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Luring the faithful to view the profane
More articles on this topic: Da Vinci CodeSony is using a website’s worth of ‘experts’ to market Da Vinci to reluctant Christians
Hollywood’s growth industry these days involves rounding up Christians and herding them into movie theatres — road-tested with The Passion of the Christ, born again with The Chronicles of Narnia and now squarely aimed at delivering big bucks for The Da Vinci Code.
It’s an interesting development for the faith: how to get followers to plunk down their money at the box office, in the case of The Da Vinci Code for a film that ostensibly trashes the conventional Christian narrative.
Financially limping Sony Pictures — now praying that Christians buy tickets rather than parade with protest placards — commissioned the current novas of the corralling-Christians business, Grace Hill Media, to come up with a marketing strategy.
Grace Hill’s solution: a website inviting more than three dozen “experts” — theologians, priests, nuns and preachers (including the former bent political operative Chuck Colson, who did prison time for obstruction of justice) — to write anything they wanted about the movie and the mega-successful book it is based on, including that it’s all hogwash and that the theology is appalling.
Men and women of the Word of God leapt at the opportunity.
Source: Dismantling The Da Vinci Code By Sandra Miesel, Crisis, Sep. 1, 2003
As Frederica Mathewes-Green, a khouria, or spiritual mother, of Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church in Baltimore, Md., put it in her article, “When The Da Vinci Code hoopla is all said and done, it will still be Jesus that we’re talking about.”
Or as Colson wrote, “While ignoring the whole mess is tempting, it’s not the way to go. We need to view these few months as an opportunity, not an ordeal. There’s a teachable moment coming up if Christians are up for it. The Da Vinci Code is raising questions and opening doors that normally go unraised and shut.”
The articles carry titles such as How to Leverage the Da Vinci Code; The Da Vinci Code: An Opportunity for the Gospel — Are You Ready?; Watching The Da Vinci Code: Is a Dialogue Between Faith and Film Possible?; and What If Jesus Was Married? What Would that Mean to Our Faith?
The last title refers to the nub of the story — certainly the nub of Dan Brown’s novel, which has sold somewhere between 40 million and 60 million copies: that Jesus wasn’t divine, and that he married Mary Magdalene and became a dad.
(There’s also a really interesting article titled A Tsunami of Sacred Sex? by Indian Christian intellectual Vishal Mangalwadi, who suggests that the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, which figures prominently in the Code, could be a sexual ritual called yoni chakra puja or swadhistana sattva — the worship of the second chakra, or spiritual centre, in this case the vagina of Mary Magdalene.) The modern genesis of Christian-film marketing begins with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Hollywood laughed at Gibson for making a Jesus movie, until the busloads of conservative Christians showed up, propelling the film to a box office of $370-million (U.S.).
The Passion presented a Jesus conservative Christians liked: whipped, beaten and savagely crucified. The Code, by contrast, presents a Jesus most Christians probably won’t like: a kind of Father Knows Best Jesus with a clever wife, plus a conspiracy theory about the Roman Catholic Church deciding centuries ago to hush up the real Jesus story.
Hence the brilliance of the Grace Hill Media strategy: Sell influential Christian leaders on the movie as a teaching opportunity, and they’ll pass that message on to the faithful.
Robert Johnston, a professor of theology and culture at California’s Fuller Theological Seminary, is one of the contributors to the Sony Pictures website. “If a church advertises a talk about the Gospels, maybe 20 people will come,” he said in an interview. “If it’s a talk about The Da Vinci Code, 200 people will come. The Da Vinci Code has become a contemporary expression for people’s fascination with spirituality. The only question is whether the church is going to be part of the discussion, part of the dialogue, about it or not.”
Institutional Christianity, says Johnston, learned a lesson in 1988 when it erroneously believed Christendom — the official Christian world — was still alive, and thought as a result that it could close down filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s provocative The Last Temptation of Christ because it was blasphemous. He added as well that institutional Christianity for the most part now recognizes that it exists in a post-Christendom age, and that trying to close down a film like The Da Vinci Code is inevitably counterproductive.
He acknowledges that Sony has invited Christian theologians and leaders to write articles for its Code website as a way of marketing the film. But that, he says, is not a problem: “Here is an opportunity for dialogue, the idea of dialoguing with culture. Should the church be engaged with culture? I believe the answer is yes.”
Not everyone agrees. Rev. John Pungente, a Jesuit scholar of culture and communications at the University of Toronto’s Regis College, suggests the Web writers are wasting their time. “The people going to see this movie are not interested in Christianity,” says Pungente. “They’re not interested in any discussion. They’re going to see the Catholic Church get theirs. In fact, the film doesn’t have the guts to do what the book did — which was to provoke.”
Pungente adds that his biggest problem with the film, which he saw this week, was trying to stay awake through it. “It’s not a terrible film,” he says, “but it is a bad film.”
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