Rhetorical Outbursts

I’ve been wanting to respond to this Brian McLaren piece since I first saw it via Mike Cope’s blog several months ago, but I hadn’t started my own blog then. Anyway, McLaren writes:

Maybe it’s because (some readers may be tempted to write me off after reading this sentence) I was so frustrated by last year’s promotional hype surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ — and I was so frustrated by the movie itself, though I know many found it moving and spiritually edifying. Maybe it’s because I have deep concerns about the alignment of major sectors of Christianity with “red-state Republicanism,” and I worry that a kind of modernist, nationalist neo-fundamentalism is trying to claim all Christian territory as its sovereign domain. For whatever reason, when I walked out of the 2005 film Hotel Rwanda this thought wouldn’t leave me: If we really had the mind and heart of Christ, this is the movie we would be urging people in our churches to see.

What is he talking about? The Passion is about the central event in all of human history. The event that is the center of the Christian faith. I saw Hotel Rwanda. It was a moving and important film. But why does McLaren think it is more important for Christians to see than The Passion? McLaren seems to focus not on the important moral implications of the two films, but on his own view of their political impact.

At least, I think so. It’s hard to tell, because he doesn’t explain what “red-state Republicanism” has to do with The Passion or why that might be a bad thing. McLaren asks a series of questions that gives us some hints about what he is trying to say. Having seen both films, I’ll try to answer them:

In fact, I can’t think of a more worthwhile experience for Christian leaders than to watch Hotel Rwanda and then ask themselves questions like these: Which film would Jesus most want us to see, and why? Why did so many churches urge people to see Gibson’s film, and why did so few (if any) promote Terry George’s film? What do our answers to that question say about us?

Well, let’s see. The Passion had a profound effect on millions of people, motivating many to repent and seek a closer relationship with God. Churches urged people to see Gibson’s film, because they knew it would have that effect. It seems obvious that we would welcome a powerful retelling in a modern medium of the central story of our faith. Hotel Rwanda was not that. The answers to those questions say that we are Christ-centered and want the story of His sacrifice for all mankind to be communicated as effectively as possible as often as possible. What’s wrong with that?

What were the practical outcomes of millions of people seeing Gibson’s film? And what outcomes might occur if equal numbers saw Hotel Rwanda — as an act of Christian faithfulness?

Gibson became even more wealthy, much of which he has dedicated to worthy causes. Millions of people were talking and writing and thinking about the story of Jesus. Hollywood started paying more attention to the audience that Gibson had attracted. There are anecdotes of individual lives being changed by the movie. Does that count as a “practical” effect? Why is McLaren focused on the “practical?” I don’t know what might happen if Hotel Rwanda had been as big a success. McLaren seems to be implying that political attitudes about U.S. intervention overseas to stop genocide would be changed, but he doesn’t actually say that. Does he think that if churches had rented theaters to show Hotel Rwanda that the Americans would have demanded military intervention to stop the massacres in the Sudan? What was his position on intervening to help the Iraqi people throw off the tyranny of Saddam Hussein?

In what sense could Hotel Rwanda actually be titled The Passion of the Christ? What do we make of the fact that a high percentage of Rwandans who participated in the 1994 genocides were churchgoers? What do we make of the fact that a high percentage of the Americans who ignored the 1994 genocides (then and now) were and are churchgoers? What kind of repentance does each film evoke in Western Christians? Why might the kind of repentance evoked by Hotel Rwanda be especially needed during these important days in history?

This is the part that really gets me. McLaren’s parallel construction implies some level of moral equivalency between churchgoing Americans and “churchgoing” Rwandans who committed atrocities and crimes against humanity. Utter nonsense. Even if McLaren is right to accuse American churchgoers of, “ignor[ing] the 1994 genocides,” it is nothing like hacking people to death with machetes. To imply that they are in the same ball park demonstrates a moral confusion that is breathtaking.

This is part of a pattern among liberal thinkers of all stripes. They seem to have a fetish for criticizing their own country, their own people, or their own religious tradition, usually unfairly. Conservative Christians and “red state” Republicans are not responsible for the genocides in Rwanda or the Sudan — either by action or inaction. Holding political opinions different from Brian McLaren’s or Mike Cope’s is not a sin, and we don’t need to watch a movie to help us repent.