Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  When film did come closer, in the remarkable Little Buddha (1994), it took an Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci, whose achievement American critics failed to appreciate. Reading the notices, which dismissed Bertolucci's film as corny, sentimental, and inchoate, one could not help thinking that reviewers accustomed to a steady diet of secular-humanist Hollywood fare couldn't make anything out of a work that reflected an entirely different sensibility. Little Buddha shuttled between two stories. One story, set in contemporary Seattle and Bhutan, was about a young American boy a group of Tibetan monks think may be the reincarnation of their deceased leader. Several of those monks travel to Seattle and teach the boy about the Buddha. Thenceforth the story of the boy alternates with the story he is being told about how a rich young prince, Gautama, became the Enlightened One.

  The film can be seen on one level as narrowly sectarian, supporting a Buddhist worldview, including a belief in reincarnation. But it can also be experienced, as it was by this viewer, as a beautifully spiritual vision of life that transcends a narrow sectarianism and that, in fact, resonates with Christian allusions. The many parallels between Jesus and Buddha are everywhere apparent if nowhere explicitly insisted upon. The film does not reject any particular spiritual tradition but is rather an affirmation of the reality of spiritual experience, the importance of a spiritual life, and the validity of different means of articulating, establishing, and celebrating one's connection with spiritual reality. The Seattle boy and his parents are a typical 1990s Hollywood movie family. They're well off, thoroughly secular, discombobulated not by the monks' foreignness but by the fact that their lives are centered in spiritual and not material reality. Perhaps many American reviewers saw themselves too clearly reflected in that portrait, and were discomfited by what they saw, and by what it said about them. Yet the wide distribution of movies like Little Buddha—and of more recent American films like Michael (in which John Travolta plays an angel) and The Preacher's Wife, both released on Christmas Day, 1996—is itself a reflection of the fact that as we approach a new millennium, we find ourselves in a time of rising spiritual consciousness on the part of many Americans, who in increasing numbers are recognizing the ultimate emptiness of contemporary American secular culture—and whose newfound spiritual interests may lead either to a revitalized Church of Love or an even stronger Church of Law.

  If Hollywood movies tell us a good deal about the secular mainstream culture's perspective on religion, the reaction of legalistic Christians to some of those movies—in particular, to those rare movies that do seek honestly to deal with the reality of spiritual experience—reflects some important truths about legalistic Christianity.

  It seems exceedingly odd, for one thing, that while legalistic Christians have assailed the lack of "family values" in popular culture, many of those same Christians have, over the decades, embraced as wholesome fare fantasies that evince outrageously unchristian metaphysics. One thinks of the ghosts in Topper (1937), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Bishop's Wife (1948, remade in 1996 as The Preacher's Wife), Carousel (1956), Ghostbusters (1984), and Ghost (1990); of the witches in / Married a Witch (1942) and Bell, Book, and Candle (1958); of the visions of afterlife proffered in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1943), A Guy Named Joe (1944), Heaven Can Wait (1978), and Defending Your Life (1991); of the devil in Damn Yankees (1956); and of the angels in Angels in the Outfield (1951,1994) and, in particular, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which has become the quintessential American Christmas movie, despite the picture it paints of a world in which angels earn their wings by leading would-be suicides on tours of alternate universes. One might add to this roster the other perennial yuletide favorite, Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which, like Christmas-oriented American popular culture generally, effectively replaces Jesus with Santa Claus.

  Perhaps the ultimate irony is that while the Religious Right hasn't loudly protested any of the above entertainments, it denounced as profane Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which (despite its dull pacing, Method-style overacting, and inane pop-psych dialogue) represented a serious attempt by a brilliant director to grapple with the relation between the human and the divine as embodied in the person of Jesus. Pat Robertson, while praising such vapid biblical spectacles as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, condemned The Last Temptation of Christ as "scurrilous and thoroughly artless" and said that the film "set out to prove the corruption and hypocrisy of Christianity and the Church." On the contrary, Scorsese's film plainly springs from a profound interest in the humanity of Jesus. It reflects not a "hatred of religion," as Robertson claimed, but an unwillingness to be shackled to safe, trite, deadening formulas—whether those of Hollywood or of religion. If spiritually inert spectacles like Ben-Hur appeal to popular religiosity, a movie like The Last Temptation of Christ offends those who don't want to think about what it really means to say that God became man, and who conceive of religion as essentially a matter of clinging to sentimental images and familiar catch phrases.

