47.

Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, never backed by a Hollywood studio, was made with a budget of $30 million, paltry in the movie business. However, the picture grossed $370.6 million in the United States and almost $612 million worldwide. A primary reason for this success was the participation of Christian churches. Pastors bused their congregations to the movie and often encouraged their flocks to donate tickets to the general public, as a way of proselytizing.

All of this despite the fact that The Passion of the Christ is one the most brutal films ever made, essentially torture porn, with Jesus whipped and bludgeoned and stabbed and punctured for the entire twelve hours the movie depicts. In 2006, Gibson’s film topped Entertainment Weekly’s list of all-time controversial movies, with Stanley Kubrick’s notoriously savage A Clockwork Orange coming in second. The Passion’s grisly violence—some of which does not appear in the Bible—offended viewers and critics, including David Edelstein, who described the picture as “a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie.” But the film was also scandalous because of its anti-Semitism. Its demonization of the Jews—the movie blames them for Jesus’ death and generally portrays them as evil—agitated synagogues and antidefamation groups throughout the world. The critic Jami Bernard said the movie was “the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II.”

Gibson’s Christian gore fest is not unique. Around the time The Passion of the Christ hit theaters, Christian churches around the country were staging their own barbarous crucifixion dramas. In an article in Slate, Patton Dodd discusses the most prominent productions: the Memphis Passion Play, staged in Memphis’s Bellevue Baptist Church; the Atlanta Passion Play, running in the First Baptist Church of that city; and The Thorn, first performed in the New Life Church in Colorado and now franchised in Minnesota and South Carolina.

These productions are, according to Dodd, “Bible spectaculars that would make Cecil B. DeMille swoon.” The plays rely on “flaming swords, pyrotechnics, and barrel-chested bodies dancing, leaping, flipping across the stage, and swirling down from the rafters.” There are angels battling demons. There are perpetually shifting images on a background screen, dictating horror or transcendence. There are crescendos of melodramatic music. There is outrageous violence: Jesus undergoes a vicious scourging with the cat-o’-nine-tails, thirty-nine lashes; he trudges battered and bloody to Golgotha, carrying his own cross; his actual crucifixion is apocalyptically savage, as harrowing and excessive as anything in Peckinpah. Dodd is troubled by the overemphasis on the violence, claiming that it is less biblical and more a satiation of “our culture’s taste for visual realism.”

After my experience of Grünewald’s painting—a meditation on the necessary connection between destruction and transcendence—I wondered about Dodd’s tone. Were Christians drawn to these passion plays out of a base appetite for titillation? Or was there something deeper, an understanding on the part of viewers that the macabre might open to truth, beauty, and goodness? Or was the attraction somewhere in between?