Left Behind vs. The Da Vinci Code: Let the Battle Royale Begin - Part 1

“All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.”
--Kurt Vonnegut on Alternet

I’ve been putting this review off for too long now – perhaps it was too much of a strange and traumatic reading experience for me to revisit right away. I needed to take some time and read grown-up books again. But alas, a promise is a promise, and I wouldn’t want my literary experiment to be in vain, so here goes…

If Vonnegut is right, that great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being, then reading Left Behind and The Da Vinci Code help to make life the bummer that it is. I did not enjoy reading either of these books. In the beginning, I took the bad prose, cardboard characters, and silly plot devices all in stride, realizing that I was sacrificing my reading pleasure for the greater cause of understanding two bizarre cultural phenomena. By the end, I was screaming for something, anything to read that would make me think or have an ounce of feeling for the characters.

Left Behind wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Left Behind benefits from the reader's low expectations. When I didn’t cringe at every sentence, I was pleasantly surprised. When it wasn’t completely unreadable, I was almost impressed. This, however, is the highest praise I can muster for this literary landmine. In a nutshell, the prose is horrendous, the characters less developed than those in video games, and the plot simply dreary and implausible.

Jon returned our copy to the library a few weeks ago, and I have a little too much self-respect to check it out on my own card, so much of my analysis will be from memory. Unfortunately, I am unable to regale you with some of the most groan-worthy of quotes to demonstrate the poor quality of the prose. I do distinctly remember a phrase about getting on the “ramp of the information superhighway” – need I say more?

Left Behind is, at best, a prologue for the subsequent volumes of the series, or, at worst, a tedious book in which virtually nothing happens. The novel opens with the mysterious disappearance of billions of people off the face of the earth – no dramatic build-up or back story here – which is naturally the Rapture of saved Christians and innocent children. We see the catastrophic events of the disappearances and their aftermath (plane crashes, traffic accidents, communication breakdowns, etc.) unfold from the perspective of airline pilot and Our Hero, Rayford Steele, who, moments after lusting after his stewardess, succumbs to pangs of remorse when he realizes that his wife and son are surely among the Raptured. (Although most of the world hasn’t figured it out yet, Rayford is certain from the get-go that the Rapture is the cause of the disappearances because, predictably, his wife, the Long-Suffering Irene, has been trying to save him for years.)

The beginning of the book was somewhat interesting in its exploration of the “what if” questions – should billions of people disappear all at once, what kind of disasters would that incur? The picture of chaos that the authors paint seems reasonable in the face of a global cataclysm, at least as viewed from the perspective of people in 1995; the confusion, destruction, and surprising lack of anguish ring hollow in light of this reader’s recollections of September 11.

In turn, we are introduced to the rest of the players: top journalist and Our Other Hero, Buck Williams; nondescript heroine and Rayford’s Little Girl, Chloe Steele; and anti-Christ and U.N. Diplomat, Nicholae Carpathia. The book showcases the parallel ascensions of the anti-Christ and the force for good that will counter him, the Tribulation Force (stop laughing, I swear I am not making this up). Of course, before Our Heroes can combat evil, they need to undergo sadly uncompelling and unspiritual conversions, hear the Theology for Dummies explanation of the Rapture, and witness the dastardly rise in power of Carpathia, whose seemingly benevolent plans for world domination eerily echo the Rapture story they’ve just heard. For his part, Carpathia, with his bewitching good looks and charming demeanor, must be unanimously elected world leader, move the U.N. headquarters to New Babylon (I’m serious), and some other anti-Christly things I can’t remember offhand. Are you with me? Okay, now we’re ready to move on to the real action – apparently in the sequels. Because that’s about it for this book (besides some weird super-spy stuff and explosions Buck goes through in London that never really seemed to fit with the rest of the book).

Left Behind fails as a novel because authors Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins know their intended audience too well. The book is written first and foremost for Christians who already believe that the end times are near and that the events described as the Rapture and Tribulation are a faithful interpretation of the Bible. Many of the plot devices in Left Behind are simply laughable – moving the U.N. to New Babylon, Israel’s miraculous salvation from the invading Russians (huh?) – but they make sense in light of a certain speculative reading of scripture, in which most readers are undoubtedly well-versed. Likewise, the novel’s explanation of the Rapture and the theology behind it is unconvincing in the narrative because the audience doesn’t need to be sold on the concept. Perhaps if I came from a religious background where the ideas and predictions in Left Behind were accepted doctrine, I wouldn’t find the book’s content so inadequate (that would just leave my objections to the plot, prose, characters, and dialogue…).

There is a certain smugness in the tone of Left Behind. Lahaye and Jenkins did not write this book to convert people to Christianity; they wrote it so that their theological and cultural kin can read it and smirk, “We were right.” When unborn babies are raptured from the womb, the authors are reaffirming their basis for a particular anti-abortion ethic. A few churchgoers are left behind, driving home the point that church attendance alone does not save a person. The Long-Suffering Irene dropped out of college after marrying Rayford to bear children and tend the home, demonstrating that she knows where a woman’s place is. While the characters’ conversion experiences are neither moving nor convincing, surprisingly, their questions as skeptics are portrayed believably (thus making it all the more satisfying when they leave their doubts behind). These references pop up just often enough that you can sense the authors slyly winking at the readers who agree with their every utterance.