  That legalistic Christians can enthuse over movies like Ben-Hur and picket a movie like The Last Temptation of Christ reflects more than a devotion to banal, greeting-card notions of God, angels, and the afterlife. It reflects, for one thing, a profound discomfort with the idea of Jesus' humanity—and in particular his physicality and sexuality. It reflects a discomfort with the idea of truly engaging the spiritual dimension of life; in fact it reflects an inability to recognize such engagement as genuine religious experience. So accustomed are many legalistic Christians to a thoroughly horizontal religion, indeed, that when they are exposed to an authentic artistic attempt to engage the vertical, their tendency is to think they are looking at something heretical. During his ministry on earth, Jesus was not about affirming the familiar, but about upsetting expectations, issuing challenges, and forcing people to see things anew; yet the rare American filmmaker who seeks to remind us of this fact—and who seeks in his work to emulate Christ's example—is likely to offend and outrage legalistic Christians.

  A more recent film occasioned much the same kind of furor that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ. Priest—which was made by a British filmmaker and released in the United States through Miramax, a subsidiary of the Disney Company—concerns Father Greg, a conservative young Roman Catholic priest who has been assigned to a church in a working-class neighborhood of Liverpool. There he assists the respected Father Matthew, a liberal older priest who, it turns out, has a long-standing sexual relationship with his housekeeper, Maria. The apparently straitlaced Greg upbraids him for this; but we discover the complexity of Greg's situation when we see him remove his collar, go out to a gay bar, and leave the bar with a young man named Graham. Greg's double life eventually leads to arrest and scandal; when the parishioners discover his secret, they harden their hearts, and Father Matthew, in a passionate sermon, tells them that "God doesn't give a damn what you do in bed!" and that Jesus is not about prudishness and judgmentalism but about love, forgiveness, and understanding.

  Priest was not meant to titillate or to tear down the church, as some critics insisted, but to inquire into the tensions within the soul of the young priest, who is tortured by guilt over his homosexuality and who has been taught by his traditional Catholic mentors to view sexual activity, especially homosexual activity, as sinful. On a larger scale, the film strikingly dramatizes the conflict between the Church of Love and the Church of Law—between, on the one hand, the human need for kindness, affection, and reconciliation and, on the other, the human capacity for abusiveness, hypocrisy, betrayal, and unthinking devotion to institutional authority. Directed by Antonia Bird and written by Jimmy McGovern, the film sensitively explores the difficult position of someone who, though identified in other people's minds with God and with inflexible institutional doctrine and authority, is nonetheless as confused and as needful of human intimacy as the next person. The film also perceptively examines the desire, common among many legalistic churchgoers, to embrace the illusion that their clergyma
n enjoys a moral perfection and a pipeline to God that they don't—and the unforgiving rage that erupts when that illusion is broken. In the end, Priest amounts to a stirring affirmation of the Church of Love that one cannot imagine being made under the auspices of a major American studio.

  Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, offered an illuminating example of the mainstream media's perspective on religion. "The question of whether priests should be celibate is the subject of much debate right now," Ebert wrote. "What is not in doubt is that, to be ordained, they have to promise to be celibate. Nobody has forced them to become priests, and rules are rules." For one thing, to say that "nobody has forced them to be priests" is to dismiss the idea of a calling and to see priesthood as just another job; for another thing, there is the question, Who sets the rules? Many Catholics today have challenged the moral and spiritual need for celibacy requirements. To answer such challenges by saying that the church can set whatever rules it wishes is to fail to accept the church as being what it represents itself as being, namely the Body of Christ, whose members are all theoretically equal in God's sight, and all of whom thus have an equal right to raise passionate objections to its rules—and even, if they feel compelled to perform acts of prophetic obedience, an equal right (indeed, an obligation) to break them. The typical member of the mainstream media doesn't understand such considerations.

