To serve and give his life as a ransom for many

By 1964 the historical epic was on its way out. In the United States Cleopatra, doomed by its stupendous cost and the scandal surrounding its leads, had hastened the demise of the genre. In Italy pepla could always be cheaply made, but audiences were beginning to desert sword-and-sandal adventures in favour of the new kids on the block, the giallo and the spaghetti western. With the ancient epic as a whole went the colossal Bible adaptations of the fifties and early sixties, like The Ten Commandments (1956) and King of Kings (1961).

Curiously, though, the dying years of the biblical epic were in fact well suited to serious public explorations of religion. The papacy of John XXIII, culminating in the Second Vatican Council, marked an opening of the Catholic Church towards the world, a qualified departure from its previous defensive stance vis-à-vis modernity and possibly an ecclesiological revolution. As part of that, the Church became more willing to engage art produced by non-Catholics.

The non-Catholic that interests us here is Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian novelist, director, poet, intellectual and pretty much every other cultural profession under the sun. An open atheist and communist, Pasolini was also followed by (well-founded) rumours of homosexuality in the tabloid press. He was, in short, precisely the sort of person the Syllabus of Errors of a more combative papacy was directed against. And yet Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo) - dedicated to the memory of John XXIII - is a stunning success, a far more interesting religious work than the often musty epics Hollywood had churned out. Armed with an unimpressive budget, Pasolini succeeds in making the most ubiquitous story in Western culture strange again.

He does this, first, by adapting only the Gospel of Matthew, shunning the usual approach of harmonising the gospels or filling in gaps in one with bits from the other. That approach often leads to ridiculousness in adaptation (witness talkative crucified Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) as well as cognitive dissonance, since we're taught not to realise that Matthew and Luke tell different and incompatible nativity stories. By sticking solely to Matthew, the film does not feature the birth of John the Baptist, the census and journey to Bethlehem (like Matthew's gospel, Pasolini implies Joseph and Mary are from Bethlehem), the birth of Jesus in a stable, the shepherds - and that's the nativity alone; later, we're not given the 'I am' statements, the woman caught in adultery, the wedding at Cana, Jesus and Zacchaeus, the parable of the Good Samaritan, doubting Thomas, and so on. By missing all these familiar elements, the narrative feels startling and strange; we see its shape, but it is not the shape of the gospel we think we know.

Instead, Pasolini - faithful to Matthew, I think - presents the story mostly as an escalating conflict between Jesus and the Jewish civil and religious authorities. He emphasises Herod's massacre of the innocent at Bethlehem, repeatedly stressing the violence of the authorities. We see Jesus react tearfully to the murder of John the Baptist, but determined to continue his mission. Under pressure in Jerusalem, he retreats into the company of the Twelve, with whom he eats a final supper at a safe house before being betrayed, arrested and executed, and rising again on Sunday.

At the heart of Pasolini's gospel story is Jesus (and, before him, John the Baptist) challenging the institutions and representatives of Israel to accept him as Messiah. Rejected, he begins forming an alternative Israel consisting of the poor, the disreputable and the sick - an upside-down kingdom that pointedly confronts the authorities. The victory of established Israel - capturing, convicting and executing Jesus - proves an illusion, as he rises and commissions his followers to extend his kingdom to the whole earth. Because the old Israel rejected Jesus, it has now been rejected by God.

That storyline, of course, is why Matthew's gospel is often accused of antisemitism - a charge that seems basically accurate, although anti-Jewish rhetoric from a precarious first-century Messianic sect is undoubtedly different from the modern-day scourge. Pasolini avoids that problem by de-contextualising Matthew's Jesus-against-the-Jews story through the deliberate use of anachronism. Herod's soldiers are dressed like medieval warriors and Spanish conquistadors, and the film uses the Romanesque and Gothic churches of Basilicata and Apulia for sets. The soundtrack features well-known pieces of religious music from Händel to Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night". By mixing symbols from two thousand years of Christian history, Pasolini's film is at once about first-century Palestine and the hope of a whole crushed humanity in Jesus. First-century events are thus imbued with an eschatological dimension.

At the same time, Pasolini undercuts folk orthodoxy at several points. Salome, whose dance before Herod II leads to the execution of John the Baptist, is portrayed as a nervous teenage girl under the thrall of her mother, not the lascivious temptress of tradition. Jesus, meanwhile, is not the serenely smiling figure of religious art; Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui portrays him as angry, driven, and ultimately inscrutable. The other actors, local amateurs all, predictably give flat, affectless performances - which, given Pasolini's copious use of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, is as it should be.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew is not the plain Marxist allegory Pasolini was expected to produce. Pasolini's Jesus is, instead, the Christ of liberation theology: in his ministry God's kingdom - inaugurated by his death at empire's hands - and the embrace of the oppressed are inextricably bound up. The audience, though, is not put in a comfortable position of solidarity. Pasolini films the trial of Jesus over the shoulders of the jeering crowd, implicating the viewer in the rejection of Jesus. His Jesus is not reducible to a single lesson or pat truth. The suffering of mankind bound up in him, he remains mysterious - but endlessly fascinating.

Jesus was a colonised person

In 'Song of the Magi', Anaïs Mitchell links Jesus' Bethlehem to today's West Bank town:

...a child is born
born in Bethlehem
born in a cattle pen
a child is born on the killing floor...
welcome home, my child
your home is a checkpoint now
your home is a border town
welcome to the brawl
life ain't fair, my child
put your hands in the air, my child
slowly now, single file, now
up against the wall

Jesus was a colonised person living under Roman occupation in first-century Palestine. Imperial rule shaped Jewish society. Tax collectors were ostracised as collaborators, revival preachers proclaimed the coming kingdom of heaven,  and zealots organised armed resistance. Occupation loomed large over Jesus' ministry too, from the discussion on paying taxes to the Romans to the expectation that Jesus would overthrow the occupiers by force and install himself as Israel's anointed king. Instead, he triumphed over Caesar by quietly submitting to the most gruesome public death the Empire could devise.