Before reading Left Behind, I was not terribly familiar with the theological and historical background of premillenial dispensationalism, the notion upon which Lahaye and Jenkins’ fictional world is based. Premillenial dispensationalism is a fairly new idea in the history of Christian thought, developed by Englishman John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century. (Here are some general links about the topic.)

One source I’ve found particularly valuable on Left Behind’s theology is my new favorite blogger, the Slacktivist, who is analyzing Left Behind page by page (at this writing he is up to page 59) and pointing out what he considers the dangers of the authors’ worldview (“The only Bible where you'll find LaHaye's weird apocalyptic fantasies is a Scofield Reference -- and that's only in the convoluted and arbitrary footnotes below the text. Nowhere is this vision "laid out in the New Testament." It is the bastard child of "premillennial dispensationalism" -- a tortured and torturous hermeneutic that carves up Scripture like a veg-o-matic and functions as a kind of American evangelical cabala.”)

As interesting as the theological stew is from which the Left Behind world emerged, this premise is as close to religious as this novel gets. From my vantage point as a Christian reading a supposedly Christian book, I didn’t find anything spiritually, theologically, or morally redeeming about the novel at all. As I mentioned above, the characters’ religious conversions are tedious and detached, despite the fact that such an narrative device has the potential to be emotionally and spiritually moving. Their actions don’t seem to be inspired by faith and, other than Rayford Steele’s need to yammer on and on to convert his daughter, the characters don’t appear to change at all once they become Christians. God is absent, Jesus isn’t back yet, and the Holy Spirit is offstage. Jenkins and Lahaye reduce the mystery and wonder of having a relationship with an awesome and loving God to an overture to a gigantic cosmic fistfight between good and evil. Left Behind claims to be a Christian novel but instead uses the authority of a particular interpretation of the Bible as a launching point for a dreary and spiritually empty thriller.

Where Left Behind purports to be a thriller yet comes up short on the thrills, The Da Vinci Code succeeds in keeping the reader on the edge of her seat. You know the feeling you get when you start eating Doritos? The first chip or two is tangy, a refreshing zing of flavor, and you tell yourself you’ll only eat one or two. Four or five handfuls later, the inside of your mouth is a disgusting orange cheese coated mess, the chips sit like a mound of pure nutritional waste in the pit of your stomach, and you swear off the demon food for life. That’s kind of what it’s like to read The Da Vinci Code. It’s junk food for your brain. And The Da Vinci Code, like Left Behind, suffers from two-dimensional characters, implausible plot devices, a flimsy grasp of religious history and theology, and the intellectual and narrative shortcuts that result from telling readers what they already believe is true.

The gist of the convoluted and fast-paced plot is that, when the curator of the Louvre is murdered, brilliant and bland Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (I predict that Ben Affleck will play him in the movie) gets involved with the curator’s granddaughter, cryptographer Sophie Neveu, in an adventure uncovering the truth about Christianity, western art, the Holy Grail, and a secret society, the Priory of Sion. Like in the Nancy Drew novels I devoured as a kid (every chapter would end with a clue, a kidnapping, or a similarly suspenseful cliffhanger), the action in The Da Vinci Code never stops. Langdon and Sophie run around Paris, ducking the police and escaping narrow capture, all the while solving riddles that reveal the most astounding secret ever in western culture and history.

The puzzles and the background information leading up to the book’s major revelation all fall short of passing the laugh test when it comes to believability. Sophie is a skilled cryptographer, yet far too many of the book’s riddles are anagrams only a step above the newpapers’ Word Jumble (I actually solved two of the book’s puzzles before the characters, which is always a disappointment, and there is nothing more irritating than sitting around for a page and a half waiting for the characters to get it - it's kind of like watching Wheel of Fortune). Langdon has descended from Harvard’s ivory towers, yet pompously produces bibliographies of over fifty titles (gasp!) and makes ridiculous claims such as, “the one statement on which all academics agree is this.” (Okay, if you put a hundred academics in a room, you couldn’t even get all of them to agree on the existence of the room or the gravity that keeps them from floating around.) The action was often compelling, but I would find myself rolling my eyes even more than while reading Left Behind.

Like Lahaye and Jenkins, Dan Brown knows what people want to hear in a culture suspicious of authority and organized religion. And since so many readers are secretly satisfied to read a novel that undercuts Christianity in general and the already beleaguered Catholic Church in particular, Brown is happy to play fast and loose with the facts in creating a conspiracy theory so compelling that even some religious folks are doubting their faith. Brown’s genius lies in telling half-truths to establish his credibility before he makes up a whole bunch of crap.

