The Faithful Citizen: Popular Christian Media and Gendered Civic Identities

3 Violence, Suffering, and Feminine Submission

57 Violence, Suffering, and Feminine Submission The Passion of the Christ 3 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. Romans 13:1-2 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. Isaiah 53:7 We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us . . . Romans 5:3-5 He delivers the afflicted by their affliction, and opens their ear by adversity. Job 36:15 In April 2004, Time magazine’s Holy Week cover story posed the question that Christians have disputed for centuries: “Why did Jesus die?” Ever an appropriate question in the days approaching Easter, it was especially salient that spring amidst The Passion of the Christ’s blockbuster cinematic run. Even if Jesus’ death and its atoning power have not always been at the top of the theological agenda among American Christians, David Van Biema’s Time article confirmed that The Passion had made these topics interesting anew. Christians, he described, hold competing interpretations of the significance 58 g The Faithful Citizen of Jesus’ death, some following Anselm’s impulse to read it as the substitutionary atonement for human sins and others following Peter Abelard’s teaching that Jesus’ suffering was exemplary for humans. Van Biema’s article also made the important observation that these varying interpretations are not matters of theology only: they grow out of political dynamics, and they have political implications. At the very least, theologies of Jesus’ suffering and death influence how individual Christians make sense of the suffering in their own lives. Conflict over precisely this issue animates the debate between liberation theologians and other contextual theologians that follows centuries after Anselm and Abelard. Whereas many liberation theologians see relating to Jesus’ suffering as a way for the poor and marginalized to escape their own oppression, other feminist and womanist theologians worry that such empathy only leads Christians to accept the suffering in their own lives. The implications for relating to Jesus’ suffering are not only private and individual; when Jesus’ suffering death is framed as a state-sponsored act of violence, how Christians understand their role in the passion drama influences how they conceptualize their relationship to the state and the possibilities for civic participation. By all conventional wisdom, The Passion of the Christ should not have been a tremendous box office success. No major studios had expressed interest in the film, forcing Mel Gibson to finance it with $25 million of his own money. Six months prior to the film’s release, in August 2003, New York Times arts columnist Frank Rich stated what seemed to be obvious: “It’s hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin.”1 Spurred in part by significant controversies over its graphic violence, its purported anti-Semitism, and its unconventional artistic qualities, such as casting unknown actors and conducting all the dialogue in ancient languages , The Passion proved all skeptics wrong when it earned $370 million dollars in box office receipts.2 Premiering on Ash Wednesday in February 2004, the film remained on the big screens through the Christian season of Lent, ultimately reaching the top ten of all-time grossing movies in the U.S. and becoming the top all-time foreign language film and the top all-time grossing R-rated film.3 By winter 2005, 44 percent of respondents to the Baylor Religion Survey reported having seen the film.4 For all the qualities that earned the film notoriety, it is the unrelenting graphic violence that drives the story line. There is little disputing just how violent the film is. In the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier declared that Violence, Suffering, and Feminine Submission f 59 the film “breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence,”5 and Richard Corliss claimed, in Time, that Gibson invented “a new genre—the religious splatter-art film.”6...