“The Da Vinci Code” …
“The Da Vinci Code” is a work of fiction, right? Right, but it’s based on a series of “facts”, many of which have been debunked. Thus it winds up leaving to the reader where to draw the line as to where fact stops and the fiction begins, even when dealing with Brown’s “facts”.
The results, then, are not surprising.
“The Da Vinci Code” has undermined faith in the Roman Catholic Church and badly damaged its credibility, a survey of British readers of Dan Brown’s bestseller showed on Tuesday.
People are now twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children after reading the Dan Brown blockbuster and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect.
“An alarming number of people take its spurious claims very seriously indeed,” said Austin Ivereigh, press secretary to Britain’s top Catholic prelate Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.
“Our poll shows that for many, many people the Da Vinci Code is not just entertainment,” Ivereigh added.
Almost one in five Canadians believe that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross was faked and that he married and had a family, according to a new poll that challenges the cornerstone Christian belief in the resurrection.
Albertans were most likely to accept The Da Vinci Code’s premise, with 22 per cent reporting they believe in a hoax.
It is true that this book and movie will also cause people to look more closely at the Bible to find the truth, but I believe it will mostly be those who would already be skeptical of Brown’s book. But the price at which this is bought–the further distancing from the truth those who haven’t made up their mind–seems too high for a Christian to stomach. Saying “it’s just fiction” doesn’t answer the problem. Saying “I wasn’t fooled” ignores the problem. Saying “only the foolish will be fooled” condemns the uneducated and ignorant (something Jesus wouldn’t do).
The reason Christians need to make a noise about this is because the truth is being muddled to the point that people are being led away from the truth under the guise of a work that, while covered by the fig leaf of the label “historical fiction”, blurs the line between “historical” and “fiction” so profoundly that a significant number of people can’t tell the difference.
If someone wrote a “historical fiction” novel about the the battle of Gettysburg with as many problems with the facts as “The Da Vinci Code” has, it would be rightly panned by Civil War historians. It wouldn’t change their minds as to the truth of what happened during that battle, but they would be properly concerned that the general public, who didn’t have the same information they do nor necessarily the inclination to research it, would tend to believe it. They would try to convince people to stay away from such a movie. No one would blame them. It should be the same for the response you’re hearing from many churches (sans any calls for banning books or movies).
And with “The Da Vinci Code”, there’s far more at stake than simple historical accuracy. There’s eternity to consider.
UPDATE: In case you still think that Dan Brown’s motive is purely entertainment, consider this quote from an interview on CNN (emphasis mine):
SAVIDGE: Obviously, you were just looking at the Last Supper there. When we talk about da Vinci and your book, how much is true and how much is fabricated in your storyline?
BROWN: 99 percent of it is true. All of the architecture, the art, the secret rituals, the history, all of that is true, the Gnostic gospels. All of that is — all that is fiction, of course, is that there’s a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon, and all of his action is fictionalized. But the background is all true.
This is a book meant to persuade under the guise of entertainment.
(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out, Blogger News Network and Redstate. Comments welcome.)
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