Reply #12: A key point about all this... [View All]

[regnaD kciN]

...is something I hadn't even thought of until last night. Gibson has marketed this film among fundamentalists as a great evangelical opportunity, and many of the megachurches are building campaigns around its release to "win souls for Christ."

From what I've been reading since yesterday, this is a serious miscalculation.

If Gibson's movie is so thoroughly centered on Jesus-as-victim (and not much else), it may have a great deal of appeal to professed Christians of a certain emotional bent, since they already know the "backstory." But expect non-Christians to convert based on two hours of beatings and execution, presented in graphic detail? I would think that, while potential converts might come away with a great deal of sympathy for Jesus, it would be much like the sympathy one might have for a victim of a brutal mugging or worse. Unless you already know who Jesus was and what his ministry was, I would think that there would be very little reason, after witnessing this film, to want to commit one's life to following him -- just as one would not expect a series of new volunteers to the cause of civil rights to emerge from a film that only shows the last twelve hours of Martin Luther King's life, without covering what came before.