Replies

There are several aspects to Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ that are worth noting.

It is clear that Anne Catherine Emmerich had a vivid imagination relative to the death of Jesus Christ. Her beliefs were reflective of folk theology that reflected a disproportionate blame for the Crucifixion on the Jews. Her beliefs do not reflect the orthodox Christian belief that Jesus Christ died for the sins of innumerable sinful human beings. His death was a substitutionary atonement for the punishment that those people rightly deserve for their sins. The Old Testament foretold of His physical death on the Cross and His subsequent resurrection. A core belief of Christianity is the sovereignty of God. Thus, the Jewish leaders and the Roman government were mere instruments in the hands of God to accomplish His purpose. Jesus affirmed this in His response to Pontius Pilate, "Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above." (John 19:11 (KJV))

What Sister Emmerich expressed in her book is folk theology, not heretical per se, but also not giving due regard for God's redemptive purposes as do the confessions and statements of faith of the early church. However, this folk theology, emphasizing the collective guilt of Jewry, has persisted in what used to be known as Christendom. Martin Luther succumbed to the "blood libel" theory; his intemperate remarks concerning the Jews have since been repudiated by the denominations that bear his name. The statements of Second Vatican Council and the pronouncements by Popes since Pius XI have repudiated the concept of collective guilt by the Jews.

It is evident that Hutton Gibson, Mel's father, denies that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis. He has been long associated with the more radical of the Catholic traditionalists, the faction called sedevacantists, who believe that the Popes who succeeded Pius XII were not legitimate holders of the "keys of St. Peter." The Gibson family's emigration from upstate New York to Australia in the 1960s was predicated on Hutton Gibson's belief that the Vietnam War was an anti-Catholic war, an opinion based on the CIA's involvement in the assassination of South Vietnam's Catholic President Diem. The elder Gibson did not want his sons to fight in such a war and resultantly emigrated to the Land Down Under.

Not unlike the political right, the Catholic right runs from mainstream conservatives like the Eternal Word network to a radical fringe of de facto schismatics. There are also strong affinities between the Catholic radical traditionalists and political conspiratorialists of the rightist flavor. For example, American rightist "Zionist" conspiracy advocates of the 1950s and 1960s such as Frank Capell and General Pedro del Valle were devout Catholics who also associated with the radical traditionalist element in the Catholic Church. It appears that Hutton Gibson was politically and religiously aligned with men like Capell and del Valle.

In continental Europe, where conservatism is closely aligned with a "throne and altar" ideology, the right wing has usually been authoritarian, favoring strong leaders (crowned or not), a state-sponsored monopoly church (whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Orthodox), a pre-industrial, agrarian economy, and the traditional national culture. Traditional European conservatism could be considered moderately anti-Semitic, inasmuch as it put stock in the folk theology of the "blood libel" and favored restrictions on Jews, unless they converted to the state church. However, these attitudes were far milder than the extreme anti-Semitism of the Nazis, whose attitudes did not derive from folk theology, but from neo-paganism and racist psuedo-science. American conservatism, and to a lesser extent conservatism in Britain and her Empire, was more individualist and libertarian. America's "throne and altar" are the Constitution and a very decentralized Christian religion. American conservatism was also remarkably free of anti-Jewish sentiments, due mainly to the sola Scriptura positions of the largely Calvinist Christians, which rejected positions on the collective guilt of the Jews that were not supported by Scripture. Up until the 1880s, Jews suffered less social discrimination than did Catholics, Mormons, or Quakers.

In reaction to the revolutionary movements from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Communist insurgencies in Russia, Germany, and Hungary from 1917 to 1920, European conservatives started blaming secret forces behind the revolutionary movements. While the Freemasons (who in continental Europe were reputedly deistic or agnostic in belief) were blamed for the French Revolution and the 1848 uprisings by European conservatives, the prominence of atheist people of Jewish heritage, like Leon Trotsky in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, in the leadership of the Communist revolutions of the 1910s led to a widespread belief that the Jews were the guiding force behind Bolshevism. Even Winston Churchill in statements he made in 1920 blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution.

