Conservative thumbs down for 'Passion'

Classics scholar John Granger will not be joining the throngs of other Christian conservatives as they pack theaters to witness "The Passion of the Christ."

Why not? Granger answers with four words: "Gone With the Wind."

Think about it, he said. Long ago, this best seller was devoured by legions of devoted readers. Then it was made into a Hollywood blockbuster, with Rhett Butler played by the charismatic Clark Gable. The film ruled.

"Ask yourself, after reading this 900-page novel, what your mental picture of Rhett Butler is," said Granger, an Orthodox Christian best known for his "Harry Potter" critiques. "If he does not look like Clark Gable, you are a remarkable reader. If you are that rare bird who has read the book and not seen the movie, write down what you see with your mind's eye when you hear the name 'Rhett Butler.' Then see the film.

"Now repeat the previous test. Is Rhett looking a lot like Clark?"

In other words, Granger is worried that images from Mel Gibson's cathartic epic will replace – in the memories of many devout Christians – those handed down through scripture, prayers, music, poems, icons and two millennia of holy tradition.

Yes, the vivid, violent visions of this film may grip the imaginations of many who know little or nothing about the faith. But something will be lost, as well as gained.

"I value very much the relationship I have with the Christians who have come before my time," said Granger. "I know that if I see Gibson's movie that I will never understand the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ as they did, which is to say, from reading the scriptural accounts, by experiencing these events liturgically and in hearing about the life and death of Christ as church and elders explain it."

Granger is not alone in these concerns. French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger recently said that he worries about all attempts to film the Passion, because this art form "can be very ambiguous."

The cardinal told reporters that pious devotional practices, such as the prayers and rituals of the Stations of the Cross, are different because the faithful actively take part, rather than merely "sitting in an armchair." As a rule, he added, "I prefer the icon to a photo of an actor playing Christ and I prefer the Blessed Sacrament to any icon."

The conservative Catholic journalist Philip Lawler has reached the same conclusion. While many Christian leaders believe "The Passion of the Christ" will be an effective tool for evangelism, he said he not sure it is wise to focus these efforts on such a raw, emotional version of the Christian faith. After the tears are dry, will anything remain other than bloody images of torture and death?

"The graphic display of violence can have a destructive effect on viewers who are unbalanced or immature," said Lawler, editor of Catholic World Report. In addition to adults, "theater audiences will ... include impressionable youngsters and teenagers who have been formed by Hollywood to revel in the display of gore. I worry how this film might affect them."

The sad reality is that these young viewers may be precisely the audience Gibson was trying to reach, said Bishop Savas, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. He attended a summer screening of an early cut and discussed some of his concerns with the director.

It is almost impossible to view this movie without seeing that it is rooted in Gibson's faith and devotion to traditional forms of Roman Catholic worship and prayer, said the 46-year-old bishop. Yet these elements have been fused with the lessons he has learned in the Hollywood marketplace.

Gibson knows how to get inside a modern viewer's head and shake things up.

"Mel Gibson is trying to find a way to pierce the emotional hides of people – especially the young – who have become callous from years of overexposure to the violence that permeates our media today," said the bishop.

"Now I am not squeamish about these kinds of things. ... I know what the violence in this story is supposed to mean. I know what the symbolism means. I can see what he was trying to do. But I still have to ask: Did he really need to go this far?"

The Mystery Worshippers are out there

It is a sight that British vicars fear more than an empty collection plate.

The business card is deposited anonymously with the loose bills and change at the offertory. It states: "You have been visited by the Mystery Worshipper." This means a detailed review of their church will soon be posted for all the world to see at the humor site www.Ship-of-Fools.com.

Were the pews comfortable? Was the service "stiff-upper-lip, happy-clappy, or what?" How was the preaching, on a scale of 10? Was the coffee good? Did any part of the service offer a glimpse of heaven? How about a whiff of "the other place?"

Mystery Worshippers have, during the past six years, slipped unannounced into 750 pews in England, North America and, occasionally, more exotic locales.

On the pop side of the aisle, one critic in Ohio survived a Christianized version of the racy Ricky Martin hit "Livin' La Vida Loca" – at Easter. Video clips from "The Matrix" spiced up the service.

Meanwhile, the incense swingers at St. John Chrysostom in Manchester, England, received top marks: "The thurifer was superb and was of the standard that made even the most complex of swings and twirls look smooth and effortless. ... I have to say that more perfume and less fog would be my personal taste." Ah, but the wine was thin.

Ship of Fools has corned the market on truth-is-stranger-than-fiction ecclesiastical silliness – from "Signs and Blunders" to the "Fruitcake Zone."

