Passionate Ranting
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ has stirred up all sorts of controversy in recent days, starkly revealing the great divide in modern America between secularists and believers. The denunciation of the film by some has reached a level that we can only describe as shrill hysteria. Since, as yet, neither of us has actually seen the movie, we will limit ourselves to observations regarding what the debate about the movie reveals with respect to conflicting views of religion in our society.
Christopher Hitchens, a curmudgeonly and glib columnist for Vanity Fair, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the movie both in print and on talk shows. (The following quotations from him can be found at here or https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4515474/.) The first thing one notes is the intense level of vituperation about the movie; it seems impossible for many to speak about it dispassionately. It’s not just that Hitchens and other like-minded critics don’t like The Passion; they positively despise it. The movie, Hitchens assures us, is “devotional cinematic pornography,” and a project of “general moral squalor.” It is “ghastly,” “rel[ying] for its effect almost entirely on sadomasochistic male narcissism,” with a “fascist aesthetic style” (whatever that might be). Needless to say, the film is not only “anti-Semitic,” but “bigoted and superstitious and fanatical.” It is, to summarize, quite simply one of the worst movies ever made.
Hitchens is, by the way, not satisfied with limiting his opining to matters of film. Hitchens the theologian holds forth as well, with this insightful description of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement: “We can’t make ourselves complicit in a crime we didn’t commit [the crucifixion] that took place as a human sacrifice in the first century. If you can believe that, you can believe anything. Christianity further invites you to say, if you will plead guilty to something you didn’t do, we will forgive you for all the sins you did commit.” It does? If this is the level of Hitchens’s theological understanding of Christianity, it is little wonder that he is an atheist.
But it’s not just that the film is bad; its maker, too, is essentially evil-though why no one seems to have noticed this from Gibson’s earlier work like Lethal Weapon and Braveheart is unclear. According to Hitchens, Gibson is a “pseudomasculine,” “sadomasochistic” “closeted homosexual,” indulging in “massively repressed homoerotic fantasies.” It is not just that Gibson made a poor choice in subject matter for his film; he is a “fascist” and “anti-Semitic by nature.” And, did we mention that Gibson is also a “coward, a bully, a bigmouth, and a queer-basher,” as well as a “crazy” “ignorant peasant and a superstition monger”? All this psychological insight into Gibson derived from a movie about the trial and crucifixion of Christ?
How does Hitchens know The Passion is anti-Semitic? Because, for one thing, “every Jew in the film looks like a caricature Jew, swarthy, hook-nosed, conspiratorial, the old stereotype. Jesus, who was one of them [i.e. a Jew], of course, looks as if he is from Finland or Iceland or Minnesota.” Is Hitchens unaware that the film was made in Italy and that most of the extras are Italians? Is he claiming that Gibson intentionally added swarthy skin-tones and prosthetic hooked noses to all these Italian extras? Or-assuming that Hitchens is not seeing something that really isn’t there-do Italians just happen to look the way they look? Did Gibson intentionally pick only non-“Jewish-looking” Italian extras to play the Roman soldiers? One also wonders why the film is anti-Semitic but not anti-Italian. After all, it is Roman soldiers who actually torture and crucify Jesus in the movie.
Why, we wonder, hasn’t the rabid Christian mob– incited by this overtly anti-Semitic movie-taken to the streets to slaughter Jews? Well, according to Hitchens, the mob are simply too stupid to recognize anti-Semitism when they see it. “It’s a good thing a lot of people don’t seem to notice this [anti-Semitism]” in the movie, he opines, and therefore “don’t draw those kinds of [anti-Semitic] conclusions”-the kinds of conclusions that Gibson supposedly wanted them to draw. One wonders precisely how anti-Semitic a movie can be if almost none of people who have seen it notice the anti-Semitism?
The failure of even the slightest manifestation of anti-Semitic hysteria to sweep America in the wake of millions seeing the movie does not dampen the ardor and certainty of the critics. The real danger, they insist, will occur when the movie reaches Europe and the Middle East. According to Hitchens, the full anti-Semitic impact of the film will rear its ugly head “when shown in the Middle East where we have already seen many extremist Muslims showing interest in the movie, because, as they keep saying openly-and you can look this up-let’s get together with our Christian brothers, because we must let them know we have a common enemy, the Jew”-as if Muslim extremists have never indulged in anti-Semitism before the making of The Passion. Claims that the movie will move millions of Muslims to anti-Semitic fever are particularly bizarre, since, in fact, Muslims don’t believe the Passion ever actually happened. The Qur’an takes a rather Docetic view of the crucifixion: Jesus did not really die by crucifixion, but was replaced by a “likeness” or “double” (see, for example, Qur’an 4.155-159). How are extremist Muslims to be outraged by a film depicting the crucifixion of Jesus, which they do not believe really happened?
