Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

Dean Lloyd invites James Carroll to talk about the very real problem of religious intolerance.

The conversation begins with an exploration of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, central to Christianity but very troubling to followers of Judaism. The Gospel of John uses the phrase “the Jews” to assign blame for Jesus’ death, even though Jesus was executed by the Roman authorities. “What do we do [if] our sacred text is historically inaccurate, but it’s telling the most sacred story of Christian people?” asks Dean Lloyd.

“It’s a problem we share with all religious people. Every sacred text is rooted in a moment in history, a moment in time. Every sacred text reflects the human condition,” Carroll responds. He suggests two remedies. “Every Christian must develop the habit of hearing the anti-Jewish tests as if they were Jews… Secondly, preachers especially have an obligation… to learn to preach against these texts, to explain how they came to be written the way they did, but also to lift them up now—not to deny them, not to whitewash them, not to pretend they aren’t there—but to lift them up and preach them as the source of a 2000-year-long sin of the church, which is the first note of the good news. Because the good news…is not that God comes to people who are…flawless, but…to human beings of the human condition.” The recognition of our human failings, then, prepares us to preach the good news.

Carroll, a former Roman Catholic priest, uses Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, as a recent example of the use of Biblical narrative to play into a primitive, violent mindset at a particular time in history. The sadistic torture of Jesus is the main element of the film, which has enjoyed great popularity with Christians. Jesus’ love and sacrifice are supplanted in the film by his ability to withstand torture.

Gibson’s film, according to Carroll, plays into the millennial fears of Americans. He points out a “sly” anachronism: in The Passion, Jesus and his followers do not wear head coverings. This historically inaccurate detail suggests that Jesus was not really a Jew. In the film, bad people wear head coverings.

James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, the recent documentary by Oren Jacoby about Carroll’s book, was screened at the Cathedral in conjunction with this visit. The title refers to Constantine’s pivotal role in Christianity and Western history. Constantine—pagan emperor and convert to Christianity—used the violence and power of empire to spread his new religion. “The state uses religion for its own political advancement,” Carroll says; and “religion uses the state to advance itself.” State power and religious power gravitate toward each other in times of crisis, Carroll asserts—in times such as our own.

About Jim Carroll

James Carroll is a novelist, essayist, and non-fiction writer whose bestselling 2001 book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews explores the history of anti-Semitism in the West. A former Roman Catholic priest, he has written about the Catholic sex abuse crisis and, most recently, about the American military in the award-winning House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. He is a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe and a regular participant in on-going Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogues at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.