That matters.

Jesus came to lift up the poor, the hungry, the broken-hearted and the despised. He ushered in an upside-down kingdom in which the last was to be first. In his body he experienced the brutality and violence of Empire. His promise to oppressed, beaten, frightened, occupied people everywhere - a pledge whispered but never drowned out by Empire's heavy boots - is that things will not always be this way.

... wear we now our warmest coats
wear we now our walking shoes
open wide the gates of hope
and let us through

There was little love lost between Jesus and the wielders of power, especially if they used God's name to justify their violence. That hasn't changed in two thousand years.

It means that, far from propping up the empires supposedly built on 'Judaeo-Christian foundations', Jesus is with their victims, whispering with them sweet songs of freedom.

Remove all the bars that keep us apart

I wish  I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could say all the things that  I should say
say 'em loud, say 'em clear
for the whole round world to hear.

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart
remove all the bars that keep us apart
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree
that every man should be free.

I wish I could give all I'm longing to give
I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish that I could do all the things that  I can do
though I'm way overdue I'd be starting anew.

 - Nina Simone 

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, 
   because the LORD has anointed me 
   to proclaim good news to the poor. 
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, 
   to proclaim freedom for the captives 
   and release from darkness for the prisoners, 
 to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour 
   and the day of vengeance of our God, 
to comfort all who mourn, 
  and provide for those who grieve in Zion— 
to bestow on them a crown of beauty 
   instead of ashes, 
the oil of joy 
   instead of mourning, 
and a garment of praise 
   instead of a spirit of despair. 
They will be called oaks of righteousness, 
   a planting of the LORD 
   for the display of his splendour... 

Instead of your shame 
   you will receive a double portion, 
and instead of disgrace 
   you will rejoice in your inheritance. 
And so you will inherit a double portion in your land, 
   and everlasting joy will be yours. 

- Isaiah 61:1-3, 7

John Piper is wrong about women

American pastor John Piper has come under criticism for saying that God gave Christianity a 'masculine feel'. Piper's assertions (which gender important virtues male, among other things) have been thoroughly refuted all over the blogosphere. In the slightly older video above, Piper discusses the question of domestic abuse (beginning with an ill-advised chuckle). He ends up suggesting that women should endure verbal abuse 'for a season' and endure 'being smacked' for one night, before taking the problem to the church.

These remarks are, of course, despicable. The fact that Piper seems to mean nothing by them makes it worse: his ignorance suggests that he lives in a subculture so male-centred that he is insulated from listening to women at all. Most of all, Piper seems to be totally unaware of the strong association between patriarchy and abuse. As Women's Aid put it:

Domestic violence against women by men is "caused"* by the misuse of power and control within a context of male privilege. Male privilege operates on an individual and societal level to maintain a situation of male dominance, where men have power over women and children. Perpetrators of domestic violence choose to behave abusively to get what they want and gain control. Their behaviour often originates from a sense of entitlement which is often supported by sexist, racist, homophobic and other discriminatory attitudes. In this way, domestic violence by men against women can be seen as a consequence of the inequalities between men and women, rooted in patriarchal traditions that encourage men to believe they are entitled to power and control over their partners.

Violence is typically the assertion of male control, not the loss of it in a fit of rage. Male rule - for which 'godly male leadership' is but a euphemism; it's difficult to imagine what besides rule Piper means by 'leadership' in concrete situations - sets the context in which women suffer violence. The belief that Christianity is chiefly masculine relegates women to second-class status, appendages of their husbands whom they are obliged to obey. This puts women into the impossible situation of choosing between their own safety and well-being (by seeking help, which may involve leaving their husband) and obedience to Christ.

Short of situations in which we are ordered to disown Jesus, that dilemma is false. We follow a Lord who was and is eternally human, who mourns with those who mourn, who will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smouldering wick. Never forget that He began his ministry like this (Luke 4:16-21):

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
    "The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
   because he has anointed me
   to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
   and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
  Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

It's horrifying that End Violence Against Women, for example, need to advise visitors how to cover their tracks to prevent their abuser from finding out they're seeking help. So much for the 'Christian foundations' of 'western civilisation' supposedly under threat: Piper's assertion that 'the fullest flourishing of women and men takes place in churches and families that have this masculine feel' is comprehensively refuted by two thousand years of church history.

Of course, as Piper says, the church can play a part in tackling abuse by running women's shelters or by excommunicating known abusers. But in its present form the church is ill-equipped for these tasks. It cannot honestly claim innocence from abuse until it abandons male rule. You cannot both deplore violence and argue for the continuing existence of contexts in which violence occurs: something has to give. Because white rule was the root cause of lynchings, the answer could not be a more benevolent form of white rule; it was and is the abolition of white rule itself. Isn't it time we said the same of patriarchy?

*The inverted commas signify the FAQ's insistence that it is ultimately the abuser who is responsible for violence, and that social context does not abolish responsibility.

If your neighbour worships twenty gods: a note on biblical law and religious toleration

Christians are used to seeing secular society - whose institutions favour no particular faith - as a dire threat. To John Piper, for example, '[t]he modern secular world... tries to remove God from his all-creating, all- sustaining, all-defining, all-governing place [and] has no choice but to make itself god'. In other words, a secular society is blasphemous by definition. Against this conservative appraisal, I'll suggest secularism is most fruitfully understood not as a menace destroying western civilisation from within, but as a blessing longed for by those who did not enjoy it, made possible by Jesus' death on the cross.

