That Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ should spark debate at Princeton University, as it has throughout the country, is no surprise. At a university-sponsored panel, “Princeton discusses the Passion,” the film achieved much more than that, exposing the cultural gulf dividing many of America’s academic elite from their students on questions of faith. Seemingly unbeknownst to many of the faculty, a religious revival is taking place at one of America’s top-ranked universities.
Introduced to an audience of nearly 500 as an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the themes raised in The Passion, the panel featured several Princeton professors, chiefly from the religion department. The first speaker, John Gager, an early-church historian, conceded that he had not seen the film. He preferred “to talk around it,” but allowed that he might see it “out of a sense of professional responsibility.” Gager assured us that “the Gospels do not place great emphasis on the suffering of Jesus,” and argued that defenders of Gibson’s film against charges of anti-Semitism were “either naïve, or disingenuous, or perhaps even both.”
Celebrity professor Cornel West spoke next. West preached to his “brothers and sisters” as “a Christian who is deeply suspicious of empires, state power, and imperial might.” By this he meant “the underside of the Roman Empire, or the American Empire.” West transitioned from the crucifixion of Christ to the rise of anti-Semitism during the reign of the Emperor Constantine. He then leapt to denouncing “Constantinian Jews who have deferred to the American Empire” and explained how, for “black people, the holocaust began in America.”
Jeffrey Stout, a scholar of religion and film, faulted the The Passion for being “not an especially self-conscious important work of art.” He contrasted Gibson’s masterpiece unfavorably with The Passion of Joan of Arc, the 1928 silent film in which the heroine is tortured with instruments that resemble a film projector and reel, in order to symbolize the director’s involvement in the act. Stout consigned Gibson’s Passion to the schlock heap along with vulgar films like Spartacus and Rocky.
After hearing that Jesus didn’t suffer much, and listening in on a left-wing rant and a postmodern assertion of cultural superiority, I remembered the senior who had told me four years ago that “God forgot 1879 Hall” (home to Princeton’s religion department). Indeed, only one faculty member, Politics professor Robert P. George, tried to answer the central question of the controversy surrounding Gibson’s film: “Who is responsible for the death of Jesus?” His answer was powerful: “I am. It was for my sins that Christ died.”
George’s words met with prolonged and deep applause.
If most of the panel wanted to dismiss The Passion of the Christ as bigoted plebeian trash, many students held a radically different view. According to Brad Flora ‘04, president of Princeton’s Agape Christian Fellowship, “It was problematic for many of us that most of the professors on the panel didn’t seem to get the main point. They weren’t interested in discussing what had brought us to the event that afternoon–the undeniable and powerful impact the film had on us.”
Unlike those of their professors’ generation, today’s students are increasingly willing to give faith a chance in the marketplace of ideas. After The Passion’s release on Ash Wednesday, nearly two hundred Princeton undergraduates attended a mass viewing organized by religious student groups. Residential-college officers organized further pilgrimages. The Rev. Tom Breidenthal, Princeton’s dean of religious life, estimates that out of a student body of 4,600, roughly 500 Princetonians attend weekly religious services and that the number who do so is rising. Student leaders offer even higher estimates. The number is probably higher, because many evangelical students prefer student-led prayer to formal services, and because a heavy workload keeps many away from religious services except on holidays.
Set against the rest of the United States, or denominationally Christian colleges, these numbers are of course insignificant. Yet compared to any Western European country, or to the likely levels of church attendance among the humanities faculty, they are impressive indeed.
How to explain these currents in university life? According to Duncan Sahner ‘06, a leader of Princeton’s Catholic Aquinas Institute, students are rejecting the academy’s 1960’s-era relativism. “Today’s generation,” he says, “is rejecting a perpetual journey in search of truth” for “the absolute nature of truth.” Yet many more of the students with whom I spoke do not necessarily see themselves as particularly religious. Rather they want to make up their own minds about faith’s place in their lives, just as they want to see the movie for themselves. It is not so much that students are adopting a religious worldview–though some are–as that they refuse to dismiss one out of hand. Princetonians want to explore religion, in the same way they explore the variety of approaches and “isms”–from leftism to hedonism, and the countless others available in college.
Even so, religion remains rare in the classroom. Many students I interviewed feared they would be ridiculed if they spoke frankly in class discussions of ethics, philosophy, and, yes, religion. As Flora puts it: “A lot of people insulate their religion from their work in order to survive academically.” The challenge, according to Professor George, is to “make it okay for students to talk about faith from the perspective of faith,” despite a faculty among which “many…hold an antipathy towards traditional religion,” and who “would not want to be caught dead praising something [The Passion] that the vulgar masses find moving.”
Princeton’s split between an increasingly religious student body and a faculty that mostly views faith as a quaint artifact to be studied cannot last forever. Opinion shifts with time, and the trends at Princeton parallel broader, national ones. That the younger generation should increasingly view religion as at least one valid approach to understanding the world, even in the heart of the Ivy League, is something that academic elites will find it increasingly difficult to “talk around.”
–Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky is a student at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.