The Da Vinci Code: Take it With Several Grains of Salt

In the publishing world and in Hollywood, if you want to sell a book or a movie, create a controversy. Conspiracy theories generate a wonderful market. Just load your conspiracy with religion, politics, or sex. (Preferably all three.) Then stand back and watch the money roll in. The formula has worked for decades, starting, in my memory, with the book Peyton Place which scandalized the country when baby-boomers were kids. 

Religious controversy is particularly enticing. Challenge religious principles, and believers will leap to defend their faith while non-believers proclaim, “Aha!"  People will flock to bookstores and movie theaters to find out what the flap is about. Only hard evidence can quell the argument one way or another.  In most matters of faith, however, such evidence does not exist, so the controversy rages. Meanwhile, books and movie tickets sell while writers and producers get rich.

The Da Vinci Code was just such a book, and now it is just such a movie. Dan Brown’s tale deals with an investigator who discovers an ancient conspiracy fostered by the Roman Catholic Church, based on a legend spawned in the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau. One Internet source sums up the controversy this way, "The two principal arguments contained in The Da Vinci Code concern the Priory of Sion and the marriage of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdalene that produced children."  According to the story, for centuries the Roman Catholic Church has engaged in a cover-up, even resorting to murder most foul to protect its interests.