We are not emotionally mature enough to send humans to Mars. If you had thought that we were ready to venture outside our Terra/Luna confines, look at this piece on US plans for weapons in space. I suggest we stay at home on our own planet until we grow up.

The Passion of the Christ: A Nail in the Coffin of Organized Religion

Every form of culture, in its vanishing, receives its most elaborate and intense expression. (William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light)

A couple of weeks and $212 million (domestic box office) into the screen history of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” a bit of the dust kicked up around its opening seems to be settling –– a good time, perhaps, to reflect dispassionately on what the film might represent as a cultural phenomenon.

Audience reactions to the movie are all over the place, from adulation to freak–out (at least one patron died of a heart attack in the aisles), but critical appraisals are virtually unanimous: the depiction of the last twelve hours in the life of Jesus is violent in the extreme, a sadistic dead-man-walking downer that strives for a realism bordering on fanaticism.

Unsparing, punishing realism apparently was the essential approach to the Jesus story for Gibson and his colleagues. One of the publicists working on the film’s pre–release promotion got the Pope himself to say after a screening, “It is as it was!” –– as if the Holy Father were present at the Crucifixion and therefore qualified for religious quality control. Later, the Vatican repudiated the “alleged” Papal statement by saying that the Pope holds no opinions on matters of artistic expression (you can hear Julius II, who commissioned art from Raphael and Michelangelo, turning over in his crypt), but the seed had been planted.

“The Passion of the Christ” appears to want us all to return to religion, and Gibson’s fundamentalist take on it in particular, as if extreme realism by itself could pry souls open. But, ironically, this in–your–face cinematic Stations of the Cross might be another indication that organized religions everywhere are on the way out. The drift at this moment in history is away from the specific practice of religion, with its doctrines and regulations, and toward a more eclectic and personal spirituality.

A recent Gallup poll [1] confirms a trend which sociologists and others have observed for some time –– Americans are abandoning institutional religion in favor of “cafeteria style” faith, and replacing denominational dogma with a more nonspecific “spirituality.” The results of the survey suggest that despite their outward affiliation with a religion and frequent church attendance, “less than half of Americans live their daily lives strictly by the code or teachings of their religious faith.”

“People want more than a long-distance relationship with God,” Gallup says. Organized religion puts priests, ministers, rabbis, ayatollahs, rinpoches and gurus of every sort between your and my relationship to the Divinity. But if it is true that so many of us are growing away from the “long–distance” religious dynamic in favor of direct spiritual experience, how to explain this peculiar movie?

The anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace has explained how a culture at the edge of extinction explodes into a ritualistic ‘revitalization movement.’ The end of a cultural activity is announced by the activity’s frenzied and fanatical application by its core adherents. From this perspective, organized religion resists being dragged kicking and screaming to the bone yard by making itself even ‘more religious.’

In this way, Mel Gibson is right in line with, Pat Robinson–type Protestant Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sunni Muslims in Egypt, Shii Muslims in Iran, Buddhist and Hindi monks in India who incinerate themselves to protest modernity, and religious fundamentalists in other places around the world who are trying to reverse the inexorable decay of organized religion by applying it more vigorously –– literally, violently, and fanatically.

Karen Armstrong, in her brilliant study of religious fundamentalism, “The Battle for God,” tells us that fundamentalists “fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past.” If you were wondering about the use of Aramaic and Greek in “The Passion of the Christ,” it’s only another way the film seeks to be literal, and therefore “pure.” Dr. Armstrong: “To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture…” –– remember that Gibson leads a small congregation of reactionary Roman Catholics out in Malibu who hear Mass in Latin.

It’s a losing battle. Here in the real world, most of us aren’t interested in saving religion. We are growing up spiritually, and growing away from the patriarchal, rule–bound religious structures of our spiritual childhood. We are beginning to understand that we may not need religion (“religare, to restrain, tie back”) to restrain our own unruly passions to tie us back to God. We can define the Divinity and relate to It directly on our own, thank you.

When you think about it, Jesus himself was on the side of the personal spiritual seeker –– and quite against organized religion. He likened the Pharisees and Sadducees, those rigid interpreters of God’s law, to whitened sepulchers and encouraged his listeners to seek the Kingdom of God within their own hearts and souls. Jesus was anti–religious. In the end, that is what got him crucified.

“The Passion of the Christ” is a religious shock treatment designed to convert the heathen and bring the wayward back into the fold, but the jolt doesn’t work. It just reminds us that the dinosaur of organized religion is lumbering slowly but surely toward extinction, leaving considerable blood and gore in its path.