Passion Plays
While there have been more than a few thoughtful reviews of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion,” most have declared that its spectacle of torture is an anomaly within the Christian faith.
Would that it were so.
In fact, Christianity has always fostered cults with ritualistic torture. From the bloody re-enactments of the Passion that continue to take place today in the Philippines to the long line of saints and martyrs whose claim to fame is the gruesome violence with which they were dispensed from this earth.
Even beyond such carnal reminders of the sacrifice that confirmed God’s love for humanity, there is yet another tradition of mutilation in Christianity — particularly in Catholicism : that of self-mortification or private masochism.
From such deprivations as anorexic fasting to the wearing of spiked chains around one’s thigh, there are virtually no forms of self-inflicted torture that some Christians haven’t tried.
Of course, there is no mention of self-mortification in the Christian Gospels, but that hasn’t stopped thousands upon thousands from endeavouring to find the pleasure of salvation through masochistic pain.
Within this dark tradition, Gibson’s motion picture is a mere technological innovation — not a cultural turning point. “The Passion” is but a DVD-ready, surround-sound addition to the panoply of instruments already available for those believers who wish to encounter Christ through their own self-destruction.
Mind you, this is not a strictly Christian impulse. We have recently been treated to the sight of Shia muslim men, devotees to an Imam Hussein, celebrating the holiday of Ashura by beating their heads bloody with a sharp stick. Such celebrations may strike some Americans as macabre and, yet, there is the inconvenient fact of “The Passion”’s commercial success.
To date, Gibson’s adaptation of the snappiest torture scenes from his “Lethal Weapon” series into a the Greatest Story Ever Prefaced has earned a tidy sum of $200 million. Indeed, some American Christian churches are even offering non-churchgoers free tickets to see “The Passion” in a drive to boost membership.
What strikes me as particularly timely about this last effort is how clearly it mirrors the recruitment efforts of certain fundamentalist Islamic sects: “Sit and watch this video replete with horrifying scenes of terror. Do you feel that sense of disgust and anguish in the pit of your stomach? That’s your faith. That means you are a believer. Join us in celebrating that feeling.”
Do recruitment efforts that use violence to instill religious fervor suggest that we, too, are locked in an embrace with nihilistic fundamentalism? Are we Americans also capable of unwitting acts of mayhem in the name of a higher purpose?
How else could America, supposedly the most religious country in the industrial world, be so cavalier about visiting its awesome military wrath, its most sophisticated killing machines, upon a people across the globe?
Surely, there is little in our current religiosity which makes it taboo to kill thousands of people in a land most of our citizens cannot even find on a map. On the contrary, our faith may be such that acts of war make sense, not for practical or strategic reasons, but as righteous deeds.
The invasion of Iraq was justified as a response to the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001. And, yet, this symmetry was a fiction — given what we now know about the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, the empty space between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda — and, as such, it was largely a theological construct rather than an expression of effective foreign policy.
The President asked the American people to shed their blood — and the blood of many times more Iraqis — in the name of the American Way. If this is not a religious rather than a rational impulse, I don’t know how to distinguish the two.
The fact is, fundamentalism is enjoying a heyday around the world and there is no more of it in the Third World than there is in the contemporary seat of earthly power and wealth: the United States.
Why?
Mark C. Taylor, an American theologian, argues that the insecurity of modernity — from the loss of the gold standard in currency to the end of the Cold War, from the introduction of genetic manipulation to the rise of the Internet — is forcing many people to adopt the rigid standards and beliefs of medieval cults.
From this perspective, Gibson’s movie — dubbed “The Gospel accoding to Mad Max” by one commentator — is an appropriate sign of the times: a worldly, materialist, high-tech and Hollywood response to the very anxieties produced by our worldly, materialist, high-tech and Hollywood-inflected culture.
But, what is not as clear to me, is to what extent the political culture of the U.S. today, the same culture that gave President George W. Bush permission to invade Iraq, is also influenced by fundamentalism.
Is our violent faith (or faith in violence) a crucial element of our current love-affair with “pre-emptive” wars?
postscript: When faith kills
Having written on “The Passion” in greater detail for the University of Chicago Press, I now believe the analysis above could go further in linking masochism to sadism and, perhaps, one of the crucial questions at the heart of Christianity: is ours a cult of violence or peace?