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.
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