I remember the feeling of dread. A number of my students were starting to wax enthusiastic about a book they had read called “The Da Vinci Code.” Others raised questions of alarm based on reading the book.
I had not heard of, let alone read, the book but I knew what lay before me. My dread was based on the growing awareness that I was going to have to read a very bad book in order to answer student questions about it. I was right. Despite the fact that the first page of the book is headed “Fact,” there are very few facts in “The Da Vinci Code.”
Dan Brown did correctly locate Paris in France, but that is one of the few he got right. From what I can tell, whether they approve of Christianity or not, my scholarly colleagues and I agree that the book is filled with errors of fact, serious misrepresentations or misinterpretations of the evidence and wanton and improbable speculation. Could this book?s account of Christian beginnings and a subsequent conspiracy to cover up the truth be true? Only in the sense that the Earth could be flat or that the moon landing could have been faked.
Nevertheless, the book has made quite a splash. Moreover, as I write the movie has just come out.
Despite its factual shortcomings one must admit, however, that “The Da Vinci Code” came along at just the right time. Any plot based on the idea that the Roman Catholic hierarchy has systematically hidden away information uncongenial to the faith will gain a wide hearing in the aftermath of the clergy sex abuse scandals and the Church?s continued unwillingness to speak fully and openly about this.
The clever marketing of the book and the movie work together with this climate of suspicion to outweigh the manifest historical and theological deficiencies of “The Da Vinci Code,” not to mention the literary ones. “The Da Vinci Code” is the book that won?t die.
As a theologian and a teacher, this is dispiriting on several accounts.On the one hand, there is the inability of many Christians to recognize and refute even the most glaringly false assertions of the book, including the notion that the emperor Constantine invented Christian views about the divinity of Jesus for purely political reasons at the beginning of the fourth century.
Even those who reject Christian claims have to admit that by the latter half of the first century, no more than 40 years after Christ, Christians offered strong assertions of Jesus? divinity. On the other hand, I am also dispirited that large numbers of Christians appear to think the book?s basic story line is both true and compatible with their Christianity.
“The Da Vinci Code” phenomenon reveals that U.S. churches are largely unprepared and ill-equipped to inform people of the basics of the Christian faith in today?s world. Churches need to find a way to reach people in a world where people are increasingly exposed and expose themselves to sources of information shaped by the pursuit of profit as well as the unedited and often uninformed morass of the blogosphere. Of course, synagogues, mosques, schools and universities face analogous versions of this same predicament.
Those churches that have recognized this problem tend to adopt the methods of the marketer. This will simply yield a form of Christianity different from, but as shallow and ill-conceived as “The Da Vinci Code” version. Instead, the continuation of Christianity, or Judaism or Islam or any other thoughtful way of life depends on our ability to reacquire the habits of patient, painstaking learning, reflective and generous skepticism in the absence of evidence, and the cultivated, careful and timely use of words in expressing our deepest convictions.
Stephen Fowl is Professor and Chair of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland. He can be reached at [email protected].
