Light Reading Gone Dark

So I’ve not yet seen The Da Vinci Code. I recently obtained the DVD, but have yet to watch it. Originally, I put off seeing it because I understood it to be a “work of art” that sought to slander the Church by reviving every heresy—Gnostic, Arian, what have you—and presenting them as the truth for the sake of an (admittedly) gripping story of conspiracy and intrigue. Based on documents and doctrines so irrational and inconsistent that they failed to fool even our most ancient forefathers, the novel and the movie had self-confessed “spiritualists” and secular free thinkers giving the time of day to garbage rightly rejected over 1,600 years ago. Not that anyone actually understood the scope of the heretical beliefs touched upon by author Dan Brown—he would have needed to use flow charts to convey all that, a little out of place in a novel—but they were nonetheless eager to believe that the beliefs held in common by Christians were not to be believed. Added to everything, Mr. Brown’s assertion that his fictional story contained wholly accurate historical and theological information undermined the line between fact and fiction and made clear his venom for the real world Christian faith.

Not to go on at too great length about The Da Vinci Code, there are other popular works of fiction that have made assaults on simple truths, some more indirectly than others. While I never read any of the Harry Potter series, not being a fan of the fantasy genre, I recall that in 2002 the Catholic Church disapproved it as being unsuitable for children. I don’t know how their argument ran, but I would agree that there is a danger here. It isn’t that the books promote satanic witchcraft. I give kids credit for recognizing these far-out elements as pure fantasy, and I don’t see the emergence of any subculture dabbling in the black arts. Rather, I find the danger to lie in devaluation. Today, America’s youth is having its wonder, its amazement funneled away to outlets with no profitable end. Children and teens, so intelligent and passionate, are squandering their faculties and energies on petty entertainments that do not glorify God or seek to apprehend divine realities.

A second danger—the constant danger—relates to the intrusion upon these novels of humanist thinking. This is presaged in Harry Potter by such post-publication announcements as a prominent character’s homosexuality, but more fully realized in the latest series of books-turned-big-screen, The Golden Compass series. Harry Potter is tame by comparison to this next attempt to discredit the Church. These books portray the Church as an organization given to brainwashing, and they define dogma, in the abstract, as necessarily evil. Rather than recognize in systematic theology the hard-won confession and oft assailed attestation that Christ is Lord, they adopt an ahistoric absurdity and suggest that any doctrine that seems too hard to understand must in fact be a fanciful invention of man designed to mislead and oppress.

The writers and producers of the cinematic version of the series have muted the anti-Christian overtones, but I haven’t a clue why. If Hollywood really isn’t interested in broadcasting atheistic tirades to young children, why make the movie at all? Why attempt to merely filter out the profane if the message of the source material is so unabashedly objectionable? Forget the film altogether and let these books rot on the shelves. Since any children’s film’s financial viability depends upon its perceived uprightness, I don’t see the point in to trying to scrub clean this petrified lump of dung.

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Christianity in the Media Recap 2: What would they have us believe?

• Reintroducing condemned heresies and seeding impieties into popular children’s literature is fair game; all’s good so long as it’s entertaining.
• The doctrines of the Church, developed over millennia to safeguard simple truths from attacks (such as these), are actually elaborate attempts to brainwash us all.