Body of evidence: today's most popular crime shows regularly display the bloody corpses of murder victims. Patrick McCormick contrasts the intended thrill of body-horror with the biblical call for body-compassion. (culture in context).

FOR THE PAST 13 SEASONS, EPISODES OF LAW & Order have begun with the ritual discovery of the body of the murder victim. Invariably, some couple arguing about an eminently forgettable matter stumbles upon the bloody (and not infrequently mutilated) corpse, and, as soon as we're back from the credits, detectives Briscoe and Green have arrived at the yellow-taped scene to question the beat cops, medical examiners, and witnesses gathered around the corpus delicti.

As the Law & Order franchise has colonized NBC nighttime programming, this mandatory viewing of the murdered body has spread to Friday and Sunday nights, offering viewers a particularly gruesome version on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where victims suffer especially gruesome violence at the hands of their killers.

Meanwhile, over on ABC, Steven Bochco's long-running NYPD Blue may have more melodrama than Dick Wolf's Law & Order, but it too begins with a long, voyeuristic glance at the murdered body (or bodies) of its victims. And it may just be my imagination, but it seems like a lot of these corpses are female, often in a state of undress.

Still, in these cop shows the corpse of the murder victim has something of a cameo role, though she or he may show up later in crime scene photographs meant to push a witness or jury's buttons. But on the newer crop of medical examiner shows like CSI and its clone CSI: Miami or Crossing Jordan the body of the deceased has a starring (and recurring) role, and over and over again we get a worm's-eye view of the bodies, bringing us up close and personal to every micron of injured flesh and shattered bone. No room for the imagination (or much sensitivity) on these shows.

Crime dramas show us these damaged bodies to evoke anger and horror. Just as Abel's blood cried out for Cain's punishment, the bodies in these cop shows demand vengeance for their murders. The mute testimony of their violated flesh awakens the wrath of the police and prosecutors on these programs and the audience at home, insisting that the villains who perpetrated these assaults be hunted down and punished. (This wrath often turns to rage when the victims are children.)

But watching these lifeless bodies also entertains us, or why would commercial TV give us so many chances to do sot We are horrified and titillated at the sight of these bloodied corpses, and being forced to see every detail of the insult visited on their wounded flesh provides a guilty pleasure, evoking the rubbernecking voyeur in us. We are disgusted but dare not turn away.

Sensationalist entertainments serving up the bodies of the dead are hardly new. In 1830 Daniel Webster complained about the public's prurient interest in the gruesome details of a murder case he was prosecuting and about the press's pandering to this morbid fascination with crime stories that rendered such horrible events attractive. "So strangely [is] the mind of man constructed," wrote Webster, "that pleasure [is] gathered from the elements of pain and beauty seen in the Gorgon head of horror."

Within a decade the rise of the "penny press" provided cheap daily newspapers with large sections dedicated to salacious and scandalous crime stories, and in 1836 the newborn New York Herald and Sun outdid each other in their sensationalist reporting on the ax-murder of a notorious prostitute, establishing once and for all that the more gruesome the details, the more avid the readership.

SOON THE NATIONAL POLICE GAZETTE WAS OFFERING A BURgeoning audience all the gore it wanted, and the crime sections of newspapers across the country were filled with details of the I tortures inflicted on the bodies of murder victims and on those of their executed killers. Stories of murder and public execution generated what one reporter called "a thrill of horror" in their readers and phenomenal sales for their publishers. Even today, the motto of local TV news remains, "If it bleeds, it leads."

In Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Harvard), Karen Halttunen argues that 19th-century crime stories and murder literature didn't just report the details of these killings and executions. They actively sought to stimulate the "thrill of horror" in readers by using the bodies of victims and killers. Whether fictional or factual, Halttunen notes, "murder literature after 1800 focused overwhelmingly on the body in pain and death. The primary technique of sensationalism was body-horror, the effort to arouse the reader's repugnance (and excitement) in the face of the physiological realities of violent death."

A brief glance at today's most popular crime shows would indicate that body-horror remains murder literature's primary technique.

The problem with this body-horror is that it evokes rage and a voyeuristic thrill, but no sympathy--either for the killer or the victim. The ritual viewing of the tortured and violated body of the murder victim is calculated to create a wrath for the "monster" who would do such a thing.

Cops on NYPD Blue and Law & Order encourage murderers to tell their side of the story, to help the DA and jury see them as ordinary human beings, provoked by some awful insult or threat. But we know the cops are lying, and that they (and we) think the accused is a self-serving monster.

And the ritual viewing of the victim's corpse does little to generate sympathy for her or him. This is no wake or funeral where we have come to honor and bid farewell to a friend, where someone has been dressed in their best attire and prepared to meet us one last time.

Watching the naked and injured body of the dead over the shoulder of cops and medical examiners is a second violation of this unprotected flesh, a final invasion of privacy. And the clinical detachment we use to distance ourselves from the horror of this scene also suppresses our sympathy for the person who suffered.

In scripture the wounded and suffering body of our neighbor is a call for compassion, not horror or rage. In Exodus, Yahweh tells Moses that "I have observed the misery of my people ... have heard their cry ... and I have come down to deliver them" (Exod. 3:7-8).

Time and again the Hebrew prophets raise a cry for the suffering bodies of the poor and oppressed and call upon their brothers and sisters to show compassion and mercy for the widows, orphans, and aliens in their midst.

Isaiah tells the Hebrews that the only worship their God desires involves their tending to the suffering and needy bodies of their neighbors. They are to "let the oppressed go free ... to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin" (Isa. 58:6-7).

JESUS TAKES UP THIS CALL FOR BODY-compassion when he announces in Luke that he has come to "bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight for the blind, to let the oppressed go free."

He drives the point home when he tells us in Matthew 25 that he has taken on the broken and injured flesh of the sick, suffering, starving, and dying, and that whenever we feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, or welcome the stranger we are tending the body of Christ.

In a society that spends countless billions to apprehend and punish criminals at home and abroad but cannot come up with a universal health care plan to tend for the bodies of 40 million of our poor and sick, we may have too much body-horror and not enough body-compassion.

Perhaps it is time for us to stop using the wounded bodies of our neighbors as a springboard for wrath and horror, and to begin finding in these sacred bodies a reason for compassion. We need to remember that the crucified body is the body of Christ.

PATRICK MCCORMICK is professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.