At the same time, I'll argue that the liberal understanding of secularism is ahistorical and impossible to square with biblical evidence. Here, for example, is the excellent blogger Fred Clark, arguing against the US Catholic bishops' attempt to stop contraceptive services for women:

'It does me no injury,' Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' The advocates of burka-logic [sic] disagree. They insist that the very presence of such irreligious neighbors does them an injury - the injury of constraining their freedom to live unperturbed by the constant reminder of such blasphemies.

This quintessentially liberal argument - my neighbour's religious predilections do me no harm, so I have no business constraining him - cannot survive an encounter with the God of the Old Testament. At Sinai God makes a covenant is with Israel as a community to ensure correct religious observance and moral behaviour in the land (Deuteronomy 1:1-14). The Mosaic Law does not offer any room for religious toleration. Indeed the Israelites are explicitly commanded to destroy all traces of Canaanite paganism if they wish to enjoy the land (Deuteronomy 12:1-4).

Contrary to Jefferson, under Old Testament law my neighbour's heterodox religious observance does pick my pocket and break my leg. The Religious Right's notion of 'individual responsibility' is quite absent in the Bible. God repeatedly threatens to punish people for sins they have not themselves committed, 'visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation' (Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9, and many more). Positively, God considers whole communities more kindly on account of a few righteous people (Genesis 18:22-32, Romans 11:28).

The insistence that Israel is judged as a whole for the actions committed in its midst rather than as individuals is perhaps best encapsulated by Deuteronomy 21:1-9:

If in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. And the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has never been worked and that has not pulled in a yoke. And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither ploughed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley. Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come forward... And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, o LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for.' So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD.

Here the murderer is unknown and unidentifiable, but the nearest settlement is required to offer a sacrifice in atonement for the sin committed lest it be visited upon their heads. The action, not the acting subject, is the primary term. Nor does the Bible consider the motives of offenders. Distinguishing murder from accidental killings, for example, is an innovation of the ninth century, when earnest scholars attempted to settle matters humanius (more humanely) than the often harsh Church Fathers. (So much, incidentally, for the notion that a concern for human welfare reveals a 'man-centred' world-view.)

We tend to take a modern legal understanding of individual responsibility for granted, but it can seriously distort our reading of the Bible. The concept of bloodguilt - that sin, if unatoned, will return to haunt even those who have not themselves committed it - is accepted by New Testament writers (Luke 11:50-51, Revelation 6:10). Augustine's notion that original sin is passed on through biological parenthood - logically consigning those who die in the womb to damnation - would also be impossible without bloodguilt.

But that isn't the whole story. In the New Testament, God's people are not told to enforce obedience among their nonbelieving neighbours. Indeed the New Testament is marked by disinterest in secular power at best, and outright hostility at worst (Revelation 17:1-6). The death of Jesus at the cross changes everything. From that point onwards, it is not biological descent from Abraham but faith that determines membership in the people of God (Romans 9:30). The ethno-religious boundaries of ancient Israel have been shattered. God's people are now of every nation and tongue, no longer identifiable with individual peoples or states.

Secularism - a society no longer compelled to enforce religious obedience among its subjects, on pain of judgment - is thus made possible by the death of Jesus. When an individual puts her faith in Christ she cannot become his without also becoming part of the people of God; God's covenant is made with his people as a whole. There is no salvation for the individual outside the collective salvation of God's people (which is why I continue to find Calvinism's emphasis on Christ's successful purchase of a definite people compelling). It is because of this ingrafting into the people of God that baptism - a public symbol of membership in God's family - is important. But it no longer coincides with membership in an earthly nation or obedience to a set of temporal laws.

If the potential for secularism was present from Jesus' death onwards, that potential had to remain unrealised in pre-modern societies, which functioned through personal relationships and localised hierarchies sealed and enforced through oaths. Public declarations of political and religious loyalty - which are quite superfluous in modern states - were vital to rulers who lacked the centralised bureaucracy necessary to enforce obedience among their subjects. (For example, a modern state knows who all its subjects are and where they live, something the ancients could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.)

Even the Roman state, often praised for its tolerance, could not solve the problem of religious diversity by becoming secular - atheist as a state - but only by being radically inclusivist, declaring all faiths valid and adding foreign deities to its pantheon. Still, it required that its subjects subordinate their loyalties to the imperial cult, and those who could not comply - Christians, most famously - had to suffer its wrath. Pre-modern societies that did not compel everyone's conversion (the political entities of the Islamic world, for example) nonetheless had to privilege one faith.

It was only with the vastly increased capacity of the state from the French Revolution onwards, and its sweeping aside of motley feudal ties and privileges, that overwhelmingly Christian societies could provide freedom of religion for their subjects without breaking down. Our nonconformist forebears - the very people from whom modern evangelicalism is descended - ardently campaigned and prayed for a secular state that would not exclude them on the basis of religion, and eventually obtained that sweet freedom.

Redemption day

There is a train that's heading straight
To heaven's gate, to heaven's gate
And on the way, child and man,
And woman wait, watch and wait
For redemption day

It's buried in the countryside
It's exploding in the shells at night
It's everywhere a baby cries
Freedom

Sheryl Crow's 'Redemption Day' is one of the most beautiful poetic summaries of Christianity I've ever encountered. Being a Christian is living in the hope that one day, every tear will be wiped from every eye; and that hope is confirmed by Jesus' resurrection, proving that he prevailed over darkness and set the captives free.

