October 13, 2003
by Bruce Walker
The elitist snit at Mel Gibson over The Passion has everything to do with anti-theism and nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Once, Hollywood – the Old Hollywood - produced films that exalted the role of faith in our lives and that included displaying the harmful results of people who ignored their own faith and so became bad.
Fiddler on the Roof shows Christians ignoring Christian ethics by mistreating Jews for being Jews. Exodus shows Christians ignoring the plight of post-Holocaust Jewry. Gentleman’s Agreement shows bigoted Christians sneering at Jews.
The villains of these films were faithless Christians, not the Christian faith. The lyrics to Exodus were written by a devout Christian, Pat Boone. Why did these films not offend Christians? Because recognition of sin and repentance of sin is a central theme of Christianity.
Jews celebrated the goodness of faithful Christians as well. Old Hollywood was dominated by Jews, and these men produced films like The Bells of St. Mary, Angels in the Outfield, The Sound of Music, Going My Way and Boy’s Town. These Jews never considered an honest appreciation of good Christians to be a betrayal of Judaism.
These moral ideas were perfected in Chariots of Fire, the story of a brave Jew overcoming the prejudices of un-Christian Christians and of a pious Christian overcoming equally daunting obstacles of deep piety for the Glory of God in a world that, after the horror of the Great War, turned away from God. Without pulling punches, Chariots of Fire celebrates the Judeo-Christian heritage.
Why did Hollywood come to hate religion? Marx replaced God. Marxists replaced faithful people. This new and dreadful Hollywood sought to divide us from God and from our common humanity as creatures of God. Because God trumps every petty nastiness of life, He became the principal foe of New Hollywood.
New Hollywood began to produce films like Agnes of God and The Last Temptation of Christ, which mocked Christianity with the venom little different from how Nazi propaganda film portrayed Jews. No goodness was allowed serious Christians and no accusation was too vile to make against Christianity.
New Hollywood also mocked Judaism. King David showed Richard Gere degenerating into a bitter agonistic by the end of his life, and even nice productions like The Prince of Egypt reduced God to a bit player. Nominal Jews like Woody Allen made films that were sentimental toward Jewishness, but coldly indifferent toward Judaism.
As Michael Medved, film critic and observant Jew, notes in his documentary Hollywood Hates Religion, even remakes of old classics like Cape Fear and We’re No Angels were edited to introduce anti-theistic themes which were absent from the original version or to remove God from the remake.
The Passion does not portray all Jews as bad. It portrays some Jews as good and some Jews as bad. This is consistent with Christian and Jewish theology. Stories in which God is present require moral judgments. The Judeo-Christian tradition is based upon the pivotal role of God in our decisions. Whether The Passion is true or Torah is true, belief in Jesus and the Bible is not the cause of misery in the world.
Based upon anti-theism, secular JINOs (Jews in name only) have leveraged one of the worst crimes of the Twentieth Century - that part of Nazi democide which murdered six million innocent Jews - into a voodoo hex on Christianity and into an attempted transformation of Judaism from a great faith into a Holocaust cult.
CINOs (Christians in name only) have diluted Christian theology into weak broth drained of divine purpose. Jesus, God Incarnate to genuine Christians, is infinitely malleable to CINOs. The Passion is an affront to the authority of self-deified CINOs and JINOs, and like Torah, it proposes evidence of something vastly greater than them in human affairs.
CINOs and JINOs find God inconvenient. They wish Him to vanish from public consciousness. If He did, or if we forgot Him, then these CINOs and JINOs would act as if nothing was more important than them. Torah and Christ, however, have not vanished just because secular elites have willed it so.
New Hollywood does not care if faith dies or if America disintegrates or if paganism and tribalism swallow mankind. New Hollywood fears only a living God who will make a reckoning of those who sought Him and with those who have rejected Him. God forgives the repentant, but the unrepentant - the CINOs and JINOs who deplore the existence of a Blessed Creator - place themselves beyond His love, and place themselves beyond redemption.
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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals. |
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