture into a full-length Roman chain saw massacre. His Jesus, it seems, must suit his purpose: an apparently right-wing, pre-Vatican II Catholicism with an emphasis on "the Body and Blood," a history of anti-Semitism, and a siege mentality that today believes even the current, conservative Pope threatens its comfortable Truth.

So, even with minimal flashbacks, Gibson's conservative approach leaves out Jesus' messages that value the poor, the outcastes, and the other people who seemed queer to society, or his preaching that criticized riches like those that are being made from this movie. Gibson isn't interested in Jesus as teacher, prophet or man, only Jesus as the sacrificial symbol.

If Gibson had filled the movie in with history, he would have known that the Empire placed Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor in charge, in that position because he was known as a ruthless tyrant who would crucify hundreds of Jews. He wouldn't have turned Pilate into an innocent pawn with a kindly wife. He wouldn't have let the also ruthless King Herod off the hook. He wouldn't have made the Jewish leaders dark and stereotyped as they were in medieval "passion plays" while seeing to it that Jesus, the Jewish man, clearly looked like a white, European.

Instead, to make this into his own full-length movie confession, Gibson does what Protestant fundamentalists hate Catholics for -- he relies for most of the film on the visions of an 18th-19th century nun whom some Catholic theologians believe had more visions than any other Catholic saint. Anne Catherine Emmerich's The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus, not the Gospels, could be considered the real screenplay for Gibson's film. Her book describes in the gruesome images this film portrays, the "details" of the horrific sufferings of Jesus she believes she saw 1800 years after the historical events.

Many reviewers have called this unrelenting, graphic portrayal of the turning of a man into little more than pulp, blood pouring from him until it seems to surround the viewer, pornographic, fetishistic, and sadistic. Some have pointed out that absolutely no horror film with such scenes would be rated anything less than NC-17.

Critic Robert Butler called it hypocrisy that such a film would be rated "R." Ratings boards maintain that their ratings are only about what should be concerned to parents, not content, but they caved in based on this film's content. Columnist William Safire observed that the film's religious content provides a loophole for displaying such graphic violence, one that lowers the bar against future film violence.

But to be a blockbuster also requires superb marketing. Gibson hired a marketing company specializing in religious organizations that used a grassroots, religious sell. It sent trailers for the movie to thousands of pastors, church leaders, and church groups. Pre-screenings for local pastors the Saturday before its release, allowed them to talk about it in their churches before it opened.

Add to this, effective manipulation of the media with an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer and the countless local media outlets feeling they're obligated to report everything about the film.

The Cultural War was reflected in the media's responses. On the one side are the reporters who don't ask questions about historical accuracy of religious depictions. They reflect the country's general intolerance of nonbelievers. On the other side were the critics that the right-wing writes off as representing "the liberal media." 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney asked: "How many millions of dollars does it look as if you're going to make off the crucifixion of Christ?"

The result was that the film opened everywhere, not just in "select theaters." There was no doubt that Gibson would not only make back the millions he invested, but greatly increase the riches of all involved.

The appeal of the film also involves some messages everyone in our culture has received regarding these events. No matter how one relates to any religion, the interpretation we received from the culture around us was: "He went through this for you." Few come to the film without having been told how to interpret the message of the blood and gore at some level.
Media response to The Passion of the Christ also continues to heat up the Culture War, including Andy Rooney's question to Mel Gibson: 'How many millions of dollars does it look as if you're going to make off the crucifixion of the Christ?'

So, the filmmaker has used effective secular techniques to draw people into the film and then in that vulnerable moment enforce the sacrificial understanding of the historical Jesus. Drowned out is the fact that this is the most conservative and least justice-oriented interpretation of the many in the 2000-year history of theologians seeking the meaning of it all.

If Schweitzer were updating his work today, he might point out that the phenomenon of the Jesus of The Passion represents two levels of interpretation. The first is that of Mel Gibson who's side in the "Culture Wars" has been consistently to the right of even mainstream Roman Catholicism. The second level is that of the viewers, most of whom will represent the right-wing and find in the film what they've been taught.

There will be other viewers who've heard the religious right's interpretation. For them the film may be a cause of conversion or revulsion. And there will be others who will be hurt and angry, seeing The Passion of the Christ as a story being used as another salvo in the war to return our culture to one that is non-inclusive, insensitive to others, even theocratic, one that restores the privileges of the religion of extreme right-wing politics.
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D. is Professor or Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. His Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society (HumanityWorks, 2003), was named one of the "Best Gay Books of 2003" and his Scared Straight (HumanityWorks!, 2001) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Independent Publisher Book Awards. He may be reached at www.fairnessproject.org
For More ...
Related Stories
The Passion of the Christ

The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism

Jack Nichols Talks Back to the Fundamentalists



Related Sites
The Passion of the Christ

Seattle Catholic: Culture Wars Over "The Passion"

60 Minutes