From occasional NR/NRO Contributor Ed Kilgore:

There are three things about “The Passion of Christ” controversy that I haven’t seen much comment on:
I find it odd that so many Christians seem to think Gibson is peforming an important service to apologetics by visually documenting Christ’s physical suffering, which is not, so far as I know, at the center of any current theological debate (though it was a pretty big deal in the fourth century). It’s belief in the divinity, not the humanity, of Christ that separates most Christians from most secularists, and seeing a biblically literal depiction of that on the Silver Screen won’t work any better than, say, the availability of the Bible itself all these years.
Some of you may recall Ingemar Bergman’s film Winter Light, in which a minor character–a church sexton with some sort of debilitative bone or muscle disease–reflects on the suffering of Christ, and concludes it was His loneliness and estrangement from the Father, not physical pain, that made His death unique. I don’t think some sort of Gibsonian bloodfest is likely to improve on that insight.
Second, the heavy marketing of Gibson’s film to conservative evangelical Protestants strikes me as theologically perverse, if commercially smart. These are people, for the most part, who don’t place much stock in the liturgical calendar, and the particular relevance of the Passion to the annual cycle of meditations about Christ. Moreover, these are people who often think St. Paul’s comments on gender relations or homosexuality–or for that matter, the entire Old Testament–are as central to Revealed Truth as the gospels themselves. Presumably, most conservative evangelicals would be as interested in, say, a movie about the cursing of the Cities on the Plain as with anything specifically about the Passion.
And third, I’m a bit concerned, though not surprised, by the sort of Popular Front thinking that has so many conservatives from every religious background expressing total solidarity with Gibson’s faith, which is by any standard a bit eccentric, and by Catholic standards specifically, heretical or at least schismatic. I realize that many conservatives share the Left’s eagerness to transfer political and cultural ideological labels into every realm of life, including religion…conservatives should beware embracing just anyone who calls himself a conservative.