davinci and mclaren and the church

(pardon me if this sounds too much like a paper--i just finished writing a 50 pager) Poaching back from Andy's poach. I think all the comments are insightful and thought provoking. You (plural) seem to be pointing to an important underlying framework for McLaren's article. There are two things going on here: (1) a conversation about a popular book, regarding why it's popular; (2) a criticism of the Church. As C.S. Lewis used to say, get nervous when you start criticizing the Church as a whole. It's much more important than we know. First of all, it's just plain false to say (as McLaren hints and others have said outright) that the popularity of Da Vinci Code (DVC) illustrates the ambivalence people in this country have toward religion. This country is by far both the most religious, in some bland sense, and the most churched. I've been to cities in Europe where there are no churches within a reasonable distance of the city center. I've been to neighborhoods where old beautiful cathedrals are boarded up or, like in Newcastle, England, made into nightclubs, for crying out loud. So if there's one thing that we're not afraid of in this country--a country afraid of many things--its religion. The popularity of Da Vinci Code must come from something else. Second, I'm not sure how to think about Christianity--about following Jesus--without thinking in terms of particular institutions. It's the case that we talk about following Jesus independently of Christianity (just me and my Bible), but what we really mean when we talk this way is that we're not committed to any particular labeled group of people. We feel that we are free to pick and choose between being Baptist, Presbyterian or non-denominational megachurch. Or, best of all, "Emergent." But this ability to choose doesn't mean that we're free from constraints. We still "convert" from varieties of Christianity that are seen as substantially socially different from one another--from Lutheran to Catholic or Episcopal to Eastern Orthodox, for instance. Some historians talk about the Protestant reformation as a switch from a "body of believers" to a "body of beliefs". But I don't think this can be entirely true. Our beliefs are formed by our bodies--our own and the bodies of others. We think and act a lot like the people who we're around. We oppose ourselves in word, thought, and deed to those that think or act or look substantially differently than ourselves. And then we go further--judging these thoughts and actions by a moral code, labeling them right and wrong. Or structuring the whole system of right and wrong so they look just like our beliefs and thoughts and actions--those of our communities, I mean. I think what Zena and others are trying to get at, however, is a mere Christianity that we can all consent to. And it is this mere Christianity (being like Jesus or whatever) that we should demonstrate to others. I largely agree with these thoughts, as long as we're talking about relationships in the Christian Church. We should be focusing on our agreements rather than on our differences. But when we're talking about the face we should to show to those outside of any Christian community, I'm not sure that there is a set of doctrinal "basics" that we should lay out before them. (Of course, this is not what Z was saying--but I do think it is part of the conversation surrounding the Emergent Church: just get to the basics.) If being a Christian was essentially about having a right set of beliefs--which is how it was explicitly taught to me and how the majority of evangelicalism talks about Christianity--then we should be worried about having exactly the right model and method of evangelism. It's not just about beliefs, however. It's about communities. Communities and who controls them. McLaren gets it right when he says that what non-Christians (and many Christians) find repugnant about organized Christianity is the clearly unethical or even immoral practices that are part of the community of believers--sexual abuses of priests, cheating televangelists, authoritarian pastors. But I don't think that's primarily what makes Da Vinci Code so popular. DVC tells us a plausible half-truth. It is at least half-true that there are aspects of the lives of Jesus, the Apostles, and the other members of the early church that the later Church has traditionally kept out of the public eye. These things are "exposed" from time to time--witness the hubbub over the Dead Sea Scrolls, the "falsifications" of the Turin Shroud, the "James, brother of Jesus" Ossuary, etc., or even the "scandals" in the late Middle Ages when pieces of the True Cross or body parts of saints were found not to be legitimate. The reason these things are so appealing to those inside and outside of the Church is because they cut at the notion of authority that has been attributed to the community of believers from the very beginning. They (i.e., the ideas attacking the authenticity of the Church) implicitly set up the importance of the individual--the reader of Da Vinci Code, for instance--as an authority unto themselves. "Everyone their own Pope," was the battlecry of the Reformation popularizers (though not the reformers themselves). And this is the legacy of evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, and every offshoot of Christianity that isn't either Catholicism or Orthodoxy. As I heard someone on NPR say when reviewing Brown's book, "The only socially acceptable form of prejudice today is Catholic-bashing." So McLaren has it half-right. The Da Vinci Code makes us feel better about not being subject to the authority of the Church--a church that we have all kinds of reasons to mistrust, certainly, because it is made up of corrupt people and has exercised its influence on behalf of all kinds of terrible atrocities. But it makes us feel better by tearing down the authority of the Body of Christ and elevating (implicitly) the Church of Self. What does this mean for the Church? I think it means that we need to be aware of the consumerism that's part of Protestantism and the Emerging church movement, for instance. In as much as we can select the portions of our faith practices that we enjoy/find powerful and collect them together under one roof, we need to be aware that this is part of that individualistic/consumeristic streak of our times rather than a throwback to the "true original Church". It is choosing a community of people who think substantially the same way as ourselves about these beliefs. It's choosing to take certain parts of Christianity that we like and marginalizing the rest. In saying this, I don't mean to imply that we should all become Catholic or Orthodox or Reformed or something like that. Nor do I mean that if we only had more authoritarian churches that we'd be better off. I just think that we should suspect the entire concept that it's ideas that we're primarily responsible for believing. Christianity is a commitment to a community as well as a God who is being worshipped by that community. What books like DVC are playing into is our deep-seated dislike of really being responsible to a community, complete with authority structure. We like to choose who we want to be around every day of the week. We liked to be liked, to be chosen by others. DVC shows us that, when it comes down to it, the Church isn't the final arbiter. We are, in this life, and--if Brown is right and Jesus was just like any other guy--perhaps in the next. We're willing to take our Jesus faith as far as the marketplace and Sunday morning. Can we make it further with this? Beyond a set of beliefs to a set of practices and a community of believers?