Ridley Scott epic Kingdom of Heaven harmful to Christian-Muslim relations

On May 6th of this year, I was in the theater at 4:00 in the afternoon, gorging myself on popcorn and soda and eagerly waiting for the previews to end. I had looked forward for months to the opening of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons. Not only was the cast spectacular (minus, perhaps, Orlando Bloom), the director had, five years ago, given us Gladiator, one of my all-time favorite movies. To top it all, this film promised to meet me on a more personal level than Gladiator could have: whereas Russell Crowe's General Maximus was an adherent to old-style Roman paganism, the heroes of Kingdom of Heaven share my religion, Christianity.

Unfortunately, Kingdom of Heaven did not come close to meeting my expectations. This is not the place for me to complain about where it falls far short simply as a film. Apart from artistic demerits, Kingdom of Heaven promotes a dangerous message through its mouthpiece, Orlando Bloom's character Balian. When he first sees a group of Muslims praying, Balian notes, "They sound like our prayers," the implication being that Christianity and Islam are essentially indistinguishable. Through the course of the film, as Balian "loses his religion," wise mentors show him that Christianity is not truly a religion at all but a mere moral system. The film claims that Islam and Judaism fulfill that role as well. One is intended to leave the theater with the idea that the world's religions are useless and even dangerous, resulting in crusades and holocausts, when they try to be real religions and to do more than just prescribe moral platitudes.

Christianity is more than a moral system. It is a religion that, in its most orthodox and traditional forms, teaches specific ideas about God and about His interaction with mankind: the God of Christianity is one God in three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Son, in obedience to His Father, became man in Jesus Christ and died to pay for the sins of the world, finally rising again from the dead and thus winning salvation for the human race. This salvation is gained through faith, which is the gift of the Holy Ghost and comes to us through the hearing of the Bible (or God's Word), Holy Baptism (or the application of water in the name of the Triune God, by which the baptized is mystically reborn as a redeemed creature of God), and Holy Communion (or bread and wine consecrated with the words of Christ, through which He gives to believers His body and blood and, with them, the salvation won on the cross). There are many variations on these core truths even within American Christian denominations, but the point is that Christianity ceases to be Christianity when it is reduced to a simple moral system. It is the same with Judaism and Islam. All three religions say much about God, and teach a great deal more than morality.

Importantly, many of the claims about God voiced by the three great monotheistic faiths are mutually exclusive. To claim that God is three Persons would be blasphemy to a Jew or a Muslim, as it would be to claim that God has become man in Christ. To claim, as do Judaism and Islam, that we are to earn our salvation through right action would be blasphemy to a Christian. We are not, as Kingdom of Heaven would have us believe, all one. That does not mean that we have to live in conflict. Proper use of the word "tolerance" reflects this. Good Christians genuinely tolerate those who believe and act differently from them, as do good Muslims and Jews. They do not accept or condone beliefs or practices that are contrary to their faiths, but they do not respond with violence to them either, or at least they ought not to do so.

The way to move forward with relations between religions, particularly in the case of Christianity and Islam, is not to eliminate both religions by blurring the differences between them and reducing each to a moral system that is no religion at all, but to recognize real differences and to coexist peacefully in spite of them. Christians and Muslims in the United States overwhelmingly follow this practice. There was one character in Kingdom of Heaven who did so as well: the king Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, who died of leprosy half-way through the movie, saw to it that members of all faiths could worship freely in the Holy City without compromising the authenticity of their religions. Here's hoping that Kingdom of Heaven's audience will find Baldwin's approach more worthy of emulation than that of the film's hero.