In a nutshell, here it is, the astonishing truth that you were never told:

Jesus was not the Son of God or divine in any way. He was a mere mortal who married Mary Magdelene, settled down, and had some kids. The mendacious Catholic Church, led by Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea, obliterated all proof of the original Christian faith by outlawing gospels speaking of Christ's human traits and mandated Christ's divinity as affirmed by a tight council vote (“Hold on. You're saying Jesus' divinity was the result of a vote?” “A relatively close vote at that.”) The Church has spent the last 2,000 years suppressing the knowledge that Mary Magdelene, as the “chalice that bore the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ....the womb that bore the lineage, and the vine from which the sacred fruit sprang forth,” is the Holy Grail, symbolic of the “lost goddess” and the “sacred feminine,” whose worship Christianity eradicated. Of course, Leonardo Da Vinci and lots of other famous dead white guys have been members of the Priory of Sion, the secret society charged with preserving this truth throughout the ages.

Entertaining as it may be, much of Brown's theory is fictitious, exaggerated, or outright lies. The shell of the story - that Constantine convened the Council of Nicea in 325 - is correct (for some background on the Council of Nicea, read here and here). The content of the Council is where the fudging begins. Brown reports that aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon, including the divinity of Jesus. More accurately, the Council addressed the issue of the heresy of Arianism, the idea that Jesus was the Son of God but that God and the Son had distinct yet similar substances. The Council officially rejected Arianism's claims that Jesus was subordinate to the Father and a created rather than begotten being, and affirmed the accepted Christian Trinitarian belief in as expressed in the Nicene Creed. (As far as the close vote on Christ's divinity, if you consider something like 318 to 3 a close vote, then Brown's right. The rest of us might consider such a vote near unanimity.) You can see why so many people have been convinced that there is truth to Brown's tales - some of it is based in fact, the exaggerations and fabrications sound believable when placed in a historical context, and most people, religious or not (myself included), just don't know enough about early Christian history to know when we're being played.

In addition to Brown's fun detours with history, his grasp of theology is shaky as well. A central piece of the book's conspiracy is that the Church has to keep Jesus' humanity under wraps and propagate the lie about his divinity. Brown, however, seems to miss one of the most significant beliefs of Christianity - that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. As a fully human being, Jesus would have been completely capable of fathering children without affecting orthodox Christian beliefs at all. One New Testament scholar at Dallas Theological Seminary explains: “…if Jesus had been married it wouldn’t touch the theology one bit. Jesus is 100 percent human. Had he been married and had he had children, all it would have done would have been to reflect his engagement with his humanity – but I just don’t think historically there’s any evidence that Jesus was married. But the important point in relationship to the novel is, had Jesus been married, the church wouldn’t have had any reason to suppress that knowledge.”

I also found it interesting that in a novel where the Catholic Church suppresses the “sacred feminine,” there is no mention of the role of the Virgin Mary, the mother of God, in the Catholic faith. (As for other fictions and distortions, Christianity Today has a good round-up of articles debunking The Da Vinci Code, including articles on deciding the Biblical canon and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels.) All of this leads me to believe that Dan Brown isn't really interested in the role of the feminine goddess, or Christian theology, or even who Jesus was; his concern is with undermining the authority of the Church. Brown and, I would argue, many of his readers as well have a problem with the authority of a tradition or scripture or a religious body. People who buy into these authorities are nothing more than dupes. And if our faith is built on nothing but flawed authority, all it takes is a hot-shot symbologist and a spunky cryptographer to start the domino effect that will send the foundations of Christian belief tumbling. The Da Vinci Code was hugely popular because it tapped into the distrust of religious authority that is pervasive in some segments of our culture, and reminded distrustful readers that they were too smart to fall into that trap.

Left Behind and The Da Vinci Code both deal with authority and, rather than trying to persuade people to their vision of who has or doesn’t have authority, the books affirm the biases their readers already hold. Lahaye and Jenkins use their fictional narrative to support the authority of their version of biblical exegesis, while Brown spins his tale to undermine the authority of the Christian Church. (It’s similar to the phenomena of Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ, where moviegoers’ experiences depend on what preconceived opinions they bring to the films. These films are arguably ineffective at winning converts to their points of view, but respectively succeed at tearing down the authority of the Bush administration and affirming the authority of the Christian faith.) In Left Behind, the characters who believed in the authors' worldview were either Raptured up to heaven or let in on the real truth behind world events, while eternal punishment awaited the rest. In The Da Vinci Code, the characters who believed in the author's worldview were also let in on the real truth behind world events, while the rest of the world wallows in the darkness of its own ignorance. Both books seemingly aim to do nothing more than stroke the egos of the authors' intellectual comrades and, to be honest, I find that a boring read.

Perhaps I am a freak when it comes to reading. I actually like to be challenged by literature. I don’t need a book to tell me that I have it all figured out; I’d prefer a book that makes me question my assumptions, knowledge, and biases, so that even if my original opinions are affirmed in the end, it’s not blindly and without introspection. If you’re a freak as well and would like to read an excellent science fiction novel about faith and trials rather than a supposedly Christian book that doesn’t feature God or anything spiritual, I’d recommend The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. And if you’re interested in reading about conspiracy theories and secret societies but want more than an intellectual lightweight like The Da Vinci Code has to offer, you should check out Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

That’s my wrap-up. Jon, your turn…