The Da Vinci Code: A Bungled Hate Crime

This is one tedious, boring, ponderous movie. A British reviewer, comparing the movie to the novel, said that for some, “watching the film feels longer than reading the book.”

Though thoroughly anti-Christian, it is such a bad movie it can’t even get the bigotry right. The dialogue, acting, photography, directing, and editing are all bad. The soundtrack is the most relentless score ever written for a single cello. There aren’t even any good chase scenes.

Nevertheless, the movie pulls off what I would have thought was next to impossible: it is both mind-numbingly boring and stridently anti-Christian. A hate crime, after all, can be bungled, as this one has been, and the shoddiness of the film obscures the viciousness of the underlying attack.

Whereas Nietzsche presented Christianity as a fraud perpetrated by the Jews, Dan Brown presents it as a fraud initiated by the Emperor Constantine. At the Council of Nicea (325 AD) Constantine, as a means of consolidating his rule, “declared” Jesus divine. Misogynist, murderous churchmen became accomplices to bolster their power and to subjugate women---women like Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s only true apostle and mother of his child. But is there any evidence for this? No, but that merely proves the extent of the conspiracy: They’ve hidden the archives! And three centuries of martyrs who went to their deaths proclaiming that Jesus rose from the dead, based on scripture written hundreds of years before Nicea? If you’re Dan Brown or Ron Howard, you simply ignore it. It’s as if early in the fourth century everyone in the West took the blue pill and has been trapped ever since in the matrix of this false religion run by the Vatican, the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, and Opus Dei.

As the movie opens, the house of lies known as the Catholic Church is about to collapse. Jesus’s descendents by the Magdalene are among us, and one of them can break the code that will reveal where Mary Magdalene is buried. The wicked Opus Dei will go to any lengths to prevent this, including employing a sadomasochistic albino assassin to kill nuns. Why must this secret be kept? Because if people knew the truth about Mary Magdalene, they would turn against the Church, embrace the eternal feminine, join NARAL, and flock to her tomb to kneel in prayer. But why? If Jesus was not the Son of God, why prefer Mary Magdalene’s tomb to any other? Why not prefer that of Gomer, wife of Hosea? Perhaps Confucius, Buddha, or Immanuel Kant had a wife. Let’s find her tomb and go on pilgrimage. This is the strange contradiction in the Dan Brown “plot.” He elicits interest in the Magdalene by implicitly drawing on what he explicitly rejects: the Christian claim that Jesus is divine.

Of more interest than either the book and or the movie, however, is what Dan Brown’s success reveals about us. Brown’s book has been thoroughly debunked and discredited, but not before we made him a multi-millionaire. Such success required two prior cultural conditions: a widespread biblical, historical, and theological illiteracy, and the inability to recognize blasphemy, even when it slaps you in the face.

Ever since the Da Vinci phenomenon began I’ve been thinking about a BBC radio interview I heard while living in England. It was 1989, just after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. The BBC host was interviewing a spokesman for British Muslims. The spokesman assured listeners that while he was not personally in favor of Mr. Rushdie being killed, he could understand why others were. Listeners must understand that Muslims were deeply offended by Rushdie’s work and considered it blasphemous. The BBC interviewer was having none of it. With barely concealed condescension, he asked: “So I suppose you’d say that we in Britain should be offended by a film like The Life of Brian?” (The film is a Monty Python parody of Jesus that most serious Christians consider blasphemous.)

The Muslim spokesman answered: “Yes, you should be offended. But since you no longer know what you believe, it’s impossible to offend you.”

What followed was the longest segment of dead air time I’ve ever heard on the BBC. In a mere two sentences the Muslim had exposed the hollowness of the tolerance of which the BBC interviewer was so proud. It was a tolerance based not on respect, but on mere indifference. Since all religions were equally false, they deserved equal tolerance. The only possible cause for offense would be to suggest than any religious claim might actually be true. This is why Mel Gibson’s film The Passion enraged so many liberal Christians. If you view God as the ultimate self-esteem counselor whose task is to make you feel good about yourself, then Gibson’s film made you feel small, petty, and bourgeois.

As for recognizing blasphemy, we hear the objection, “But it’s only fiction.” Would the same defense be offered if Hollywood produced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Satanic Verses? Furthermore, if Ron Howard had wanted to make a fast-paced murder mystery, there are many scenes he could have cut, all to the movie’s advantage. Scenes of a deranged, nude, sadomasochistic “monk” praying before a crucifix as preparatory to committing murder, intentionally mock Christian faith, and Ron Howard’s decision to include them shows that he shares Dan Brown’s contempt for Christianity. Any normal Christian would be offended. That many will not be offended is an indication of the extent to which our society has become post-Christian. The reaction to the movie so far has reminded me of the film The Cider House Rules, which presents abortion as a kind of sacramental rite of passage. I remember hearing Christians say that it was a “nice” film.

A society incapable of recognizing blasphemy against the God that 80% of its citizens claim to worship, is a post-Christian society lacking self-respect. Those without self-respect will be incapable of seeing why their fellow citizens deserve respect. Such a society becomes capable of believing and tolerating almost anything if it contributes to comfort and demands no sacrifice. This is not a mark of sophistication or virtue; it’s evidence of profound decadence.