Having finished this rather dopey book, I have only one question: Why would so many people want to believe it? I admit, I’ve sometimes felt it was unfair for Jesus to be given a human body but never have a girlfriend. And millions of men probably jumped for joy when they read that we were meant to access God through sex rather than church attendance. But, because Dan Brown taps into popular anxieties about the hierarchy, authority and secrecy of the Catholic Church, it’s easy to miss how elitist and exclusionary his vision is, compared to orthodox Christianity.

“I don’t need the church to mediate my encounter with God.” Whether you’re a Protestant clinging to sola scriptura or an ordinary American individualist who resents having your spirituality crammed into pre-set rituals and doctrines, this sentiment should be very familiar. It sounds so democratic, right? But the church and the sacraments are open to all comers. What does Dan Brown put in its place? Heterosexual intercourse. Bad news if you’re gay, underage, physically incapacitated, or the pimply kid standing by the punchbowl all night at the senior prom. We want so much to believe in transcendence through pleasure, to skip the disciplines that help us endure pleasure’s fading.

Another conceit of the book is that Christ was not divine, just a human prophet who had a real wife and a royal bloodline that continues to this day. That’s an interesting story, but as irrelevant to my life as Zeus and Hera. The Bible says Christ’s bride is the Church, that is, all of us. Through him, our souls can be as intimate with God as Dan Brown’s Jesus was with Mary Magdalene. Why would anyone prefer a story about a royal family that we worship from afar? If Jesus wasn’t divine, what makes his kids better than the rest of us? (Does God drive a SmartCar with a bumper sticker saying “My son is an honor student at Galilee Elementary School”?)

Finally, I don’t get why so many people find relativism more comforting than sincere belief. Brown’s fictional hero, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (another reason I never give to the Harvard College Fund), explains thus his decision not to publicize evidence that the gospels are a fraud:

“Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith — acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove….The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof that Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.” (pp.369-70, paperback edition)

My husband’s a Buddhist, and I don’t think the lotus blossom legend plays a big role in their activities over at the sangha. On the other hand, if there were proof that no one had ever achieved enlightenment by meditating, and the stories to the contrary were a plot to get Tibetans to sit still while the Chinese took over their country, I’m sure he would want to know.

Again, what seems like liberal openness is the worst kind of elitism. The world is divided into “those people” who need their illusions, and “our kind of people” who know better. Because “we” don’t believe that religious ideas have real-world consequences, we don’t mind that billions of people are misled about the nature of ultimate reality. (This is what my minister believes, BTW, which is why I’m blogging this morning instead of going to church. “Resistance is futile!”)

Someone, please explain to me the appeal of this kind of thinking. Is it that you want the warm feeling and pageantry of church membership but can’t manage to agree with the doctrines? Are you afraid of dividing the human race between true and false believers (a line that relativism merely redraws, not eliminates)? Do you actively disagree with Christianity and want to appropriate its cultural capital for other ends? As for me, I’d rather live in a world that God loved enough to die for, instead of a world where most people have to swallow comforting lies in order to avoid eating a bullet.

The day after Christmas seems like a good time to defend corporal mortification. (Memo to world: stop giving me cake unless you’re going to reinforce my office chair.) Anyhow, with the shining obliviousness to social trends that has always been my hallmark, I am just now getting round to reading The Da Vinci Code, and finding it both as exciting and as annoying as I expected.

I mean, poor Silas. In case you don’t know, he’s the tormented albino monk who likes to whip himself when he’s not assassinating people. The book makes a little effort to arouse our sympathies about his abusive childhood, but the overall tone is voyeuristic and superior. Just as in Chocolat, a film that made fun of the Lenten fast, we’re supposed to apply our little pop-Freudian insight that anyone who would deny himself bodily pleasure (or worse, deliberately undergo suffering) for the sake of spiritual formation must be repressed and neurotic at best, a lustful hypocrite at worst. By implication, nothing that this character believes should be taken seriously.

I’m not a big fan of extreme ascetic practices, as they can feed un-Christian ambitions to bring about perfection by our own efforts. Meditation, therapy and a sense of humor about one’s inevitable weaknesses are a healthier path for most everyday struggles with temptation. BUT — a little respect, please, for anyone who loves righteousness so much that he’s willing to tear his own flesh to conquer the devil within.

Ask yourself: would Dan Brown mock a vegan? a bodybuilder? an anorexic? a U.S. Marine? a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War? Like Silas, and unlike me most of the time, these folks have made some extreme physical sacrifices, sometimes for a noble goal, other times for a questionable one (you do the match-up yourselves, kids). I’m with Simone Weil, who saw something godly in every effort to transcend one’s self through discipline, even a mundane one like doing your math homework when you hate math. Christianity needs its freaks.

I’m currently reading Philip F. Gura’s brief, lively biography Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical, which holds special interest for me because the great 18th-century theologian and preacher spent the first two decades of his career in my adopted hometown of Northampton, Mass. The issues of church discipline and unity that Edwards confronted seem uncomfortably familiar, 250 years on.

Casual students of church history know Edwards only as the author of the infamous “spider” sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” where he thunders that God’s unmerited mercy is the only thing keeping Him from dropping your loathsome soul into the pit of hell. This leads modern readers to picture Edwards as a dour, witch-burning sort of fellow, because we’re no longer comfortable with the theology of damnation that was pretty standard in his day. According to Gura’s very sympathetic portrait of the Puritan minister, Edwards’ true passion was not fire-and-brimstone but awakening sincere “religious affections” in a church that had become hidebound and hypocritical. He preached and wrote copiously on the beauty of God’s holiness and the love and joy that arise in a heart transformed by grace.

