It's Jesus or Dan Brown

St. Paul Pioneer Press ^ | 05/20/2009 | Ross Douthat

[rhema]

The movie treatment of his novel, 'Angels and Demons,' is cleaning up at the box office this week. The sequel to 'The Da Vinci Code,' due out in November, might buoy the publishing industry through the recession. And if you want to understand the state of American religion, you need to understand why so many people love Dan Brown.

It isn't just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That's what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain — to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn't a serious novelist, but he's a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he's said, are there to make the books' didacticism go down easy, so that readers don't realize till the end "how much they are learning along the way." He's working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He's writing thrillers, but he's selling a theology.

Brown's message has been called anti-Catholic, but that's only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church's past constitutes a "greatest hits" of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

But Brown doesn't have the soul of a true-believing Enemy of the Faith. Deep down, he has a fondness for the ordinary, well-meaning sort of Catholic, his libels against their ancestors notwithstanding. He's even sympathetic to the religious yearnings of his Catholic villains — including, yes, the murderous albino monks.

This explains why both "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons" end with a big anti-Catholic reveal (Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene! That terrorist plot against the Vatican was actually launched by an archconservative priest!) followed by a big cover-up. A small elect (Tom Hanks and company, in the movies) gets to know what really happened, but the mass of believers remain in the dark, lest their spiritual questing be derailed by disillusionment and scandal. Having dismissed Catholicism's truth claims and demonized its most sincere defenders, Brown pats believers on the head and bids them go on fingering their rosary beads.

In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It's a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized "religiousness" detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don't suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion's dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who's too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they're making or how many times they've been married.

These are Dan Brown's kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who's a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown's many thriller-writing imitators — can't be separated from its dishonesty. The "secret" history of Christendom that unspools in "The Da Vinci Code" is false from start to finish.

The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they're far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he's the only historically plausible Jesus there is.

For millions of readers, Brown's novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can't have both.

Ross Douthat writes a column for the New York Times. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" and, with co-author Reihan Salam, "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream." Previously, he was a senior editor at Atlantic Magazine, and he is the film critic for National Review magazine.

[ROLF of the HILL COUNTRY]

What's amusing (sort of) about all this is: Dan Brown (nor Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, & Henry Lincoln) didn't invent this myth at all!

All they did was recycle a medieval myth perpetrated by some “noble” families (the Medecinis were one I believe) to enhance their political standing. They needed the mythology in order to make their claim to being direct descendants of Christ.

[edcoil]

I was listening to a women in the market talking. She had just seen it and said it was OK but not as good as the D. Code.

[texmexis best]

Just what are you people reading on a day to day basis that makes you think that Dan Brown’s novel are good fiction?

In “The Da Vinci Code” he spends the first thirty one pages trying to convince the reader that the antogonist is:

6’6
A fulltime Monk
A part time assassin
fastens boards full of nails to his thigh in flagellation....or something. Or maybe he is just a masochist.
An Albino with pink eyes
He is misunderstood

And from there the book goes downhill because it basically consists of word games. I refer to it as “Wheel of Fortune: The Death Match”.

The only book I have read that is worse than this drivel is “Tom Swift on Sindrift Island”. It is horribly written.

1. Cops do not communicate by cell phone to other cops. They use emergency radios that are extremely sophisticated. I used to sell those radios. I know what they can do.
2. A Smart Car will not, repeat, will not outrun a police issued Renault. Under any circumstances.
3. Parisian Police use choppers during car chases just as we do.
4. Detectives do not give perps “enough rope to hang themelves”. They nail them at the first opportunity.
5. The romance between the stunningly beautiful (with a perfect bod) detective, and the professor of Cryptology in his early fifties with slight graying at the temples is hack writing. It is roughly the equivalent of the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night...”. The next time you run into it, bag the book up, take it back Barnes and Noble and demand a refund under the UCC Code “Goods Not Fit for Resale”.
6. Epilogue to #5: Quelle Surprise! Zut Alors!

This book is one of the most awful books I have ever read. I finished it (did not buy it, no way) just to see how the train wreck ended. And my patience was rewarded when, to my horror, Francois Mitterand made an appearence at Versailles in the last pages as one of the keepers of the secrets.

[BipolarBob]

I also borrowed the book (wouldn’t buy it either). Atrocious writing. But the confusion arises when the writer claims it’s fiction based on truth and goes back and forth between the two. Unlearned people will believe this tripe unfortunately.

[nina0113]

All they did was recycle a medieval myth perpetrated by some “noble” families (the Medecinis were one I believe) to enhance their political standing. They needed the mythology in order to make their claim to being direct descendants of Christ.

I know. A really fun treatment of the myth is "The Serpent Garden", by Judith Merkle Riley, set in Cardinal Wolsey's household. I can recommend any of her books, but that one is my favorite.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Raising the kundalini of his chakras with Aunt Bee.
Aunt Bee and Opie summoning Lucifer through incantations in a gnostic Albigensian ritual

The sequel will be a riot: Illuminati in Mayberry.
Opies and Demons: Dark Secrets of the Opie Code

[Salvation]

It's Jesus or Dan Brown
Galileo: The Trump Card of Catholic Urban Legends

Dan Brown and the Catholic Church: Interview With Fr. John Wauck, (Angels and Demons)
BILL DONOHUE: “ANGELS & DEMONS”: SPECTACULARLY STUPID
“ANGELS & DEMONS”: THE ANTI-CATHOLIC AGENDA
More to Rome Than Angels and Demons; a True Story
Angels & Demons Director Ron Howard Denies 'God the Creator'

Hanks: Angels & Demons 'loose with the truth'
Ron Howard: Vatican Obstructed 'Angels & Demons' [Enemies of Catholicism Complain]
Small cameras and fake tourists: how Angels and Demons flouted Vatican ban
RON HOWARD LIES ABOUT “ANGELS & DEMONS” (Donohue responds today)
RON HOWARD LIES ABOUT “ANGELS & DEMONS”