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rfmcdonaldIt'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.
Leon Wieseltier's essay "The Worship of Blood" is fairly scathingly critical of Gibson's new film. Two critical paragraphs excerpted below.
Paula Frederiksen, also in The New Republic, has commented on how this gory depiction fits into a deeper medieval tradition of demonstrating just how horribly Jesus suffered, the better to make it clear how culpable all human beings are in his suffering. Expanding on this theme, Michelle Cottle observes how, in early 21st century America, "[r]eligious conservatives feel constantly menaced by a godless liberal elite--headquartered in Hollywood, or maybe New York--intent on undermining all that they hold dear. (Just witness the mass ecstasy conservative Christians are experiencing over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: At last, a pop-culture product that shares their values!) Social liberals, meanwhile, are convinced that an army of religious zealots--led by Ralph Reed or Jerry Falwell--is looking to turn America into a hard-line theocracy à la prewar Afghanistan. And since each side suspects the other of furiously plotting to impose its worldview on everyone, both must constantly keep their guards up, and neither can bear the idea of letting the other just do its own thing."
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.
Leon Wieseltier's essay "The Worship of Blood" is fairly scathingly critical of Gibson's new film. Two critical paragraphs excerpted below.
The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence. The notion that there is something spiritually exalting about the viewing of it is quite horrifying. The viewing of The Passion of the Christ is a profoundly brutalizing experience. Children must be protected from it. (If I were a Christian, I would not raise a Christian child on this.) Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.
[. . .]
When a non-Christian [. . .] reads the Gospels, he is filled with a deep and genuine pity for the man who endured this savagery, and for his mother. (Jesus' mother is infinitely more affecting than his father.) In its meticulous representation of Jesus' excruciations, Gibson's film is designed to inspire such pity. The spectacle of this man's doom should be unbearable to a good heart. Yet pity is precisely what The Passion of the Christ cannot inspire, because the faith upon which it is based vitiates the sympathetic emotions. Why feel pity, if this suffering is a blessing? Why mourn, if his reward for his torment, and the world's reward, is ordained? If Jesus is not exactly human, then it is not exactly dehumanization that we are watching, and that we are deploring.
Paula Frederiksen, also in The New Republic, has commented on how this gory depiction fits into a deeper medieval tradition of demonstrating just how horribly Jesus suffered, the better to make it clear how culpable all human beings are in his suffering. Expanding on this theme, Michelle Cottle observes how, in early 21st century America, "[r]eligious conservatives feel constantly menaced by a godless liberal elite--headquartered in Hollywood, or maybe New York--intent on undermining all that they hold dear. (Just witness the mass ecstasy conservative Christians are experiencing over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: At last, a pop-culture product that shares their values!) Social liberals, meanwhile, are convinced that an army of religious zealots--led by Ralph Reed or Jerry Falwell--is looking to turn America into a hard-line theocracy à la prewar Afghanistan. And since each side suspects the other of furiously plotting to impose its worldview on everyone, both must constantly keep their guards up, and neither can bear the idea of letting the other just do its own thing."
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?
