‘Gay Jesus’ movie is a politically-correct cop-out

It’s hard to understand the fuss over the Netflix movie The First Temptation of Christ, which depicts Jesus as being gay, unless you are going to make uncomfortable comparisons.

A couple of million people signed a petition calling on Netflix to remove the film made by a Brazilian comedy troupe who’s company was also attacked on Christmas Eve by a far-right religious group using Molotovs, which must be condemned obviously.

I decided to have a quick look and skimmed through parts of the film over the holiday and while it appears to try and replicate The Life of Brian with a gay twist, it does not compare in terms of humour. Maybe it was the subtitles.

In any case, it was fairly harmless in content, and given that there are around 2 billion Christians around the world, the reaction has been mostly muted. There are nutters and fundamentalists in every religion and it’s a testament to the teachings of Christianity that the reaction was not worse.

The one issue with the movie that should lend itself to objective criticsim involved a scene where gay Jesus meets up with Shiva and Buddha – both colourful characters that appeared as non-binary genders or somesuch – and what I believe was a depiction of Rasta smoking a joint and an alien in costume meant to be Tom Cruise as a Scientologist.

However, there were two notable religious ‘icons’ from the world’s other two main Abrahamic religions completely missing from the scene. It’s not difficult to guess who they were. One was said to be ‘somewhere around’ but depicting ‘him’ would, it seems, have been a bridge too far.

This, in my opinion was a major cop-out on the part of the filmmakers and if these two religious characters had been depicted comically as the others were, it’s certain the backlash would have been way worse and the film likely pulled from Netflix over the outrage, if it had made it onto Netflix at all.

If you’re going to make fun of religious characters, then make fun of them all.

SK, Nicosia

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