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Introduction: Evangelical Performative Culture
- University of Michigan Press
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Introduction Evangelical Performative Culture Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster film The Passion of The Christ not only created a media storm, but the popularity of this film among Christians, and particularly evangelical Christians, took many people by surprise. In the months before and immediately following its premiere, articles about the film dominated the mainstream press.1 This discourse engaged many important issues, chief among them the anti-Semitic legacy of Passion playing. Yet, despite this intensive scrutiny, and even as church congregations across the nation reserved blocks of seats in movie theaters and youth groups held pre- and post-viewing prayer sessions in cinema parking lots,2 few critics assessed or critically discussed how the film might function as an effective and legitimate devotional device for its target audience—Christian believers . Although certain writers acknowledged that Gibson was employing the “dolorous” visionary texts of the German nun Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824), which contain Passion imagery that builds upon the “Man of Sorrows” representations of Christ that first emerged during the later Middle Ages,3 the film’s extreme violence seemed to hinder those critics from reconciling this iconographic tradition with an ability to provide genuine spiritual value to contemporary spectators. Without such assessment the film did not cultivate the informed dialogue that some hoped it would,4 but instead, as Marcia Kupfer writes, it “polarized the nation, demarcating the faithful from nonbelievers, insiders from outsiders.”5 In fact, as Mark C. Taylor notes, the very elements in the film that many reviewers believed would make it a failure with U.S. audiences—such as the extreme violence, lack of any major stars, and Latin and Aramaic dialogue with English subtitles—ultimately helped it achieve unprecedented success.6 2 Sensational Devotion This discursive gap occurred largely because The Passion of The Christ functioned differently than had previous films or plays characterized as Christian that had entered the mainstream market. In Margaret Miles’s work on religion in film she differentiates between movies that raise religious issues and those that act religiously.7 Writing about the late 1980s and early 1990s, she argued that the Passion films of that period—such as Jesus of Montreal and The Last Temptation of Christ—raised religious issues but did not act to intensify the viewer’s devotion.8 In contrast, I would assert that Gibson’s film does exactly that—it acts religiously—a function that most critics of the film were not prepared to engage. In this respect, I believe The Passion of The Christ exposed a difficulty that many critics have in analyzing the very real spiritual power that contemporary Christian media possess for believers, especially those forms that circulate through popular culture. In the years immediately following The Passion’s release, a variety of special journal issues and essay collections explored the film from a range of critical perspectives.9 Yet, in many respects, this intense scholarly interest was a striking anomaly; as John Fletcher contends, contemporary Christian performances are all too often dismissed by theater scholars as merely forms of proselytism.10 And, indeed, even some notable scholars struggled to assess how Gibson’s film might function as a devotional medium. For example, in her 2006 article on The Passion of The Christ, Miles contends that “we are trained by our many viewing experiences to expect and respond to a number of film conventions,” and she identifies “detachment” as one of the foremost conventions. Arguing that “movies are entertainment, and entertainment places the viewer in a position of distance and passivity,” she implies that it is extremely difficult for spectators to resist this conditioning and employ an alternative spectatorial mode.11 Therefore, in response to reports that Gibson’s Passion provided stimulus toward increased Christian commitment, she writes, “On the one hand, viewers’ reports of their own experience are to be respected. On the other hand, there are reasons to doubt that the movie ultimately enhances understanding of, and empathy with, Christianity’s founder.”12 I agree that many viewers not already familiar with the biblical account were likely confused by the lack of a coherent, linear plot and left the film without a clear understanding of the Passion narrative; as Beal writes, “The movie gives [non-Christians] no way to interpret the violence, no way into its symbolic world. As a result, they come away alienated, feeling like outsiders.”13 However, the film’s popularity among two particular groups [35.173.178.60] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15...