One worldwide film celebrity, Mel Gibson, gave us a typical demonstration of how absolute and literal Catholic thinking are reflected in his entire perception of life. Gibson openly declared during interviews involving his film, The Passion of the Christ, that his wife - who is an Episcopal - is certainly a better person than Mel himself but is still included with all non-Catholics who are going to hell.

Such thinking then diminishes the magnificence and power of his film portrayal, reducing it in effect to Mel's own public worship of Jesus Christ from his traditional and intense fundamentalist/literalist perspective.

This in fact is the literalness of Catholic life that typifies the historical priority at the top and the intent for all human beings calling themselves Catholic to conform in a trusting but faulty orthodoxy.

Despite the appeal of the Passion movie, non-Catholics moved to re-think their lives and spiritual attitude seem then to be stuck in the quandary of seeing Jesus in the Protestant way but moved to tears and spiritual regeneration by a Catholic dogmatic dominance of the film. All they can do, in the eyes of the Roman church, is look through the window at the meal which is not for sale to non-Catholics.

According to Catholic literalists the ultimate achievement of the Christ - universal salvation - remains exclusively in the proprietary purview of the Roman Catholic Church while Protestants are relegated to mere moral and ethical improvement.

Protestant literalists however, dispute the Roman claim to authoritarian exclusivity although they make no challenges to the Roman biblical literalism regarding most spiritual truths as contained in the supposed  inerrant Bible. Such thinking captures Christians in a proprietary dispute over whose literal interpretation of scripture authorizes the absolute claims in an either/or inclusion or exclusion.

These literalists have been engaged for centuries in a continuing conflict. Most Evangelical Christians trust a contemporary biblical literalism that is dominated by historical Pentecostal absolute thinking - particularly in the non-divine fashioning of an electrifying End Times Fantasy that has now  captured millions.

Many evangelical readers of the Left Behind series cannot distinguish between entertainment and truth. This no more fully revealed as acutely ironic in that many evangelicals who denounced The DaVinci Code as fiction could not see their own acceptance of Left Behind which is much more a case of fictitious fantasy.

The ancient historical debate and rivalry continues.

Historically, the luckiest early Christians were those in the right place at the right time and who became the official Roman-enforced state religion complete with a doctrine mandated by the emperor himself

One in power and no longer the targets of persecution, were unable to resist that sense of victimization that authorizes the former victims to become the perpetrators themselves in a seemingly unending cycle of abused-becoming-abuser.
Part of Christian history includes tortures and torment administered by authorities who made no bones about doing it all literally in the name of Christ, a silliness of thought that remains manifest currently as typified by the blustering "Blow them away in the name of the Lord," exhortation of one of Evangelical Christianities most prominent celebrities - Reverend Jerry Falwell.

The precedent set by Roman Catholicism with it's foolish crusades that led millions to believe in a Christ of violence, vengeance and persecution is the very precedent that its historical targets then used once free from Catholic domination.

It was not Catholics, but Protestants who tortured and burned fellow Christians on this continent after having fled European persecution at the hands of the Catholic church.

The literalist Christian, seeming guided by explicit and direct biblical verbiage that supposedly commands and instructs every aspect of human morality and behavior nevertheless remains the Christian practitioner most blinded by assumption. Whether belief or assumption, a literalist Christian based his thinking and action on his own assumption of who God is, what God is like, who Jesus is and what Jesus meant in his messages.

Quick to criticize those who openly recognize and admit that they are reluctant to make absolute bricks out of strawed-down assumptions, literalists assume a God and Christ neither attractive nor benevolent - merely judgmental to a fault and obsessed with every nuance of human intimacy.

Those strawed-down assumptions were used to create evil bricks of arrogant authority upon which dungeons of coercion, persecution, torture and bonfires of outright murder and war were the terrible consequence.

Professed Christians committed the most egregious crimes conceivable in the name of a Christ who would have repudiated every moment of every crusade and inquisitive interrogation.

What is most needed in this country in these fateful years of Christian apathy and blind conformity in the face of radical Christian demagoguery and outright manipulation is another "Passion of the Christ" event that captures the real Christ of Compassion.
... that captures the imagination of church-going minions sitting with a Bible in one hand and a box of Junior Mints in the other.

To be continued

In the United States in the 21st Century it is the Protestant Evangelicals and their judgemental literalist thinking that have driven both America and the world to the brink of global social disaster.

Yet the principal evangelical leadership and its celebrity publicists pointedly look the other way and studiously ignore speaking of the tragedy the United States of America - presumably guided by a Christian-in-the-White-House at whose feet responsibility for organized military aggression and collateral damage lie.

You cannot get the evangelical literalist celebrities to speak substantively of Christ's teachings in the context of global war and terror. It is as if all those who voted for a Republican president and Republican representation in the government absolutely refuse to look outside the borders of this country to see what this supposed Christian nation has done.

What every Christian needs to become more aware of the kind of visual and visceral literality of actual suffering of Gibson's movie.

We need another historical movie about the Passion of the Christian. Mel has demonstrated how it's done. Someone then - even Mel - need to do it.

American Christians need to see and learn the one absolute and literal truth of the centuries that led to the Dark Ages and how much of the blame for the Dark Ages is to be laid at the feet of literalist Christians mindlessly and viciously suppressing any and all who disagreed with them.

Part II to follow