"THE PASSION" AS RORSCHACH TEST:
Why Most of the Opposition Comes from Liberals

Well, the screeching in the Establishment media continues.

Even before the general public began to view The Passion of the Christ for themselves, liberal commentators have been attacking it as "pornographic" and "obscene" in part or in whole because of Mel Gibson's hard-to-take but thoroughly accurate depiction of the sadistic torture and death Christ suffered at the hands of the ancient Romans, surely the Nazis of their day. When they look at The Passion, instead of seeing a message of redemption, love, and forgiveness they see "racism," or "anti-Semitism, or a "dangerous" philosophy of "divisiveness."

For liberals, religion should be about niceness, feeling good about oneself, and preaching sweetness and light from the back of the cultural bus. It ought not move up to the front to challenge the status quo, especially with in-your-face images of a suffering Savior who makes demands and wants you to make a decision ("who do you say that I am?," He asked His disciples).

For liberals, including those who think of themselves as "Christians," The Passion of the Christ is a Rorschach Test in which they see the cross as "foolishness," as the Apostle Paul observed about the Roman pagans of his day. He could just as easily have penned the same thing about modern-day liberals, including modern-day liberal Christians. 60 years ago, someone else did:

While the Nazis were plunging Europe into world war, partly due to apathy on the part of mainline Christians here and in the Reich, noted German Protestant theologian and anti-Nazi activist H. Reinhold Neibuhr summarized modern-day mainstream Christianity, especially in Germany and America, as a religion in which "a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment though the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

As Presbyterian minister William Sloane Coffin once said about Fundamentalists and their interpretation of the Bible, Mel Gibson's film "is something like a mirror: if an ass peers in, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.''