CrossCurrents: Making Sense of the Christian Life

Chapter Three: Conspiracy Theory

Book: The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown.

Issue: Can the Bible be Trusted?

1. A Public Seduction.

In Chapter Two, we mentioned Francis Schaeffer's observation that the arts in Western culture (including music, theater, cinema, painting, sculpture, and literature) had degraded and had become the enemy of common decency in general and Christianity in particular. Carroll and I understood that we could no longer expect that any aspect of our culture could be trusted, and would probably become more and more hostile to followers of Jesus Christ.

On October 4, 1997, I joined over one million other men in Washington, D.C. to attend a Promise Keepers rally called Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men. We spent the day in repentance and prayer for the nation. The American Bible Society gave out nearly one million New Testaments, and encouraged all the men to form the habit of daily Bible study. It was a blessed time, and we all came away impressed (by the Holy Spirit) that our lives should revolve around the teachings of Scripture. It had a powerful impact for righteousness. But it did not take long for the culture to strike back.

No better example of a hostile attack can be found than the 2003 best-seller, The Da Vinci Code.[1] This book has reportedly sold over 80 million copies, and that figure is several years old. It has been translated into at least forty languages. Since it mounts an anything-but-subtle attack on Christianity in general, and on Catholicism in particular, it seems reasonable to take a careful look to see if any of the author's revisionist claims have even a shred of merit. One thing is sure– Though the book is cast in the form of an escapist adventure novel, many biblically-illiterate and historically-challenged readers are accepting the claims interwoven in the plot as factual, credible and reasonable.

A reading of the novel reveals that the quality of the writing and the action-adventure plot are not adequate to explain the huge popularity. The opening chapters are well written, it must be conceded. The reader is quickly swept into a fast-paced (and farfetched) plot and is enticed to feel sympathy for the hero and heroine, a professor of religious symbology and a female agent of the Judicial Police of Paris (who is also a cryptographer or code-breaker), respectively. The quality of the writing then deteriorates noticeably as the plot is reduced to a skeleton on which to hang a bizarre collection of feminist conspiracy theories. It then muddles on to an unbelievable and unsatisfying termination.

The most ludicrous of the theories is the claim that Jesus secretly married Mary Magdalene, that their descendants were secretly spirited off to France, and that the Christian hierarchy had suppressed the truth to prop up the claim of Jesus' deity. This is bad enough, but it gets even more unbelievable. A secret society, "The Priory of Sion," had supposedly preserved the secret (and Mary's mummified body) all these years. Leonardo da Vinci was a member of the society and had hidden clues about these secrets in his paintings (thus the title). A second secret (Catholic) society called "Opus Dei" supposedly had been aware of all this and had been trying to kill the leadership of the Priory of Sion and obtain their secret documents.

Many novels of this kind are replete with secret societies and conspiracy theories. But perhaps the most outrageous marketing ploy of recent times was the author's claim of a factual basis for the book. This follows in the grand tradition of supermarket tabloids who always claim that their outrageous stores of aliens and Elvises are completely true. Apparently this sort of thing can be quite profitable. This claim was a bold attempt to seduce readers into viewing Jesus Christ as a mere man and the Bible as a deeply-flawed collection of fables. Brown said at the beginning of the book: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” This is hardly the case.