HOW DARK THE CON OF MAN Continued
WHY ARE THESE LIES SO EASILY BELIEVED?
Why then are so many people so easily misled? Amy Wellborn suggests that most people know very little about the historical origins of Christianity, so they are “easy targets for a cleverly packaged, sensationalized set of lies.” Carl Olson suggests several traits of postmodern culture that make a book like “The Da Vinci Code” attractive: a relativistic attitude toward truth and religion; a dislike for religious authority; a fondness for conspiracy-based claims; a belief that reality is malleable and can be customized to each person’s wishes.
Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, takes a more ironic view: “A cultural anthropologist, a hundred years from now, will doubtless find, in the unprecedented success of ‘“The Da Vinci Code”,’ during the time of a supposed religious revival, that, in the Elvis mode, what a lot of Americans mean by spirituality is simply an immense openness to occult superstitions of all kinds.”
IS “THE DA VINCI CODE” ANTI-CATHOLIC?
“I have been educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic virtues.” (Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad)
Let’s begin by admitting that anti-Catholicism is as American as, well, Mark Twain. Of course Twain was more honest about himself and everything else than most of us are. The Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., remarked to the American Catholic historian, John Tracy Ellis, “I regard the prejudice against your church as the deepest bias in the history of the American people.” The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, used to describe the anti-Catholicism of a few decades ago as the last socially acceptable form of bigotry in the United States. Such witnesses can’t easily be waved aside.
Catholics in this country have even had a Dan Brown-style experience before this present one. In 1836 “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk” was first published. It was a sensational success, and stayed in print for many years. One mob even burned down a convent school, partly because of that book. It took the dedicated investigative work of a Protestant newspaper editor, Colonel William Stone, to debunk the book’s lurid portrayal of the decadent goings-on between priests and nuns, and the murder of their infant children. The Colonel did his work very well, but generations of readers continued to buy the book and believe it.
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