Recent offerings in the "Gadgets for God" pages – real items sold elsewhere – included boxer shorts covered with crosses, but with the fly sewn shut. Other links yielded bobble-head dolls of the Blessed Virgin Mary and flashing cell-phone crucifix covers. In one "church organists behaving badly" report, a Scottish musician was caught playing "Send in the Clowns" as the elders processed. A Brooklyn organist snuck a few bars of "Roll Out the Barrel" into the funeral of a popular pub patron.

But the long-running "Mystery Worshipper" feature is a clue that the site has a serious side, said editor Simon Jenkins. The goal is to reach out to "people on the fringes" who are either fleeing the church or just starting the process of investigating the faith. Almost everyone knows what it is like to be a stranger in a pew.

"There is no shortage of Mystery Worshippers," Jenkins said, during a U.S. speaking tour that included a stop last week at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Charlotte, N.C.

"I think one reason so many people volunteer to do this is that everyone can identify with the whole process of visiting a new church. Church shopping is such a pain and it kind of helps to laugh. We know what people are going through."

For many Mystery Worshippers the most challenging part of the review process is its requirement that they test the degree to which each church welcomes strangers. The instructions are clear. At the end of the service, they are asked to stand alone in the back of the church for five minutes – looking sad and lonely. The goal is to count the number of people who approach them to chat.

Nearly 50 percent of the time, the answer is "zero."

"Clergy dread this part of our reports," said Jenkins. "It is sad to have to see the church like that. But it can be good, too. ... Like it or not, this is a chance to see what their churches really look like to those who are on the outside."

Year after year, the "friendliness factor" is the bad news. The good news, said co-editor Steve Goddard, is that the online form's request for "heavenly moments" in worship almost always leads to results.

This is not a matter of old churches vs. new, or big vs. small.

"I think the good news is that there are genuinely spine-tingling moments of spirituality happening in pews out there," said Goddard. "It doesn't matter if it's a smells-and-bells church or a rock-the-flock church. We get reports from people who find a sense of worship in all kinds of places.

"What matters is genuine reverence and a sense that people are truly seeking the presence of God. That's what the Mystery Worshippers are looking for."

The Passion and the Talmud

The ancient rabbinic text is clear about the punishment for those who twisted sacred law and misled the people of Israel.

Offenders would be stoned and then hung by their hands from two pieces of wood connected to form a "T." The Talmud once included this example from the Sanhedrin.

"On the eve of Passover they hung Jesus of Nazareth," said the passage, which was censored in the 16th century to evade the wrath of Christians. "The herald went out before him for 40 days saying, 'Jesus goes forth to be stoned, because he has practiced magic, enticed and led astray Israel. Anyone who knows anything in his favor, let him come and declare concerning him.' And they found nothing in his favor."

If armies of Jewish and Christian scholars insist on arguing about Mel Gibson's explosive movie "The Passion of the Christ," it would help if they were candid and started dealing with the hard passages in Jewish texts as well as the Christian scriptures.

At least, that's what David Klinghoffer thinks.

The Orthodox Jewish writer – whose forthcoming book is entitled "Why the Jews Rejected Christ" – believes these lines from the Talmud are as troubling as any included in the Christian Gospels. They are as disturbing as any image Gibson might include in his controversial epic.

The Talmudic text seems clear. Jesus clashed with Jewish leaders, debating them on the meaning of their laws. They hated him. Many wanted him dead.

It is possible, said Klinghoffer, to interpret these documents as saying that Jesus' fate rested entirely with the Jewish court. The use of language such as "enticed and led astray" indicated that Jesus may have been charged with leading his fellow Jews to worship false gods.

There are more details in this confusing drama. Writing in 12th-century Egypt, the great Jewish sage Maimonides summed up the ancient texts.

"Jesus of Nazareth," he proclaims, in his Letter to Yemen, " ... impelled people to believe that he was a prophet sent by God to clarify perplexities in the Torah, and that he was the Messiah that was predicted by each and every seer. He interpreted the Torah and its precepts in such a fashion as to lead to their total annulment, to the abolition of all its commandments and to the violation of its prohibitions.

"The sages, of blessed memory, having become aware of his plans before his reputation spread among our people, meted out fitting punishment to him."

Is that it? What role did the Romans play?

In terms of historic fact, stressed Klinghoffer, it's almost impossible to find definitive answers for such questions. But the purpose of the Jewish oral traditions that led to the Talmud was to convey religious belief, not necessarily historical facts.

