The fashion of Christ

Now that the bloody carcass has long been dragged out to dry, after being beaten, flogged, flayed, whipped, hung up, crucified, vilified, praised, worshipped, adored, revered, transcended, transformed, and the whole process repeated again, we can leave Mel Gibson’s movie at that, and no more has to be said.

Growing up in a Catholic country, being emblematic about the common religion was no big deal. Scapulars, rosaries, saintly names were identikits, markers of uniform conformity. Everyone said a Hail Mary or two, went to mass when the occasion called for it. Religion was mundane, a habitual of the ritual thing. For those who wandered, the artifacts of religion were either tossed aside or rendered into harmless kitsch in the realm of the secular. Although in this country, it is almost shameful to call ourselves Christians, not because it is a stigma, but because we often act so godlessly.

But we know how the world works: in phases of marketing trends. No longer is it considered controversial (nor particularly holy) to be wearing large studded crosses and go lapdancing with saints – Madonna paved that road for future cruci-fashion fixes by first offering herself up to be burnt at the stake. Wearing your faith on your sleeve, literally, has become trendy again. I knew a guy who had the beatific likeness of the Virgin Mary tattooed in pious blue, her radiance spreading down the length of his arm in a blind hallucination. It was devotionally extreme, I thought, although she could’ve just been his blessed version of the untouchable pin-up girl. Not many go that far, the most we’d be comfortable with is a rearview rosary swinging from a taxi mirror – but once again, like those old Christians who cautiously writ icthys in the sand – people have come out again from under the shade of liberalism to proudly align themselves with the current resurrection.

As seen on the Internet: Pamela Anderson in a "Jesus is my Homeboy" shirt! Instant cachet of cool, for her and the shirt, the very irony, because. Pammy, in a Mary Magdalene move, asserts mockingly through her heaving bosoms that yes, Jesus and her do come from the same hood. The same shirt spied on a young Manileña takes on a different meaning, the cooler po-pomo equivalent of sticking the fish on your car, or praying in school. You know the chick is sincere without being evangelical, it is cheeky and campy and subversive at the same time. Jesus the homeboy has way more street cred than Jesus the carpenter and more social palatability than Jesus, God’s ultimate whipping boy. By the way, a "Mary is my homegirl" shirt is also available for those who swing that way. Won’t be too long till "Heaven is where my Dog’s at" graces chests of the urban faithful.

Whether or not you liked Mel’s movie and thought it was a powerful cinemato-religious experience or just this decade’s Titanic, it has undeniably sparked more debate and reflection than any of the elections, and replaced all headlining interest now that Saddam has been demistyfied – you didn’t see him go down in a painful blaze of gory. It has rekindled Christian pride, rehashed allegations of anti-Semitism, and rashed a pool of tasty jokes (one spoof news item: "Jesus Christ now more popular than the Beatles"). And inevitably, the Passion fashion – nail pendants are more in vogue than the old beleaguered cross. Just when we’ve come to a point where the spiritual mix is the hit compilation, where we reject anything pre-packaged and choose to sift through the debris of belief for our own personal gems – a bit of Buddhist here and a little animism there – JC is thrust back in focus, he regains superstar position. As they say, oh what a trend we have in Jesus.

Variations on the Jesus Christ poseur: He’s also got his own action figure complete with swiveling arms to drive the temple merchants away, and a wheeled base for smooth gliding action. We’ve always been taught that he’s our personal savior, why not take it a step further and make him your personal shopper? One website hawks such witness fashion as Christian panties (thongs emblazoned with praying hands, spiritual challenges like "What would Jesus do?"), nativity style computer speakers and other salvationally salacious products. But all this pseudo-religious gimmickry, while egregious, is actually telling us something else – that we’ve turned Jesus into another Che Guevarra. Not Che Guevarra, real life Cuban revolutionary, but the rage-against-the-machine-ish icon clueless young boys like to trump on T-shirts and posters, the Che who ends up hawking liquor and cigars.

Jesus has been incarnated into more than just heavenly flesh – he has become an avatar of all possibilities, a vessel for tangent imaginings. Jesus as an icon is more a statement of cultural recognition than of intransigent faith – everyone can agree he’s one cool dude, the mother of all peaceniks, but hey, none of that thorny Son of God stuff. We’ve heard of the black Jesus (amen, funk soul Brother!), and there have been sightings of the buddy Jesus, the one you’d have a beer with. An old favorite of mine was the guerillero Jesus, drawn by a Cuban poster-maker during the ‘60s. Christ as guerilla has the expected peaceful countenance, a geographically typical tunic, and long plebian hair rung softly with a halo – but this Christ packs a mean rifle on his back. A paradoxical image, because of course Jesus would never have literally fought in any man’s war or even carried such a weapon of crass murder. But his revolutionary aspect, his romantic rebelliousness, was appropriated for the Cubans’ cause, and it does make for a more compelling image than the fictional, garrulously eye-poking Uncle Sam, or the wan smile of a distant Mao smudged in Warholian lipstick.

Jesus’ various transmutations in our world of pop cult, while indicating the universality of his teachings and making him more accessible to the great unchurched, are also confusing, disempowering, and potentially dangerous. If we make him in our own image every new time, reproduce, update, and refashion the Lord like the latest Barbie, something essential is inevitably lost in transition. Even Mel Gibson’s ultra-orthodox interpretation, while attempting to be biblically accurate, already fails in its very attempt. Choosing to narrowly focus on Jesus in only one way – the extremely torturous way – refuses other ideas and shuts out a world of perspective that can only add to the entirety of his Messiahood and what it means to believers.

Holy chic. There is a time for everything, and the fashion of Christ is in season. The nation’s top-selling book is the heaven how-to The Purpose Driven Life, while apoplectic apocalyptics have been thrillingly thumbing their Left Behinds. Christian pop acts like Evanescence and P.O.D. are big fish in the mainstream with their ambiguously worded songs and edgy wardrobe. Maybe some kind of religious renaissance is brewing, maybe we’re just riding the wave that broke with The Passion. Perhaps, like the Spiritualists of the industrial revolution, we’re only knocking on hollow walls, looking for some answer-shedding phantasm to believe in, when in fact, the message has been here all along – we’ve just been busy with all the wrong signals.