And that's a hope far better than that of the Religious Right, who merely expect that their super-buddy Christ will come and kill everyone they dislike with fire. Why be satisfied with that?

Let the little children come unto me

When I was seventeen, I spent three weeks serving as a 'senior camper' at a Christian summer camp. The purpose of Iwerne Holidays was to present the gospel to teenagers from independent schools in a fun environment including sports, excursions, and all sorts of activities. It was just like being a 'camp counselor' across the pond, except we weren't hacked to pieces by machete-wielding madmen.*

It was, however, nothing at all like Jesus Camp. Therein lies much of what makes the film so fascinating and irritating.

Jesus Camp, released in 2006, is an artifact of the culture wars of the 2000s, that appalling time in history when 'religion' (whatever that means) was at the forefront of public debate in the Anglo-Saxon world. The days of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, James Dobson and Pat Robertson, all of them thankfully increasingly irrelevant in an age where culture war has dissolved into the naked class struggle whose halo it was from the beginning.

Anyway! The film follows evangelical culture around a Pentecostal children's camp called 'Kids on Fire' in North Dakota. There, pastor Becky Fischer 'equips' children to be 'warriors for Christ' to 'take America back' by evangelism as well as fighting abortion and other forms of ungodliness in the public sphere. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady focus on three of the children: twelve-year-old Levi, homeschooled by his mother, who teaches him that evolution is a hoax; nine-year-old Rachael, who regularly engages in evangelism towards strangers; and ten-year-old Tory, who breakdances to Christian metal.

At Kids on Fire, these and other children are taught to be wary because 'the devil goes after the young' and to distrust secular entertainment ('Had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would've been put to death!'). Among themselves, the children discuss their feelings about films and books, revealing their struggles with what they're being taught. In a service that can in good conscience only be described as mass hysteria, the children break down weeping and pledge to end abortion by political activism and asking God for 'righteous judges'.

We meet Levi again at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. In an interview, Pastor Ted Haggard expresses his delight at evangelical Christians forming a decisive voting bloc against homosexuality, abortion and the teaching of evolution. This scene, of course, now has a potency the filmmakers couldn't be aware of at the time: just a few months later, Haggard fell from grace when it was revealed he'd indulged in adulterous gay sex and illegal drugs for years.

As you'll have guessed by now, Jesus Camp is a liberal message picture. Despite the lack of a narrator, Ewing and Grady clearly think the formation of a political evangelicalism focused on anti-abortion, anti-homosexual 'family values' is a very bad thing, and I agree with them. Even so, I didn't really need the constant scare music they lather on every scene of Pentecostal worship. The snippets of Mike Papantonio's radio show, in which he criticises the Religious Right, are editorialising I welcome: it's good to see a Christian offer an alternative view to the one pushed by the film's subjects.

Even while Jesus Camp sternly disapproves of its subject matter, it's a respectful, humane film. When Becky Fischer says, offhand, 'I get exhausted doing this' while preparing for another session, it's the rawest, truest moment in the film. While I don't think we learn enough about them (which isn't really excusable, given the film's short running time), the children are never treated as less than full human beings with dreams and ambitions. Levi's worldview may be a mess of cruel lies - if global warming is true, ye are yet in your sins - but we learn to rejoice and mourn with him.

As such, the film's ostensibly simple message constantly rebels against the much more complex response the film actually induces in the viewer - especially if that viewer, like me, is himself an evangelical Christian. Becky Fischer's ministry is horrifying: she's convinced children need to be indoctrinated because most people's Weltanschauung is fixed from a young age, so better get in early; and she's worried because 'the enemy' - Islam - is supposedly training young children to blow themselves up, an amount of dedication she seems to view with envy rather than horror. (It was 2006, remember.)

In Fischer's call that children should be 'warriors' the Christian concept of spiritual warfare thus comes worryingly close to real, physical warfare. The 'Christian pledge of allegiance' one of the families recites at home has nothing to do with the gospel but a lot with a brand of Christian nationalism - something I can't imagine Jesus approving of. Faith in radical, counter-cultural grace - following an executed criminal - does not sit comfortably with colonising the public sphere because 'our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian values' (Fischer).

Although the film is unmistakeably a product of its time - witness the scene in which the children are invited to bless a cardboard cutout of George Bush by stretching out their hands towards it - it seems prescient in other ways. The language of 'taking back America', now secularised in the Republican Right's crusade against ostensible Marxists, socialists, and liberals, is used here in religious garb. This rhetoric of national rebirth in the face of an ungodly, totalitarian government - a narrative that is a pack of lies, remember, no matter what we might feel about Obama otherwise - has given rise to the uniquely American permutations of fascism that are now flourishing at the even-loonier end of the Tea Party.

Jesus Camp runs into problems in failing to notice that Fischer and her ilk are engaged in intra-evangelical point-scoring, too: Rachael believes that churches with ordered, sedate services are 'dead'. The raucous Pentecostal manifestations of Kids on Fire - dancing, weeping, speaking in tongues, the whole vocabulary of the charismatic movement - would be regarded with bemusement if not outright horror by many evangelicals; fundamentalists, who trace their tradition back to the Puritans and disapprove of both dancing and what Jonathan Edwards called 'enthusiasm', would be especially appalled.**

The filmmakers don't seem to realise that the Religious Right is less a terrifying monolith than a collection of increasingly disparate forces provisionally united around certain political issues: opposing homosexuality, abortion and secularism, championing the military and the death penalty. Just like Fischer herself, Ewing and Grady never investigate the loci of structural power and privilege among their subjects: the power of leaders over followers, adults over children, men over women. Jesus Camp would be a richer film for it, but it remains an eye-opening portrait of the Religious Right.

