Faith No More

More than just a bestseller, The Da Vinci Code is reigniting the flames of the culture wars. Postmodernism, be damned!

“Every Christian who loves Jesus, your mission, if you will accept it, is to buy movie tickets. We need to bring our kids, our church groups, our youth ministry clubs, our seniors groups - and buy tickets for the homeless after we feed them. And we all need to go to see THIS!”

So writes Christian journalist and screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi in her blog, Church of the Masses. Nicolosi is talking about her personal “How to respond to The Da Vinci Code Strategy” – by skipping out on seeing the film altogether and trying to boost the ticket sales of Over The Hedge, the Dreamworks animation released in the US on the same day, instead. If Christian audiences can make hits of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Passion of the Christ, the logic goes, they can make a ‘miss’ of even of the film adaptation of one of the world’s highest selling contemporary novels. It’s a bit like the teenage girls who bought multiple copies of *NSync’s No Strings Attached back in 2000 to make sure the album hit number one, only in reverse.


CONTROVERSY AND THE CODE

For a book with over 36 million copies in print, which has been translated into 44 languages and sparked sufficient excitement to see a man who’d been dead for almost 80 years reburied in a tourist-proof concrete grave for little reason other than that his name resembled that of one of its characters, The Da Vinci Code is surprisingly divisive. You don’t see too many people rolling their eyes at the words “Harry Potter”, but everyone seems to have an opinion on The Da Vinci Code, even those who haven’t read it.

Criticisms range from author Dan Brown’s abilities as a writer (Salman Rushdie famously called it “a book so bad it makes bad books look good”), to the book’s loose differentiation between fact and fiction, its portrayal of albinos in the murderous Opus Dei monk Silas, and even plagiarism, with a court case earlier this year. But the most controversial element of The Da Vinci Code has been its treatment of the Catholic Church, which it depicts as archaic, power-hungry and misogynistic.

Since the book was released in 2003, at least ten books and countless websites have been created to debunk its claims and draw attention to its inaccuracies. Where the The Da Vinci Code claims five million women were burned at the stake as witches, historical estimates average more around the 50-60,000 mark – and a quarter of those killed were men. The vote on whether Jesus was the son of God at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 was not “close”, but around 316 to 2. The Priory of Sion is considered by many historians a hoax. And as for Silas – well, Opus Dei doesn’t even have monks!

SACRILEGE!
Perhaps not so surprising for a work of fiction – even one which opens with the statement: "Fact: (...) All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." But what troubles many Christians about The Da Vinci Code isn’t its small-scale factual errors but its broader message. “Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false,” the wealthy historian Leigh Teabing tells cryptologist Sophie Neveu (played by Amelie’s Audrey Tautou in the film). And even if readers or viewers don’t take The Da Vinci Code as fact, many take away with them the questions it asks.

“The problem,” writes J. B. Hixon of the College of Biblical Studies in Texas, “is that the alleged historical accuracies are at odds with the only true source of absolute truth: God’s Word.” “[It] suggests that subjective individualism, not traditional religion, holds the real answers to life’s big questions,” says Carl Olson, co-author of Debunking The Da Vinci Code. In other words, The Da Vinci Code suggests that everything – including religion – is open to interpretation.

According to Chantelle Ogilvie, a 24-year-old Christian youth worker and theology student, that’s part of the book’s appeal. “A lot of the young people that I work with are excited about the book, and I think what excites them about it is that it asks questions they don’t usually feel comfortable asking, and don’t have permission to ask in some experiences of the church,” she says. “It doesn’t always come up with historically accurate answers to those questions, but it gives permission to ask them which is important for those kids, particularly if they grow up in religious environments where they’re not encouraged to question.”

Leading UK theologian, Reverend Tom Wright, agrees. “The Da Vinci Code has a great deal to say about where our culture currently is and which myths our culture is eager to buy. It comes in on the tide of the new age postmodern hunger for spirituality which assumes that spirituality is a good thing but also assumes that the one place you will not find it is mainstream Christianity,” he says.

THE CHURCH TALKS BACK

In the lead up to the film’s release, Christians have engaged with the Da Vinci phenomenon in different ways. While some, like Barbara Nicolosi, are planning to boycott the film, others are using it as a starting point for discussion. Father John Sewell of St. John's Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee, says, “This [novel] is not a threat. This is an opportunity. We are called to creatively engage the culture and this is what I want to do. I think Dan Brown has done me a favor. He's letting me talk about things that matter.” In an approach precisely the opposite of Nicolosi’s, Julie Scheving, a 46-year-old Michigan resident and born-again Christian told US magazine Newsweek she would be taking at least a dozen of her non-Christian friends to see the film when it opened on her birthday – in a hope that it would spark a discussion about the true nature of Jesus Christ. “Any spiritual conversation is better than no conversation,” she said.

And she’ll have plenty of material to help her spark that conversation. Tapping into the insatiable demand for all things Da Vinci-related, Christian groups have developed books, magazines, promotional postcards and study guides to help parishioners transform The Da Vinci Code from a threat to a platform for evangelism. And not without a little help from their corporate friends, either.

In February, Christian marketing firm Grade Hill Media and Sony Pictures Entertainment (who also happen to be distributing the film) launched a website to help Christians better understand and engage with The Da Vinci Code. Called TheDaVinciDialogue.com and featuring essays from 39 prominent religious scholars and experts, the site was developed “to present a forum where people can wrestle with the complex topics raised by the book and the film” - cultural, historical, theological and practical.

Meanwhile, on the less Da Vinci-friendly side of the ring, the Da Vinci Outreach Coalition is urging US Catholics to campaign around the film, offering free study guides and “action plans” to aid their education. Once they’ve finished with the free resources, visitors can purchase The Da Vinci Deception, a 144-page book described as a “powerful antidote to the spiritual poison found in The Da Vinci Code”.

That Christian groups are engaging in dialogue at all is a sign of their current strength – not just religiously, but politically. When Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, Christians formed a mass boycott, which many now describe as “a mistake”. Christian responses to The Da Vinci Code have also been compared to Islamic responses to the Danish cartoon scandal at the beginning of 2006, interpreted both as a sign of mainstream lack of respect for Christianity and of Islam’s comparatively vulnerable state on the world stage.

And the likely end result of all this discussion? Increased ticket sales, of course – and a few more weeks on the bestseller’s list. For all Dan Brown’s factual errors, it seems he got one thing right: everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. Postmodern or otherwise.

- Rachel Hills

Published in YEN, June/July 2006.