101 Questions & Answers on The Da Vinci Code and the Catholic Tradition, by Nancy de Flon and Fr. John Vidmar, OP. “De Flon and Vidmar not only show where Brown went wrong, but they also unlock the doors (that Brown ignored) to the treasure rooms of the Catholic tradition and they display for the reader the wealth of people, customs, and events that comprise Catholic identity. Far more than a mere Da Vinci Code ‘debunker,’ 101 Question and Answers on The Da Vinci Code and the Catholic Tradition serves as celebration of Catholic culture that uses The Da Vinci Code as its springboard.”

All of the general interest in things relating to Jesus Christ generated by DVC can be seen as an opportunity, and turned to the advantage of the Church. Or, DVC can be seen only as an unfair attack and shrilly decried from a fruitlessly defensive posture.

Your point is different from the one I’m making but don’t you think that the truth of Christ has been virtually hollered from the rooftops for a very long time? Isn’t it more a problem of rejecting the truth than not knowing it? Do not writings like the DVC provide them more suppositions and rationalizations to reject the truth? Shouldn’t we be trying to refute all rationalizations and justifications for denying Christ or does providing the “infidels” —speaking literally and not pejoratively— misinformation and outlandish claims about Christ help them come to Christ?

Should we encourage Dan Brown to write more fascinating misinformation because “those brought into the faith would still represent a net gain for the ranks of the faithful”? I suppose books on witchcraft, etc., would therefore also provide a “net gain” because they relate to the supernatural and negatively to God.

It would be interesting if your number count were right but I don’t think it works that way. More would come to the faith without Dan Brown’s book, or Pagels’ and Ehrman’s books. And without the latter two more would stay in the faith.

P.S. After writing the above I heard Elaine Pagels on Talk of the Nation. She affirmed what I am saying through her defense of the DVC. She is emphasizing “the truth” in the DVC to undermine the biblical and orthodox account of Christ and Christianity. It was acknowledge that Dan Brown relied on her book The Gnostic Gospels for much of the DVC. It is this kind of fiction, coupled with distorted scholarship, that will undermine the Word, the Truth, being transmitted to those outside of the faith. With her solid support of the DVC it will not be so simple for the ignorant to see through the Dan Brown myths and receive the faith.

For more of the truly harmful Pagels perspective see Pagels’ , “The truth at the heart of `The Da Vinci Code’” at http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/14633739.htm

For a sound expose of the Pagels tactics see Paul Mankowski, S.J of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome: “The Pagels Imposture” at http://www.cwnews.com/news/dossier/view.cfm?id=34

I don’t see it that way. It seems to me that if completely secular people–of which type there are many in our society, despite the nominal 80% theist poll number–develop an interest in the topic Jesus and Christian history because of reading this book, or seeing its film adaptation, some of them will be drawn into further reading. In the course of that further readin, they are almost certain to encounter the truth, along with all the rest of it. If the Spirit moves them, then, they may actually be brought by this route *into* the faith. If some only have their unbelief strengthened by DVC and its repercussions, those brought into the faith would still represent a net gain for the ranks of the faithful. I see it as an opporunity, rather than as a wholly negative phenomenon for the cause of Christianity.

The writers that are truly harmful to people of nascent faith are authors like Ehrman and Pagels, even as they may criticize the historical details of the DVC. They are the ones coming on as providing definitive historical and scholarly research to undermine the biblical and orthodox account of Jesus Christ and Christianity. We would do better to zero in on their misleading interpretations than focus too much on Dan Brown’s manifestly preposterous intimations. These will soon blow away even if he sells lots of entertaining books.

It does affect the present, because about 80% of America is at least nominally Christian, and the book’s claim is that Christianity is essentially a hoax. Christianity is a faith based upon historical events, so historical claims are highly relevant to it. It goes to claims about God himself (or herself) who is a matter of present concern as much as ever.

One last difference would be the relative impact of books on society in the 19th century and before, when the written word was the sole mass medium, and today, when the written word, especially as published on paper, has become more of a still, quiet voice.

Maybe, although fewer people were literate then so it may come out in the wash. At any rate, it’s a movie now.

What I view as the “hysterical” over-reaction of the RCC, has gotten the controversy some TV time, but in the non-Catholic world, does the furor really even exist?

Sure it does. Several of the anti-DVC books were written by non-Catholics, such as the aforementioned Bart Ehrman and Ben Witherington. In fact, in the debate between Ehrman and Richard Hays that I mentioned earlier — which was held at Duke, hardly a Catholic bastion — one of them says, if we’d advertised this as a debate about the historical validity of Scripture twenty people would have showed up, but we say it’s about the Da Vinci Code and look, there’s standing room only! The huge Episcopal church where Hugo works is also hosting some big discussion about it soon. Back when the book came out somebody accosted Telford about it. And of course, the woman at my lunch table brought it up totally unbidden. So yeah, I would say this has generated some debate outside of Catholicism.

People with a scholarly interest in religion know DVC for what it is: an entertainment. People whose faith is shaken by it obviously had faith that needed to be shaken and rebuilt into something stronger.

I think it is good that the public discussion seems to be educating people, but I would add that it’s only because of what you think is a hysterical overreaction that anybody actually is being educated. And yeah, it would have been nice if people already knew the history of their own religion well enough so this wouldn’t be a challenge, but on the other hand most of us lean on cultural consensus about a whole lot of subjects. I don’t think every generation needs to re-argue the case for heliocentrism, or discover again why Newton’s physics beat Aristotle’s, or debate the germ theory of disease. I don’t think that the fact that many Christians have leaned on cultural consensus a certain amount is really a problem with their faith, it just indicates that those arguments were thought to have been settled.

But my guess would be that most people are either merely entertained by the book, or indifferent to it, or have never taken notice of its existence at all.

Well, my experience is anecdotal, but it sounds like yours is largely guesswork, so this may not be an issue that can be settled here. However, the experience with the woman at lunch jives with a lot of my experience of Americans and pop culture, which is that nobody really wants to admit that it affects them, but it still plants things in their heads. I don’t know what the long-term effect of DVC will be, but the overall point I was getting at was that a culture’s stories are an important part of its collective consciousness, so I would never dismiss something out of hand as being “just” fiction.