*What did you expect? Being a Christian summer camp, the experience lacked the weed-smoking and fornication necessary to enrage Norfolk's homicidal maniac population.
**Perhaps more embarrassingly, many evangelicals would not be comfortable with a female pastor.

Observing the hypocrites: Tesco and the wrath of God

Today the Guardian reported that 'fringe Christian pressure group' Christian Voice had attributed Tesco's falling profits to divine retribution for the supermarket giant's decision to sponsor a gay pride festival.* First of all, kudos to the folks at the Guardian who used 'fringe' as the very first adjective to describe Christian Voice. But even though the group makes a lot of noise for a bunch of people who wield little influence within British Christianity, their culture-war obsessions are unfortunately more widespread (as shown by Anglican Mainstream and the Catholic Herald on the same subject).

Christian Voice consider gay pride events 'divisive' and 'depraved', and have engaged in prayer that God would 'humble proud Tesco' through 'confusion in the Tesco boardroom' (says their chairman). What's so astonishing here is the total loss of perspective. There are three passages in the Bible that unambiguously discuss homosexuality - Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and Romans 1:26-27. (That's three more than we have about abortion, incidentally.)

There's little there to suggest the idea of a dire homosexual threat - the Big Gay Menace - presaging the imminent downfall of western civilisation. What's so odd and hypocritical is that Tesco is indeed engaged in sinful practices, of a kind the Bible condemns hundreds of times. I don't just mean their strange failure to distribute all their assets to the poor, as demanded by Jesus.

No, as an international business Tesco routinely, systemically engage in exploiting and expropriating farmers at home and, more significantly, in the Global South, blackmailing them into accepting low prices and forcing them into chronic dependency by the threat of starvation (as exhaustively documented in Joanna Blythman's Shopped). They overwork and underpay their employees to secure fat profits for their shareholders. And while of course capitalism didn't exist in biblical times, the apparent ability of oppressors to live healthy, wealthy lives caused even the prophet Habakkuk to doubt God:

You who are of purer eyes than to see evil
   and cannot look at wrong,
why do you idly look at traitors
   and remain silent when the wicked swallows up
   the man more righteous than he?
You make mankind like the fish of the sea,
   like crawling things that have no ruler.
He brings all of them up with a hook;
   he drags them out with his net;
he gathers them in his dragnet;
   so he rejoices and is glad.
Therefore he sacrifices to his net
   and makes offerings to his dragnet;
for by them he lives in luxury,
   and his food is rich.
Is he then to keep on emptying his net
   and mercilessly killing nations forever? (Habakkuk 1:13-17)**

It wasn't God's failure to punish gay people that caused the prophet's despair: it was the fact that cruel empires apparently enjoyed the fruits of their depredations, living in wealth, luxury and security while a good God, supposedly the protector of the lowly, seemed to do nothing. (Similarly, Jesus had exactly nothing to say about homosexuality, but quite a lot about those exploiting religious sentiment for their own ends.)

Where is Christian Voice's anguished cry over the misery of the wretched of the earth that Tesco preys on? Why do so few modern evangelical leaders see fit to echo Habakkuk? His confusion showed his humanity. Rather than rejecting his honest enquiry, God answered that the oppressor would not live in security forever, that the apparent triumph of the wicked was an illusion:

Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house,
   to set his nest on high,
   to be safe from the reach of harm!
You have devised shame for your house
   by cutting off many peoples;
   you have forfeited your life.
For the stone will cry out from the wall,
   and the beam from the woodwork respond.
Woe to him who builds a town with blood
   and founds a city on iniquity!
Behold, is it not from the LORD of hosts
   that peoples labor merely for fire,
   and nations weary themselves for nothing?
For the earth will be filled
   with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD
   as the waters cover the sea. (Habakkuk 2:9-14)

Christian Voice's obsession with homosexuality and indifference to Tesco's real inhumanity is thrown in sharper relief by their other campaign: their Islamophobic attempt to brand halal meat as 'ritually slaughtered'. Despite their protestations - which they almost certainly believe themselves: the religious right are nothing if not good at convincing themselves they're reading the Bible literally - Christian Voice don't care much about what the Bible actually says.

Their hateful rhetoric is not biblical but plainly reactionary: they want a society in which we can all pretend all those gays and Muslamics don't exist. The call to love one's neighbour implies that that neighbour is different, seemingly alien, perhaps upsetting to your personal sensibilities: else the commandment would be unnecessary. God's wrath is reserved not for oppressed minorities (which Muslims and LGBTQ people most certainly are, whether we agree with them or not) but for the powerful exploiters, and it takes a degree of moral perversity to read the Bible any other way.  

*A decision which, for the record, was achieved by grassroots pressure from LGBTQ employees.
**See also, for example, Psalm. 10, 12, 14...

Where do oppressors go when they die?

Me in Ceasefire, on Christianity and social justice:

As a result of historic defeats the language of the Left is often focused on outcomes, 'equality' and 'social justice' The Bible, on the other hand, is more forthright: it talks of freedom, loosing the yoke, setting the prisoners free. Its vision of another world is not one that is more equal, but one in which the Downpresser Man has been vanquished, and revolutionary discourses heavily influenced by the Bible – reggae, for example – reflect this...

If he is 'the least of these', then Jesus is a Palestinian woman giving birth at a checkpoint in the West Bank, a fourteen-year-old jailed for rioting in Tottenham, a peasant starving in Somalia, a factory worker losing her home to foreclosure in Michigan, an Iraqi street orphan, a black man on death row in Texas, a raped woman who’s told she 'wanted it', a Foxconn employee who kills himself out of despair in China.

