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Ross Douthat expresses his concern about the state of American religion by giving us marketing advice about why Dan Brown’s work (and his latest film, Angels and Demons), is so popular:
[I]f you want to sell a 100 million [books], you need to preach as well as entertain — to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.
Was equating religion and marketing intentional or a Freudian slip? At least Douglas Adams’, Life, the Universe, and Everything, had verve and a sense of humor. Mr. Douthat writes like Marvin in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
If Ross is correct about what it takes to sell 100 million books, his logic should apply to the works of J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien. Imagine how that would reassure the religious audience Mr. Douthat writes for. Ross also takes Dan Brown’s self-promotion at face value. I’m sure Mr. Brown is grateful. But that he can so mesmerize a NY Times pundit explains his ability to sell books better than does Ross Douthat’s claim that it requires "unlocking the secrets of history, the universe and God".
Not knowing his politics, I can’t say whether Brown would agree with Douthat that his work has parallels with that of Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra. To say that he has more verisimilitude than Rand and more depth than Chopra would be damning with faint praise. For Mr. Douthat, though, it’s all about marketing religion: Brown’s success comes from how his stories mirror Americans’ religious views:
In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true.
Now why would a successful novelist (or a political strategist) mix fact and fancy and themes from popular culture in order to create a fictional world of heroes and villains, damsels and the damned? Is Douthat angry because of Brown’s commercial success, because he isn’t writing speeches for Michael Steele or because Americans have an eclectic religiosity that’s becoming divorced from any single, exclusive religion? Or is he just confused that novelists write fiction.
The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling…nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.
That’s quite a mouthful, starting with how different the first three gospels are from John. One could carry it forward to how different is the historical Jesus from the Christian churches’ Christ. (A premise of Brown’s fiction.) In the end, though, Douthat fails to explain Brown’s popularity and simply rails against it.
The buried lede is the continuing power of films (such as Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code) to distract us from a dangerous, disappointing, fearful reality. Fortunately, Bob Herbert doesn’t bury his ledes. Today, he writes about the toll that war and repetitive tours of duty are having on the men and women in our armed forces, how little that seems to affect us, and how wrong that is:
A CBS News survey found that veterans aged 20 to 24 were two to four times as likely to commit suicide as nonveterans the same age. A Time magazine cover story last year disclosed that “for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
We’re brutally and cold-bloodedly sacrificing the psychological well-being of these men and women, which should be a scandal. If these wars are so important to our national security, we should all be engaging in some form of serious sacrifice, and many more of us should be serving.
Now that’s a column – and an argument – worth reading.
7 Comments
Thanks EoH. One of my favorite sayings is ‘Don’t Panic Yet.’
The “yet” is the important part.
Never forget your towel!
…or your “thumb” drive.
I liked the idea of applying Douthat’s logic to explain the mega-sales of J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter as Christ and his thunderbolt as the key to God and the universe.
Douthat’s religious readers, more likely to condemn Halloween as devil worship rather than grade school hilarity and free candy, aren’t likely to accept that logic, though they are probably happy to accept the reality of the devil figure – he who must not be named – and his followers. Ditto Tolkien’s white wizard as god-the-father and Frodo as Christ. I guess that makes Sam Peter, the rock on which the white wizard would build Middle Earth’s church.
There are parallels, suggestions of archetypes that elicit great emotions, though the ones constructed by C.S. Lewis are more direct. But they don’t carry the explanatory weight Douthat puts on them. Creating the archetype without the storytelling skills wouldn’t yield many sales.
Like Bobo, Douthat’s job is to assure the Base and to articulate its fears. Why the NY Times would subsidize the two of them (and Dowd, et al.) with investment bankers’ salaries and then complain about profits is beyond me.
“promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way”
That easy: 42.
I am also at a loss to understand Mr. Brown’s success. He can make a fascinating story–Christian history and Gnosticism–so awkward, drawn-out, implausible, and dull. Was it Barnum that said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public?
The worst indictment of the “DaVinci Code”, in my view, was that Tom Hanks’s movie was, by comparison, a ripping good yarn. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my archbishop forbade me to go see it, and nothing packs the Catholics in like a clerical condemnation. I went on the first night.
I am not religious but there are aspects of Christianity’s history that play into alternate and conspiratorial views. Early Christianity was quite diverse and women played a larger part in it. I believe Paul had a lot to do with the pushing out of women from leadership roles. There were also numerous debates and conflicts among the early Church Fathers over what the beliefs of the Church were and how the Bible was to be constructed, i.e. what went in it.
As the Church centralized, it met resistance. This was generally denigrated as heresy. But again from a conspiracy angle it provids fertile ground for ideas. Heresy has been an integral if largely ignored and/or downplayed part of Christianity’s history. It was there as I pointed out above from its beginnings and continued throughout its history. Church corruption, a decline in its authority in certain periods and areas, and a questioning of its ideas, all contributed to various heretical movements.
What we know of such heresies is often fragmentary. As Umberto Eco said in the Name of the Rose all heresies tended to resemble each other and involved demonic ties and sexual perversions not because these actually happened but because it was the most convenient way for the Catholic Church to stigmatize them.
I am most familiar with the history of France and it seems to me that just about every century from the 8th onward had some large religious movement associated with it. Some like the various brands of monasticism and church reformers were accepted by the Church. Others like the Cathares and Huguenots had what were essentially crusades waged against them. Some started out well but ended up closed down like the quietists and Port-Royal. These movements came from all across the religious spectrum and what they show is not the static, monolithic entity the Church presents of itself but something much more dynamic.
The shorter version of what I am saying is that Christianity is often portrayed as something that sprang into the world readymade and essentially timeless and unchanging. The truth is that it has been constructed, and challenged, every step of its way. It is in the discrepancy between these two images that alternate histories and conspiracies are born.