Some of the critics of the film claim that they object to its violence. While the violence of The Passion is certainly problematic for many, that is not the essential issue. That claim is belied by the fact that none of these same critics were ever seen vociferously objecting to Quentin Tarrantino’s recent ultra-violent Kill Bill-nor, for that matter, to any of his other movies. Why is it only when an explicit depiction of the crucifixion is filmed that these people notice the problem of violence in Hollywood?
Seldom, if ever, has the making of an allegedly bad movie created such controversy. Which leads one to suspect that the real issue is religion, not cinema. The schism created by the film is quite clearly between Christians and secularists and atheists, and represents part of the larger, ongoing culture wars. Hitchens is refreshingly forthcoming with his views on this matter. “I am atheist. I’m not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Protestant. I’m not anti-Greek Orthodox or anti-Judaism or anti-Islamic. I just think that all religious belief is sinister and infantile and belongs to the backward childhood of the race.” (It is puzzling, however, why someone who believes that a Jew was the divine Son of God can be considered anti-Semitic, while, on the other hand, someone is not anti-Semitic if he believes that the most cherished doctrine of Judaism-that there is a God-is “sinister and infantile.”)
The real problem is that many of the critics of the movie feel that religion in and of itself is inherently irrational and repugnant, and they particularly despise the message of Christianity. For many of the critics, Christianity itself is inherently anti-Semitic, and a film about the crucifixion cannot be other than anti-Semitic. It is not that they don’t like the movie; they don’t like the Gospels.
We want to emphasize that anti-Semitism is a real, dangerous, and repugnant phenomenon. It should be opposed wherever it is found. And historically there has been a close connection between anti-Semitism and some medieval Christian interpretations of the crucifixion. The essential issue is the question of deicide-the killing of God. The basis of the claim is Matthew 27:24-25, where Pilate says, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person,” to which the Jewish mob replies, “His blood be on us, and on our children.” (Incidentally, this text remains in the movie, but only in Aramaic; it is not translated in the English subtitles.) If, the pernicious idea claims, the Jews killed God, their children deserve to be punished for it. Throughout history, this concept has been used as a justification for anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews.
However, the claims surrounding the deicide charge have been formally repudiated by the Catholic Church, and, we believe, have no legitimate place in Christian thought. A doctrine of perpetual, collective Jewish guilt is certainly not intended in the New Testament (which was, after all, written almost entirely by Jews). The idea that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children derives from the Jewish law, where God “visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Ex 20.5, 34.7; Dt 5.9), and is related to the broader Near Eastern concept of communal responsibility for individual behavior.
In Matthew, this passage has prophetic reference to the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 that Jesus predicted (Mt 24.2; Mk 13.2; Lk 21.6), and which happened during the lives of the children of those who crucified Jesus. Furthermore, the context of the Jewish law limits such communal culpability to the children of specific sinners (not the entire nation), and only extends for a generation or two. Moreover, execution of the punishment was reserved for God, not man. The New Testament provides no justification for holding all Jews, throughout history, responsible for the crucifixion, and therefore deserving of persecution. While we should rightly repudiate this malicious idea, it makes no sense to repudiate the New Testament accounts of the trial and crucifixion because some Christians in the past have misconstrued the New Testament and used it to justify their persecution of Jews.
There is obviously much, much more to what is going on here than that an allegedly nasty man in Hollywood made an allegedly bad movie. Unlike Hitchens, we feel unqualified to comment on whether Mel Gibson is a good or bad person. The Passion of the Christ might be a bad movie. Indeed, it might be a very bad movie. But if being a bad person and making a bad movie were grounds for expulsion from civil society, there would be few people left in Hollywood. Various figures involved in the movie and entertainment industry have been convicted of murder, rape, child abuse, beating women, prostitution, drug abuse, pornography, robbery, and fraud, to say nothing of rampant sexual promiscuity. None of them has ever been reviled with such utter abandon as Mel Gibson. Gibson’s crime? Making a faithful movie about Jesus.
