‘Temptation’: Protest and the Pain Beneath

The news brings us yet another sight of aggrieved protesters marching in front of a building, bearing blunt placards of oversimplification. What is it now in the ongoing saga of American fragmentation, in the mounting Us-vs.-Them atmosphere that seems to characterize American life? The whales? Nuclear disarmament? Contra aid? The writers’ strike?

This time it’s the fundamentalist religionists who have marched in the thousands outside Universal City and other sites where “The Last Temptation of Christ” is playing. They are trying to convince moviegoers that if there’s any truth to the notion of blasphemy in this modern world unhinged from the ministrations of an omniscient God, then this is it.

Why has this movie, which most critics contend is mortally burdened with a tedious over-earnestness, become such a flash-point? Is this the religious New Right’s most recent counter-offensive, or is it its perpetually exasperated last gasp?

Or is it something else?

It may be easy for a Warren Beatty or Sydney Pollack to hurl a shot from deep within their plush liberal environs and call the release of the movie a sacrosanct matter of First Amendment freedom, and that anyone who doesn’t like it is out of luck.

In one respect, freedom to screen the movie, and the freedom of people to see it, is a First Amendment guarantee. And if producers and writers begin to think that religious or any other themes are untouchable and censor themselves beforehand, then the trivialization of experience that characterizes most of our movie and TV output, as well as our music and theater, won’t just be a by-product of commercialism, as it is now. It will be a result of artists who lock themselves in trepid silence, leaving the culture to decay.

But in another respect, the question of whether or not to see “The Last Temptation of Christ” has less to do with freedom of choice than it does with the contention that there is such as thing as going too far, that there’s an integrity to the concept of desecration.

The fundamental question that divides the moviemakers and the protesters is as old as Christ and the Pharisees, and has been responsible for some of the ghastliest genocidal spasms to wrack the heart of civilization: If, as Shakespeare said, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” what is the nature of that divinity that we can understand it and bring redemptive meaning and salvation to our lives?

Inquisition, Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, the Age of Reason, the 20th Century’s secular legacy of Marx, Einstein and Freud--all these ages have clamored with the struggle of whose truths would be uppermost in the European plain where, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “ignorant armies clash by night.”

But the current controversy has a peculiarly American wrinkle that is as much about history and class as it is about religion.

The movie producers, directors, lawyers and accountants--the “flyover” types whose American axis consists of Los Angeles and New York with nothing in between--represent the latest incarnation of the educated Northeast elite that has been a source of impotent rage for most of the rest of the country for nearly 200 years.

When in 1630, John Winthrop preached to the colonists preparing to disembark from the Arrabella off the coast of Massachusetts, “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us . . . for we must consider that we shall be as a City on the Hill (where) the eyes of all people are on us,” it was one of the few instances when the American Protestant religious community was ever unified. But Puritanism was austere and rationalist, and after the colony took hold, was subject to the kind of “emotionalist” apostasy that led to the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, figures who believed more in the divinity of personal inspiration than in the “flames of righteousness” hurled from an authoritarian pulpit.

Various revisionist movements and “awakenings” followed, and as the Republic grew out geographically, the itinerant preachers who moved with it had to develop an evangelical Populist vernacular that further distanced them from the culture of the East, where the American power elite had consolidated and its religious leadership sought to integrate the discoveries of social science, evolution, higher biblical criticism and modernism into its doctrine.

Not so the South and the West, which were slower to change in the face of immigration, industrialization and the disruptions brought about by the Civil War. As Carol Flake writes in “Redemptorama, Culture, Politics and the New Evangelism”:

Nearly every denomination in America was affected by the dissension between regional revivalists and Bostonian rationalists, between Bible-embracing conservatives and culture-loving liberals, between last-chance premillennialists and progressive postmillennialists. Evangelical Protestantism was a mosaic of denominations, a very loose, scattered alliance cemented primarily by the Good News of Christ’s sacrificial death and Resurrection. The conservative movement that came to be known as fundamentalism, which incorporated revivalism, scriptural adamancy, and urgent prophecy, became a stress factor within the mosaic, causing new fractures and realignments within the pattern.

