The religion Dan Brown is selling

Dan Brown is “writing thrillers,” said Ross Douthat in The New York Times, “but he’s selling a theology.” In his bestsellers “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons,” Brown paints Jesus as a “thoroughly modern messiah” to make ancient Christianity more compatible with “modern American faith.” The trouble is, his mission depends on a dishonest depiction of the Jesus of the New Testament. “You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.”

Let's not give Dan Brown too much credit, said Philip Giraldi in The American Conservative. He’s just out to make a buck by “bashing” the Catholic Church. “What offends me most is that the books were marketed as being meticulously researched" so readers will think his tales of Church "skulduggery" are plausible. Yet Brown gets basic facts of Rome’s geography wrong and there’s still “no serious examination in the media” of the “crap” he writes.

That’s because Dan Brown writes fiction, said Kathy Rudd in the Springfield, Ill., State Journal-Register. His mission is to entertain. Too many Christians go through life shutting out anything that tests their faith, and never thinking about the violent history of their religion. So don’t knock the film adaptation of “Angels and Demons”—now in theaters—until you’ve seen it. And if you still hate it, remember—it’s just a movie.

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