As far back as the age of ten, Martin Scorsese wanted to make a movie about Jesus. He even drew storyboards for his imaginary magnum opus. Catholicism was such a force in his life that he considered entering the priesthood as a teen-ager, until he found his true calling as a director. His faith has influenced his filmography ever since, and, before his career had begun, he learned of a book that would allow him to tell Jesus’ story—and embroil him in a years-long battle with the religious right.

In 1961, when Scorsese was an undergraduate at N.Y.U., a friend told him about a novel, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Its author, Nikos Kazantzakis, had nearly been excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church for its depiction of Jesus as a tormented man wrestling with his destiny. In the Bible, Jesus is tempted three times. First, when he is hungry, the Devil tells him to transform stones into bread and feed himself. The second time, the Devil takes him to the top of the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and invites him to throw himself off of it, since God will surely send angels to catch him. The third time, the Devil shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world,” promising them to him on the condition that he forgo that whole Messiah business and worship Satan instead. In all three cases, Jesus refuses.

Kazantzakis adds a final temptation, in which Jesus is shown what it would be like to live a normal life while he is dying on the cross. During this illusory life, he realizes that his sacrifice is essential to the future of his teachings, and it is only then that he willingly accepts his fate. As Kazantzakis explained, the “struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally—the supreme purpose of the struggle—union with God; this was the ascent taken by Christ.”

It would take more than a decade for Scorsese to actually read the book. Once he did, he promptly optioned it, and handed it off to his frequent collaborator Paul Schrader. In 1982, Schrader completed a draft screenplay for “Last Temptation,” one that relied on what had become his signature device: a radical limiting of point of view to the film’s protagonist. “What I discovered with ‘Taxi Driver’ was this monocular storytelling,” Schrader told me. “You only have one view of the world. If he doesn’t see it, you don’t see it. When you apply that to film, people start to identify, because a picture creates empathy. Action creates identification.” This way of approaching the story would help make its portrait of Jesus all the more human, and, to some, all the more blasphemous.

“The Last Temptation of Christ” was overseen by David Kirkpatrick, a vice-president of Paramount Pictures, which at this point was a subsidiary of Gulf & Western. The reaction within Paramount was enthusiastic, and Scorsese began casting while rewriting the script. Sting, another devotee of the book, signed on to play Pontius Pilate, and Harvey Keitel agreed to play Judas. Scorsese cast Aidan Quinn as Jesus after studio execs balked at Christopher Walken. But the project would never be completed at Paramount. Irwin Winkler, the film’s original producer, backed away to make “The Right Stuff,” and figuring out how to shoot a Biblical epic in and around Israel on a tight budget proved a challenge. These hurdles might have been surmounted had “Last Temptation” not become the focus of a minister from Tupelo, Mississippi, named the Reverend Donald Wildmon.

According to his memoir, “I Had a Vision. God Had a Plan,” Wildmon accepted Christ as his personal savior at the age of nine. “Ever since,” he wrote, “I had a feeling God had something for me to do.” He spent many years searching for what that something was. A terrible student, he later excelled at seminary at Emory. He became a minister and, he claims, was briefly targeted by the K.K.K. for his conciliatory stance on civil rights.

An epiphany came during the Christmas season of 1976. Sitting at home with his wife and children, Wildmon tried to find something appropriate for his family to watch on TV. Instead, he witnessed a parade of horrors, including an unmarried couple in bed, a fight between two men, and frequent profanity. (Given that this was network television in the seventies, the profanity must have been fairly mild.) Lying awake at night, he tried to figure out how to change television for the better. He came up with an event he called Turn the Television Off Week—the first one launched a few months later—and realized he had found his calling.

Wildmon was a pioneer of media advocacy, and his most effective weapon was the threat of consumer boycotts. By the time he founded the National Federation for Decency, in 1977, the religious right had figured out that the purse could be even more powerful than the state in shaping expression. Wildmon applied this knowledge to a tireless quest to reform American popular culture. Only a year after launching Turn the Television Off Week, he successfully pressured Sears into pulling advertising from both “Three’s Company” (too sexy) and “Charlie’s Angels” (too sexy and too violent). These early victories came with an additional prize: the mailing list of the Moral Majority, courtesy of Jerry Falwell himself. From there, Wildmon built up his own operation, which he renamed the American Family Association. Modern conservatives have taken his philosophy to its logical extreme, boycotting the likes of Target (for selling Pride merchandise), Bud Light (for an ad featuring a trans influencer), and Disney (for shows that included gay characters); a recent Onion article summed up the phenomenon with the headline “Conservatives Boycott All Forms Of Entertainment.”

