Review
Culture
Easter
Resurrection
6 min read

Cinematic Passions

Gibson, Darbont, Pasolini, Eastwood and Scorsese all feature in priest Yaroslav Walker’s top five Good Friday movies.
A haggard Jesus is looks ahead during the night.
Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ.
Newmarket Films.

Good Friday is a tough day for a Christian. It is a day of weeping and mourning; of venerating the Cross and meditating on the terrible reality of Christ’s tortuous death. It is an annual memorial service for a loved one, and the pain and grief is never made any easier because the reality of the Cross is fresh and relevant and immediate in the life of the believer: it is a moment that transcends time and space and is as real this year as it was in the thirty-third and final year of Christ’s life. It is also traditionally a day of intentional and serious fasting - mainly a diet of water and weeping for me. So, by the evening you’re wiped out and just want a bit of rest, perhaps relaxing in front of a film; that is certainly how I feel. Yet every Christian wants to spend the day focused on the Passion of Jesus, so not just any old film will do - it ought to be a film that allows us to keep Jesus’s sacrifice in mind. Below are my top five tips for a Good Friday evening watch… popcorn to be eaten plain, or salted with tears if you must! 

5 - The Passion of the Christ

The obvious choice. Controversial upon release for its depiction of the Temple hierarchy and the bloody violence with which it depicts Christ’s scourging and Crucifixion, it lives now in a certain ignominy. I would argue it deserves a reappraisal. Gibson is a solid director, takes the work seriously, and gives us a good-looking film. Jim Caviezel gives a terrific central performance (that makes you think he deserved a better career for the last twenty years), and all the cast put in good turns. However, it's the interpretation of the meaning of the death of Christ that intrigues me. When it first hit the screens, some saw it as a bloody expression of the view that Jesus dies to appease God’s wrath. Yet Gibson carefully intersperses scenes of the Last Supper with the scenes of torture, makes Satan a demonic inversion of the Madonna and Child, and constantly makes clear that it is the power of love and not anger or cruelty that is conquering the world. It is brutal and horrific (and so in fifth place) - but so is capital punishment… so maybe we need to endure it. In this film you can find many nuances of the Christian idea of love and redemption and salvation etched upon the screen. 

4 - The Shawshank Redemption 

An man stands in the rain, topless, with face and arms raised in celebration.
Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption.

A less obvious choice, and a film in which there is no vicarious death, but bear with me. Frank Darabont's epic drama sees Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) locked up for a crime he did not commit. Over the decades he learns how to navigate the dangers of prison life, makes friends and enemies, and becomes implicated in a great web of corruption. His great supporter and confidant is ‘Red’ (Morgan Freeman), who is the only man in Shawshank Prison who will admit his murderous guilt. This is one of those films that it's hard not to love, and you’ve probably seen it so many times before that it is the cinematic equivalent of a comforting takeaway. Under the surface of some terrific performances, masterful direction, and a heart-tugging score, the film is full of Christian themes. The innocent man punished for the sins of another, the death of Andy’s ego as he learns to find purpose in improving the lives of his fellow inmates, the dark powers of corruption brought to justice, and a man descending in the very bowels (the right word if you know the escape scene) of hell and emerging clean and reborn. Its aged beautifully, and inaugurated the Freeman voiceover as a staple of cinematic culture. 

3 - The Gospel According to St Matthew 

Jesus carries a cross over his shoulder while Roman soldiers wearing armour look on
Enrique Irazoqui in The Gospel According to Matthew.

Approved by the Vatican and made by a director in his prime wrestling with his faith, Pasolini’s masterpiece is a sumptuous black-and-white exploration of the life of Christ. The entire film is saturated with the sense of living in the poverty of first-century Palestine. Static close ups jump-cutting between one another disorient the viewer and give the impression that the supernatural is taking over the world we are seeing. It is hardly dynamic by the standards of a modern Passion film, but this is to its great benefit. Pasolini lends the film an Italian neo-realist flair that makes it seem almost like one is watching a documentary. The great joy of The Gospel is that it is a telling of the full Gospel, rather than the Passion in isolation. We see Jesus grow into manhood and into ministry, we see the shocking impact of his radical teaching, we see the conspiracy, and so when the Crucifixion of Jesus does happen it is remarkably impactful while also seeming ‘right’. We see how such a Gospel of radical devotion to God and love of neighbour does terrify a world that thinks in terms of power, and we see the great victory that the Cross really is.

2 - Gran Torino 

An older man kneels over in anguish, a window casts light and shadow over him.
Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.

Clint Eastwood playing a role of a lifetime, and teaching us what loving one’s neighbour really looks like… what more could you want. Eastwood plays Walt: a widower, and veteran, a retired blue-collar worker, and an inveterate racist and tobacco user. Walt is embittered and alone, disgusted by the state of his Detroit neighbourhood, which has morphed from an all-white working-class community to a mainly Asian community blighted by gang violence. One night Walt saves his young neighbour from a forced gang initiation, and grudgingly becomes a mentor and quasi-father-figure to the boy, and soon his sister. Walt has no desire to connect with the world outside, but does so out of a sense of discipline and duty, and this is an excellent corrective to modern sentimental notions of love. On the Cross, Christ performs the most perfect act of love, offering forgiveness even to his executioners… it is unlikely that in that moment Jesus liked them. In the Gospel narratives Jesus is often frustrated to the point of anger, with the stubbornness of his hearers, and the lack of understanding of his disciples. Jesus doesn’t always like them, but he does love them. In the climactic scene of the film Walt resolves to make a great sacrifice to protect his community - a community he doesn’t really like anymore. This is real love, the love of the Cross. It does not emanate from fleeting and flighty emotionalism, but from a tremendous act of dedication and will. Eastwood gives us a great Good Friday lesson in love, and his performance is superb. 

1 - The Last Temptation of the Christ 

Jesus, scared and wearing a crown of thorns, looks directly into the camera.
Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ.

My number one pick is a mammoth of visual spectacle and a roller-coaster of emotions. Martin Scorsese has always been fascinated with the Catholic faith that he can’t quite embrace, and many of his most interesting and personal films have had the Christian narrative of redemption woven through. In 'Temptation' he tackles the subject head on, and gives us a religious epic to rival any Charlton Heston flick. Willem Defoe is a lean, wild eyed, and manic Jesus - plagued by doubt and anxiety and horrific migraines that could be demonic…or they could be God. Scorsese and Defoe work together to present the ministry of Jesus in very human terms. Christ is a psychologically complex man who is struggling to cope with his mission in a world that is so very broken. Much like Pasolini’s Gospel, this is a film that takes the supernatural seriously. Nothing is ever just what it is. There is no weather event or vision or animal encounter that is not suffused with eternal meaning. The film touches on every emotion: from furious anger, to heart-rending sadness, to uproarious laughter (to this day I can’t see a priest friend of mine without shouting ‘Judith’ and bursting into laughter). The closing acts of the film allow us to see just what Christ was sacrificing on the Cross - not just the life he had led, but the life he could have led. Christ is tempted to the very end, with the worst psychological torment possible, and still he remains faithful to the end. Scorsese may not know exactly where he stands before God, but he was graced with the talent to give the world a remarkably evocative take on the Passion of Jesus. 

Article
Culture
Digital
Freedom of Belief
4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development. 

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.
Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?  

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.   

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria.  A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?  

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.  

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses. 

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.  

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.     

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.  

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US. 

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.   

What’s driving the reticence? 

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.  

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.  

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.