It may seem ironic that a war fought in the name of principles and imbued with religious ardor should degenerate to such sordid lows. While in America people flock to see Christ tortured, in Iraq we torture our own prisoners -- for information, for deterrence, but also -- as the pictures document -- for the sheer fun of it. And yet, perhaps "irony" is not quite the right concept. Perhaps the relationship between a U.S.-made blockbuster about Christ's pain and the pain inflicted by our soldiers abroad is closer and more inevitable that the notion of "irony" would suggest, because many of the torturers are no doubt heartland Americans, many of them surely devout Christians -- the core audience of "The Passion of Christ." They are the people Bush directly addressed when he characterized the war as a crusade, a fight against evil in the name of the God. The aptitude of Christians for delivering pain draws on a rich, millennial tradition -- a tradition built on certainty and a Manichean worldview. The ability to torture somebody both requires and confirms this certainty; the torturer's exhilarating privilege is to feel right by God while doing what is normally forbidden.

"The Passion of the Christ" is, not unlike an exploitation movie from the '70s, saturated with ultra-violence to the point of ridiculousness. Yet the representation of this violence is unobjectionable to the audience because the violence is inflicted upon the Christ. There seems to be no limit to the amount of violence you could show in this context (provided you could root it in the Scriptures). The torturers themselves are not the ultimate culprits: those are the Jews, as architects of the deicide. By assigning blame to "them," we can watch an hour of torture entirely guilt-free. In fact, the more severe the torture, the more godlike and awesome Christ's endurance. Which means we have a moral incentive to welcome the sight of torture, to wish for more and more punishment to be administered and exhibited on screen. The amount of butchery is directly proportional evidence of our own worth: look what Jesus, the extreme athlete of pain, chose to endure in order to save us! This is the fundamental perversion of the movie -- that it encourages us to fetishize and get high on the horror of the martyrdom.

Sacrifice is perhaps the most ancient form of religious devotion. It goes back to pagan times, when it was meant to placate the gods. It is at the heart of our notion of justice, which focuses its previously random nature onto a "culprit" whose death will placate the aggrieved party. Christian sacrifice is rather meant to educate. It comes as the culminating point of a vast body of teachings. By choosing to emphasize the sacrifice outside the context of those teachings, Christianity (Mel Gibson's version of it) harks back to the most primitive, bloodiest aspect of religiosity. "The Passion of the Christ" repositions pain, blood, sacrifice, at the heart of the religious experience.

Why is this exercise so relevant and so powerful right now? The answer takes us straight to 9/11. As much as we loathed the terrorists, we couldn't help being affected by their conviction. When Bill Maher disputed the assertion that they were cowards, the hysterical outrage that met his remark was a symptom of a raw nerve being tweaked. Because this kind of conviction is precisely what we couldn't be further from. The question is not whether their conviction justifies their action -- it doesn't (and I tend to believe a case for the fundamental cowardice of attacking any defenseless person, regardless of whether or not one commits suicide in the process, could be convincingly made.) The question is how we respond to the sheer intensity of the conviction. Because as much as this intensity horrifies us, it may also be something that, in some dark recesses of our psyche, we (some of us, anyway) envy. And so we may want to remind ourselves that our own God performed the ultimate act of self-abnegation, exonerating us from doing the same as long as we maintain and worship the memory of it. You can fly into the building in the name of Allah? We can reenact the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the name of our own God. The effort to distill every ounce of sacrificial pain from this representation, and the uplift that the audience gets from it, can be read as a response to the suicidal fury of the 9/11 terrorists. Our guy's sacrifice was not only purer, because he didn't bring any innocents along for the death trip, but it was also more painful. We can reach back into our spiritual history and find our own, superior certitude .

It's not simply demagogy that the war against terrorism, or against Iraq, has been cast in religious terms, as a crusade, a fight against evil and for God-given freedom. Sept. 11 shook us to the core because if an act like that can be executed not in the name of profit, power or the traditional motivations we understand, but in the name of religious ideals (however aberrant), our own beliefs -- or lack of them -- are called into question. We suddenly realize we live in a spiritual vacuum, where no comparable degree of conviction can be easily summoned forth.

"The Passion" came to fill this profound need. Paradoxically, the fervor it inspires is directly proportional to the distance we have accrued from any kind of spiritual authenticity in our life. The more our culture obsesses about fad diets, plastic surgery, Paris Hilton's sex video, Donald Trump's hair or Jennifer Lopez's butt, the more fervent our response to "The Passion" has to be.

And so we come full circle. While frivolousness and pornography saturate our culture, "The Passion" offers us redemption, all the more effectively for pushing the limits of graphic representation that porn itself has irrevocably stretched. And while at home we feast our eyes on the torture inflicted upon the Christ, abroad we vindicate ourselves by torturing the infidel with the same righteous abandon, in the way we know best -- a pornographic way. Two faces of torture. Two faces of porn.

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