Conglomeration left seventies-era Hollywood particularly vulnerable to consumer boycotts. Studio executives might not have had much interest in listening to a preacher from Tupelo, but parent companies could be threatened with viewer anger. While Scorsese and Kirkpatrick tried to get “Last Temptation” off the ground, Gulf & Western began receiving over five hundred letters a day from incensed Christians. Then Barry Diller, Paramount’s C.E.O., decided that shooting in Israel was too expensive. Scorsese, desperate, began promising Paramount the moon. Maybe he and Keitel could forgo their salaries? Or perhaps he’d sign on to make a movie far beneath him, such as “Flashdance II”? What if the budget was cut to six million dollars, including the four they’d already spent in preproduction? None of his offers could persuade Paramount—particularly once Salah Hassanein, the head of the second-largest theatre chain in the country, told them that under no circumstances would he be screening “Last Temptation.” The project, Scorsese finally learned over Christmas, 1983, was dead.

Jesus rose from the grave after three days; it would take four years to resurrect Scorsese’s movie about him. By 1987, the director had scored a mega-hit with “The Color of Money,” and Salah Hassanein was leaving United Artist Theatres. Tom Pollock, the head of Universal Pictures, was interested in the project, which he saw not as an expression of secular humanism but as a response to it. He said that he wanted to counter a rising sense in American culture that “people look down on religion and don’t really feel that believing can make them happy.” Pollock persuaded Cineplex Odeon to invest in the film, limiting Universal’s risk. Scorsese agreed to make it for a modest seven million dollars, and the project was greenlit. This time, he would film in Morocco, with Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Keitel as Judas, David Bowie as Pontius Pilate, and Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene.

In Mary Pratt Kelly’s “Martin Scorsese: A Journey,” the film’s director of photography likens the production to being in a war. Scorsese and his crew had fifty-eight days to shoot a hundred-and-twenty-page screenplay that mostly takes place outdoors. The compressed timetable left him with very few takes, and the remote location meant that he couldn’t get rushes in time to review what he had shot. At one point, a flood swept in and cut off the roads back to Marrakesh. Depending on whom you ask, the low budget gives the film either an immediacy lacking in most Hollywood epics or, as Schrader put it to me, “a lot of just walking around ruins when Paul was preaching and stuff.”

I belong to the former camp. “The Last Temptation of Christ” is one of Martin Scorsese’s greatest films. It is also one of his strangest. The screenplay, which Schrader described as “a plexiglass layer cake,” built out of Kazantzakis’s Greek Orthodoxy, Schrader’s Calvinism, and Scorsese’s Catholicism, shifts beguilingly among the mystical, the mundane, and the surprisingly funny. All dramatizations of Jesus’ life struggle to make his story coherent: we have four contradictory accounts of what he said and did in the Gospels, and his teachings do not always line up. “Last Temptation” channels these inconsistencies into a story of Jesus’ evolving understanding of his mission. Surely, being a prophet destined to die on the cross would be a painful vocation, and the film refuses to look away from this pain. By focussing on Jesus’ humanity and putting it in difficult conversation with his divinity, “Last Temptation” gives us a life of Christ that is both more relatable and more moving than other Biblical films.

Scorsese frequently discussed the film as “faith-affirming” in the press, but his arguments did little to persuade evangelical leaders. Before it was finished—before anyone had even read the script, which Universal had locked down like the nuclear codes—the religious right had decried his depiction of Jesus as blasphemous. If the book was any indication, they said, it was libelous of someone with whom they had a personal relationship.

Universal knew the movie would be a tough sell to the public, and they wanted help building inroads to the camp most likely to speak out against it, so they reached out to a man named Tim Penland, a marketing consultant with deep ties to the Christian community. In the eighties, Hollywood had begun dipping its toes into the evangelical-Christian marketplace, looking to tap into a demographic that numbered roughly eighty million people. Penland had made “Chariots of Fire” a hit in 1981; five years later, he brought out an audience for “The Mission,” a superior, if less successful, film.

“You only have your credibility in this business,” Penland later told the historian Thomas Lindlof. “Once you lose your credibility, you’ve lost everything.” Worried that “Last Temptation” would erode that cred, Penland reached out to his friend Larry Poland, the head of Mastermedia International, a prominent Christian media-advocacy group. Together, the two men attempted to help a blasphemous film find a faithful audience.

