There have been several reasons given by leaders of the cultural elite why the American public should not see Gibson’s Passion.

A few months ago we weren’t suppose to see Passion because Gibson and his film were anti-Semitic. The movie had the power to turn Americans, the most philo-Semitic people in the world, into brutal Jew-hating predators. It was Gibson’s lethal weapon against Jews.

Now Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League says that though he is still troubled by the film be doesn’t believe Gibson is anti-Semitic and he does “not believe this is an anti-Semitic film”.

Then a few weeks ago we weren’t suppose to go see Gibson’s Passion because, well, no one else would. Frank Rich of the New York Times not only ridiculed Gibson for making the film but believed that the controversy would have a negative effect on the film’s impact and box office success.

Now Passion has already broken records. It opened on over 4000 screens, the most ever for an independent movie. On the first day it took in $26.6 million and should clear $70 million within the first full week of its release. It will undoubtedly be the highest grossing foreign language film of all time, surpassing Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Now that Passion’s box office success is not in question, Andy Rooney quipped on 60 Minutes last week: “My question to Mel Gibson is: ‘How many million dollars does it look as if you’re going to make off the crucifixion of Christ?”

Today’s raison du jour for not seeing the film is that it is nothing more than exaggerated violence. The Goriest Story Every Told. Passion is Gibson’s Mad Max assault on our civilized sensibilities.

Finally they got it right! Unfortunately for Passion opponents, this is exactly the reason TO see the film.

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
      H. Richard A. Neibuhr

Professor Neibuhr was just one in series of great minds to lament the success of the Protestant purification of the world, isolating moderns from the ugly underbelly of life. In an effort to remake the world anew, the great Protestant project to purify our homes, our lives, our jobs, even our loved ones has largely worked. The world today enjoys less violence and suffering than it did 500 years ago. If you don’t agree read some history. But it has come at a cost. Our lives are a bit too planned, too predicable, too punctual, too pretty, and too polite. Paradoxically, we are not all that comfortable in this perfect world.

Don’t you sense this a bit yourself?

Why else would middle aged coach potatoes watch grotesque Fear Factor food feats while their kids sneak off to the tattoo shop for haute couture Gothic body art or to the mall for the latest glow in the dark spiked body studs and patent leather witch shoes?

Why else would Max Weber call modernity (Christianity’s rebellious and often atheistic step-child) an iron cage? Nietzsche considered Christianity a hideous perversion of our true nature because it turned great men like Pascal into subservient slaves to a life denying moral ethic of feigned niceness and foolish banality.

Every week millions of Christians attend Protestant churches where Jesus has long been taken down from the cross. In the 16th century Puritans decided that displays of the body of Jesus represented Papists idol worship. Visual images were be stripped off the altars, walls, and windows of sanctuaries. The spoken word became the preferred medium. A white washed, minimalistic, over-intellectualized spirituality resulted. No one should get too excited. And nothing unexpected should take place.

Today, parishioners want their pastors to refrain from contentious or controversial subject matter. Sermons that run long should be the exception, not the rule. The service should end at twelve. The parking lot should empty by 12:15.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ drives a Mack truck through this pleasantness. His intent from the film’s conception is to visually offend our cultured sensibilities. “I wanted it to be shocking,” Gibson tells Diane Sawyer last week on ABC’s Primetime Live.

For the following scholars and film critics, Gibson succeeds.

“The graphic, brutal, unrelenting violence was deeply disturbing. I found it difficult to really do much thinking or meditating simply in the face of the visceral sort of torture that I witnessed.”
      Philip Cunningham, Boston College

“The problem with The Passion’s violence is not merely how difficult it is to take, it’s that its sadistic intensity obliterates everything else about the film. Worse than that, it fosters a one-dimensional view of Jesus, reducing his entire life and world-transforming teaching to his sufferings, to the notion that he was exclusively someone who was willing to absorb unspeakable punishment for our sins.”
      Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“A surprisingly violent narrative that falls in danger of altering Jesus’ message of love into one of hate….One of the cruelest movies in the history of cinema…The movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beating, blood and agony.”
      David Denby, The New Yorker

“Mr. Gibson has departed radically from the tone and spirit of earlier American movies about Jesus, which have tended to be palatable (if often extremely long) Sunday school homilies designed to soothe the audience rather than to terrify or inflame it.

The Passion of the Christ is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it. Mr. Gibson has constructed an unnerving and painful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one.”
      A. O. Scott The New York Times

For Scott, the film is more about Gibson’s sado-masochism than his religious piety.

Reviews from Christian web sites and publications have been equally cautious.

“This is definitely not a date movie; it is a think flick. Church folks should be warned, this is not a family-friendly ‘Christian’ movie such as Chariots of Fire or The Ten Commandments. The Passion is the most brutal movie you will probably ever see. People will be sobbing in the theaters or running out to get sick in the lobby.”
       Steve Beard, Good News

There are critics who agree with Gibson’s decision to graphically portray Christ’s Passion. They see Americans as increasingly jaded people who crave increasingly sensational reality based shows. Therefore, a film that does not realistically depict Jesus’ crucifixion would not be taken seriously by today’s audience.

For example, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert said that Gibson provided for him “for the first time in my life a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of.” He thinks that those who criticize the film for concentrating on the death of Jesus and not his life teachings, miss the point. “This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.”

Joel Siegel, film critic for ABC's Good Morning America, who is Jewish, said that he "did not sense any anti-Semitism". He noted that "many critics use the words excruciating to talk about the violence of the film. I wonder if they know what I have learned, that the root word for excruciating is the same as for crucifixion. This is a very powerful film."

Christ’s death holds a mirror up confronting us with the brutal capacity within our human condition that must be honestly faced.