He is all the people we have been told to fear and despise, the whole suffering mass of humanity, the wretched of the earth. It’s not Christian to defend mansions and missiles just so long as the government will keep gay marriage illegal. Christian life is to unmask the discourses of power and to end oppression. The promise of Christmas is that injustice will not last forever.

Standing in the afterglow of Rapture with the words the Rapture left

On her terrific second album Virtue, Emmy the Great deals with the break-up from her fiancé, who found Jesus and went overseas to become a missionary. She investigated Christianity, but ultimately realised she could not follow him on his path. In 'Paper Forest', she likens his departure to 'standing in the afterglow of Rapture with the words the Rapture left', while in 'Trellick Tower' she sees herself as a 'relic [Latin relictum, "left behind"] and you're so so high':

You propel yourself into the arms of God
And Christ and all the angels
Now you're high above the people
Who you used to call your equals...
You left me as a witness
Who can tidy up your business...

There's bitterness, confusion and longing in those songs, but they're tightly controlled poems too. It's no accident that Emma-Lee Moss uses the imagery of ascension and Rapture here. Her former lover removed himself and, when she found she didn't believe as he did, well: there's your cherubim and flaming sword. In declaring himself committed to a holy purpose, he claimed she - and everything they'd built up together and valued - was unholy. By ascending he'd counted his entire former world but dung.

That hurts. I don't think Christians usually appreciate how painful our conversion can be for others. 'Come out of her, my people', we hear, and we may even believe others' distress is evidence of their unredeemed nature. We've changed, in ways our loved ones could never foresee: we're open about the fact that we've died, after all. We've got a whole new set of priorities, and we disown everything that used to matter to us, the world they were a part of. What's more, our relationships with others suddenly seem conditional on a set of beliefs they find baffling, even repugnant.

When Emma-Lee Moss's fiancé became a Christian, he moved out of their shared house and broke off their engagement. That would make anyone feel not just rejected, but dirty: as if he thought she wasn't good enough to be with him. When she says that this shock was 'an odd and nasty thing I wanted out of my life', I believe her.

I have no answer to this, but the Rapture metaphor haunted me and caused me to think. Those who believe in the Rapture long for the final separation of Christians from non-Christians, much like Emmy's fiancé thought that breaking off his engagement was the godly thing to do. Among end-times believers, the Rapture isn't just an eschatological tenet: it is an event soon to be expected, to be longed and prayed for, dominating their lives. They can't wait for the moment when they'll be whisked away, leaving everyone else behind in the winepress of the wrath of God.

This parallel accounts, I think, for the similarity between Emmy's lyrics and a work like Therefore Repent! by the Canadian anarchist Jim Munroe, which deals with the experience of being left behind in a decaying post-Rapture America in a way that affirms the intrinsic worth of these people's stories. The radical turn of the Rapture-ready away from the world, on the other hand, denies human life on this earth any place other than scenery to be swept away by the coming deluge.

Such an anti-human ideology may be based on social despair, but ultimately an explanation that reduces accepting Jesus as 'your personal lord and saviour' to disaffection with society is simplistic. A key aspect of religious conversion (for me as for anyone else) is that it's unexpected and irreducible: that, while grounded in our own historical, real, material lives, it nevertheless transcends them, becoming fundamentally, almost by definition inexplicable.

This messianic convergence between the now and the not-yet is the basis for the great tension in the Christian life explored by St Augustine. In his fusion of history and theology, he traces 'the rise, the development and the destined ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, the cities which we find... interwoven, as it were, in this present transitory world, and mingled with one another' (City of God X, 1). Unlike earthly kingdoms, '[t]he safety of the City of God... can be possessed... only with faith and through faith' (XXII, 6).

Interwoven though they are, we mustn't confuse the two. Our country or even 'western civilisation' is not the City of God, no matter what its imagined 'Christian foundation'. Likewise, it won't do to pretend we're not still living in this world by fleeing into separatism or eschatological fantasy, or to feign fanatical certainty while secretly knowing we still see through a glass, darkly.

The incarnation - God choosing to become flesh and dwell among us - is the clearest indication that our lives are not merely the waiting room before heaven, a present-day purgatory: that, rather, God believes in life before death, as the old Christian Aid slogan has it. Until God wipes away all tears from their eyes, Christians are a part of this world, and we're called to be salt and light: to live with our neighbours, and draw out our lives to them.

The trouble with pre-tribbers

I didn't expect it after the dire Left Behind, but Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) is one of those things you hear so much about but never encounter: an improved sequel. To be sure, it's still cheaply made, poorly written and outrageously idiotic; but it is all these things to a lesser extent than the first film was, and it even adds a couple of legitimately watchable scenes.

You may recall that Left Behind gave us the Rapture as foretold by premillennial dispensationalists. In the blink of an eye, God snatched away every single child as well as every born-again Christian on earth. The remnant of the still-corporeal seemed to take this in their stride and soon had bigger things on their minds: the rise of obviously evil Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie) to power at the United Nations.

At a UN meeting behind closed doors, Carpathia appointed ten lackeys to run the world for him. He also murdered two men in front of witnesses he then brainwashed - all except for Buck Williams, who was shielded from his mind control by 'accepting Christ' - and proclaimed the dawn of a single global government and the disarmament of the nations. This, it seems, was accepted by the international community without a single complaint - surprising, you might say, since Carpathia has no military force at his disposal to threaten anyone into compliance. This isn't your run-of-the-mill idiot plot: the very premise of Tribulation Force requires not just its protagonists, but pretty much everyone in the whole world to be a wretched moron.