In their initial meetings, Universal’s Tom Pollock pitched Penland on Scorsese’s sincere, if idiosyncratic, Catholicism, and the ways that showing Jesus’ human side could open people’s hearts to his message. Penland offered a deal: he could get Jerry Falwell, Donald Wildmon, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and their allies to hold their fire on the film if he could also promise that they could see a cut before it came out. Once that happened, they could proceed as their consciences dictated. Pollock agreed to the terms, and Penland left the meeting excited by the possibility of forging greater links between Hollywood and the evangelical community.

Instead, both sides began planning almost immediately for what would happen if the deal went south. Christian advocates wanted time to attack the film should they not like what they saw, so they pressured Universal to schedule a screening as soon as possible. Universal hired Josh Baran, a P.R. specialist and co-founder of Sorting It Out, an organization that helped people who have left their faith communities, to develop a strategy for defending the film from Christian activists.

By March of 1988, Universal was playing both sides. Through Penland, they had reached out to Christian leaders to talk up the “faith-affirming” aspects of the film. Simultaneously, Baran was preparing a free-expression-based defense of the film and readying himself for war with the very people Penland was trying to court. The promised screening failed to materialize. In April, Christian leaders’ impatience with Universal was difficult to ignore, especially since no one would tell Penland when he could see at least a portion of the movie. On April 17th, the Los Angeles Times’s Pat Broeske wrote up the first public rumblings of discontent from Christian leaders. Wildmon began calling Penland almost daily, asking if Universal was playing them.

While Wildmon et al. waited for a screening, Universal sent Penland the shooting script. Penland was so shocked by what he read that he immediately called Poland. “If this is a faith-affirming film, I don’t know whose faith!” he said. He read aloud one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, in which Jesus watches Mary Magdalene service a series of men in her work as a world-renowned prostitute. Penland would eventually flag eighty out of the script’s hundred and twenty pages for material that alarmed him, ranging from nudity to events in the film that are not in the Gospels. Of particular concern was a scene, cut from the final script, in which John the Baptist kisses Jesus while Jesus says, in voice-over, “His tongue felt like a burning coal in my mouth.”

Universal executives were so worried about leaks of the script that they had only given Penland a day to review it, but Wildmon still managed to get his hands on a copy. As Wildmon put it, “Never in almost twelve years of fighting the media’s bias against Christian values had I ever come across a more blatant attack on Christianity than this movie.” He phoned Penland, informing him that the American Family Association had made hundreds of copies of the script and planned to send them out. This could be prevented only if Universal delayed the film’s release.

Universal told Penland that Wildmon’s script was a pirated copy of Paul Schrader’s far more confrontational and explicit draft from 1982. It was six years out of date, at least twenty pages shorter than the shooting script, and contained multiple sequences that were not in the final version, including one in which Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene and declares, “God sleeps between your legs.” But Penland needed proof that Universal wasn’t lying, and the only proof that could satisfy him would be seeing the film. Universal informed him that, as Scorsese had not finished editing the film, it did not belong to them yet, and therefore could not be screened.

This was only partially true. Although the film was unfinished, Universal had a rough cut, which they had begun screening within the studio and for distributors. Baran was present at these screenings and, it turned out, did not like the movie very much, but that was beside the point. “Ultimately this is . . . a cultural war that’s been going on for a long time,” he told Lindlof, “and that’s the forces of the reactionary right against an open society. . . . That’s what ‘The Last Temptation’ was for me. And I wanted to win it.” Baran believed Universal should cut its losses with Penland. There was no way this film would not be controversial.

Before Universal could make a decision about Penland, a news story emerged about Scorsese screening the film for Catholic clergy. Penland was furious—and, by then, Donald Wildmon had begun making good on his threat to circulate the script. Recipients made their own copies, and sent them to their colleagues and friends. Universal sent Wildmon a sharply worded letter telling him that the pirated draft bore little resemblance to the final film, but the damage had already been done.

Penland knew it was time for him to quit. He told Pollock, “I can promise you that the Christian leaders . . . will make you eat that script passage by passage.” Now, released from his obligations to Universal, he was ready to make that prophecy come true. As Larry Poland put it, “It was time to mobilize for war.”

