Reality Gets Wierder than Brown's Fiction

I'm sorry, but it really seems that Christians are getting totally wigged out over the impending release of Ron Howard's movie. The wierdest part is how the response from the Church is all over the map.

In the most recent news reports, one Catholic cardinal is suggesting that the appropriate response is through the courts—despite the fact that he could offer no concrete options for carrying out such a plan, and despite the fact that Scripture specifically recommends staying out of the courts. Huh.

In Singapore, conservative pressure has led to the film being rated NC-16, which prevents any children below the age of 16 from seeing the film at the theaters. In India, small groups of Catholics have gathered to burn books and effigies of Dan Brown, and are calling for a hunger strike to protest the movie's release. And in the Philippines,

Archbishop Ramon Arguelles said he would lead a crusade to ban the film because it was “sacrilegious against God.” Brown’s book, released here last year, did not elicit a similar controversy. “In a predominantly Christian country like the Philippines, making publicly available such [a] film is sinfully condoning blasphemy and undermining the very limits of the people’s values and religious foundation,” Arguelles said in a letter to the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board. But Msgr. Pedro Quitorio, spokesman for the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said banning the movie would likely only stir more interest. “We neither oppose nor endorse its showing. We don’t want to ride the commercialization and marketing hype because we know that this is all marketing strategy and the bottom line here is money—it’s not religion,” Quitorio said.

Christian author Brian McClaren seems to side with Msgr. Quitorio. Says McClaren, "We need to ask ourselves why the vision of Jesus hinted at in Dan Brown's book is more interesting, attractive, and intriguing to these people than the standard vision of Jesus they hear about in church. Why would so many people be disappointed to find that Brown's version of Jesus has been largely discredited as fanciful and inaccurate, leaving only the church's conventional version? Is it possible that, even though Brown's fictional version misleads in many ways, it at least serves to open up the possibility that the church's conventional version of Jesus may not do him justice?"

Various Sources, 07.05.06-10.05.06