Once upon a time I subscribed to the New York Times. I don’t any more. I decided I couldn’t justify the getting the Paper of Record posted to me every day! I still use the website a lot and noticed that Ross Douthat has now joined the NY Times team as a contributor. Douthat is the film critic for the National Review and joined The Gray Lady only last month.
It will be interesting to see how his view on American Life is received by the Times’ readership. Douthat’s latest opinion piece Dan Brown’s America pokes some holes in the current fascination with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons (along with the slew of copy cat pseudo-historical-religious-conspiracy-revisionist-thrillers those works have inspired).
His sharp assessment of Dan Brown’s approach to novel writing is clear:
But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.
For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.
The same goes for the church portrayed in Angels and Demons. Are aspects of the church as described in the novel based on fact? Yes (the Vatican is in Rome, for example!), but there are numerous websites, books and even documentary television shows that demonstrate just how far from reality much of what is presented as “fact” in the book really is. Thus I can’t see that anyone should let themselves to believe too much of what Dan Brown says about the church. Yet still, people seem to be flocking to the cinema and the booksellers to experience for themselves the great unveiling of the church!
It reminds me a little of Tom Wright’s, Who Was Jesus? where, responding to attempts by liberal scholars to create a “new” Jesus, the good bishop observes,
It must have been somewhat galling for Barbara Theiring and A. N. Wilson when each discovered that the other was about to publish a much-heralded new book on Jesus. It’s rather like planning a surprise arrival at a party, dressed like Father Christmas, only to discover that someone else has had the same idea. Children at the party will be suspicious. They can’t both be the real Father Christmas… which leads to the nasty suspicion that perhaps neither of them is.