I just read Stephen Bainbridge's review of "The Da Vinci Code" (DVC) as both book and film. Bainbridge highlights the Catholic disenchantment with the film as heresy, a particularly old set of heresies, and notes that the film makers (not to mention the author) will nonetheless make a pile of money for denying the divinity of Christ.

Doesn't seem much to base a blog posting on, but what struck me was the rather chauvinistic definition of heresy--i.e. the Roman Catholic Christology is definitive. Well, not too surprising, since Bainbridge is a practicing Catholic, but let's recognize that the audience is a lot broader than Catholics, practicing or otherwise.

I understand that Catholics would resent being portrayed in such a negative light, but frankly anyone who takes the book at face value probably already had a fair bit of emnity for the church, as well as Christianity generally.

Yet there is also another, legitimate audience for the book, one that doesn't consider Catholic Christology the gold standard. Living in the intermountain west, when people say "the church", the mean the Mormon church, not the Roman Catholics. For Mormons, the idea that Jesus was married is old hat. While most Christian faiths rever marriage, Mormons actually consider it an essential element of soteriology (salvation theology). Jesus was married because "he had to be", just as he was baptized to fulfill all righteousness. You can imagine that DVC had an entirely different reception among Mormons than it would for Catholics--an affirmation rather than an assault on faith.

I am telling you this because DVC, much like the life of Jesus Christ himself, seems to have become a mirror for our contemporary political and religious diversity. Like the song says, "you're so vain, you probably think this song is about you..." At the end of the day, DVC isn't a Satanic attack on the Roman Catholic church or an affirmation of the Mormon new and everlasting covenant of marriage, its a beach novel, and the film is no more significant than "National Treasure" was as a guide to the Freemason "end game".