Everyone, that is, but the ragtag bunch of American Christians who call themselves the Tribulation Force. As the film begins, we're told that in Israel, Tsion Ben-Judah (Lubomir Mykytiuk), the world's foremost religious scholar, is about to announce 'the single biggest piece of news in history'. (What, bigger than Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection? The filmmakers think so.) It seems that after careful study of the scriptures, Ben-Judah has determined the identity of the Messiah, and Nicolae Carpathia, who's just proclaimed a one-world religion, wants to make sure it's him.

Through personal connections - his ex-pseudo-mistress Hattie Durham (Chelsea Noble) is Carpathia's personal assistant - Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson) becomes the pilot of the Antichrist's personal plane. Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron), meanwhile, is sent to cover Ben-Judah's proclamation in Jerusalem for the Global News Network, and decides to take the scholar to meet the two extraordinarily shaggy witnesses (Les Carlsen and Louis Negin) who are preaching Christ at the Western Wall. The problem: Carpathia's UN soldiers have sealed off the area and have been ordered to shoot any trespassers.

This plot point is mind-bogglingly stupid. Recall, perhaps, that the United Nations don't have a standing army; recall further that Israel, which controls Jerusalem and is the only sovereign nation that has not been integrated into Antichrist's empire, isn't exactly known for its cooperation with international institutions, especially when said institutions are inflaming religious tensions by gunning down pilgrims. Even so, this is the plot we get. My recap in fact skips most of the film: for two thirds of its running time, Tribulation Force is treading water.

That wheel-spinning at least gives us the series' first gospel talk. For a Christian film, Left Behind was curiously devoid of Jesus, befitting the authors' reading of the Bible as a mass of coded prophecies. In Tribulation Force, though, we get the new character of Chris (David MacNiven), who's lost his family to the Rapture. He shares a pretty nifty scene with Rayford, which feels almost raw and human, and although the gospel as preached by Tribulation Force is all about sin and judgment and not about Jesus' attractive qualities, as well as being curiously free of reference to the world-shattering events of Left Behind, this alone makes Tribulation Force better than its predecessor.

There's also a contrived romantic subplot between Buck and Chloe Steele (Janaya Stephens), involving one of those misunderstandings we all love so much when Chloe mistakes Buck's sister Ivy (Krista Bridges) for his fiancée. (This trope is virtually never gender-flipped.) Because women are irrational, it's perfectly all right for Rayford and Buck to join forces in patronising and manipulating Chloe in amusing and heartwarming ways until the misunderstanding is resolved. Although I do love some sanitised, subtext-heavy romance, it's still a bit much to take, especially when Buck and Rayford go off to Israel and leave Chloe behind. (This, however, gives us several hilarious scenes of unmistakeable sexual tension between Chloe and Ivy. I don't think that was intentional.)

That sort of relief makes Tribulation Force rather more enjoyable than its dour predecessor. Directed by the hack Bill Corcoran, the film trumps the books by considering what would actually happen to the world in the wake of the Rapture - although it still does so much less successfully than, for example, Jim Munroe's terrific comic book Therefore Repent!, which wisely focuses on the human element. The film also ends in the wrong place, going for a limp warm glow where a shock setback at the close would have worked much better.

Then there's the questionable theology. 'We can't stop [Carpathia], we can't change the events of the Bible', Bruce Barnes (Clarence Gilyard) suggests. Well, that's all dramatic tension gone; but despite Bruce's claim, the Tribulation Force does manage to foil Carpathia in this film. It throws up a much larger question, though: in the rigid end-times chronology of premillennial dispensationalism, what space is there for human beings to act and affect events? What exactly is the TF to do? Ultimately, dispensationalism has a flawed understanding of the relationship between God's sovereignty and human free will, and that's a millstone around the neck of a series that already has a considerable number of strikes against it.

In this series: Left Behind: The Movie (2000) | Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) | Left Behind: World at War (2005)

What hath God wrought?

There's something oddly fascinating about end times mania. You may remember that the Rapture was supposed to happen earlier this year, as predicted by Christian radio host Harold Camping. Virtually nobody believed Camping's arcane numerology, but the media lavished undeserved attention on him, and Facebook was awash in mockery.

When the apocalypse failed to occur, Camping retired. The real story, though, wasn't that somebody claiming to have deciphered a secret message in the Bible had once again been wrong: it was that people cared, if only to ridicule. In 2011, billboards announcing the imminent fiery destruction of all life seemed to be a visible sign of the extraordinary times of economic and political crisis we're living through.

And where there's a cultural obsession there's a market. Enter Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins with their Left Behind series of novels. Left Behind deals with the end of the world, all according to the teachings of premillennial dispensationalism. The books became a publishing phenomenon and would have turned their authors into millionaires if they hadn't been already. They mostly sold in the States, though: I've certainly seen Left Behind volumes prominently displayed in English Christian bookshops, but they remained largely unknown on this side of the pond.

It was inevitable there should be a film; and what a film! Left Behind promised to be the biggest, most ambitious Christian production of all time. Cloud Ten Pictures threw $17.4 million at the film despite realising it would go straight to video, as indeed it did: but strong sales led to Left Behind being thrown into cinemas after video release. Even so, it lost money and led Tim LaHaye to sue the producers, claiming they'd promised him a $40 million film. (Two direct-to-video sequels were produced, and there's supposedly a reboot in the offing.)

