Passion piques interest and raises eyebrows
Thousands of Canadian pastors and ministry leaders got a sneak preview of The Passion of the Christ last month, as Campus Crusade and several other evangelistic organizations sponsored a cross-country tour of a rough cut of Mel Gibson's graphic and controversial film about the death of Jesus.
The film shown at these screenings was not quite complete-it had no end credits, it was missing some special effects, and it had a temporary music track-but it still had the power to move audience members to tears.
"Every place we went, there was a holy hush that came over the crowd when it was finished," says Bob Kraemer, director of special projects for Campus Crusade. "It was very difficult for people to speak when it was finished. At every place there were people who couldn't handle the intensity of Jesus' suffering. We had a woman faint in Calgary-that was an interesting thing."
The film was shown to an estimated 9,000 people in nine cities over six days in mid-January, beginning in Halifax and ending with two screenings in Surrey, B.C.
The screenings-sponsored by Campus Crusade with help from Outreach Canada, Alpha Canada, Focus on the Family, Christian Direction, Catholic Evangelization Training Ministries and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada-were held to encourage Christians to use the film to reach out to their non-Christian friends and neighbours.
To this end, the organizers have set up two Web sites: ShareTheLife.com contains resources for promoting the film and reaching out to non-Christians, while TheLife.com has been designed for "seekers" who want to learn more about Christ after seeing the film, which will be released to over 2,000 theatres across North America February 25.
However, organizers say Christians need to be subtler in promoting and using this film than they would normally be with other outreach programs like the Alpha Course.
At one of the screenings in Surrey, Kraemer said that even though Gibson is a believing Catholic who has encouraged Christians to make evangelistic use of his film, Gibson himself is not directly involved in these efforts, and The Passion itself remains a secular film.
Kraemer says Christians do not need to lobby theatres to show the film, since Equinoxe Films-a secular distributor that has released such hit films as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Mambo Italiano-will do everything it can to maximize the film's box-office success. "We don't want the church to be so aggressive in promoting it that the non-churched person says, 'Well, that's a church thing, and I'm not going to it,'" he says.
However, some theatres still report a flood of calls from individuals and church groups wanting to purchase advance tickets, often for large groups.
The Passion of the Christ has received an R rating in the United States for its violent depiction of the arrest and crucifixion of Christ. The film had not been rated yet by any of Canada's provinces at press time, though the B.C. Film Classification Office did rule the trailer could not be shown before G or PG-rated films.
Kraemer says the violence is justified because the film is a "realistic" and "accurate" depiction of the crucifixion of Christ. He added there is "nothing gratuitous" about the film, though it does take artistic license with its source material. "People ask me, 'Is the film biblical?' And I say, 'It's not un-biblical,'" he said. "There's nothing that contravenes the scripture or contradicts it. I think [Gibson] did a good job."
The Passion of the Christ has been an ongoing source of controversy ever since Gibson appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" more than a year ago to say that an investigative reporter was harrassing his father and raising allegations of anti-Semitism against the film.
However, conservative Jewish pundits such as Michael Medved and David Horowitz say there is nothing anti-Semitic about the film. Kraemer says several Jews who attended the screenings in Canada also found nothing anti-Semitic about the film.
Ron Reed, founding artistic director of Pacific Theatre in Vancouver, attended one of the Surrey screenings and said the film was more of an "art film" than all the talk of historical accuracy had led him to expect.
He called the film "bracing, challenging, far more stimulating, far more orthodox than I ever would have expected," and he said he was "thrilled" by some of the more "nightmarish" aspects of the film that reminded him of the works of David Lynch and Franz Kafka.
"I also thought, anybody who becomes a Christian because of seeing this film won't likely be signing on for any health-and-wealth gospel," he added. "The Jesus Country Clubs won't gain a lot of members from this one. The tract that ought to accompany The Passion should lead with, 'If anyone would follow me, let him take up his cross and follow me.'"
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