My predictable post-election essay is over on Nonviolence.org, “Four More Years”. Aside from the politics, I’ve been fascinated how the election was finally framed in terms of “moral issues” and how this measurement somehow translated to support for President Bush.
Friends and other lefty Christians need to take the “moral and faith issues” question as personal and corporate queries. (As usual Beppeblog has a good post about this, “Tough numbers for a fag like me…”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/tough-numbers-for-fags-like-me.html). If someone had come up to me after I voted yesterday and asked me what I thought was the most important issue in this election, I would have replied “the war”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php. The answer would mask the fact that for me war is a moral issue defined by a deep passionate faith (a deep passionate Christian faith). It’s too easy for me to talk around my faith though, and to frame the debate in secular language. I tell myself I’m being more inclusive when I use pragmatic rationales, but in reality I’m hiding from my listeners my true understanding of Christ’s work in the world and our role in His covenant.
A majority of voters are suspicious of us East Coast liberals and they should be. I just talked to a Friend buying a book for a Bush supporter who, she explained, “doesn’t understand the complexity of life.” Talk about judgemental! Would you support someone who thought you were a idiot if you didn’t support Kerry? The Democrats are starting to look at the turn-off of this form of elitism; from today’s _New York Times_ (of course, here _I_ am, quoting from the official publication of elite America):
bq. “Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter got elected because they were comfortable with their faith,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide. “What happened was that a part of the electorate came open to what Clinton and Carter had to say on everything else–health care, the environment, whatever–because they were very comfortable that Clinton and Carter did not distain the way these people lived their lives, but respected them.”
He added: “We need a nominee and a party that is comfortable with faith and values. And if we have one, then all the hard work we’ve done on Social Security or America’s place in the world or college education can be heard. But people aren’t going to hear what we say until they know that we don’t approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment.”
h3. War and tolerance as moral issues
Why am I not more explicit about my faith and my politics? Why don’t I say that I voted against Bush because I question his moral judgement and his faith? Why don’t I say that war is a Christian issue and that all Christians should be against war? Why don’t I say that charity and love is a Christian issue and that all Christians should honor loving same-sex relationships?
The Revealer has an article called Gay Marriage, GOP secret weapon. The author recently wrote a book about religion in America and concluded that the “greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality.” But here’s a telling observation from his interviews of Christians:
bq.. Most of these people are surprisingly abstract in their thinking. There may be a certain disingenuousness to the popular anti-homosexuality mantra, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” but nearly everyone we met really did distinguish their hatred of homosexuality from their dealings with homosexuals.
How do I know? Because many, if not most, thought that Peter and I were a gay couple, by virtue of the facts that we�re writers and had come from New York City. We�re neither a couple, nor gay, but there never seemed to be a polite way to say that, so we didn�t, and still some of the great homosexual-haters of America welcomed us into their homes and their churches and their temples.
p. This does mean the laws are abstract and we shouldn’t worry. I’m sure there were plenty of Germans in the 1920s who could work themselves into a lather against Jews but be good friends with actual Jews. This sort of casual bigotry grows cancerous when government gets involved. When Hitler took power it was all too easy for them to pretend that the obvious wasn’t happening.
In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?
The most striking moment of all three debates came when the top lieutenant of the most loyalty-obsessed administration in modern history said he disagreed with his president on the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage. Vice President Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter and that experience forced him to see the human consequence of these otherwise-abstract laws. Both Cheney and his debate opponent “John Edwards are United Methodists”:http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week745/news.html. What if Edwards had broken the debate rules, walked over to Cheney and asked that they use his ninety second response time as an opportunity to offer up a joint prayer on love and charity? They could have held hands (gasp!) and could have turned the issue around right then. What good is faith if we don’t witness to it when it counts?
