November, 2006 Calendar In This Issue: Money Messages A Money Autobiography Winter Family Retreat Half-Day Prayer Retreat Belief: It's something Americans shop for Advent The Susan Tree For All Souls Day St. Augustine's Columbarium Chapel & Niches

(Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from an article about the film "The Da Vinci Code" that appeared in the L.A. Times on May 20, 2006. It raises interesting questions about the nature of belief in American culture.)

The attitudes that make Americans so "religious" are the same ones that have made them such a ready market for the "Da Vinci" flimflam. This country is suffused with religious sentiments and impulses, but Americans are abysmally - even willfully - short on religious knowledge. All the periodic hand-wringing over this country's crisis of faith or creeping secularism notwithstanding, the problem with Americans is not that they don't believe anything; it's that so many think they can believe anything - and that believing one thing doesn't preclude belief in another.

You can't go to a dinner party nowadays without encountering somebody who describes himself as "spiritual" – whatever that means. (Tell the truth: Haven't you ever wanted to throttle somebody who tells you how they made over their yoga studio to include a "meditation altar" with crystals, Buddha and Virgin of Guadalupe icon?) Americans are religious because they've come to treat belief as an adjunct to the consumer society, sort of like the potato chip aisle in the local grocery.

Brown's claims for his book and, by extension, the film adaptation belongs to a strong new current in American life – the culture of assertion, which increasingly pushes logical argument out of our public conversation. According to this schema, things are true because I believe they are true and you have to respect that, because it's what I believe. Thus, the same sensibility most likely to take offense at this film – that of the religious assertionists – is the same one that makes things like creationism an issue in our schools and the demands of biblical literalism a force in our politics. Brown and his foolishness are, in fact, a part of this same culture of assertion and not of some wider secular one.

Kevin Phillips, the Republican political strategist who devised the GOP's Southern strategy in 1968, has written a great deal recently about the culture of assertion's infiltration of his party's politics. "Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq – widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon, the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations for fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research …. No other world power in modern memory has become captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science."

Not to mention the demands of classical logic.

The bottom line is that faith-based credulity and religious ignorance have sent Dan Brown and, despite bad reviews, probably Sony Pictures laughing all the way to the bank. Unfortunately, when it comes to the way those same qualities act on our politics and national life, the joke is on all of us.