by Berry Craig

[6-4-06]

MAYFIELD, Ky. -- The Almighty is convicting -- her word -- our freshly-saved Southern Baptist neighbor against evil.

"Going to see that movie is a sin," she warned our 13-year-old son. She meant The Da Vinci Code.

Berry IV and his folks gambled with their souls and went anyway. "The family that sins together…"

Of course, our neighbor isn’t alone in dissing The Da Vinci Code, book and movie. The religious right group Focus on the Family says the Da Vinci Code "is a seductive fiction being presented as fact."

But wait. Author Dan Brown and hell-bound Hollywood, however unwittingly, have opened "a door of opportunity" with the Da Vinci Code, Focus folks say. The novel and film can be soul-savers, FOFers add.

FOF has spun an Internet website to help the faithful "know the truth and share it with others." The website quotes Dr. Edwin Lutzer, who wrote The Da Vinci Deception: "The movie will confuse lots of people, but Jesus will become the centerpiece of many conversations. For those who are prepared to explain that Christianity rests on solid foundations, the opportunity will be tremendous."

The movie’s star, Tom Hanks, doesn’t understand the fuss. Apparently, my Southern Baptist in-laws and their kids don’t either. They watched the film with us. The boys loved the novel that inspired the movie and lent its name to the film.

Hanks says we shouldn’t take The Da Vinci Code too seriously. "…The story we tell is loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense," he claimed in the Evening Standard, a newspaper in London, where part of the movie was filmed. "If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you’d be making a very big mistake."

The FOF probably thinks Hanks is just another sneaky, liberal Hollywood heathen like The Da Vinci Code’s director, Ron Howard. Opie, we hardly know ye.

I haven’t heard anybody connected with the movie claim it is factual. Brown says his book is make-believe.

Even so, the FOF frets that "many readers (and presumably film-goers) are expressing confusion about Christianity due to the blurred historical references and facts" in The Da Vinci Code. Beware, they say, "The Word of God warns us of false teachers who ‘secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who brought them.’"

If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, the plot goes like this: Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene; sinister Catholic conspirators have hidden the secret for eons, and the Holy Couple has divine descendants living in France.

That’s entertainment, but not necessarily entertaining. Writing in Newsweek, movie critic David Ansen called the movie "overstuffed and underwhelming," adding that The Da Vinci Code is "not likely to topple Christianity as we know it."

Nonetheless, Focus on the Family and its leader, Dr. James Dobson, will doubtless continue their tilting at The Da Vinci Code windmill with "truth" as FOF defines it: You can’t be a liberal and a Christian. (Dobson has been cozy with the Republican right for years.)

Anyway, what possibly bothers Brother Dobson most about the movie and the book is that most of Christendom seems unvexed by them. The film is making millions; the novel is an international bestseller.

Dobson, of course, is famous for ferreting out "hidden agendas." In 1994, the FOF magazine clobbered the Girl Scouts for making "a religious oath optional for membership," according to Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Dobson "added that the Girl Scouts are ‘pushing a philosophy -- a philosophy that includes humanism and radical feminism,’" AU says.

Last year, Dobson disparaged a We Are Family Foundation-sponsored music video that used SpongeBob SquarePants and other popular cartoon characters to promote tolerance among kids. Dobson is on record against the t-word.

In 1996, he claimed "tolerance" is a "double meaning" term that "can be misconstrued by those ‘who reject the concept of right and wrong,’" according to AU. "Tolerance," Dobson concluded, "is ‘kind of a desensitization to evil of all varieties,’" AU reports.

Dobson suspected the We Are Family video "hijacked" SpongeBob and the other "childhood symbols…to promote an agenda that involves teaching homosexual propaganda to children." Sponge Bob has held hands with Patrick, his starfish sidekick.

Eventually, The Da Vinci Code will exit movie screens for video stores. The novel will fall from the best seller list and end up in the bargain bin at bookstores.

But you can bet Focus on the Family and others of the Jesus-loves-me-but-He-can’t-stand-you persuasion will find a new demon du jour. I hear there’s another Harry Potter movie on the way.

-- Berry Craig is a professor of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah. He and his wife, Melinda, are members of the Witherspoon Society.

An article by Rob Boston, "Breaking the Da Vinci Code," takes a more realistic look at the order. It was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaria Escriva, canonized in 2002 by Pope John Paul II. The pope had already given the order special status as a "personal prelature," answerable to the pope alone.

Opus Dei has long been known for its traditionalist values and reactionary political stance, often at variance with the positions taken by the Vatican. In the U.S., an Opus Dei priest converted Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) from evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism; the conversion was shepherded by Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), an Opus Dei booster.

In 2002, at an Opus Dei event in Rome, Santorum blasted John Kennedy's 1960 endorsement of church-state separation and described President George W. Bush, a Methodist, as the nation's first true Catholic president.