Word is that the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks take on The Da Vinci Code is so bad that perhaps we needn't worry about large-scale religious confusion resulting from its release. Of course, the bad news is that the book has already accomplished that.
If Dan Brown's book had appeared 200 or 300 or 400 or 500 years ago, both parties — the Christian faithful and the heretics — would have strenuously argued the truth or falsehood of little details like Mary Magdalene's marital status. And by “both sides” I mean large numbers of believers and heretics, not just semi-professional Christians and Gnostics monitoring each other's blog sites. In the early post-Gutenberg era of Luther and Calvin, for example, everybody who could read passionately followed the religious pamphlet wars, and the preachers ensured a strong trickle-down effect among the illiterate.
In contrast, The Da Vinci Code's huge best-seller audience does seem more or less aware that the book diverges from the Sunday school line, but many readers passively absorb Dan Brown's borrowings from early heresies, legends and crackpot theories. Recent polling of Americans and Canadians reveals a sharp up-tick in the numbers who now believe that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. There's also increasing fuzziness about Jesus' divinity and salvific mission, and the trustworthiness of the apostles. Clearly, readers of Da Vinci do not understand that the “willing suspension of disbelief” that allows us to enjoy fiction is meant to be temporary.
Cardinal Newman famously wrote that to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant. One thing that Dan Brown's best-seller hammers home is how few people are nowadays willing to make the effort to be deep in history, and how little they seem to think it matters. A subsection of the orthodox Christian population buys the rebuttal books and attends talks on the work's inaccuracies, but don't count on people who gullibly gobble up Da Vinci's belief system to tarry long enough at a cocktail party to absorb a detailed critique.
One of my teens passionately loves Forrest Gump. A few weeks ago I discovered that she had been assuming all along that Forrest was a real, historical person, who had really met all those famous people and been present at all those history-making moments. After I broke the truth to her, I found out that her older sister had the same misconception. If either of them had been a little more up on recent American history decades — if they'd lived through some or all of the '60s and '70s, for example — they would never have fallen into this error. However, both my daughters reluctantly accepted historical truth.
In contrast, Dan Brown's work enjoys much more credibility not only because of our era's historical ignorance but also because many of us now assume that debunkers are more credible than upholders of orthodoxy. That's a legacy of '60s and '70s anti-authoritarianism and cynicism. After all, people who resist being reigned in by religious and moral authority welcome whatever serves to undercut that authority.
And it is also a legacy of progressive theologians' cavalier discounting of the reliability of the Gospels. As a Catholic-educated middle-schooler recently shrugged, “How do we know that Jesus and Mary Magdalene weren't married?” She wasn't agonizing over it, and certainly wasn't interested in doing the intellectual heavy lifting of researching the subject. Nor was she picking up on the implications for Christ's redemptive mission and message, his dual nature, or the role and reliability of the Church in passing on his message. Truth — what it might be and how we are to ascertain it — mattered less to her than keeping the mind open indefinitely to possibly more palatable “truths.”
So, however the critic-panned movie version of Da Vinci does at the box office, the “teachable moment” cohort of Christian apologists have their work cut out for them. Of course, we are called to evangelize both in season and out of season. But we may as well recognize how out of season the times are, and plan accordingly.
Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.
