As you probably know by now, on Friday night Mel Gibson was picked up by police, charged with DUI, and went on a drunken rampage that contained various vulgarities, including racial slurs. Gibson works in a field in which image is everything. Certainly in the short run his career will suffer, and rightly so. One watches to see how his latest directed work, Apocolypto, does at the box office, although films in ancient Mayan have a history of doing poorly. One also hopes that he will be punished by the law as other similarly situated people are punished.
There is a temptation to dump on Gibson because of the rather public piety of The Passion Of The Christ. Many moons ago I posted some ruminations on the subject of hypocrisy. I stand by what I said. Among Mel Gibson's many sins is the sin of hypocrisy. It is a bad sin, but I know a worse one. To avoid the error of hypocrisy one must believe in nothing. That Gibson is a hypocrite is axiomatic: we are all hypocrites in that we all fail to live up to our own standards. Gibson's sins no more discredit his religious convictions than, say, the likelihood that Martin Luther King was unfaithful to his wife destroys his moral authority (not to compare Mel Gibson to MLK). One should note, however, that in The Passion, Gibson made a point of filming his own hand as the first to put a nail into Christ. That suggests some level of self-knowledge about one's sinful nature.
I suppose some annoyed by Gibson's public profession of faith will revel in his fall. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity is helpful on this account:
Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite as bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker, If we give that wish its head, later we shall wish to see gray as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything--God and our friends and ourselves included--as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
Update: I see the guys at Powerline came up with the same headline I did. Great minds, blah, blah, blah.
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