Because there were Jewish bankers and businessmen of great wealth and influence and because the Russian Bolsheviks appeared to be well funded, the inference was made that the Jewish bankers of New York, London, and Berlin were funding the Jewish-led Communists in Moscow. The apparent purpose of this conspiracy was to effect Jewish world supremacy, according to many European and American rightists. A book called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, first circulated by the Tsarist secret police, described a plot by wealthy Jews to effect world dominion. This book proved primary ammunition for the American and European rightist antipathy toward the Jews, or at least thise Jews they deemed to be "Zionists." (In addition, American and Northern European rightists were strongly influenced by the mutated Darwinism called Nordic supremacy. Under this theory, Nordic whites were the highest and most noble form of humanity, while Jews were an inferior race of Semitic or Turko-Slavic origin.)

On the farther shores of American politics, there has been a near crazy quilt of ideas. Libertarian concepts of property rights, gun ownership, and personal freedom co-exist with those who would suspend civil liberties to deal with the threats of Communism, terrorism, narcotics, and cultural decay. The traditional American isolationist posture competes with those who have favored forceful intervention to defeat international Communism and radical Islam. Pro-life libertarians, such as Lew Rockwell, who believe the fetus is a human being from inception, conflict with those libertarians, such as Harry Browne, who believe the "right to choose" is unlimited. Catholic rightists who fear Masonic and Jewish enemies have problems with Protestant rightists who add the Jesuits as co-conspirator and the Pope as the "Whore of Babylon" of the Book of Revelation to the usual Masonic and Jewish fare. Both Christian factions are uncomfortable with apostate groups like the Anglo-Israelites who believe Northern Europeans to be true Israel or with pagan groups like the Nazis who reject the Bible as "Jewish fables." There were also those, associated to a great extent with the John Birch Society, who proffered a universal conspiracy theory without blaming the Jews or the Masons.

The purpose of the above discussion is to indicate the environment in which Hutton Gibson operates. Were his name, say, Hutton Wilson, he would just be another crank in the eyes of most people, a superannuated relic of post-World War II American rightism. His audience would be, at most, a few thousand people attracted to his newsletter, audio/video tapes, shortwave broadcast, or Web site. In the overall world of politics and religion, he would be less significant than the turnip growers association or the model train collectors league. But Hutton Gibson is Mel Gibson's father and may be fairly perceived as a major influence on his son.

Mel Gibson is a very unusual "bloke." He is neither truly American nor truly Australian. He eschewed upfront politically conservative statements that have marginalized actors and entertainers like Charlton Heston, Tom Selleck, and Ted Nugent in the strongly leftist environment of the mainstream media. (All three are Episcopal or Catholic white guys from Michigan, FWIW.) The traditionalist variant of Catholicism to which Mel Gibson adheres was apparently seen by the Hollywood elite as just a personal quirk, inasmuch as he did not proselytize in public and he was not an "EEEEEEEEvil" Protestant fundamentalist in any case. Yet the movies with which he has been associated in the last few years, notably Braveheart and The Patriot, have been the strongest expression of traditional, Biblically based values and mores in the cinema since the long gone days of John Ford and Frank Capra. Like those associated with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mel Gibson has managed to successfully smuggle a Christian oriented worldview into a medium dominated for decades by hedonism and moral relativism. In so doing, he is a far more effective fighter against the Left than Heston, Selleck, or Nugent have been(or for that matter, old-time conservative actors like John Wayne, Ward Bond, or Gary Cooper were).

Making movies about wars in medieval Scotland or 18th Century America is one thing. Producing a film around the central event in human history (at least from a Christian perspective) is entirely another. Because Mel Gibson is so skilled in moviemaking, his potential to persuade and to offend far exceed the generally poorly crafted movies made in recent years by evangelicals depicting the end times from a premillenial, pre-Trib rapture dispensational viewpoint (FWIW, an eschatological position that is rejected by a substantial minority of conservative evangelicals, such as PCA Presbyterians, Missouri and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, Nazarenes, Wesleyans, and Reformed Baptists).

