Entertainment Theology by Barry Taylor

Author:Barry Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Retrolution: Postmodern Gothic

Life is something unfathomable, ever-changing, mysterious, and every attempt to confine it within an artificial, abstract structure inevitably ends up homogenizing, regimenting, standardizing and destroying life, as well as curtailing everything that projects beyond, overflows, or falls outside the abstract project. What is a concentration camp, after all, but an attempt by utopians to dispose of those elements which do not fit in?

Vaclav Havel, On Evasive Thinking

God is nowhere, God is now here.

God is now here, God is nowhere.

Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus

Darkness has more Divinity for me,

It strikes thought inward, it drives back the soul

To settle on Herself, our Point supreme.

Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Seventeen million people have read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code,68 a tale of murder, mystery, and intrigue, in the first two years of its publication and millions more have seen the movie. It is the story of an American symbologist, Robert Langdon, who while on holiday in Paris is summoned to the Louvre late at night for a meeting with the curator of the museum. Upon arrival, Langdon is shocked to discover the death of the curator, whom he finds clutching a baffling cypher. Langdon begins to solve the complex riddles contained in the code, discovering a trail of hidden clues in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. As a symbologist, Langdon sees things differently, and the clues that lay dormant in Leonardo’s most famous paintings, right before the public’s very eyes, are revealed by this new form of detective.

The Da Vinci Code is a spiritual story disguised as a murder mystery. The heart of the story is the discovery of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, whose past members, along with Leonardo, included Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and other key figures of European history. This society is engaged in a secret mission, which, if revealed, would threaten the very existence of Christianity. As the story unfolds, there are notes and fact pages alongside the narrative that contain verifiable historical information on the works of art, the existence of certain societies, and other “secrets hidden before our very eyes.” To say more would ruin the enjoyment of anyone who has not yet read it, and the telling of the story is not the ultimate point here. A veritable cottage industry of books seeking to refute many of the claims of The Da Vinci Code, from a number of upset Christians who see in this yet another attempt to destabilize the Christian faith and its claims to spiritual ascendancy, has arisen in the wake of the book’s phenomenal success.

There is also something reflected in the success of this book other than its dubious historical claims, which along with a number of other developments leads us into a discussion of another dynamic of a people’s religion. This dynamic falls into two groupings, both of which fall under the same rubric. I will use the terms: the rise of the gothic, and the new medievalism. They are two distinct versions of a similar response to the present situation.

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