  "Take away the occupations of the two central characters," writes Ebert of Priest, "and the rest of the film's events would be laid bare as tiresome sexual politics." But the whole point is that for these two men, priesthood is not simply an occupation; it is a vocation. Ebert goes on to question whether audiences would get as worked up over the story if Greg were a doctor or a lawyer; what he doesn't seem to understand is that Greg's status as a priest reflects the fact that the film is about ultimate meanings, about the significance of his actions sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity. In the end, Ebert scores the filmmakers for their "prejudices," by which he presumably means prejudices against the church; but to take the church seriously enough to mount an eloquent critique of its current leadership's approach to sexual morality is hardly to be prejudiced. What Ebert does not understand is that the people are the church—and they can hardly be prejudiced against themselves.

  Ebert was not alone in denouncing Priest as antichurch; legalistic Protestants did so as well. In a 1996 resolution, the Southern Baptist Convention criticized the Disney Company in very strong terms for, among other things, "producing . . . the film Priest which disparages Christian values and depicts Christian leaders as morally defective." (This is a surprising complaint, given that the theology of the fundamentalists who control the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't regard Roman Catholic priests as saved Christians.) To suggest, as the Southern Baptist resolution did, that the lightweight movies Disney used to make (such as Herbie the Love Bug and The Absent-Minded Professor) embody "Christian values" and to see Priest, by contrast, as anti-Christian is to be very misguided about what the word Christian really means, or is supposed to mean. And to deny that all Christian leaders are not, in some way, "morally defective" is to set them up as immaculate in the same bizarre way the Roman Catholic Church has done with the Virgin Mary.

  In the mid-twentieth century, television entered the American home and soon became the center of family life and of the common culture. Yet the newly introduced medium almost never reflected the fact that the United States was the most churchgoing nation on earth. James Dobson and other champions of "family values" fondly invoke the 1950s as a time of domestic stability and harmony, yet even during that decade television almost entirely omitted religion from its picture of American life. Such television series as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, which are nowadays lauded by some (and mocked by others) for their idealized depictions of white suburban households, almost never showed their characters attending church or talking about it. The same goes for the most popular series of that decade. Was Lucy McGillicuddy, who married the presumably Catholic Ricky Ricardo, raised Protestant or Catholic? If the former, did she convert? Did he? Was little Ricky ever baptized? If so, into what faith? None of these questions was ever answered on I Love Lucy. Already Americans were so accustomed to the idea of the entertainment media as a religion-free zone that few even noticed these omissions.

  In later decades, religious themes did figure from time to time on some TV series. The families on such programs as The Waltons and Littie House on the Prairie attended church regularly—yet on both these shows, set during the Great Depression and the frontier era respectively, churchgoing functioned principally as an emblem of the innocence and uprightness of America's "good old days." On situation comedies, a favorite plot device was that of the handsome would-be inamorato who turns out to be a Catholic priest. (Television writers hardly seemed to know what else they might do with a character in a collar.) When a regular on The Mary Tyler Moore Show considered becoming a nun, it was, predictably, not out of a sense of vocation, but out of frustration over her love life. (Though Mary Richards identified herself as a Presbyterian in the first episode of that series, viewers never learned, during the next seven years, if she ever actually attended church.) One of the more controversial aspects of Norman Lear's situation comedies of the 1970s, among them All in the Family and Maude, was that the characters actually talked—and even argued— about God and faith; Edith Bunker even went to church on Sunday mornings, and Archie, irked by his son-in-law's atheism, sneaked his baby grandson off to church and baptized him. A more recent exception to the rule is the series Touched by an Angel, in which three heavenly messengers involve themselves in the lives of people in need. (The God that these angels serve, incidentally, is very much a God of love: In one episode, angel Delia Reese tells a gay man dying of AIDS that God loves him just as he is.) Yet American television's overall approach to religion is pretty much reflected in the fact that the only series most Americans can recall that centered on a man or woman with a religious vocation was The Flying Nun.

