davinci, danger, art
A friend just sent me an email he'd received, with links to "resources" for equipping Christians for a particular battle.
What battle, you ask? Fighting temptation, perhaps? The battle against keeping marriages together, attacked as they are by the army of gays that magically cause people to divorce? Nope, these resources were for fighting the lies of The Da Vinci Code.
The thing that's depressing about this is that Da Vinci is such an awful book. It's worse than This Present Darkness. It's worse than Gilligan's Island, which suddenly seems elegant and multilayered.
Not that there's anything wrong with hack fiction per se. It keeps the book industry lubricated. It can be entertaining reading. Dan Brown puts out a great page-turner; even though you don't care about any of the characters, you keep going, through your derisive laughter, to find out what happens. He's a genius at plotting really interesting puzzles. He just needs a ghostwriter. Either way, I find myself wondering why we can't at least be threatened by Philip Pullman.
The other thing that's depressing is what it tells us about the state of the religion. Evangelicals have, for their whole existence, only had two responses to art produced by Christians: they either view it with suspicion, or they view it as an evangelical tool. If it can't be used as an evangelical tool, why have it? What's the use of art that doesn't win souls? (This veering between hostility and utilitarian opportunism explains people's weird opinions about U2, for instance.) Conversely, much of the art that the rest of the world produces is perceived to be evangelical as well. By this light, Da Vinci isn't just an entertaining book (more entertaining if you don't know your church history; if you do you have to squint). It's a Dangerous Tool for winning people's souls to Satan. I can't even count the number of people who say the book is full of lies. Lies?! They're not lies; they're fictions.
The larger narrative I see here is this ratcheting up of the tone in the past ten years: when did conservative Christians begin to feel so threatened? Precisely when they had something to lose. It used to be that evangelicals were the persecuted underdogs in society, and so they could simply press on with what God had them doing. St Paul wrote, "To live is Christ; to die is gain." It's no coincidence that he wrote that in jail. When you're there, literally or metaphorically, you realize the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be damaged by pen or sword. But now that these same people have pens and swords, now that they've taken the place of their former oppressors, they need to retain their earthly power by crushing all dissent, just like their oppressors did.
What battle, you ask? Fighting temptation, perhaps? The battle against keeping marriages together, attacked as they are by the army of gays that magically cause people to divorce? Nope, these resources were for fighting the lies of The Da Vinci Code.
The thing that's depressing about this is that Da Vinci is such an awful book. It's worse than This Present Darkness. It's worse than Gilligan's Island, which suddenly seems elegant and multilayered.
Not that there's anything wrong with hack fiction per se. It keeps the book industry lubricated. It can be entertaining reading. Dan Brown puts out a great page-turner; even though you don't care about any of the characters, you keep going, through your derisive laughter, to find out what happens. He's a genius at plotting really interesting puzzles. He just needs a ghostwriter. Either way, I find myself wondering why we can't at least be threatened by Philip Pullman.
The other thing that's depressing is what it tells us about the state of the religion. Evangelicals have, for their whole existence, only had two responses to art produced by Christians: they either view it with suspicion, or they view it as an evangelical tool. If it can't be used as an evangelical tool, why have it? What's the use of art that doesn't win souls? (This veering between hostility and utilitarian opportunism explains people's weird opinions about U2, for instance.) Conversely, much of the art that the rest of the world produces is perceived to be evangelical as well. By this light, Da Vinci isn't just an entertaining book (more entertaining if you don't know your church history; if you do you have to squint). It's a Dangerous Tool for winning people's souls to Satan. I can't even count the number of people who say the book is full of lies. Lies?! They're not lies; they're fictions.
The larger narrative I see here is this ratcheting up of the tone in the past ten years: when did conservative Christians begin to feel so threatened? Precisely when they had something to lose. It used to be that evangelicals were the persecuted underdogs in society, and so they could simply press on with what God had them doing. St Paul wrote, "To live is Christ; to die is gain." It's no coincidence that he wrote that in jail. When you're there, literally or metaphorically, you realize the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be damaged by pen or sword. But now that these same people have pens and swords, now that they've taken the place of their former oppressors, they need to retain their earthly power by crushing all dissent, just like their oppressors did.
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