h3. Elsewhere on the Net
* “Gary Hart: Why the Personal Shouldn’t be Political”:http://nytimes.com/2004/11/08/opinion/08hart.html
Who would have thought that the Howard Dean of the 1980s would be so incisive about the issues of religion? I didn’t realize how religious a man he is and he explains why: “As a candidate for public office, I chose not to place my beliefs in the center of my appeal for support because I am also a Jeffersonian; that is to say, I believe that one’s religious beliefs — though they will and should affect one’s outlook on public policy and life — are personal and that America is a secular, not a theocratic, republic.… Declarations of “faith” are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy.” Found via “The Revealer”:http://www.therevealer.org/
* “Beppeblogs’s roundup of post-election talk”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/inspiration-about-elections-beyond.html
* “Omri Elisha: God Save the Queen”:http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001162.php
An explanation of Christian Evangelical appeal of Bush, and why for them qualifications aren’t as important as faithfulness (a principle any Quaker should agree with). “The Esther story, and that passage in particular, is read by evangelicals as a sign of the individual�s role in God�s sovereign designs for human history. They see it not as a story of heroism, but of instrumentalism; Esther is a vehicle, a tool. Mordecai�s statement (�Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this�) sounds like grandeur, but for evangelicals it is read as a radical call to self-abnegation.” These are Quaker themes too, and there are possibilities for “Liberal Quakers and Evangelicals to connect on these issus”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/emerging_church.php.
* The Friends Committee on National Legislation has issued a “Minute on Moral Values”:http://www.fcnl.org/legpolcy/moral_109th_printer.htm. It’s kind of the predictable press release you might expect but it’s good to see them weigh in.

I keep reading inflammatory pieces about Mel Gibson’s movie _The Passion of Christ._ The basic gist is that anyone who focuses on the suffering of Jesus’s last days is inherently anti-Semitic. Because medieval passion plays stirred up anti-Semitism, all good Christians should stay away from the story and should stay away from Gibson’s movie.
I haven’t seen the movie (update: yes I have, see below), but I find it hard to imagine that there’s any anti-Semitism in it that matches the anti-Catholicism of Gibson’s detractors. To focus on Christ’s sufferings is to explain one of the most important metaphors of Christianity, especially of Roman Catholicism. I went to a Catholic college where every room had a crucifix–Jesus nailed to the cross. It was very different from the empty crosses I had always seen growing up as a pseudo-Protestant, but this difference is an important difference of focus between Catholics and Protestants. Is the most iconic act of Jesus his suffering for our sins (his time on the cross) or his resurrection (his disappearance from the cross)? As a good Catholic, Gibson is going to focus on the torture, on the pain, on the cruelty and on the suffering and to imply that he’s doing so just to shock is to miss the whole point. It is the very gruesomeness that makes the sacrifice so meaningful and it is the horror that makes the resurrection even more of miracle.
While we need to be aware of anti-Semitism we also need to be aware of this country’s history of anti-Catholicism. My alma mater is situated twelve miles outside Philadelphia because its first home was burned to the ground by anti-Catholic rioters (of course the Irish Catholics killed, looted and burned out African Americans in New York City a generation later). My Italian wife is related to Aunt Jemima (I kid you not) because in the 1920s Italians were considered half-black (and presumably because white audiences preferred a half-black performer to an all-black one). Lots of the anti-prohibition societies and reform societies of the early 20th century were fueled in part by an abhorrence of the garlic-eating immigrant mobs with their too-colorful clothing and their religious obsession with suffering and iconic excess. Much of this WASPy distaste and aloofness lingers in the anti-Gibson pieces.
It’s all a shame. This is just a movie folks. But because it’s become so polarized we can’t talk about it without taking sides. And the sides have nothing to do with the movie itself or its merits or detractions, but are instead positions in a proxy cultural war about religion. A recent piece by one prominent religious essayist argued that good Christians don’t focus on Christ’s suffering. For the last fifty years liberal Christians have focused on the positives, on that empty cross, and Gibson’s movie is a challenge to that. It’s a challenge that reminds liberals that suffering is also a central part of the story. For those who would demote Jesus to a merely human teacher, on the scale of Abraham Lincoln, _The Passion of Christ_ is a reminder that for many Christians the suffering and miracles of his life is quite beyond anything else in that has ever happened in human history.