In June, 1988, a war council of self-described “offended brethren” convened on the phone to discuss their next moves. During the call, they devised what came to be known as “the three missile strikes.” First, they took out a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter—signed by more than sixty people, including Christian employees in Hollywood—denouncing the film. Next, James Dobson preëmpted his normal radio programming to devote an entire episode of Focus on the Family’s show to the film, which he described, with typical restraint, as “the most blasphemous, evil attack on the Church and the cause of Christ in the history of entertainment.” That episode, broadcast to over a thousand stations, aired on July 11th. Soon “all hell broke loose,” according to one Universal employee, as the studio was flooded with angry calls.

Universal had finally scheduled a screening for Christian leaders, but the offended brethren refused to attend it. Instead, they launched the third strike: a press conference for the national media. Facing the gathered reporters, they took turns explaining their devotion to Christ and the harms they felt the film was perpetrating on American Christians. Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, testified that the screenplay left him bereft. Lloyd John Ogilvie argued that the film distorted Christ; Larry Poland said it put Christian employees of the studios in an impossible position between their need to earn a living and their faith. Jack Hayford, the founder of the King’s University, in Texas, claimed that the film was persecuting Christians, who only wanted to be treated equally. This inversion of civil-rights rhetoric would soon become a hallmark of the culture wars—one invoked in multiple Supreme Court cases that clawed back civil-rights-era advances.

The press conference featured another rhetorical move that’s since become ubiquitous: exaggerated claims of harm based on out-of-context excerpts from works that the protesters have not seen. What mattered to Wildmon and his allies was their response to the idea of the work, and their ability to trigger that response in their followers. The argument that such an intense reaction was itself damaging and must be prevented upended a commonly held belief about art—that causing intense responses, whether positive or negative, was one thing art was particularly good at, and part of what made it important for our shared humanity. Ironically, the view that bad feelings are inherently injurious has found a home among some camps on the left. The culture wars of today often purport to be about protecting particular constituencies from art, whether it be books about trans youth or the work of Philip Guston.

On the heels of the press conference, Donald Wildmon’s outreach operation sent out action packets to 2.5 million people. These included a letter excoriating Universal, a petition for the recipient to fill with signatures and deliver to their local movie house, a torn ticket stub to send to Universal’s parent company, M.C.A., with a note attached that said, “It will be a long time—if ever—before I pay to see another Universal Studios produced movie,” and a fund-raising appeal. Wildmon also recorded an anti-“Temptation” radio spot that aired on eight hundred Christian radio stations, produced a thirty-minute anti-“Temptation” TV program, and, on July 1st, wrote Christian pastors all over the country asking them to join in the fight. Meanwhile, Josh Baran lined up ministers to speak on the film’s behalf.

The anti-“Temptation” effort suffered a major setback when the Reverend R. L. Hymers, Jr., who was not part of Wildmon’s coalition, began staging explicitly antisemitic protests aimed at Lew Wasserman, the head of M.C.A. In the most spectacular of these, he and his followers marched on Wasserman’s home with signs and chanting, “Paid for with Jewish money.” They then staged a fake crucifixion in which a man playing Wasserman in a suit with fake blood on his hands stepped on Jesus’ back. This event, far more offensive and sacrilegious than anything in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” caused huge blowback as American Jewish organizations joined the fray, denouncing the protest and supporting Universal.

Hymers’s protests made “Last Temptation”—still unfinished, seen by at most a few dozen people, and months away from its theatrical release—into a national news story, one in which the noble free-speech warriors of Hollywood were beset by a horde of antisemites and Bible-thumping lunatics. Desperate to regain control of the narrative, the offended brethren hatched one last mad scheme: attempting to buy the film from Universal. The offer was eventually made to the studio by Bill Bright, who said that the idea had come to him as he prayed one night, unable to sleep because he was so upset by the film.

Baran’s associate Susan Rothbaum drafted a letter of response, which moved the contested territory from religious values to free expression. It’s a masterly piece of rhetoric, one that looks backward to Thomas Jefferson and forward to the spectre of Soviet authoritarianism in a handful of paragraphs. “You have expressed a concern that the content of films be ‘true,’ ” she wrote. “But whose truth? If everyone in America agreed on religious, political, and artistic truths, there would be no need for our constitutional guarantees. Only in totalitarian states are all people forced to accept one version of the truth.” The letter goes on to remind them that Christianity is not monolithic and that many Christians, including the people who made the film, believe in it. The letter concludes:

In the United States, no one sect or coalition has the power to set boundaries around each person’s freedom to explore religious and philosophical questions whether through speech, books, or films.

These freedoms protect all of us.
They are precious.
They are not for sale.
We cannot accept your offer,

Universal Pictures

The letter ran as a full-page ad in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Atlanta Constitution.

