About a year ago, my cousin John sent me a copy of Dan Brown's best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, with a note acknowledging the book is trash, but encouraging me to read it so that I know what trash a mass of Americans are currently consuming.
When I finished reading it, I thought it would be hard to write a book that more perfectly illustrates the steep slide into gnosticism and paganism that is so obvious across the Western world, and particularly these United States. May I encourage our good readers to borrow a copy and read it? You will be much wiser in calling your friends, neighbors, and family members to repentance and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ having spent the time to read this book, looking as through a periscope into the prejudices and delusions of modern man.
What living proof of Chesterton's foresight in pointing out, "When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." Surely the millions who have bought and read The Da Vinci Code have not simply been looking for a pleasant diversion, but have sought in this work facts to justify their prejudices.
It would be pleasant to think that any criticism of this work coming from a liberal media outlet might indicate a decline in the work's influence, but I think not. Rather, the very anti-clericalism and hatred of authority at the book's heart...
...will carry as much of a roundhouse punch to the secular clerics as it first carried to the priests and Christian shepherds. Authority is of a fabric and the same hatred of authority that seeks to destroy The Only True Faith is, as we watch, inexorably destroying the media's secular priesthood. Still, our good readers may be heartened to read this from the latest New Yorker:
The first thing to be said about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is that "da Vinci" is not a name; no one in Leonardo's lifetime would ever have called him "da Vinci" (it just means "from Vinci," his birthplace) or anything like it. But Brown is shaky on names throughout: a key cryptogram-filled book depends on decoding the original meaning of "Mona Lisa"--a name that nobody used for the picture until well into the nineteenth century. The next thing to be said is that the book depends on a story, or backstory, pulled more or less in one piece from the 1982 occult best-seller Holy Blood, Holy Grails. And the most significant thing is that The Da Vinci Code is plain burn-at-the-stake blasphemous: its entire point is that Christianity as it is understood is a fraud put over by Constantine, and that Jesus, far from being divine, is a human being who fathered children.... A cultural anthropologist, a hundred years from now, will doubtless find, in the unprecedented success of The Da Vinci Code during the time of a supposed religious revival, some clear sign that, in the Elvis mode, what a lot of Americans mean by spirituality is simply an immense openness to occult superstitions of all kinds.(Adam Gopnik, "Renaissance Man," in The New Yorker, January 17, 2005, p.86.)
Gopnik might better have written, "a lot of evangelical Americans."
