Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

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How is Da Vinci Code Changing People’s Religious Views?

May 15, 2006

Spiritual Musings

Barna did research on the book, The Da Vinci Code.  I found sev­eral of the find­ings interesting:

  • Roughly 45 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have read the book — 1 in every 5 which makes it the most widely read book with a spir­i­tual theme other than the Bible
  • Only 5% said that the book changed any of their beliefs or reli­gious perspectives

“Before read­ing The Da Vinci Code  peo­ple had a full com­ple­ment of beliefs already in place, some firmly held and oth­ers loosely held,â€? explained George Barna, the author of numer­ous books about faith and cul­ture. “Upon read­ing the book, many peo­ple encoun­tered infor­ma­tion that con­firmed what they already believed. Many read­ers found infor­ma­tion that served to con­nect some of their beliefs in new ways. But few peo­ple changed their pre-existing beliefs because of what they read in the novel. And even fewer peo­ple approached the book with a truly open mind regard­ing the con­tro­ver­sial mat­ters in ques­tion, and emerged with a new the­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tive. The book gen­er­ates con­tro­versy and dis­cus­sions, but it has not rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way that Amer­i­cans think about Jesus, the Church or the Bible.â€?

But what I also found inter­est­ing was this quote:

“On the other hand,â€? the researcher con­tin­ued, “any book that alters one or more the­o­log­i­cal views among two mil­lion peo­ple is not to be dis­missed lightly. That’s more peo­ple than will change any of their beliefs as a result of expo­sure to the teach­ing offered at all of the nation’s Chris­t­ian churches com­bined dur­ing a typ­i­cal week.â€?

Ouch, that hurts.  But I believe it is prob­a­bly pretty accurate.

I have heard Josh McDow­ell say that this story only feeds skep­ti­cism.  I am more con­cerned about how it affects Chris­tians than those out­side the faith.  I think Brown does a good job of mix­ing in fic­tion with fact and it is deal­ing with Church his­tory which I believe most Chris­tians are not well acquainted with. I also fear that it is more of a sub­con­scious thing that Chris­tians will have some doubts regard­ing how we got the Bible in its present form and things very sub­tle that will plant seeds of doubt and skep­ti­cism in their heart.

I am inter­ested to see what is going to hap­pen.  My prayer is that this movie will give us a chance to talk about Christ and expose the fic­tion in the story. I have been think­ing about it a lot the past sev­eral months as I have worked on GodSquad.com.  There is a spe­cial sec­tion on respond­ing to The Da Vinci Code that I put together and have been evolv­ing to pre­pare for this week’s release of the movie.

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