Larry Poland dismissed it as sophistry. Private citizens imploring a studio to forgo releasing a film could not be censors, because definitionally only the government is capable of censorship. But these arguments, about how free expression is defined, whether art that offends is inherently harmful, and whose sensibilities determine what art gets shown to the public, would recur again and again. Shortly after the letter circulated, Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter and syndicated columnist turned lifelong culture warrior, addressed the controversy in a column titled “Blasphemy from Hollywood.” “The issue,” he wrote, “is not whether ‘Last Temptation’ can be shown; but whether such a film should be shown.” Buchanan asked how Hollywood liberals would feel about “a film titled ‘The Secret Life of Martin Luther King’ that depicted the assassinated civil rights leader as a relentless womanizer, a point of view with more foundation in truth” than “Last Temptation.” Echoing Poland’s worries about Christian persecution, Buchanan asserted that “we live in an age where the ridicule of blacks is forbidden, where anti-Semitism is punishable by political death, but where Christian-bashing is a popular indoor sport.”

Universal decided to release the film early to take advantage of the controversy. Although Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker wanted more time to get it right, they delivered the finished film on August 3rd. The next day, the studio announced that “The Last Temptation of Christ” would begin rolling out to theatres in a week. The Christian war council felt stymied. They would not take further action without God’s guidance, but He seemed reluctant to offer it. Together, they prayed, and the inspiration they were searching for arrived: they would lead a boycott effort against all of M.C.A./Universal’s interests.

Soon, the studio began receiving threats. One senior executive received both a bloody pig carcass and photos of his family’s beach house in the mail. Someone left dolls meant to resemble Lew Wasserman and the studio’s spokesperson Sally Van Slyke, crucified and with knives sticking out of them, at Universal’s headquarters. Universal spent far more than usual to guarantee the security of screenings, assuming responsibility for damages, hiring guards to escort every print of the film, and sweeping movie theatres for bombs.

The studio also pioneered a new P.R. strategy: hiring political operatives to “advance” the movie in the way they would a politician, shaping “appearances” such that everything goes exactly as planned while seeming spontaneous. With the Democratic National Convention wrapped up, and Michael Dukakis declared the nominee, many advance operatives were on hiatus. Working in secret for Universal, they set up screenings for sympathetic religious leaders, designed crisis plans, strategized for the media, and, in some cases, deliberately inflamed local tensions to whet the public’s appetite for the film. As both sides wanted large protests, “Last Temptation” was greeted by them wherever it went. Though most were peaceful, in Ithaca, New York, a man rammed a converted school bus into a theatre lobby.

One night, Paul Schrader received a phone call from his father, a man so religious he had forbidden Schrader from seeing movies as a child. The two rarely talked about his career, so Schrader was surprised by how much his dad wanted to discuss the film. How was it going? Where was it playing? How many theatres? “It totally hit me,” Schrader recalled. “I said, ‘Dad, by any chance, are you involved in the movement to stop this movie?’ ”

“Yes,” his dad replied. “But only locally.”

During the next few months, as the film rolled out across the country, the war over “Last Temptation” spread from city to city. But the opposing parties ultimately battled it out to a draw. Scorsese’s popularity and the film’s notoriety ensured a good opening weekend. Once people knew what the fuss was about, however, the crowds swiftly dried up, and most reviews were mixed.

Although the brethren would claim credit for the film flopping, it actually broke even. Universal made a small amount of money, and Cineplex Odeon lost a small amount. The biggest financial blow may have come from Blockbuster Video’s refusal to carry the movie on VHS. Scorsese’s career was largely unaffected. Two years later, he returned to cinemas with “GoodFellas,” a film widely regarded as his masterpiece. Though Universal would claim that the protests did not impact “Last Temptation” too badly, they increased its marketing costs, affected its budget and editing timetable, kept its release extremely small, and insured that few people saw the film for what it was.

Meanwhile, the religious right profited handsomely from the skirmish. Jerry Falwell charged believers thirty dollars for a “Battle Plan Kit” to help him quash the movie. Campus Crusade for Christ sold its own film about the life of Jesus on VHS for $39.95. Many of those 2.5 million mailers asking for money for Wildmon’s efforts came back with donations in them. He emerged from the conflict flush with cash, with new names on his mailing list, and with confirmation that telling people that they were under threat because of their Christian beliefs would inspire them to take action. Sacrilege, it turned out, did sell, so long as you were fighting it. ♦

This is drawn from “The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars.”