From page 1 of the Currents section of the the May 4, 2006 edition of the San Diego Union Tribune - written by Sandi Dolbee, Religion and Ethics Editor
Factions over Fiction
Brown's book and movie prompt fervent reactions from backers and detractors
SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune
“Not everybody treats it like a novel,” the Rev. Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church, told his congregation Saturday night. “The Da Vinci Code” movie opens May 19.
It's a wonder Mona Lisa can smile at all. So many secrets to bear. Jesus and Mary Magdalene and their baby. A clandestine society sworn to keep it all covered up. A church forged from fourth-century politics, rather than a first-century Resurrection.
“Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false,” Dan Brown writes in “The Da Vinci Code,” a novel rivaling the Bible lately for attention. It has sold more than 40 million copies and been on the best-seller list for three years.
And soon, there will be the movie.
Never mind that the book is fiction, a conspiracy thriller whose plot revolves around whether the early Christian church rewrote history, turning Jesus into God incarnate and keeping secret his real relationship with Mary Magdalene for a host of reasons, including patriarchy. Leonardo Da Vinci figures into it because the Renaissance artist supposedly embedded clues into his works.
From Catholic groups to Protestant seminaries and even the religious left, the controversy has become a kind of ground zero in the newest battle over the historical Jesus. For its opponents, “The Da Vinci Code” is divisive on a basic us-against-them religious level.
“At stake is a totally different view of the world,” says Peter Jones, a New Testament scholar at Westminster Seminary in Escondido. “What's at stake is getting it right or getting it wrong.”
Last week, a Vatican official called for a boycott of the film, blasting the story for its “offenses, slander, historical and theological errors concerning Jesus, the Gospel and the church.” A conservative U.S. Catholic group is calling for 1,000 prayer vigils outside theaters when the film opens here May 19.
The archbishop of Canterbury used his Easter sermon to preach against “The Da Vinci Code.” There are more books about the book than Jesus had disciples (Judas included). And congregations around the world, and across San Diego County, are holding forums to bless or blame this barnstorming novel.
Brown bites
The plot: Harvard symbology expert Robert Langdon and French cryptologist Sophie Neveu team up to unravel hidden symbols related to artwork of Leonardo Da Vinci, battle evildoers and unlock the mystery of the Holy Grail, which is really the secret that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married and they had a daughter, named Sarah. And that's just for starters.
The author: Dan Brown is a graduate of Amherst College who taught English at his alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. His first novel was published in 1998; “Digital Fortress” is described by Amazon.com as “an Internet user's spy novel.” His father was a math teacher, his mother a church organist, and Brown himself sang in the church choir. He considers himself a Christian.
The buzz: “The Da Vinci Code” has been on The New York Times best-seller list for 161 weeks, making it one of the best-selling fiction books of all time.
The movie: Starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, it is scheduled to open May 17 in Kuwait, May 18 in Argentina and May 19 in the United States.
The polls: 13 percent of Americans believe that Jesus was married and had a family, according to a survey by Canada's CanWest media group. Christian pollster George Barna, based in Southern California, reports that 53 percent of a national sample of adults stated the book helped in their “personal spiritual growth and understanding.”
What's the fuss all about?
“There are people believing it – huge numbers,” says Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Wesleyan in Rancho San Diego, one of county's largest churches, and a national leader in the code-cracking movement of critics.
Garlow calls the novel fact-ion, “where you put fact and fiction together in such a way that it gets terribly distorted.” It's also creating factions within the world's largest religion.
“All Dan Brown had to say was, 'Folks, it's a novel. Chill out. Relax. I made it up.' And novelists have the right to make up what they want,” adds Garlow, who has written two debunking books. One of them, “Cracking Da Vinci's Code,” was co-written with Jones.
In a rare public appearance April 23 in his native New Hampshire, Brown told a sold-out audience that it's not his job to address the controversies. “Let the biblical scholars and historians battle it out,” said the former prep school English teacher, according to The Associated Press.
You could almost hear the detractors in their collective response: Game on.
Despite the calls for a boycott of the movie, along with a push to halt the release of it in Korea, there is a growing force who are urging folks to use this controversy to their advantage.
Getty Images
The plot includes clues supposedly embedded in Da Vinci's artwork. Who is that to Jesus' right? “I think they should read the book and see the movie,” Jones says.
“Brown is giving expression to the great objection to the Christian faith,” he adds, referring to such issues as the sacred divinity of Jesus. “Christians should know what that is and how to answer it. It's actually a good occasion for Christians to start seriously thinking about what they believe.”
Pop culture as evangelism isn't new.
Two years ago, churches bought out movie screenings for Mel Gibson's “The Passion of the Christ.” But in that case, much of the controversy was over the graphic violence in the R-rated film (the “Da Vinci” movie is rated PG-13). While fans credited “Passion” with eliciting conversion experiences, media critics lambasted it with such lines as the “Texas Chainsaw Jesus Massacre.”
Skyline's Garlow recently led a training session for 200 local clergy and religious leaders in preparation for the movie's release.
He'll hold a similar workshop for lay people at 7 p.m. Monday at his church. Last weekend, he began a monthlong sermon series.
Other congregations and coalitions also are launching initiatives – from the www.DaVinciOutreach.com, produced by Catholics to “undo the damage inflicted by this blasphemous novel,” to a pair of community forums at College Avenue Baptist Church (8:45 a.m. May 14 and 7 p.m. June 1).
Garlow's four-point response plan culminates with urging people to throw post-movie parties to discuss the story's fallacies. “I don't care about 'The Da Vinci Code,' ” he says. “I care about the enduring issues – the divinity of Christ and the reliability of the New Testament. That is front and center for me. I'm rather consumed with that.”