This movie is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down over the centuries to become little more than feel-good cliches. Today we talk of “The Light” as if it’s some sort of ultraviolet grow lamp helping us to become nice big plants. That’s a nice image and George Fox might have appreciated it. But Fox’s “Light of Christ” was also the harsh light of the interrogation room, a light that banished shadows to expose our sins and human failings. It was only after the light had “convicted” us (and that was the terminology) and only after we had given up our human follies to walk only in its power that we would find Christ’s comfort. And that comfort would often be in the midst of our suffering in imitation of Christ, in our persecution by those who would call themselves Christian.
Friends burst onto the scene in seventeenth century England with a radical message: that Christianity had been stolen to serve the power of the state and that only by restoring primitive Christianity could we truly follow God. Today that’s a challenge to both left and right: to those who will use Gibson’s movie as a banner to reinforce their cultural bigotries. On the right, some will surely use _The Passion_ to justify their anti-Semitism. On the left, I see many op-ed writers using it to justify their distaste for anyone who takes their Christian faith too seriously. Mel Gibson is making a movie about his belief. He claims that it’s not anti-Semitic and I’m inclined to believe him, that any bigotry we will see there is conditioned by our gruesome history and not by a deliberate act on Gibson’s part. Why can’t we just accept a believer believing? And why can’t we just watch the movie before arguing about it?
The heart of this debate is this: is Christianity so defiled by centuries of those wrongly tortured in its name that any honest expression of it is bigoted? There are many who will answer on both sides of that question. But Friends are a people born in a time of much wrongful persecution and so for us the answer is actually kind of easy: Christianity has been stolen time and again but we must constantly try to recover it. We do that by telling stories and reaffirming the truths we have no matter who’s critiquing us. We need to engage with our history and with each other. We are often put into a �uncomfortable middle� when we affirm the truths arising out of our peace testimony (opposing a war while still denouncing a dictator) and it seems to me we should have a similar attitude towards Christianity’s past.
Does Mel Gibson cross the line into bigotry? I haven�t seen the movie but I doubt it. All the op-eds against him have argued guilt-by-association and some of the charges against the “cult” or “sect” of traditionalist Catholics are so laughable that it’s pathetic to see them repeated on respected news programs. Gibson is a talented storyteller, one who will choose drama over sensitivity. He�s not averse to pandering to stereotypes to rouse an audience. He�s not a Quaker, that�s for sure. But he is a sincere believer telling a story about his faith. We need more of those. Let�s not picket and boycott someone simply for telling a story that doesn�t fit with the pieties of the modern liberal orthodoxy. Let�s return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort.

h3. Update 3/1: Having Seen the Movie
I’ve seen the movie now. It wasn’t as terrifying as I had feared. As a director, Gibson provides cues as to when the squeamish should look away. About half a dozen times I anticipated a particularly gruesome image and was able to avert my eyes in time. He didn’t need to do this–he knows how to shock audiences and he does have a few moments where he springs us from our seats, but he does play nice and keeps the shocks and goryness separate.
Because the movie tells a familiar story and tries to portray it in realistic terms, it acts as a sort of blank slate ripe for the projection of individual audience members. How you see this movie depends in large part about what you bring to it. What you bring to it of course often depends on your feelings about Jesus Christ. More than any movie I can remember, you will see what you want to see in the film.
Take the famous scourging scene. My wife Julie winced at every bloody lash, but she did so because she understood the Catholic teaching that each strike represented her own sins.
I didn’t take it that way. As an anarchist and Christian pacifist I was struck anew with the impossibility of supporting empire in the name of this man. Our temples have been rent asunder and reborn in the Spirit. We are the lamb’s warriors. If even Jesus didn’t save himself from this torture how can we? For me, the Roman warlords were clearly the American generals in Iraq and Pontius Pilate’s sacrificing of a Jewish prophet to keep civil order too reminiscent of “US occupying forces giving jobs to ex-Saddam security forces”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000206.php to do the same thing. To be honest, the high Jewish priests all looked like Catholic bishops to me–I kept seeing Boston’s former Cardinal Bernard F. Law, a man who cared more about keeping his church out of scandal then he did the innocent children being molested by abusive priests. The message for me was that leaders will always be tempted to sacrifice the truth to protect the vanity of their institutional power. As Fox said:
bq. “When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, ‘�There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.’ ”
Now, I can pretty sure that Mel Gibson doesn’t share my anarcho-pacifist politics or George Fox’s theologies (update: or can I be? See below for a link to an interview with the Jewish Romainan actress who plays Mary and explains the film in fairly political terms). And that’s the most interesting thing about this movie. I’m sure an anti-Semite will find reasons to be anti-Semitic. Someone angry at Christianity will find reasons to be angry. It seems as if just about ever movie reviewer I read must have seen a different movie, and I think there’s a kernel of truth in that. I wonder if this is a result of it being such a loaded story worn rigid by two thousand years of retelling for such different agendas or whether it’s a result of Gibson’s relatively radical filming decisions? I kept wondering what it would have been like if Gibson had followed through on his original concept and omitted even the subtitles?
