Down on Da Vinci

So I saw the Da Vinci Code movie last weekend. I hadn't read the book (except for the first 40 pages in French after blowing my last few Euros in Charles de Gaulle earlier this year) so I was pretty out of the loop when I walked into the movie theater. It was a poor movie--there was absolutely no character development and the plot consisted in little more than an endless series of clues whose solutions made little sense and who related to each other about as much as one section of the Phenomenology of Spirit does to the next. I walked out baffled: not only was the mystery boring and completely incredulous, but the philosophical import of the issues at hand (the authority of the Gospels, the Church's monopoly of interpretation, the character of Jesus, etc.) was very poorly developed. In fact, one of the most ridiculous and banal points of the movie comes when Tom Hanks (who was clearly bored to death playing this role) tries to be philosophical after he figures out what's-her-face is a descendant of Jesus. He says something silly about divinity and humanity and the divine in the human that sounds about as deep as a line from Half Baked. The movie sucked and, although I assume the book was at least more entertaining, I assume it generally sucked as well. But I've been thinking this week and, after following the leads of some other writers, have decided that maybe the Da Vinci craze will have some interesting results for a culture being taken over by orthodox and conservative Protestantism. I am of the opinion that the greatest challenge for Christianity is maintaining the legitimacy of the canonical 27 books of the New Testament against the scores of other Gospels who vied for interpretative authority before the canon was created. This seems particularly challenging for Protestants who cannot lay claim to a divinely inspired institution that could have legitimately assembled the authoritative scriptures without at the same time establishing some kind of extra-Biblical legitimacy for the Church, who--at least according to Catholics--would have ultimate jurisdiction over which Gospels were true. And if we resort to a Catholic or Orthodox answer--the Church got it right because the Church is the lawful representative of God on Earth--then the skeptical response of Protestantism (what Biblical authority does this institution have?) seems to make sense. Without going deeper into these issues, I simply offer the possibility that the Da Vinci Code (at least in that semi-decent scene with Tom Hanks in the house of the British professor) could raise some nagging questions to the consciousness of an America swamped by religion: Who put the scriptures together? What makes us accept one Gospel over another? After seeing some obscure Catholic group protesting against the book on the streets of D.C. the day after I saw the movie I realized how much the angry reactions of conservative Christians to the book's popularity are making Brown look like a religious iconoclast. And like Rushdie, there's money out for his head. Even if it's a historically inaccurate, poorly written, and generally crap novel, at the very least something challenging the status quo has caught the minds of the American public.