I recently received an e-mail from a good friend of mine discussing the release of a new movie* that was reportedly depicted Jesus and his disciples as active homosexuals. The e-mail urged me to sign a petition to prevent its showing in America and forward it.

I gave it some thought and decided to write:

To whom it might concern:

As a believing Christian, I am deeply concerned with any work, artistic or biographical, that might misrepresent my faith and what I believe in. I think it is a travesty to make a religion that is so important to my life into a symbol of popular culture or a secular political statement.

Because I share your opinions on this issue, I think it is absolutely critical that this movie be produced and released to the public. I don’t say this just because such a movie would likely cause more people to stand up for their faith. (In fact, it would be more likely to cause a secular backlash against homosexuality than anything else.) Rather, I think this movie should be released because of the statement it should force us to make.

The history of Christianity in modern America is a mediocre one. As a country born on the freedom to express religious beliefs, we have never had any problems with gathering in churches, reading Bibles, or admitting our faith. Human beings, though, are restless; we have always spent more time pursuing that which we find hard to obtain. Success is successful in part because it takes so much effort to achieve.

When success is easy to acquire, it is much easier to simply try to defend what one has, than to obtain more. Without the need for effort, Christians do not exert effort; Christianity as a political movement has become defensive, a builder of walls. We put up these walls to prevent America from being exposed to attacks on Christianity, whether they are from offensive movies or intellectual ideas that seem to disagree with what we believe in. This has had two effects, both of which I will discuss.

First of all, it means that opposition to Christianity has maintained a monopoly on intellectual discussion. By shutting out ideas that are offensive to us, we do not kill those ideas. Instead, we remove ourselves from the discussion. The theory of evolution does not die because it is not taught in grade schools. Instead, its proponents become more convinced that because Christians will not allow the expression of opposing points of view, that they are incapable of defending their own.

This intellectual superiority and intolerance is not beneficial to them, or to us. The segregation of beliefs also makes Christianity seem less legitimate as a whole, when there is no reason it should be so. Christianity, as a belief system, does not demand the willful ignorance of empirical science or logic; God has not given us our brains to fight with.

The second result is that Christianity in its popular form no longer focuses on preaching the message of God; it focuses on preventing the message of the Enemy. This is entirely backwards to the spirit of discipleship. No one has ever been converted because they didn’t listen to rap music, or because they were not taught that the universe was caused by the geometric expansion of space from a single point.

By preventing a movie from being shown in the United States simply because it does not depict the life of Jesus Christ as it actually happened, we are denying ourselves the opportunity to counter that image with the actual life of Christ. Christianity is a relevant religion; the message of the New Testament has great meaning, even today, to us as human beings. In order for it to be relevant, though, we cannot build walls to protect ourselves from the world; we must build Christianity up in the rest of it.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this letter, I think it is a travesty to make my beliefs into a symbol of popular culture or a secular political statement. I fear, however, that they already are, and no censorship or self-induced ignorance will protect us from that.

God bless
Chris

In the end, though, I decided not to send the letter.

*The movie in question is, in fact, a hoax perpetrated on the Internet.