October 5, 2004

Despite the attention given to religious issues in this year’s presidential race, three public opinion experts have stated that the political force of faith and ethics questions has been overblown. Their assessment was not as blunt as the 1992 dictum “It’s the economy, stupid!,” but they came close.

In 1964 the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini created a new mode of presenting Jesus in film. His The Gospel according to St. Matthew is a word-for-word rendering of Matthew’s Gospel. It contains no additional dialogue and shows only the scenes described by Matthew. The film was a radical departure from the Jesus genre, which typically (as in the stolid 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told) blends various gospel accounts into a screenplay, freely rendering and harmonizing the story in order to present a more satisfying dramatic portrayal.

Delegates to the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission meeting in Kuala Lumpur in August had the novel experience of seeing their sessions covered in the Malaysian media with the intensity that normally attends national elections or the latest developments in the “Malaysian Idol” competition. Malaysian Christians enjoyed this unprecedented public attention given to their church life. The government and most media celebrated the event—the first major WCC meeting ever held in a Muslim country—as testimony to the country’s diversity and harmony.

Many Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians must cringe when they read the newsletters and Web pages of activists within their denominations. Sometimes the partisans carefully couch their warnings and strategies in cooperative language, but generally their pronouncements leave no doubt that they are spoiling for a fight.

Most discussions of George W. Bush’s religious faith draw heavily on his campaign autobiography, A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House (1999), which puts religion at the beginning, middle and end of the story. Deliberately vague in its chronology, the book describes a man who drifted until middle age, when Billy Graham “planted a mustard seed” in his soul and helped turn his life around.

Jacob Aaron Estes’s debut feature is being marketed as a Columbine-era fable about a bully who gets his comeuppance. But the film works on levels far more precipitous and challenging.