Mel Gibson

Seems as if Gibson was stopped for (alleged) DUI in the last few days. While driving while drunk is clearly a bad thing and a very bad choice made by Gibson, what allegedly followed is also deeply concerning. According to the police report, Gibson launched into an anti-semitic tirade that the officer documented pretty meticulously. In Gibson's public apology, he does not seem to deny this, and tacitly confirms that he said some terrible things as a result of being drunk.

This, of course, will rekindle the feelings of some regarding Gibson's attitudes toward the Jews. A number of Jewish organizations and prominent Jewish leaders (though certainly not all) alleged that Gibson's Passion of the Christ was anti-semitic, or at the very least, would incite anti-semitic sentiment among members of the viewing public. Evangelicals, of course, rallied to Gibson's defense and strongly endorsed Gibson's movie and helped whip up the exact kind of public relations momentum among the public that the studios who want to turn a big profit dream of. Evangelicals like Dobson and many megachurch pastors claimed Gibson as one of their own and (uncritically) made common cause with him.

I don't know Mel Gibson. He said in his public apology that he has struggled with alcoholism for years, and that this most recent event represented a very unfortunate slip in this ongoing struggle. Despite the severity of the bad choice he made to get behind the wheel of a car drunk, I can sympathize with the struggle itself and the need to persevere with someone who is struggling with an addiction. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be legal consequences for what he did. It just means that on a personal level, I believe in redemptive sanctification, but with the understanding that sanctification is often a very difficult, hard-fought thing that has plenty of failures mixed in with the successes. On this level, I can, without apology, pray for Mr. Gibson's recovery and can sincerely celebrate the successes he will hopefully have at the hands of God's grace.

Having said that, however, Gibson's apparently anti-semitic drunken tirade, and the predictable fallout from it, should serve as a warning to all those evangelicals who uncritically embraced him 2 years ago. Gibson does not believe many of the things evangelicals believe on matters of theology. His movie was a decidedly Catholic influenced portrayal of the Passion, with the evangelical stress on resurrection and Atonement being mostly downplayed. I don't fault evangelicals for endorsing Gibson's movie, since it was certainly a better than average portrayal of Christ by Hollywood standards. But the fact remains that Gibson's version of Catholicism, and the questionable beliefs that arise from this, should have made us as evangelicals far more wary than we were to lock arms with him. And now that this latest incident will no doubt provoke people to think that the drunken Gibson showed us his true colors that night (whether this is true or not), evangelicals would be wise to try and learn something from this for future reference. The lesson is simple - we need to choose our friends far more carefully than we do; we need to be far more discerning than we are; and we need to draw carefully thought-out lines that draw appropriate degrees of separation from those who are not in our camp. Gibson was never one of us. He needed us to promote his movie (which we did in spades), and we felt we needed someone to provide a Christian-informed witness for Christ in Hollywood (which he did). But instead of seeing the relationship as a temporary intersecting of mutually compatible momentary goals that had the potential of yielding common fruit down the road subject to testing, we gleefully considered him one of our own and very publicly adopted him despite severe theological divergence in a number of important areas. And now the fallout that should have been reserved for Gibson alone will spread indirectly to us. We need to be smarter than this going forward; we need to pick our friends better and do what Scripture commands us regarding those who bring a false teaching (in this case, regarding the Jews) into the camp. This is one area where the reliable caution of the Presbyterians was spot on. Presbyterians, by and large, were not sharing hugs with Gibson or promoting his movie 2 years ago. Instead, they were mostly able to take the good from the movie, while being very discerning about what wasn't so good. While Presbyterians, in my view, too often turn caution and deliberation into idols that stifle the work of Christ, the Presbyterians succeeded in showing us that caution still has a valuable place in preserving and increasing the purity of Christ's Bride. The gung-ho evangelicalism of the megachurch movement needs to learn from their Presbyterian brethren just as much as the Presbyterians need to learn from megachurchism.