Dan Brown’s ecclesiastical pornography

The more faith, the more doubt: Dan Brown’s imbecilic scenarios exist precisely because the Catholic Church has become the dominant Christian denomination in the United States, displacing the mainline Protestants. Think of it as religious pornography. Anyone who believes in supernatural occurrences as a matter of faith cannot help but wonder whether it is all a monstrous delusion. Doubt, as Benedict XVI wrote many years ago, is the handmaiden of faith. Americans, for example, venerate Jack Kennedy, which is why salacious books about Kennedy’s love life sell all the more.

That’s a very different take than that of Ross Douthat in today’s New York Times. Ross sees Brown as representing the vague, drippy, homogenized “religiousness detached from any major faith tradition:

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story.... 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...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.

It’s an intelligent thought that has only one defect, namely that of being wrong. Brown really is a malignant, anti-religious peddler of intellectual smut — and that is precisely why people of real but poorly-informed faith devour his dreadful prose.

In a “Spengler” essay three years ago, I explained Brown’s appeal as follows:

The danger that Dan Brown’s prose style might be contagious discouraged me from reading The Da Vinci Code, and I decline to see the film. In 1982, I read the same asinine story in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail presented as fact, and do not gladly dive twice into the same sewer. Why this rubbish became the world’s best-selling work of fiction, though, paradoxically confirms the strength of America’s Christian faith. 

Why should an American novel depicting Christianity as a hoax command such a readership while Christian faith is resurgent? Americans are migrating en masse to evangelical denominations who preach Christ crucified and eternal salvation, abandoning the blancmange beliefs of mainline Protestantism. Americans, to be sure, also watch pornography. One might dismiss Brown’s oeuvre as ecclesiastical pornography, but there is something more to it. 

To make sense of the Christian fascination with The Da Vinci Code, compare Christian and Muslim reactions to fictionalassaults on the foundation of faith. In English fiction, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is the nearest Muslim equivalent to Brown’s book. More than 60 million copies of the latter have been printed, and a large plurality of American Christians either will read the book or see the film. But very few Muslims have read Rushdie’s book. Rushdie still lives in danger of his life, but no Christian fundamentalist has invoked violence against Dan Brown. 
Inconceivable, for that matter, is a Jewish counterpart to The Da Vinci Code, for Judaism is short on mysteries and long on history. Jews quibble, to be sure, about whether Moses received the Pentateuch from God at Mount Sinai, or whether later redactors compiled earlier tales into the canonical version, but it does not much matter. 

If 8th century BC scribes wrote the Torah instead, who is to say they were less inspired than Moses? Once I asked a Jewish child, “How do you know that God brought you out of Egypt?” Before I could end the sentence she countered, “If God didn’t bring me out of Egypt, than what am I doing here talking to you?” 

But if Jesus did not die on the cross, but instead married Mary Magdalene and begat a bloodline of French aristocrats, Christianity’s promise means nothing. Precisely because Christianity is a promise, the promise of eternal life, it always is subject to doubt. To be Christian means to get out of one’s skin, that is, to relinquish one’s sinful, Gentile nature and to be reborn into the People of God. 

Unlike the Jews, who consider themselves God’s people, warts and all, no Christian can see the People of God, or be sure whether he himself belongs to it, or whether the mystical transformation of his flesh actually has taken place. It is not certainty that Jesus offered - except to the few who saw him after the Resurrection - but rather the possibility of faith. If the Christian did not have to wrestle with doubt, like Jacob with the angel on the riverbank, faith would have no redeeming power. 

Brown, in short, is a parasite who sucks blood from the faith of his readers. One wishes that American Catholics were better informed; then we might get a better quality of ecclesiastical pornography, something on the level perhaps of Kazantsakis. For pure fun, ignore Brown and read my all-time favorite Jesuit conspiracy book, Friedrich Schiller’s The Apparationist.