The latest resurrection of the evangelical New Right began with Jimmy Carter’s presidency in 1976, and the last 12 years has seen its unprecedented rise--based on a more sophisticated knowledge of computer mailing lists, fund-raising techniques and the use of television as an electronic pulpit--and yet another unraveling. Jim and Tammy. Jimmy Swaggart. That nice church secretary who still doth protest her innocence after two lush Playboy spreads. Oral Roberts’ successful blackmail attempt on God.

There have been the financial disclosures of just how munificent these kingdoms of the air have become, and how they’ve been pieced together principally through the small donations of the elderly, the shut-ins, the poor, the uncertain young who ache for the purity of true belief, the folks who abhor the satanic permutations of true secularism.

If much of the religionist right traditionally looks askance at formal education, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t prefer intellectual credibility, or that all of its adherents are ignorant. Here too its leadership has let it down. Does anyone really believe that hurricane turned around because Pat Robertson told it to?

Finally, the fundamentalist movement simply hasn’t been able to withstand intellectual scrutiny from outside itself.

In “Thunder on the Right, the Protestant Fundamentalists,” Gary K. Clabaugh comes out with guns blazing: “The central function of this book is to provide unimpeachable and exhaustive evidence that the movements described as threats to whatever tolerance and freedom we have are, in fact, just that.”

Flake’s vigorous and breezy “Redemptorama” takes dead aim at “This . . . world of semipro choirs and combo accompaniments, of cushioned pews and carpeted cathedrals, of picture-book families and comic-book culture.”

But Flake, who grew up in Texas, also writes, “. . . As I looked back, I realized that, for all its flaws, the church of my childhood had touched my heart and shaped my life in a way that secular culture never could. It had been a meddlesome family, offering a strong system of values and a real community--fellowship for old folks, socializing for harried housewives, visitations for the faltering, prayers for the invalids. If it had shut out other avenues of transcendence, trapping many worshipers in their fears and neuroses, it had at least offered a glimpse of a better life and a better self, and a means of looking beyond the mundane matters of the quotidian.”

One can argue that nothing in the Bible, shrouded in as much ambiguity as it is, contradicts what director Martin Scorsese struggles to explore about the nature of Christ. Scholars disagree about Jesus. As for his sex fantasy, Hebrews 2:17-18 observes, “Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren . . . For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.”

But that’s not the point here. As much as your teeth are set on edge by what some of the protesters are saying, you have to acknowledge the pain and dismay that underlies their anger, and the acute suffering over what they see as an assault on the sanctity of their spiritual consciousness.

“You can feel for them,” observed playwright and investigative reporter Donald Freed, who spent part of his boyhood in Louisiana and knows this constituency.

“They have been ruined. By government. By science. Ninety-nine percent of them are unquestionably sincere. The question doesn’t arise, ‘What is it that has them so frightened?’ They at least admit that they’re frightened. They sense the human race is on a thin edge. We may disagree about the means of salvation, but they at least have it half-right.

“Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Einstein, Bertrand Russell, all made an enormous attempt to integrate matter, meaning and spirituality into human consciousness, but most of what we’ve seen about the 20th Century is how science and technology, in being harnessed to ideologies of power, have been accomplices to murder. Think of Oppenheimer, when he saw the atom bomb go off and said, ‘I am Become Death.’ Can you look at the protesters and really say, ‘These people are crazy?’ ”

It has to be a final galling irony to the protesters that, probably owing to them, the movie is doing so well. It’s one more dismal reminder of how this group and its forebears, when not ridiculed and repudiated, have been successfully ignored by the power elite throughout American history.

But even that isn’t the thing that wounds them most. As Freed implied, they have an instinct, and it’s not altogether inconsistent with a worldwide drift towards fundamentalism, whether in Europe, Israel or the various Islamic nations.

The Universal protesters represent a much larger group of the alienated and disaffected, whose spiritual hunger has never been truly satiated. In “The Last Testament of Christ,” they see not only the deadly literalness of the reified image that displaces the spiritual imagination, but they also sense that this one last apprehension of divine purity, this single incorruptible ideal that they’ve held against the manifold pollutions of the modern world, has been taken away from them and used up by a movie.