  The growth of television has been a crucial factor in the rise of legalistic Christianity. In a sense, legalistic Christianity started out as a branch of the nation's folk culture and has, in the latter half of the twentieth century, become a branch of its pop culture. Jerry Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour (the title of which recalls Charles E. Fuller's mid-century radio show The Old Fashioned Revival Hour) made Falwell a national figure and enabled him to launch the Moral Majority; The 700 Club and other programs on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network did the same for him and his Christian Coalition. Certainly the nature of television is far better suited to the purposes of legalistic Christianity than to those of nonlegalistic Christianity. The spiritual experience at the heart of the Church of Love is not something easily communicated through the medium of television; for one thing, that experience, as attained in worship, necessarily involves interaction in community rather than mere spectatorship. At best, worship services, whether simple and austere or liturgically and musically rich, succeed in creating vertical experiences in the hearts, minds, and souls of congregants. Whole shelves of books have been written about how to design liturgies to create sacred time and space that are demarcated from the nine-to-five grind, from quotidian domestic drudgery, and from, yes, television. To participate in such worship services involves seeking, in communion with one's fellow human beings, to disengage oneself from the horizontal context of daily life and to touch the vertical. The Church of Law, by contrast, embraces the horizontal and encourages worshippers to play a passive role, listening obediently as the preacher tells them what the Bible says and what they are expected to believe, to do, and to condemn. It does not seem entirely a coincidence that the advent of television has coincided with the rise of legalistic Christianity—for television has made America a nation of passive viewers, and passive people are much more likely fodder for legalistic than for nonlegalistic systems of belief.

  Another way to put this is to say that television
has created a nation of people many of whom, consciously or not, now think of themselves as audiences and think of politics and education—and even, yes, religion—as forms of entertainment. Accordingly, many legalistic ministers have designed their worship services—whether at small fundamentalist chapels, at large megachurches, or on televangelist programs—to make them more like TV talk or variety shows. This is not difficult to do, as the legalistic message is essentially a matter of black-and-white doctrines and not of nebulous, numinous experience. At such services, there is little sense of strangeness, of spiritual depth, of mystery; everything is made familiar, comfortable, unchallenging, horizontal. Such services are less about being actively involved than about watching, less about being an integral part of something than about being an audience member, less about being transformed than about being diverted. In practice, then, though legalistic Christian churches today tend to present themselves as being in conflict with mainstream culture, many of them conform to that culture in style and tone far more than most nonlegalistic churches do. Indeed, it could be said that the principal achievement of men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson has been to repackage legalistic Christianity—which in my childhood was, on television anyway, a very clunky-looking commodity—into a very slick one.

  How can one discuss Christian television without mentioning Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, whose PTL Club represented both television and religion at their most vapid? To mainstream Americans, the Bakkers—who began their joint TV career with Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and who saw it ended by a financial scandal—were veritable cartoon characters. Neither Tammy Faye, with her grotesquely painted face and her frequent on-air sobbing, nor Jim, with his perpetual preacher-on-the-make grin, ever evinced any spiritual depth, or for that matter any gravity, humility, or awe in the presence of the divine. There was, indeed, nothing in The PTL Club (the initials stood for both "Praise the Lord" and "People that Love") that any member of any religion in human history would recognize as spiritual; with its mix of bland chitchat, insipid music, and homespun advice, it differed little from other daytime talk shows of the era, its wall-to-wall babble almost seeming designed to drown out the intrusion of any still, small voice. It is, indeed, a measure of legalistic Protestantism's essential lack of spiritual depth and intellectual seriousness that these two bufFoonish figures not only won millions of fans (the word fans seems more appropriate here than followers) but were treated as esteemed colleagues by Billy Graham, Robert Schuller, and other figures whose public images differed dramatically from their own.