The other side is consumed as well.
“It's one good thing 'The Da Vinci Code' has done and that is, raise these questions amongst a very enormous number of people,” says Michael Baigent, one of the authors of “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,” a 1982 book that may – or may not – have inspired Brown's conspiracy thriller (a London court ruled last month that Brown didn't steal from “Holy Blood's” theories).
“It's a very serious debate,” says Baigent, a religious historian in England who argues in a new book, “The Jesus Papers,” that Jesus was still alive a decade after traditional Christianity believes he was crucified.
He hopes what will come of this debate is a better awareness of the “spiritual system that Jesus was involved in and the way that Christianity manipulated the reality of Jesus eventually for their own particular purposes.”
Ditto for Tom Sannar, co-pastor of One Heart-One Mind, a Religious Science congregation that meets in the Sorrento Valley. Sannar, who led his own seminar on the book last weekend, calls “The Da Vinci Code” a noble effort – particularly when it comes to elevating women in religious leadership.
“I believe Dan Brown has tapped into this great spiritual longing and tells us if we look behind the plot, the facts and the characters, it is possible that a real wisdom can be revealed to us,” according to Sannar.
“And that wisdom begins with the acknowledgment that the deep feminine energy of nurturing, compassion and healing has been suppressed not only by the Catholic church but modern technological society and that the secret of becoming fulfilled and happy people has nothing to do with creeds or dogmas and everything to do with re-establishing our connection with the earth and with the divine feminine.”
Baigent and others point out that theories raised in “The Da Vinci Code” aren't really new. The so-called Gnostic Gospels, religious writings from around the second century, made some of the same arguments. But they, too, are in dispute – and they are hardly as popular as “The Da Vinci Code.”
The right place at the right time. A perfect storm of supply and demand. When it comes to trying to understand why this novel has become such a phenomenon, you can pick your cliché.
Critics see it as more cannon fodder for the culture wars in general, and church-bashing in particular, by a society where it's chic to be more spiritual than religious.
“Dan Brown is touching a nerve in modern culture, which is a discovery of a sort of mystical spirituality,” says Jones, the New Testament professor. He adds: “I think the wind is in the sail of this new spirituality, and Christianity will find itself in the face of a great persecution.”
Garlow suggests that part of the staggering response is because the book “really does put Jesus down in a traditional sense that may be playing well in the culture.” Besides, everybody loves a conspiracy. “There's something about us that wants to believe something sinister about anybody in positions of authority. They must have a sinister motive.”
Brown, in an question-and-answer segment on his Web site, denies his novel is anti-Christian.
“This book is not anti-anything,” Brown says. “It's a novel. I wrote this story in an effort to explore certain aspects of Christian history that interest me. The vast majority of devout Christians understand this fact and consider 'The Da Vinci Code' an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate.' ”
Baigent echoes that sentiment. “I don't think there's anything in 'The Da Vinci Code' that could upset any Christian,” Baigent says. “And if any Christian gets upset by it, then his or her Christianity is pretty vulnerable, it seems to me.”
Lost in this maze of who's right and who's wrong are readers like Pam Mathison, a Clairemont woman who couldn't put the book down and is looking forward to the movie.
“Who really cares?” she asks. “It's just typical of everything – arguing about religion or politics or anything else. It's much ado about nothing. Everybody has their opinion and thoughts, and that's OK. It's all good.”
But UCSD student Michael May, who finished reading the novel last week, says that while he liked the book a lot, he can understand the anger. Religion is an anchor, he adds, and yanking that anchor can be upsetting. “To them, you're messing with their lives.”
Sandi Dolbee: (619) 293-2082; sandi.dolbee@uniontrib.com
CRACKS IN THE CODE
A comparison of selected disagreements between “The Da Vinci Code” and its debunkers:
THE NOVEL: Jesus' divinity was decided for political reasons by a close vote of bishops at the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century. Until then, Jesus was seen by followers as an inspiring leader, but not God.
THE DEBUNKERS: The council in AD 325 wasn't called to decide Jesus' divinity, although one topic was the nature of this divinity. There were roughly 200 to 300 bishops in attendance, only two of whom refused to sign a statement of faith (the original Nicean Creed).
THE NOVEL: The figure to the right of Jesus in Leonardo Da Vinci's “The Last Supper” is really Mary Magdalene.
THE DEBUNKERS: It's John the Evangelist, one of the 12 disciples, and the effeminate look is a typical artistic representation of the time.
THE NOVEL: Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child together, and the church covered it up, a secret kept by a covert organization called the Priory of Sion. Mary Magdalene was pregnant when Jesus was crucified and fled to France. Jesus also intended for Mary Magdalene to take over where he left off.
THE DEBUNKERS: The New Testament does not mention Jesus having a wife. The Priory was a club created in the 1950s by Pierre Plantard, a Frenchman who later confessed that it was a hoax. Jesus' 12 disciples were all men. Mary Magdalene is a saint in the Catholic Church, regarded as an exemplary model of holiness.
THE NOVEL: Opus Dei is a Catholic group whose ranks include a robe-wearing, albino monk named Silas; they're involved in murdering and drugging people, among other sordid activities.
THE DEBUNKERS: There are no monks in Opus Dei; it is a Catholic institution for lay people and diocesan priests. It adheres to Catholic doctrine, “which clearly condemns immoral behavior, including murder, lying, stealing and generally injuring people.”
Sources: “The Da Vinci Code”; opusdei.us; thetruthaboutdavinci.com; catholiceducation.org; beliefnet.com; “The Da Vinci Code Breaker.”
