Christians vs. The Passion of The Christ Tom Beaudouin of The National Catholic Reporter has written an excellent review of the Passion of the Christ. "Lord, protect us from your followers" is becoming less of a snide sarcastic remark and more of a sincere petition for me. "Gibson’s Jesus sheds more light on us than on the Passion. His Christ could only ascend to this heroic action antihero status in a culture where we neither encounter nor take responsibility for our own violence. If we Americans regularly saw, for example, the bloodied corpses of Iraqi women and children, or American soldiers’ mangled bodies in the papers and on television, this film would not have the same shocking and exclusivizing hold on our imaginations that it does. Brutal physical violence would be more immediately connected to real pain, to authentic devastation, and to our own complicit tolerance for a faraway war on the condition that we are not drafted and are not told how much of our tax money pays for each Iraqi civilian death". "The Anti-Christian Passion of the Christ"