"If you really must ask, 'Who is responsible for the death of Jesus?', then you can only conclude that both the Gospels and the Talmud agree that the Jewish leaders did not have the power to execute him," he said.

"Did they influence the event? The religious texts suggest that they did, the historic texts suggest that they did not. It's hard to know. ... But if Gibson is an anti-Semite, then to be consistent you would have to say that so was Maimonides."

Obviously, Klinghoffer is not spreading this information in order to fan the flames of hatred. His goal, he said, is to provoke Jewish leaders in cities such as New York and Los Angeles to strive harder to understand the views of traditional Protestants and Catholics. And it's time for liberal Christians to spend as much time talking with Orthodox Jews as with liberal Jews.

It's time to everyone to be more honest, he said.

"I don't see anything that is to be gained for Judaism by going out of our way to antagonize a Mel Gibson or to antagonize as many traditional Christians as we possibly can. I think we have been yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater," said Klinghoffer.

"To put it another way, I don't think it's very wise for a few Jewish leaders to try to tell millions of Christians what they are supposed to believe. Would we want some Christians to try to edit our scriptures and to tell us what we should believe?"

Terrorism, fiction and the Truth

WASHINGTON – One of the most sobering sights that novelist Joel Rosenberg has ever seen was the glitter of Manhattan outside the windows of a Learjet a few months after Sept. 11.

Since this was a private plane, its passengers did not pass through a metal detector and have their ID cards checked. There were no security procedures at all.

"It was the middle of the night and we were flying right over Ground Zero," he said. "I remember saying at the time that there was nothing – literally nothing – except our own morality that could stop us from taking a private jet like this one and doing pretty much whatever we wanted to do with it. That's still true."

This moral blind spot in the war on terror has bugged Rosenberg for years. That's why his first novel – the 2002 bestseller "The Last Jihad" – opened with a private jet exploding into a presidential motorcade in the not-so-distant future.

Rosenberg was writing the final chapters of that book on the morning of Sept. 11. That meant he had some rewriting to do.

But those kamikaze pilots were front and center in chapter one, written in 2000. So was the author's emphasis on faith. This is what happens when a Jewish Christian who used to work for Rush Limbaugh and Israeli politico Benjamin Netanyahu starts writing thrillers about nuclear terrorism. The religious content increased in the 2003 sequel, "The Last Days," which earned Rosenberg a $1 million advance.

Many secular critics have been brutal, including the Washington Post's infamous verdict that his work was "an act of terrorism on the reader's brain."

Rosenberg is unapologetic. He said he simply started asking "what-if questions" about terrorism in America and the Middle East and tried to figure out the answers. As it turned out, the timing was right to ask big questions about good and evil.

For example, one of Rosenberg's fictional heroes is a retired Israeli spy who is convinced that American leaders cannot wage a war on terror because they no longer believe that evil is spiritual reality. Thus, they also doubt the existence of eternal, absolute truth.

This theme shouldn't be surprising, said Rosenberg, because his ancestors were Orthodox Jews who fled the pogroms of Russia. The writer's father was Jewish and his mother Methodist. Both converted as adults to evangelical Christianity, as did their son.

"Because of my own faith and my family's experiences, I truly believe in the reality of evil. ... But many, many people in this town do not," said Rosenberg, sitting in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill. "That includes lots of people in the U.S. intelligence community and the state department. They had a hard time conceiving of a 9/11 because they didn't BELIEVE it could happen.

"What we had was not so much a failure of intelligence as it was a failure of moral imagination. ... It was a worldview problem."

All Rosenberg did was take these religious convictions and blend them with what he knew about politics, economics, world affairs and intelligence work – creating fiction. It also didn't hurt that his political roots gave him bullet-proof ties to the rulers of talk radio. During one blitz, he was on 160 radio and television programs in a month.

Some of these shows were religious, but the vast majority of them were secular. Also, his books were published by a mainstream company, rather than a religious one. This was intentional, he said, because the Christian writers he admires the most – such as J.R.R. Tolkien and John Grisham – dominate shelves in secular bookstores.

Now it's time to navigate the minefield of making a movie in mainstream Hollywood. Rosenberg also faces hard decisions about the content of his future books. What happens to his themes of moral absolutes and religious conversion?

"I don't know if Hollywood producers are going to want those scenes in a movie," he said. "We'll have to see. Whatever happens, it won't weaken my conviction that Christians and other conservatives have not been doing enough to tell these kinds of stories in the secular media.

"We have to try. Who knows? We may have stories that people want to hear and see. That is, if the stories are good enough."