Although Americans disagree on almost everything, most of us still really love Jesus. According to a 2023 Barna study, 71% of Americans have a positive view of Jesus. This includes 84% of Christians (which raises questions about the other 26%), 58% of adherents of other faiths, and 40% of those with no faith.
But although we like Jesus, we still have wildly different ideas about who He is. This is reflected in the American movies and shows produced about Him, the most popular and enduring of which often have fans who are at each other’s throats. Fans of The Last Temptation of Christ often hate The Passion of the Christ and vice versa, because they represent contrary values in the American culture war. Meanwhile, The Chosen has somehow become universally beloved despite deep American divisions.
Because these depictions of Jesus capture different American subcultures, studying these movies can help us understand at least some of our discord as Americans. It may not heal the divide, but it might at least help us navigate it better.
The Last Temptation of Christ: The Doubting Jesus
The Last Temptation of Christ became easily the most controversial Jesus movie ever made at its release in 1988. While critics praised the film, conservative Christians were outraged by its depiction of a sinful Jesus and engaged in protests, boycotts, and calls for banning the film.
Temptation’s Jesus is a Jesus who doubts. He doubts his calling, his mission, and his faith at every turn. As Charles Bramesco wrote for The Guardian, “Uncertainty runs rampant through the nearly three-hour sprawl of Christ’s life and times, in turns tormenting and compelling him … a man constantly parsing and re-interpreting his relationship to God depending on the given situation.”
This doubt is exactly what Temptation’s fans love about the film. “The Last Temptation of Christ is a film of questions and not of answers,” continues Bramesco, “Scorsese’s confession that the closest any of us can get to godliness is not full understanding, only partially-comprehending goodness.” Bramesco expresses contempt for the religious right “tongue cluckers” who rejected the film in favor of the “comforting clarity of organized religion.”
Temptation’s Jesus reflects the growing number of Americans who love Jesus but not the church. Starting with the American cultural shifts of the 1960s and ’70s, the share of Americans who trust established institutions has been in steep decline. Those who don’t identify with any religion (known as “the nones”) went from 5% in the 1970s to 29% in 2022. The majority of these “nones” still retain a belief in God and other spiritual ideas (more people today believe in the afterlife than those polled in the ’70s) but simply choose for themselves what they believe rather than assenting to a church’s doctrine (such as the belief that Jesus was divine or never sinned.)
Likewise, growing numbers of self-identified Christians find themselves part of the “deconstruction” movement, radically questioning and challenging traditional interpretations of Christianity and embracing more progressive ones, predominantly in the mainline denominations, which downplay the supernatural doctrines of the faith in favor of a commitment to social justice activism, aligning them largely with the political left.
For this group, Jesus becomes a kind of “patron saint of doubters.” He’s a Jesus who reflects, and by doing so affirms doubt and defiance of the narrow-minded dogmas of religious institutions while still allowing room to have some form of self-discovered spirituality. For those who’ve been so wounded by the church they question everything it teaches, a Jesus who affirms doubt lets you have continue to question without abandoning Him.
It does, however, fundamentally alter the nature of one’s faith. As sociologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation, religion binds communities together partly based on shared beliefs and practices. When everything is up for grabs, there is no longer a shared anything that can serve that function. That may be why progressive and mainline Christians started making politics more foundational than theology. Sociologist George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk found, while writing their book One Faith No Longer, that progressive Christians were far more likely to make their politics their primary identity than their faith, choosing their friends and theology based on progressive politics rather than their religious tradition. They were certainly more likely to do this than were their conservative counterparts, who were much more likely to base their friendships and politics on their theology.
The Passion of the Christ: The Conquering Jesus
The Passion of the Christ film shocked everyone with its popularity when it was released in 2004, an independently produced and directed film by then-massive star Mel Gibson and featuring then-unknown Jim Caviezel as Jesus. In fact, it became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time domestically before being overtaken by last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine. The response to the movie was almost exactly the opposite to that of Temptation. Despite the fact that both Gibson and Caviezel are Catholic, the movie was most enthusiastically embraced by evangelicals. But critics, and most of the nonreligious, were either lukewarm on the film or actively hostile to it.
Because of The Passion’s graphic depiction of Jesus’s suffering and death, most people focus on that when discussing the movie. But even more than a sufferer, this Jesus is portrayed as a conqueror of evil. When we first see Jesus, He’s in a battle for his soul against Satan, who is trying to tempt Jesus away from saving the world from sin. In fact, Satan pops up throughout the film, manipulating people like Judas and mocking Jesus triumphantly. But at film’s end, when Jesus dies, Satan is in Hell screaming as he realizes he’s been beaten. This Jesus is a heroic figure, bearing up under his suffering as a way of defeating Evil and vanquishing the forces of darkness. His weapons are love and self-sacrifice, but His goal is victory over sin, death, and yes, the Devil.
