Selling his brand of salvation: the novel The Da Vinci Code not only attacks the basic tenets of Christianity but promotes a religious outlook based on free sex.

Before Dan Brown penned his fictional work, The Da Vinci Code, most of the world was happily ignorant of his existence. Having written other books few people had read or even heard of, he hit upon the idea that has made him a phenomenally wealthy man. The book is now the subject of a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks.

When the book emerged, it was, of course, a sensation. Reviewers loved it. The cognoscenti were amazed. Feminists got the vapors. With the movie, the "buzz" was even more. However, critics trashed the film. Early reports from Cannes had the audience of critics laughing at inappropriate moments and booing at the end, and the Boston Globe's Peter Brunette, speaking for many critics, said the film was "almost as bad as the book."

Yet the success of the book and the movie aren't problems in and of themselves. We should wish all novelists such success; we might then do away with the unconstitutional federal agencies that subsidize writers who can't sell their work. Nor is the problem their literary and cinematic quality. On one level, like other novels, it may be worth reading or seeing in the sense that novels may be entertaining or provide a good story. You take them to the beach, read them, then toss them in the trash can on your way to shower off the sand. Brown's book is what it is, a racing, thumping potboiler.

However, on another level, The Da Vinci Code is just another novel. It is fiction. But in another profound sense, it isn't and that's the real problem with the book. It claims to be true, using a murder mystery to weave one unambiguous and one partly veiled theme into a long exposition of bogus history. The book explicitly and falsely states that Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular are anti-woman and anti-sex, and further, that the whole Christian story is a fable. It flatly states that Jesus Christ was not God incarnate.

Far from being an innocent work of fiction, The Da Vinci Code is a carefully crafted anti-Christian apologia for feminism and free sex.

The Story

As thrillers go, it isn't that bad. The book isn't high literature, but Brown is a good raconteur. The tale doesn't end until the last sentence of the last page. Story is, a famous symbologist from Harvard, Robert Langdon, is in Paris and becomes enmeshed in a murder at the Louvre Museum. The victim is a member of the Priory of Sion, a secret society that guards a 2,000-year-old secret: Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and spawned a line of French royalty. The Catholic Church knows this truth and has attempted, by murder most foul, to keep it a secret.

The action revolves around Langdon and a French cryptologist, the murder victim's granddaughter, Sophie Neveu. Together, the two decipher the so-called Da Vinci code, a sequence of clues, beginning with hidden messages the artist left in his paintings, which lead to the truth about Christianity. The most crucial of Da Vinci's paintings is the "Last Supper," in which Da Vinci supposedly revealed the true nature of the Holy Grail. The apostle traditionally thought to be St. John, Brown says, is really Mary Magdalene, and we don't see the chalice Christ used at the Last Supper because the Holy Grail is not a cup. The grail is really Mary Magdalene, or more specifically, her womb.

As the pair seek to unlock the Da Vinci code, Langdon and another character, a Grail expert, explain the "real" story of Christianity to young Sophie, who had witnessed her grandfather participating in a bizarre, pagan sexual ritual known as hieros gamos, which supposedly goes back to the ancient Egyptians. Brown reveals the underlying premise of his book--Jesus was a great prophet, but is not and was not God--in fits and spurts of dialogue as the two flee a "taurine" French detective. "The original feminist," Jesus chose Mary Magdalene to head the new religion, but Peter and the other apostles, jealous because of her intimacy with Jesus, forced her to flee to France. Brown even claims that few believed Jesus was God until the Emperor Constantine assembled the books of the Bible and settled the question of Jesus' divinity in the fourth century. The Christian Church is anti-woman and wiped out worship of goddesses and the "sacred feminine." The Priory of Sion, once led by Da Vinci, "a flamboyant homosexual," not only guards the secret of the Grail, but also protects the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene from assassins sent by the Vatican. Not incidentally, the Priory also practices hieros gamos. That's the polite way of saying Priory members partake in orgies. The architecture of old Christian churches, by the way, according to Brown, is full of pagan imagery, including doorways, arches, and other features crafted to resemble the external female reproductive anatomy.

Eventually, Brown's characters unbosom the historical point of the book, that Christianity is a falsehood. "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ," Brown writes, "is false." Moreover, the Church has oppressed women, kept us from worshipping the "sacred feminine," and turned sex into something dirty that must be cleansed and brought into the open.

If true, Christianity has failed miserably, given today's rampant promiscuity and pornography that celebrates deviant sex. Anyhow, the notion of the "sacred feminine" appears repeatedly throughout the book, along with the idea that Jesus wished us to worship Mary Magdalene as a goddess, partly by participating in orgies that fortify our spirituality.

Feminism and the Sexual Revolution

The main purpose of The Da Vinci Code, then, appears to be resurrecting feminism and reinvigorating the sexual revolution by suggesting that orgies are how God, or the goddess, wants human beings to satisfy their sexual desire. Promiscuity, you see, brings one closer to the goddess. It is "spiritually" elevating. Here, Brown simply repackages The Playboy Philosophy and glazes it with the patina of spirituality and religion.