A few friends of mine have been emailing back and forth, noting that they would be scared of anyone converted to Christianity by this movie. I barely see how that’s possible. Without the context of belief, this is just a story about some guy being tortured to death. (There were only two miracles, touched at briefly: a reattachment of a Roman solider’s ear and a brief, dream-like scene of the Resurrection. The latter reminded me most of ending in “Being There”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078841/ where the lucky simpleton played by Peter Sellers unexpected starts walking on water, tantalizing us that maybe he wasn’t quite so simple.) There are plenty of secular movies that have more miracles or more overt “Christ figures” than this one.
If there are any conversions it will be because of the activity _around_ the film.
The sad thing though, is that too many people have become divided on this film. Political correctness has settled in on both sides of political aisle. I lot of people I respect might have gone out to see this film had it been made by anyone but Mel Gibson and had it not been so denounced by the liberal media.
Because of this Martin Kelley Quaker Ranter website, I’ve been introduced to a much wider variety of Friends and fellow believers than I had before and it’s become harder to take seriously the institutional divisions we’ve erected. There’s a lot of sweet people among the big scary Evangelicals and a lot of deep thinking and concern deep in FUM-land. Likewise, non-Liberal Friends reading this site might realize that Liberal Quakers aren’t all the cartoonish stereotype we’re sometimes made out to be (fair disclosure: my wife Julie, the ex-Quaker, just read this sentence and laughed out “yes they are!”). The truth is beyond these divisions and it’s only when we break the ranks of our own orthodoxies that we will are really able to greet that of Christ/God/Spirit in each other. It’s fine to like or not to like _The Passion of the Christ_ but the biggest lesson the film might teach us is how to look beyond the pat answers to engage with each other and with our traditions.
h4. Other Stuff
* New Quaker Merle Harton Jr. wrote an interesting piece last year about “passion plays, anti-Semitism and the upcoming movie”:http://www.newQuaker.com/2003_08_17_blogarchive.htm#106116543162349803 and he has this piece “about seeing the movie”:http://newQuaker.com/2004_02_29_blogarchive.htm#107820009585274899.
* The Evangelical Friends at “Barclay Press”:http://www.barclaypress.com/ have a special feature on their website with reviews and reader’s comments.
* Whoa, apparently the cinematographer from the movie is Quaker!? Here’s an iinterview that “mentions he’s a Quaker”:http://starbulletin.com/2004/02/22/features/story4.html but doesn’t go into any depth. Link from Quakerinfo.com. Googling him he’s also described as a “Philadelphia-born Quaker,” which makes me wonder if he’s “ethnically” Quaker but not practicing. If anyone knows more I’d be interested.
* Talk about interesting casting: Mary is played by Maia Morgenstern , a Jewish Romanian whose parents are Holocaust survivors, who says of the film: “Again and again — I underline and underline this — it’s not the people who are blamed. It was some leaders. Unfortunately, we have so many examples — even now, every minute — of political, social, military, religious leaders who are dealing with our fears, with our hopes, who are trying to manipulate our ideas and our fears. And that film speaks about this.”
* Celebrity film critic Roger Ebert has an “interesting review”:http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/cst-ftr-passion24.html: “For we altar boys, [the Stations of the Cross] was not necessarily a deep spiritual experience. Christ suffered, Christ died, Christ rose again, we were redeemed, and let’s hope we can get home in time to watch the Illinois basketball game on TV. What Gibson has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of… This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.”
* There is of course an official “Passion movie website”:http://www.thepassionofthechrist.com/.