Because he was a Calvinist, however, he insisted that spiritual transformation happened solely on God’s initiative. He fought all his life against Arminian tendencies in the New England churches, as Enlightenment philosophy and the colonists’ increasing economic security made people more inclined to trust their own efforts to attain salvation. Ironically, the spiritual revival known as the Great Awakening, which Edwards helped spark, also released a spirit of resistance to church authority that made the absolutely sovereign God of Calvinism seem less appealing.

Gura reveals the power struggles behind Edwards’ ouster from his Northampton pulpit, which is sometimes misperceived as a triumph of liberalism over repression. Two teenage sons of prominent families were getting their kicks from a forbidden textbook on female anatomy, and the congregation was not happy with Edwards’ attempts to discipline them. It’s easy to side against Edwards as Puritan censor, when the material in question seems laughably tame by our standards. When Gura points out that the boys were using the book to sexually harass young women, and that the underlying issue was the minister’s moral authority over wealthy and powerful laymen, one feels more sympathy for the beleaguered cleric. Edwards reportedly had a happy marriage (with 13 children, surely no prude), and respected his wife’s piety so much that he made her born-again experience a central feature of one of his narratives of the revival.

Despite the very different cultural context, Edwards’ story closely mirrors some important tensions that persist in the churches today. One such is the role of communion (a/k/a the Mass or the Eucharist). Is it a privilege reserved for those with certain beliefs or religious experiences, or is it more like an altar call? In the 17th century, the Puritan churches had required testimony of a born-again experience before one could be admitted as a full member with communion privileges – a status that had social and political implications as well as spiritual ones. Edwards’ grandfather and predecessor in the Northampton pulpit, Solomon Stoddard, had eliminated this requirement as not based in Scripture, arguing also that it inappropriately set men up as judges of one another’s spiritual state. Stoddard opined that the experience of taking communion might trigger a spiritual transformation in itself. Edwards continued this policy until late in his Northampton career, when he was deeply disappointed to see that many who had been caught up in the revival enthusiasms quickly backslid into immoral behavior. Requiring born-again testimony was his way of distinguishing the victims of temporary hysteria from those whose hearts had really been changed by God. Unfortunately, it also cost him his job.

Nowadays, we see the same tension between two visions of the Lord’s Supper, and by extension the church. One impulse leads us to form a community of the pure; the other stresses radical openness. So, on the one hand, you have the Catholic Church, which restricts communion not only to Christians, but to Catholics, and within that sect, to those who do not openly defy church teaching in selected areas (particularly abortion). On the other hand, you have my Episcopal parish, which extends communion to “all who are worshipping with us,” baptized or not. The looming schism in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality similarly forces us to ask how much doctrinal variation and error we can tolerate and still remain one body. (FYI, I am in favor of full acceptance of gays and lesbians; that and the 1982 Hymnal are the only things keeping me away from Mother Rome’s embrace.)

Picking heroes and villains in this debate misses the point. The church needs both impulses in order to fulfill its mission. Communion and membership rules should always be informed by Jesus’ willingness to mingle with sinners before they became cleansed. (Having briefly attended a church where you were expected to be “slain in the spirit” every week, I’m suspicious of demands for Christians to work up a particular emotion on cue.) On the other hand, if one can fully participate in church life without having made a commitment to Christ, the church edges toward irrelevance; it becomes hard to answer the aging boomer who asks “Can’t I worship God just as well looking at the sunrise from my hot tub?”  

How should that “commitment to Christ” be manifested, then? Baptism has the virtue of being an objective, bright-line rule, compared to the fuzziness and potential emotional dishonesty of experiential signs. Again, Edwards’ trajectory is instructive. His efforts on behalf of the religious revival stemmed from his perception that many people’s faith had become empty formalism. However, once the Holy Spirit is on the loose, it’s hard to put Him back in the bottle again. Edwards found himself struggling to reassert his moral authority as a clergyman after God had seemed to speak directly through low-status laypeople such as women and children. The balancing act between openness and leadership never ends.

I wasn’t expecting to find this much common ground with Edwards, since I instinctively recoil from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (all people deserve hell but God arbitrarily saves a few). Gura’s book summarizes Edwards’ creative attempt to reconcile this doctrine with free will and moral responsibility. According to the Puritan preacher, we are all free to do whatever we want to do, and therefore morally accountable for doing it. But what we want to do is determined by the good or evil disposition that God predestined us to have. Thus Jesus, for instance, was simultaneously free to sin but incapable of sinning.

This analysis made me realize that the problem I have with Calvinism is not that it’s unfair, but that it’s unkind. The whole idea of calculating our moral deserts is sort of beside the point if you believe in salvation by grace. Let’s even assume Edwards is right that we all deserve damnation. However, if God has decided to save some people anyhow, out of the goodness of His love, why wouldn’t he choose to save everyone, if it were totally up to Him? Isn’t His love infinite?

Edwards’ psychology also makes me uneasy. At least by Gura’s description, he believed our dispositions were fixed, unless changed instantaneously by God’s
grace. This all-or-nothing mentality stands in stark contrast to contemplative traditions like Buddhism or medieval Catholicism that heavily emphasized spiritual practice; through cultivating good spiritual habits, they say, one can gradually change one’s character and reorient one’s affections. This seems healthier to me than the bipolar cycle of revivalism. Evangelical Protestantism’s move away from “slow and steady” spiritual disciplines, in favor of emotional moments of decision, may be both a symptom of its co-optation by anti-intellectual and subjectivist tendencies in American culture, and a reason why its critique of this culture is less effective than it might be.