In my little corner of the deep south, when we see someone expending great amounts of effort for something that has no chance of success, we often remark that they look like a dog chasing his tail. What an apt description that is of the current frantic effort by the Religious Right to suppress or discredit the movie version of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. It's a little bit like closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out. The book's been out there for several years. There are millions of copies in circulation, in dozens of languages. The damage, if there is any, has already been done.
What is all the excitement about, anyway? Surely no twenty-first century adult believes that there are no skeletons in the Church's historical closet. You don't have to be a very profound student of history to call to mind the barbarism of the Crusades, the unspeakable cruelties of the Inquisition, or the pattern of persecution and suppression with which the Church has confronted its original thinkers, such as Galileo. In my lifetime, the indifferent silence offered by the Church to the Holocaust, the complicity of much of white Southern Protestantism with Jim Crow laws, and the recent sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic clergy all cry out that the Church is a fallible, imperfect human institution. That is a fact, and no amount of spin or damage control is going to make that go away.
I just don't understand what the fuss is about. Would the discovery that Jesus had married and had children really change anything? Why on earth would his teachings be any more or less true or relevant just because he may have had sex with a woman?
And it is, after all, the teachings that matter, isn't it? The Church seems to want to bury their simple truth under the weight of doctrine and superstition. Do we really need the hocus pocus of the "Virgin Birth" to make us understand the truth of "Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth."? Those profoundly fundamental teachings remain there, shining through all the gunk that the Church has piled up around them. It really doesn't make any difference in the end who the original teacher was, or what his or her sexual experience was.
At its best, the Church is a powerful force for good in the community. Most of the congregations in our area have reached out in a very generous and caring way to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, providing aid and assistance both to refugees who have found their way to central Alabama, and to those who remain in the affected areas. That work has been sustained and effective, beginning that awful week last September right after the storm struck, and continuing even now, nine months later. I celebrate that effort, and I honor those who have taken the initiative to lead it. That has to be a better use of the Church's time and resources than wringing our hands over a summer movie.
Thomas R. Borden Montgomery, Alabama May 28, 2006