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It's funny how, well into my teenage years, I used to be fairly religious. It was in a passive sense, of course, and in a liberal sense--the United Church of Canada is theologically rather liberal. At times, it seemed to me like I was the only person in the class who took Sunday school seriously, in the sense of actually listening to the teacher and doing my readings. By the time I was 15, though, my family stopped going to church without any significant discussion. Inasmuch as I'm offspring of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, I suppose that can be taken as proof of the correlation between interreligious marriages and low religious practice, though the question of whether this is cause or effect remains to be answered in my specific case. Likely it's both.
I've been following the controversy over Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ at a distance, not particularly committed. (Easter's a time when you receive sugary treats and some small gifts, like your birthday. My family are such heathens.) Today, though, I was visiting The New Republic when I noticed a few interesting articles.
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It's interesting to observe this conflict in Canada's southern neighbour, even given my personally necessary attachment to the "godless liberal elite" (or, at least, "liberal elite") feared by the theocrats down below. I admit to being a fan of many of the sentiments in Skunk Anansie's "Selling Jesus." It's a global conflict, really, between rising Islamist and Hindutva sentiment globally and, as Philip Jenkins has suggested, the development of Christian fundamentalisms in the Third World.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serod's review made me start to wonder how this film will be appropriated by these Christian fundamentalisms, as some sort of icon for the epoch of electronic media.
I don't think I'll go see The Passion of the Christ. I do admit to some concern at what many of the people who see it will make of it. If he (or He) suffered that horribly, after all, then anyone who refuses to accept the Word must be someone rather extraordinarily hard-hearted. Might not some people think it suitable to chastise these people?
I've been following the controversy over Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ at a distance, not particularly committed. (Easter's a time when you receive sugary treats and some small gifts, like your birthday. My family are such heathens.) Today, though, I was visiting The New Republic when I noticed a few interesting articles.
( Read more... )
It's interesting to observe this conflict in Canada's southern neighbour, even given my personally necessary attachment to the "godless liberal elite" (or, at least, "liberal elite") feared by the theocrats down below. I admit to being a fan of many of the sentiments in Skunk Anansie's "Selling Jesus." It's a global conflict, really, between rising Islamist and Hindutva sentiment globally and, as Philip Jenkins has suggested, the development of Christian fundamentalisms in the Third World.
serod's review made me start to wonder how this film will be appropriated by these Christian fundamentalisms, as some sort of icon for the epoch of electronic media.I don't think I'll go see The Passion of the Christ. I do admit to some concern at what many of the people who see it will make of it. If he (or He) suffered that horribly, after all, then anyone who refuses to accept the Word must be someone rather extraordinarily hard-hearted. Might not some people think it suitable to chastise these people?
