The revulsion many nonreligious critics feel toward The Passion of the Christ cannot be explained by the violence and gore it depicts.

I believe this movie generates hostility because it is radically counter-cultural. Mel Gibson's devotional film raises questions the modern world can't face.

Why do the innocent suffer? How should we behave in the face of unavoidable suffering? What is the point of suffering that appears meaningless? The main intellectual constructs of the modern world have trouble dealing with these questions.

For instance, science can't answer these questions. When parents of a terminally ill child turn to their doctor and ask, “Why?” he cannot answer them as a scientist. Medical science might tell him the particular organism that caused the disease. But this isn't the sort of answer the parents are looking for. Evolutionary biology might tell him that the death of this particular child will enhance the long-run survival of the species. But if the doctor offers that as an explanation, the parents might just punch him in the nose.

The crude utilitarianism so common in the modern West isn't much help, either. “Avoid pain; pursue pleasure” doesn't tell us what to do in the face of unavoidable pain. Nor does it tell us what to do when someone we love is suffering. Do we avoid them? Do we put them out of their misery? Watching people try to apply these answers tells us for sure that these answers are incomplete at best. There is something pathetic about the frantic flight from pain so common in the modern world.

We demand relief from, or at least compensation for, ever more trivial discomforts. We seem to have lost the capacity for endurance in our own pain or for genuine solidarity with the suffering of others.

We sometimes find people so disabled by these questions that they avoid suffering people altogether. When someone gets sick, we bustle them out of the workplace, out of the home, into secluded places where no one but sick people go. When people die, we can't bear to see the body. Cremation might be cheaper than an open-casket funeral. But in the richest country in human history, it is hard to believe that cost alone accounts for the increasing popularity of cremation. People for whom avoiding pain is the ultimate value are not prepared to look at the lifeless body of a loved one.

Sometimes we redefine the question: Why do the innocent suffer? The suffering person must be guilty of something, like evolutionary unfitness. According to the postmodernist, the word innocent has no meaning. We are supposed to be beyond guilt and innocence. So there is only suffering, equally meaningless for all.

By contrast, Christianity confronts the questions surrounding suffering and its meaning quite directly. Throughout the course of human history, no other belief system, whether religious or philosophical, has placed these questions at the center of its attention to such a great extent as Christianity has done.

Can there be meaning in suffering that appears arbitrary? Christianity claims suffering can be redemptive. How should we deal with unavoidable pain? Christianity teaches its followers to unite their sufferings with those of Christ, the suffering servant of Isaiah's prophecy. In so doing, we participate in the redemptive sacrifice of the cross for the benefit of our own souls and the souls of those we love.

Why do the innocent suffer? This is truly the unanswerable question, even for the Christian. We cannot really fathom why the world is the way it is. But Christianity assures us that the evidence of our senses does not deceive us: The innocent do sometimes suffer. Jesus really was innocent, and he really did suffer. We are invited to contemplate the ultimate mystery of why the world is as it is rather than rage against the world as it is. The Christian need not fear what he cannot explain.

In The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark shows that Christianity was successful in its early centuries precisely because it confronted these issues better than its competitors. The subtitle of Stark's book states the historical question it answers: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries.

As the Roman Empire collapsed, people faced war, social dislocation, poverty and ignorance. Not only did Christian communities offer effective methods of alleviating suffering, but Christian doctrine also helped people find meaning in their suffering. It helped them see that pain need not be their fault or punishment for anything they had done. They learned that pain could be redemptive if they united it with the suffering Christ. Most of all, Christianity taught them that they did not suffer alone: The God of the Christians remains in solidarity with every soul in pain.

Likewise, historian of religion Philip Jenkins has shown that in modern times, the center of gravity of Christianity is shifting from the developed West to the impoverished South. The Christian message of the redemptive power of suffering resonates with people who face starvation, war and political instability. Far from being an outmoded religion for “dead white males,” Jenkins argues that the next Christendom will be brown, poor and particularly attractive to women.

The modern West is rich, fat and self-satisfied. We barely even understand the question to which Christianity is the answer. This is why so many critics cannot comprehend the countercultural message of The Passion of the Christ or, indeed, of the Gospel itself.

Jennifer Roback Morse, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Love & Economics:Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work (Spence, 2001).