Some time ago, columnist Joe Sobran wrote that all rebellion against the Catholic Church, ultimately, is sexual. If true, the message of The Da Vinci Code neatly fits Sobran's observation. Brown doesn't merely suggest that the Christian Church in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, hates sex, viewing it as dirty; he also invents the ultimate sexual rebellion: Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, marries Mary Magdalene and bears a child. The irony here, of course, is that Dan Brown's world of oddball sex makes no room for children because the purpose of the sex act is not procreation and the loving unity of spouses, but worshipping the sacred feminine. The object of human sexuality is physical gratification and putative spiritual enlightenment, with no thought given to fidelity, marriage, or procreation. Thus does Brown's vision of human sexuality, which includes orgies, crudely and viciously exploit women, who become mere objects for male gratification.

The inescapable subtext of the novel is that men must worship women, and they must worship them by abusing them as sexual objects. Hardly a book that is friendly to women, but such are Brown's skills with the pen that most women, whom one critic calls the target audience for the book, won't notice. That is because the book repeats the worn-out cliche that the Catholic Church, and Christian churches in general, hate, oppress, and exploit women.

Clearly, Brown is obsessed with sex. Again, he even suggests that some old Christian churches contain architecture created to resemble female anatomy.

No, It's Not History

Yet Brown's falsehoods are hardly relegated to the story itself. He opens with an astoundingly false claim: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals are accurate." That statement can only be true if one holds an elastic definition of "descriptions" and "accurate." Answering questions at his website about whether "the novel is true," he replies, "The Da Vinci Code is a novel and therefore a work of fiction. While the book's characters and their actions are obviously not real, the artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals depicted in this novel all exist." Yet on the same page, he writes, "The secret behind The Da Vinci Code was too well documented and significant for me to dismiss."

Of course, none of the "secret" nonsense in the book is "well-documented" because none of it can be documented. Historically speaking, The Da Vinci Code is false nearly to the last detail. Five minutes of research on the Internet proves that Brown is either lying when he claims to present solid history, or that he is willfully ignorant. The latter is unlikely, but again, Brown can't seem to decide whether he has written fiction or fact. As he told a National Geographic television special about the book: "I really thought I would disprove a lot of this theory about Mary Magdalene and holy blood and all of that. I became a believer."

But if the book is a work of fiction, what is there to believe?

The Movie

The tricky thing for Ron Howard was getting this theory, something on the order of tinfoil hats and dental fillings as radio transmitters, on celluloid. He pulled off the trick, albeit badly, and wisely omitted some of the outrightly anti-Christian remarks. He also excised the boilerplate leftist feminism, leaving out, for instance, the line that Jesus was "the original feminist." He even permits Professor Langdon to mount at least some defense of traditional Christian beliefs. More importantly, likely because a film is limited by length restrictions, Howard does not explore in depth Brown's theme of feminism and sexual revolution. The main point of the movie, as far as defining the themes of Brown's book, is denying the divinity of Christ, undermining the Bible, and defaming Christianity. Yet the film somewhat dilutes these points, and necessarily so given the pace of the story and the action that must be crammed into two hours.

Yet whatever Howard's success or failure in expounding Brown's hypothesis, unhappily for Howard, critics roundly denounced the film. A.O. Scott of the New York Times called it a "busy, trivial, inoffensive film," while Ann Hornaday, of the Washington Post, amusingly observed, "The most controversial thriller of the year turns out to be about as exciting as watching your parents play Sudoku."

What the Book Is

The Sudoku metaphor is apt, given the subject of the book and movie, which is deciphering codes and solving a puzzle. Yet the book and its reception are puzzling as well.

The Da Vinci Code is a shockingly successful literary effort that fails as a serious attack on Christianity. Yet Christians weak in their faith, and liberals who don't attend church, one survey showed, tend to believe its outlandish claims. Still, likelihood is, most Christians will reject Brown's propaganda for a simple reason. It is built upon monstrous falsehoods that, again, require a suspension of common sense. As the historian Stephen Ambrose observed about a controversial book some years back, if your common sense and knowledge of settled history tells you something can't possibly be true, then that something probably isn't true.

Those claims aside, the most worrisome aspect of the book is the ideology behind those easily falsifiable claims. Brown wants the reader to believe he has woven a fictional tale using historical fact, in much the same way that Jeff Shaara writes Civil War novels. Difference is, Brown builds a murder mystery on phony history. He then works in just enough authentic detail by throwing around an impressive array of names and dates, to make the history appear real, which permits him to mug the Christian faith. The book assails the essential Christian belief in the divinity of Christ, and calls Christianity a falsehood, yet also posits the Catholic Church as the principal villain in human history because it has murdered millions, globally, to propagate the faith, and murdered hundreds more on a smaller scale, to veil the "truth" about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This mass murder and deception over two millennia is ultimately rooted in the Catholic Church's hostility to women and its censorious attitude about sex, which is why goddess worship (feminism) and orgies are the liberating routes to true spirituality. Thus is the Catholic Church, and by extension the whole Christian faith, the cause of humanity's woes.

The book's critics have rightly observed that neither Brown nor Ron Howard, who produced the film, could have gotten away with a similar novel about Jews or Muslims, but that doesn't mean Brown wrote the book for spiritual or ideological reasons. Like all novelists, he wrote the book to make money. Howard made the movie ... to make money. Yet making money coincided with Brown's ahistorical, anti-Christian views. No one ever said, after all, you can't make millions of dollars while trashing the beliefs of millions of people giving you the money.