We open with a ludicrous fauxlosophic narration by Buck Williams (noted banana expert Kirk Cameron), followed by credits over stock footage of Jerusalem. Then we see something ominous: CGI warplanes approaching Israel both from the east and the west - and, for some reason, disgustingly fake-looking CGI tanks driving east across the Syrian border. Now it's time to meet Buck Williams, Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time, standing in the Israeli desert (played by a quarry in Ontario) where, thanks to a miracle formula by Dr Chaim Rosenzweig (Colin Fox), corn is being grown. Dr Rosenzweig refuses to sell his formula, but he'll exchange it for peace for Israel, yada yada yada -

- and then Israel is attacked by planes from all directions. A great deal of silliness ensues, but the gist of it is that the massive, overwhelming attack is defeated by the hand of God pretty much swatting the planes out of the sky. (The identity of the attackers is never clarified, by the way: in the book it's Russia and Ethiopia, thus supposedly fulfilling Ezekiel's prophecy about Gog and Magog. Miracle!)

The film's special effects budget thus blown in the first five minutes, it's time to meet the Steeles. They're Rayford (Brad Johnson), a pilot; Irene (Christie MacFayden), his devoted born-again wife; and their children, twenty-year-old Chloe (Janaya Stephens - Lacey Chabert was originally attached to play this part) and pre-teen Raymie (Jack Manchester). Chloe has a nose ring, and dialogue establishes this means she's rebellious & unsaved. Blah blah, Rayford is emotionally unavailable and misses his son's birthday, Chloe is displeased, Irene is saintly, and Raymie is annoying. Then Rayford goes off to work.

Now, about half an hour in, we've finally reached the first page of the novel this is based on: we're on a flight out of Chicago. In the middle of the night, people begin to notice some of the adults and all the children seem to be missing. There's much panicking, and Rayford has to turn the plane around; there's chaos on the ground, too, as the disappearances, apparently global, have led to panic and accidents. (Chloe, for example, has to hit the brakes to avoid a pile-up caused by a disappeared lorry driver. This suggests Christians should not be issued driving licences.) Anyway, the cast realise that the disappearances are the supposedly foretold Rapture: God has whisked away his church, and a seven-year tribulation is about to begin on earth. At the same time, there's a charismatic young man, Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie), rising to power at the UN with promises of world peace.

I don't believe in the Rapture. It's a nineteenth-century invention based on incredibly weak scriptural evidence. (Fred Clark has done excellent in-depth dissections of the books, by the way. His criticism is intelligent, Bible-based and, best of all, hilarious.) I find LaHaye and Jenkins's approach - cobble together bits of 'prophecy' from Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel and wherever else you can find it into a maddeningly elaborate, fragile whole - both silly and deeply misguided. I've always been told not to waste my time with end-times prophecy since 'concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven' (Matthew 24:36).

But even if I didn't have deep reservations about the film's happy-clappy attitude to the rivers turning into blood, it would still be a bad film. As directed by Vic Sarin and shot by George Tirl, Left Behind looks totally anonymous. (The 4:3 TV aspect ratio doesn't help.) It reeks of cheapness: apart from the initital all-out attack on Israel the rest of the film is talking, and the dialogue is very bad.So's the acting, by and large. Chelsea Noble, Kirk Cameron's real-life wife, is dispiritingly awful, acting mostly by blinking a lot.

But it's very rare for a film to achieve total worthlessness: the laws of probability dictate that something will almost always work out right. And so it is with Left Behind.

Imagine you're Brad Johnson. You may have been a Marlboro Man in the eighties, but for a brief time you were hot stuff after your roles in Spielberg's Always and Milius' Flight of the Intruder. It didn't work out, though: instead of becoming a star, you turned into the poor man's Tom Berenger. Now you're approaching middle age, you've got a mortgage to pay, and there's this part in a Christian film about the apocalypse. It's silly, it's low-budget, and it will go straight to video. How do you approach that role?

You and I would probably be phoning it in. But clearly, we're not Brad Johnson, because he takes one look at the dismal material and creates a believable, relatable character using nothing but good old-fashioned acting skills acquired over long, moderately unsuccessful years in the business. He turns Rayford Steele, obnoxious and vapid on the page, into an actual living, breathing human being. He could anchor the film, if only they hadn't decided to demote him to supporting cast.

This is worth mentioning because of the baffling contrast between Johnson and our nominal lead, Kirk Cameron in the role of Buck Williams. After his conversion to Christianity and the end of Growing Pains, Cameron became increasingly evangelistic and didn't do much acting in mainstream films anymore. As a fervent believer in 'prophecy' he wanted to do Left Behind and create the greatest/only evangelistic blockbuster of all time. They even rebalanced the material to make Buck the main character rather than part of an ensemble. But here's the thing: Cameron is terrible. He can't convincingly present things he actually passionately believes in. He is a very bad actor, and his presence is the equivalent of cement shoes to Left Behind.

It was a tremendously misguided enterprise from the start. Many of the scenes are laughable when they're meant to be sincere, and for some reason the filmmakers decided to shoehorn in contemporary Christian music whenever anyone shuts their mouth for more than a couple of seconds. Ultimately, though, Left Behind is tripped up by its theology as much as by the incompetence of most of those involved.

When Rayford Steele tells Hattie that '[i]t's not about us. It's about something bigger and something better', Left Behind's failure as a Christian work is laid open for all to see. Actually, it is about us; God does what he does because he loves human beings. We're not just ants to be slaughtered from heaven. It's no wonder LaHaye and Jenkins don't understand that, though. There is no Jesus in Left Behind, no cross and no forgiveness, only death and judgment; and I'm glad that's not the world we live in.

In this series: Left Behind: The Movie (2000) | Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) | Left Behind: World at War (2005)