Scripture declares the Crucifixion as an obstacle to nonbelievers. "Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." (I Corinthians 1:22-24 (NIV)) Jesus Himself recognized that He would not unite, but profoundly divide, humanity. "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.'" (Matthew 10:34-35 (NIV))

The opponents of Christianity also recognize the existence of the irreconcilable nature of the claims of the Bible. "It was not 'according to the Divine purpose' that Jesus was slain at the Passover, but it was according to a human invention that he is declared to have been slain at this time. These attempts to connect the crucifixion with the Passover afford the strongest proof that it is a myth." (John E. Remsberg, American freethinker) "There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment." (Bertand Russell, British philosopher and atheist) "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people." (Karl Marx, founding father of Communism) "That they said (in boast), 'We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah' -- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them." (The Koran, Surah 4:157)

A Biblically accurate rendition of the death of Jesus Christ by a talented and proven movie producer is a serious blow to those secular humanists and moral relativists who have been on the winning side in the American (and Western) culture war, a conflict that has roots well before the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Indeed, it goes back well before the French Revolution, to the Enlightenment era. (It could be argued that the conflict began in the Garden of Eden, with the temptation of Adam and Eve.) Thus, the liberal elite has a vested interest in stopping, or at least limiting the effect, of The Passion of the Christ.

This is where the marginal opinions of Hutton Gibson or an obscure work by a 19th Century Catholic mystic that Mel Gibson has read come into play. If the public, at least outside the evangelical Christian minority, the conservative Catholic minority, and other cultural and social conservatives, can be persuaded that Mel Gibson blames the Jews for Jesus' death and denies the severity of the Holocaust, the effect of the film will be blunted. In the mainstream culture, unjust accusations against the Jews equates to anti-Semitism, which equates to Nazism, which equates to the murder of six million human beings. Even if the film is profitable, it will have been segregated from the mainstream of casual Christians and nonbelievers as surely as, say, country music and NASCAR racing are largely compartmentalized to a cultural subgroup, white Southerners and Midwesterners.

Thus, we see the liberal propaganda machine in full throttle. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which represents the liberal wing of Judaism, is in the lead, as it carries the banner of the Jewish religion and people even as it does not recognize the authoritative nature of the Torah and Talmud. Observant orthodox Jews hold the ADL in contempt. However, it has proclaimed itself arbiter of what is anti-Semitic. Flanking the ADL are the apostate National Council of Churches and the liberal faction of the Catholic Church, to alienate the large body of Christians who do not adhere to the absolute authority of the Bible.

Gibson's opponents have a problem. Since the film is reflective of the New Testament accounts of Jesus' death, it shows the Jewish leadership of Roman Palestine circa 30 A.D. in a negative light. However, it is difficult to persuasively argue that this represents anti-Semitism. Many Israelis are critical of the government of Israel, yet they are not anti-Semitic. Orthodox American Jews disdain the dominant liberal faction of the nation's Jewish community, and they are not anti-Semitic. The Jewish leaders are depicted as treacherous in the Gospels. A movie that portrayed a Meyer Lansky-like character as treacherous, Godfather II, was not considered anti-Semitic. How then, could a movie showing Caiphas as treacherous be considered anti-Semitic? To "prove" their charge of anti-Semitism, the detractors drag Hutton Gibson and Sister Emmerich into the picture. Sister Emmerich is long since dead. Unfortunately, Hutton Gibson is using his newfound fame to revive old grudges, to the detriment of his son's purposes.

In order to defame Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ, his liberal detractors use the smear tactic of guilt by association, the same technique these very liberals accused Joseph McCarthy of using to smear innocent men of Communist sympathies. Usage of the smear tactic only emphasizes the moral bankruptcy of the liberals. However much the liberals spout pious phrases, express self-righteous indignation, or wrap themselves in the Star of David, they only show their adherence to moral relativism (smearing is bad for thee, but okay for me) and their elitism (we are smarter and more perceptive than those ignorant people who are unaware of their subconscious anti-Semitism). To liberals, who are at the core secular humanists with (sometimes) a religious veneer and moral relativists, the end justifies the means.

Deuteronomy 24:16 states: "Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sins." Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ should stand (or fall) on their own merits, and not those of Hutton Gibson, nor on the imaginings of a long-dead nun.