The Da Vinci Code: teaching that society is nothing but a conspiracy?

Perhaps it is no surprise that in an age when, for at least a generation now, the majority of humanist academics have been teaching that our society is essentially the creation of a victimizing patriarchy and its will to power, that one of the biggest best sellers is Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. However, I am not so sure whether to dismiss Brown's book outright, considering that I have not even bothered to read it. Maybe, in its own peculiar way, The Da Vinci Code will bring some people back to a place where they can take seriously questions of faith.

It's just that I'm not inclined to think that representing one of the fundamental texts and institutions of western society - the New Testament (with its omission of the Gnostic Gospels) and the Catholic Church - as founded on a denial of the supposed truth about Jesus and Mary Magdalene having had a child from whom has descended a "royal line", whose existence the church fathers deny in their supposed rejection of Mary Magdalene as symbol of the "feminine sacred", is all a good thing for the health of the west.

Still, I must admit that I took some pleasure in watching a recent program on the History Channel that was exploring the cultural history behind the claims and myths of The Da Vinci Code. There are inherent ascetic pleasures in the free-ranging symbolic imagination, quite apart from the actual, though never fully specifiable, relationship of our signs and corresponding myths to the reality of historical events.

Bringing me back to sobriety is this article by David Klinghoffer who argues it is not just the Church that is under attack:

You may wonder if Brown’s readers find his tale convincing, not as fiction but as truth. Seemingly they do. A Barna Group poll found that 53 percent of the book’s readers said The Da Vinci Code aided their “personal spiritual growth and understanding.”

But why should a non-Christian care?

Consider that the alleged conspiracy underlying the “biggest cover up in human history” bears a remarkable resemblance to another phony conspiracy, the famous hoax called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Apparently authored by Russian monarchist and anti-Semite Mathieu Golovinski in 1898, the Protocols tells of a secret society of Jewish elders that work to keep gentiles ignorant of a plot to rule the world through “Darwinism, Marxism, and Nietzscheism.”

In both conspiracy theories, an ancient world religion turns out to be a massive fraud perpetrated to gain or maintain power. In Dan Brown’s version, the “Priory of Sion” (“Sion” simply means “Zion” in French) is the good guys. They’ve been waiting for the right moment to reveal the secret about Jesus having children and to introduce the world to the worship of the “Goddess,” a.k.a. Mary Magdalene.

Meanwhile the Catholic Church plots to suppress forever the truth about the “sacred feminine.” Opus Dei is willing to go to any lengths, including murder, to keep the male church hierarchy in power.

Note the irony that it is today the children of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche who are presumably Dan Brown's readers. The conspiracy in which they believe now comes wholly from the traditional order, not from the putative modern forces of a false liberation, forces that mask their service to an old Jewish conspiracy.

I emphasize that Dan Brown never intended to foment bigotry. Yet to the cause of conspiracy theorizing, he has done a wonderful favor, training his readers in the habits of paranoia and gullibility. For people committed to finding the truth through investigation and argumentation, that’s depressing.

As for Jews, we haven’t fared well when the culture we live in turns to entertaining fantasies and delusions at the expense of an unfashionable religion. The success of Brown’s book, now transformed into a movie blockbuster, is bad news.

All of this came home for me when I read at NoDhimmitude about a recent report: "Egyptian Cleric and Former Islamic Lecturer in the U.S.: "82% of All Attempts to Corrupt Humanity Originate From the Jews":

In the April 14, 2006, edition of his weekly show on Al-Resala TV, The Raids,in which he discusses the battles of the Prophet Muhammad, Egyptian cleric Hazem Sallah Abu Isma'il explains to his audience that, according to U.N. statistics, "Jews produce more than 82% of the video clips in the world," and adds that "82% of all attempts to corrupt humanity originate from the Jews."

This puts The Da Vinci Code and its screen adaptation by an ostensibly Jewish-dominated industry - so say the conspiracy theories, with whatever grains of truth - in a new light. It may well be that as dangerous people watch Dan Brown pocket the big bucks, it is the conspiratorial mindset that must become our biggest cultural target in the present war.