Theology students at Glasgow University have been told that they can leave lectures if they find images of the Crucifixion too upsetting. This is under the system of “trigger warnings”, the latest manifestation of the belief that nobody should ever be upset or offended and that all the world must be a “safe space” free of statues of people we don’t like, of opinions with which we disagree, where rudeness is criminalised rather than regarded as ignorant and where hurt feelings can be turned into cash.
Any theology student who cannot cope with the Crucifixion should change course pronto, and my first reaction to the reports of the university’s policy was one of irritation. My next was to think that the reason the Crucifixion comes as a shock to some is that we are surrounded by bland images of it from the moment we can identify objects. People wear small discreet crucifixes, churches display large ones, as do convents and monasteries, and Dracula is always defeated by one. Frequently the cross is bereft of its victim and, while widely recognised as the symbol of Christianity, it is shorn of the horror of its true meaning.
Perhaps then, it does come as a shock to be forced to focus on what a Roman crucifixion actually meant. If so, it is a shock which we should all endure, perhaps by steeling ourselves to watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
I first saw it at a pre-release screening for film critics, having been asked to write a press article about it. It is unlikely that many of that audience were committed Christians, but at the end everyone left in silence. The only other time I have known a cinema empty in complete silence was after Schindler’s List.
The realism of the film was appalling, but accurate. If you are flogged half to death, have thorns jammed down on your head and nails driven through your hands and feet, then you will bleed copiously. Your features will contort in agony. You will groan and cry out. Mel Gibson did for the Passion what Spielberg did for war in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan – he brought home its real horror.
So, yes, some will be shocked by contemplating exactly what Christ endured, but that might get them thinking about why He did it, which is no bad thing. Perhaps the secret to getting the message across is to forget to be bland and to set out to shock.
Much the same applies to abortion. The BBC is not alone in reluctance to screen one, although just about every other operation has been shown in graphic detail. If people actually saw the product of a late abortion they might be shocked into some appreciation that this is a child, not a choice. Indeed, there is an argument for saying that in order to make an informed choice a woman should be fully educated about what the child in the womb looks like at whatever stage of gestation she is presenting. What is wrong with facing facts?
Pictures of famine victims can profoundly shock, but they raise awareness and the exercise of charity in a way that mere words cannot. When Richard Dimbleby broadcast a verbal description of the relief of Belsen there was an outcry of protest – and even some disbelief – but it was the beginning of the general appreciation of what millions of innocent Jews had actually suffered, of what Nazism had led to, of the intense evil we had been fighting. The world needed that: it needed to be horribly shocked.
Being shocked, repulsed and distressed is a necessary part of the human experience, of human learning and development. Universities are places where all three should be promoted. There is nothing wrong with a warning, but it should be a precursor to facing reality not a means of escape from it. Of course, there are limits but education does not require excess any more than it requires blandness. A student who really is squeamish should just briefly close his or her eyes, not flee the lecture.
It is common practice for news bulletins to carry warnings that there are some images which viewers may find distressing. Usually these precede scenes from wars or famine areas. Surely we would just assume war and famine to be distressing, would we not? Why do we need a warning?
We need it because we have grown up in a safe space where there has been no total war for more than 70 years, where mass starvation here is unthinkable and medicine can cure a large percentage of diseases. That was not always the reality for our parents or grandparents and it is not the reality for large tranches of the modern world today. How shocking.
Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister
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