Christianity Online: Response to <i>The Da Vinci Code</i> as Impression Management
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Christianity Online: Response to The Da Vinci Code as Imp ...

Chapter 2:  On Identifying Crisis Thresholds and Managing Impressions
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  • And generally, the financial viability of churches is dependent on their successes in building followers. The prosperity of religious organizations correlates with their membership numbers and characteristics, and it is no sin to suggest that the Christian goal of helping the poor cannot be managed by institutions that are themselves resource-starved. Thomas Woods, Jr., an associate editor of The Latin Mass Magazine, has argued that the Catholic Church would do well to recognize prevailing economic order as reality (Woods, 2004). While some claim the Catholic Church “doesn’t have the kind of deep pockets that many critics claim” (MacDonald, 2002), the existence of more than 1 billion persons affiliated with Roman Catholicism worldwide would seem to help the institution deflect poverty.7
  • The Besmirching of Religious and Secular Precepts. Literally dozens of individuals have written in defense of why the four canonical, Church-endorsed gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) of various credible Bible editions are sacrosanct—why they are “the True words made Holy,” exclusive of the so-called gnostic texts. Similarly, dozens of scholars have attacked Brown’s revisionist suggestions that Roman emperor Constantine “commissioned” a new Bible, omitting those gospels that spoke of Jesus’ human traits. Many Da Vinci opponents have been taken aback by the suggestion that the Council of Nicaea exercised political motives more than 300 years after the life of Jesus to “vote the man Holy.” Other critics decry Brown’s supposition that the early church patriarchy repressed women and subjugated their role, a pattern that he says exists to this day.
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