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Hollywood never lets facts get in the way of fiction

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published May 16, 2006

A wildly popular novel or movie is hard to fight.

Just ask the nuclear power industry about The China Syndrome.

Or ask historians about the movie JFK.

Or ask a shark about ... well, you know.

Now Christian leaders are faced with the same problem over the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, which comes out as a movie this week.

In case you haven't read it, it's a wild book. A murder mystery is the excuse for the real story, the claim that the Catholic Church has been involved in a 2,000-year-old conspiracy.

Among the book's sensational allegations are that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that his divinity was decided by a church vote centuries later and that the Church has been squelching the "Sacred Feminine'' - the Holy Grail, no less - ever since.

Oh, by the way, the story claims that secret religious societies have been covering up all this for centuries. Leonardo da Vinci (as well as other historical notables) was in on the secret, and with a wink to posterity, he painted clues into his Last Supper.

Of course, almost all of the "evidence" cited in the book is patent nonsense. Some of it is made up or totally twisted from the historical reality. The story gets everything wrong from what the Dead Sea Scrolls contain to what happened at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. Unless the movie departs wildly from the book, we can expect more of the same.

But Christian leaders are finding, just as Kennedy debunkers, nuclear advocates and shark lovers found before them, that fighting a fictionalized, pop culture version of events is frustrating.

If you try to debunk the fake facts one at a time, people say: "Lighten up! It's just a story!'' Modern auteurs seek to have it both ways, praising themselves for tackling "controversial" subjects, then running back to the label of entertainers when challenged.

Meanwhile, the new version of reality soaks its way into the popular consciousness. (More than once, I have heard people cite scenes from JFK as "proof'' a conspiracy existed.)

What is the right way to handle it, then?

With patience and good humor, I think. Most church leaders are getting it right. They see this as an opportunity for education. Even a lot of Christians, let alone denizens of the secular culture, don't know enough about the religion's early history. The more facts that they possess, the less that any fiction can be a threat.

That's true of any belief, by the way. And yet our nature is to become riled at even the most easily refuted challenge. We often act as though our beliefs were fragile, to be shielded desperately from contrary ideas, rather than to be buffeted by them and made stronger.

In that spirit, rather than railing against Hollywood and thundering in vain for people not to see the movie, were I a preacher (which I most definitely am not, though I sometimes play-acted the part as a child), I would march down to the theater in full garb and see what I was up against, so that my point-by-point refutation would be all the more effective.

Like a lot of popular misrepresentations, The Da Vinci Code piggybacks on an existing perception or claim - in this case, that the Catholic Church suppresses women. The novel seductively weaves a conspiracy of misogyny stretching across two millennia.

But in a way, that's a cop-out, another convenient modern answer. A conspiracy is to blame, naturally! Oliver Stone, meet the Knights Templar. Mystery solved by the last reel.

The truth, as always, is harder. How the church has treated women, what the Bible says on the subject, and what later Christian thinkers have written about it is a fine and difficult subject for debate. But it hardly requires made-up evidence.

If we schooled ourselves differently in this society, if we were chock-full of history and skepticism, the debut of a half-baked historical film would be no cause for concern at all.

Instead, things being what they are, Christians are right to worry that some people might mistake a popular film for fact, and right to offer a friendly rebuttal.

For my part I expect to enjoy it, while resisting the temptation every few seconds to say: "Wrong! That never happened.''

[Last modified May 16, 2006, 06:24:04]