CAMP Spirit

Because I’m a Christian minister, lots of folks have been asking me what I think of Mel Gibson’s new film, The Passion of the Christ. I am quick to say that I have not seen it and haven’t made up my mind whether or not I will see it. I do have definite opinions about it, however. No...strike that. My opinions are mainly about the hype surrounding the film, rather than the film itself.

I look out my office window in Midway Center and see every parking space filled, along with several yellow school buses that have brought teens, young adults, and seniors to see the film. "What’s the big deal?" I ask myself. This isn’t the first time the story has been told. In my own lifetime I remember King of Kings, The Greatest Story Every Told, and The Last Temptation of Christ, as well as the Jesus of Nazareth miniseries on TV. It can’t be that the "text" is new, so it must be the "context." What’s different this time?

I think what’s different this time is the fact that the White House is occupied by a rabid "born-again" Christian who does not hesitate to thrust his faith into the public square, making it safe for groups of what I call "christo-fascists" to prosper and monopolize the airwaves and discussions of what it means to be truly religious. Case in point: I received a beautiful, full-color postcard from a well-known independent fundamentalist church offering free tickets to the Gibson movie. This mailing must have cost thousands of dollars to produce and mail, let alone the cost of the tickets themselves. And all to publicize a film about a person—himself a part of the landless peasant class of rural Galilee—who gave food away to the poor and told the rich that to be his followers they must sell everything they had and give the money to the poor. Interesting.

You might think that it is a bit vulgar of me to refer to these folks as "christo-fascists," but I can’t think of a better term. They want to lift up ONE view of the Christ as normative, as though there were no other opinions or beliefs possible. The headline on the mailer I received says it all: "Dying was his reason for living." What this ignores is that there are many views of the doctrine of Atonement other than the orthodox one that "God the Father sent His Son to die for our sins." This limited take on Jesus Christ ignores his life, his interaction with the oppressed and marginalized of his day, his ethical and moral teachings, and his capacity for reflecting the unconditional love of the God he believed in. As I continue to maintain in my ministry, if God is God, surely "He" could have figured out a way to save humanity other than through divine child abuse; this kind of God is pathological, bloodthirsty, and vengeful, created in the image of human beings.

Moreover, thinking like this exalts Christian exclusivity and denigrates other faith traditions that have been around for millennia. Progressive Christians of good conscience today are acknowledging that there are many paths to the Divine, that Spirit has manifested Itself/Herself/Himself in manifold ways throughout time. In a postmodern, pluralistic world it makes no sense to think that a Force/Power/Creative Element would will the majority of Its creatures to exist without fulfillment or wholeness (the root meaning of "salvation").

When westerners lived in a world where everyone looked, talked, believed, and thought alike, perhaps exclusivity made sense; but in a world and at a time when we can meet in the flesh (or see on TV) wonderful people of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, and Wiccan beliefs (to name only a few), it seems counterproductive to trot out the old canard about there being Only One Way to God. History has shown us otherwise, whether it was through martyrs and survivors of a Holocaust perpetrated by a Christian madman and supported by Protestant Churches and the Vatican, the lynchings and torture carried out by Christians of the Ku Klux Klan, or the brutal modern-day "crucifixion" of Matthew Shepard, left on a fence to die as a symbol much like the crosses with which the Romans lined the roads in ancient Palestine.

I believe that spirituality in the 21st century MUST come to grips with the religious pluralism and diversity we see around us, and the atmosphere I see resulting from one film director’s vision of his faith scares me. I urge those who have even bothered reading a column with "Spirit" in the title to do some thinking about what Spirit should mean to you and to our world.

For Further Reading on Religious Pluralism:

• Chester Gillis, Pluralism: A New Paradigm for Theology (Eerdmans, 1998)
• John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (Yale, 1989)
• Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Fortress, 1987)
• Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, Divinity & Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism (Abingdon, 2003)