This reflects Gibson’s worldview: “There are big realms of good and evil, and they’re slugging it out,” he said in an interview with ABC, during which he claimed that the “big dark force” didn’t want this movie made. Many Christians praised the film for exactly that portrayal of the battle against evil. Yet, it also found critics. Dr. Randall Ballmer, a professor of American religion at Barnard College, described the film as a “revenge story,” arguing it was defined by “anger” and “rage” against the enemies of Christians, whom they believed Jesus would one day vanquish.
American evangelicals are often known as the “culture warriors” of Christianity because (as culture critic Aaron Renn writes in Life in the Negative World) they see a major part of their role as believers to fight society’s growing secularism. “Fighting back” against the decline in traditional faith is a big part of their identity, and the belief that Donald Trump (whose supporters included Gibson and Caviezel) would “fight back” against government-enforced secularism was a big part of the religious right’s argument for supporting him in all three of presidential bids.
Of course, progressive Christians fight just as passionately and divisively as evangelicals do in the culture war. But progressives don’t march under a “Jesus banner” but rather an explicitly political one. Faith is the realm of doubt, and politics is the realm of certainty. Not so with evangelicals, where their Jesus is the foundation of certainty and values in all realms, whether family, art, or politics. This difference explains why both sides baffle and terrify each other. When evangelicals fight to preserve traditional Christian norms in the public square at the expense of liberal democratic norms, progressives see that as Christians compromising their values for power. When progressives fight to preserve liberal democratic norms in the public square at the expense of Christian norms, evangelicals see that as a compromise of Christian values and betrayal of the Savior.
The Chosen: The Compassionate Jesus
While the Temptation Jesus and the Passion Jesus are both divisive, there’s one Jesus that everyone loves: The Chosen’s Jesus. Directed by Dallas Jenkins and starring Jonathan Roumie as Jesus, the multi-season show about the life of Jesus premiered in 2019 after being funded by the biggest crowdfunding media campaign in history at the time. After making a big splash in 2020 during the pandemic, the show has grown to be a mainstream hit. Everyone from famous Christian evangelist Greg Laurie and Last Temptation screenwriter Paul Schrader to Jimmy Fallon and conservative podcast host Jordan B. Peterson has praised the TV show’s portrayal of the Son of Man.
How can that be? How can a country so divided on matters of Christian faith be so united in its love for the portrayal of that faith’s founder?
The most common praise fans give about The Chosen’s Jesus is related to his humanity. Schrader writes, “At its center is Jesus, not the divine superhero, but Jesus the rabbi from Nazareth. The teacher bursting with original ideas.” Greg Laurie praised Jenkins for doing “a fantastic job of conveying Jesus and His disciples as real, down-to-earth people.”
But this humanity isn’t the humanity of the Temptation’s Jesus, which is defined by doubt and even sinfulness. So how is it expressed? Primarily through compassion.
The main way we encounter Jesus throughout The Chosen is through Jesus’s love and care for those who need Him. We meet Jesus when He heals Mary Magdalene. Over and over Jesus prioritizes helping those who are sick and broken, whether it’s the paralytic man lowered through the ceiling (season 1, episode 6), the throngs of people seeking relief from their suffering (season 2, episode 3), or the woman with the issue of blood (season 3, episode 5). Jesus speaks to every person in pain with love and understanding. When He crosses swords with the religious leaders, it’s because He wants to prioritize the marginalized, and they don’t.
This focus on compassion explains why this Jesus is so universally beloved: because that’s actually a shared American value. As published in Science Direct, “Victimhood: The most powerful force in morality and politics,” Americans largely agree that compassion for victims is how to determine the rightness or wrongness of a moral idea. “Perceived victimhood forms the core of moral judgments: people condemn acts based on how much they seem to victimize others.” What we disagree on is who the victims are. “Unfortunately, liberals and conservatives often perceive different victims, which creates political division.”
This shows the strengths and potential weaknesses of The Chosen. Because it’s set in the past, it’s easy to project the victims you prioritize onto the ones Jesus is siding with. This is good in that it allows all sides to love this Jesus. But it also blunts His ability to challenge any of them, since they’re already assuming their approval of Him is also His approval of them.
The Future of America’s Jesus
American interest in Jesus isn’t likely to change anytime soon. The nones—once growing year upon year—have largely tapered off in numbers, and studies even indicate that Gen Z is returning to church. As of now, the numbers favor a combination of the Compassionate and Conquering Jesus as the predominant American Jesus going forward. The membership decline of mainline/liberal denominations of Christianity continues to be far worse than in their conservative/evangelical counterparts. And the nones are too individualized in their spirituality to have a united vision of Jesus to put forward. Meanwhile, the influx of new converts to Christianity among Gen Z is driven largely by young men, who are more attracted to battles of good versus evil and are moving to the right politically. As the influence of the Doubting Jesus shrinks, both sides will likely drift further apart.
Understanding the different American Jesuses and their respective appeal opens the possibility of dialogue. Understanding that all sides value compassion and only disagree on who are the real victims are can give us a much friendlier basis for disagreement. And understanding the different values people place on doubt versus unwavering faith can help us see why we talk past each other. Greater understanding may not end the culture war, but it might help us fight it a little bit more like Jesus did.
(Season 5 of The Chosen will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video June 15.)
