April 21, 2004

So here I am, having finished The Da Vinci Code, a tome I’d been avoiding until my book club (made up of local ministers and involved lay people of all denominations) chose this stinker for the month of April. I’ve read Holy Blood, Holy Grail and some dozen or so of its spin-offs, and I pretty much have this “Jesus bonked Mary Magdalene and so spawned the Merovingian dynasty and the Church has covered it up for centuries” stuff memorized by now.
The appeal in this “theory” (for lack of a more demeaning word) mirrors the appeal in those equally atrocious Left Behind books—that is, the desire among people for certainty. The quest for a grand conspiracy, as Umberto Eco has noted, is essentially the quest for God.
Think about it. Those believers of the fundamentalist stripe behave much the same way as conspiracy nuts. It’s all about certainty and assurance. For the fundamentalist, God is in control and what you do, provided you believe enough, is in accord with the will of God, sanctioned from on high. God controls all. For the conspiracy nut, someone controls all, be it the Freemasons or the Priory of Sion or the Council on Foreign Relations or those damned pesky Jews. Conspiracy theories get bigger and bigger—go from lone gunman assassinations to plots to place the entire human race under the dominion of an alien race (often the same alien race who created us)—until they eventually become veritable frameworks for God, lacking only the divine spark.
There is the controlling force (God, the Freemasons) and those who work to defeat said force (Satan, the Catholic Church)—the only difference is in who is right and who is wrong.
Too, fundamentalism of all stripes tends to result in conspiracy theories. For fundamentalist Catholics, a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy gave us Vatican II, with all its modernist abominations. For fringe evangelicals, comic books are a component of the New Age conspiracy to subvert Christianity in America. The Bible Code managed to please both at once. Anything which might disprove their worldview is seen as a part of the conspiracy itself. Like dinosaur bones. Satan planted those, you know.
But I belabor my point.
Both fundamentalisms and conspiracy theories are the manifestations of certainty. I don’t mean any old sense of certainty, but rather the religious and philosophical certainty which will admit no unknowns. The complete inability to recognize a valid point-of-view in someone from outside the group—because you and your ilk have the truth, whole and complete.
Certainty is grounded in fact, and boy, do we like our facts here in America. Most professors I talk to really take issue with their students clamoring only for the facts, for what is going to be on the next test, failing to understand that whether the course be history or biology or anthropology or English, the end result should be a mind better honed to think critically. When you get down to it, all academic disciplines have as their ends that good old fashioned clear thinking that is no longer in vogue.
We like our facts. We like our scientific method. And we truly do believe in that grand unifying theory that will explain everything. As a friend of mine put it, conspiracy theories can be seen as the end result of the scientific method put on steroids. Seeking an explanation for one localized phenomenon (e.g. assassination of a president), they soon branch out until the entirety of human existence (and some non-human) can be explained under the auspices of a grand unifying theory bringing together the Knights Templar, Comte St. Germain, Rasputin, alien species, George Washington, Mandean Gnostics, Jesus, and more. It all operates very scientifically, doesn’t it? Theories for phenomenon observed only indirectly by their effects upon certain objects, be that phenomenon gravity or the Priory of Sion. And so of course it must be true, right? Is all of this a mere coincidence?
But fundamentalists, too, have their own scientific method. Why do you think they work so hard to ground the Bible in the language of modern science and persist in showing how Scripture can be “proven?” As if we might conduct some sort of laboratory test that will say for certain just what sort of colors were on Joseph’s coat. They dismiss all attempts to approach the Bible as a literary work, with all the tools incumbent in literary theory which have helped us understand Scripture, because their God is not a God who works through the conduit of Man, for mankind in inherently flawed. Their God is the God of fact, not perception; the God of certainty, not ambiguity; the God of literalism, not literature. And of course, the Bible must be true in everything that it says, right? True in the scientific sense of the word, not the moral or philosophical or theological sense, for we know it because the Bible says so.
The fact that, right now, The Da Vinci Code and Glorious Appearing sit at the top of the bestseller lists does not bode well for our American religious consciousness. It’s worrisome enough to make me ponder a possible conspiracy in the publishing world, an attempt to rob us slowly of the last vestiges of higher thought possessed by the people of this nation. But then I shake that notion out of my head and go back to slogging through the day, reminding myself that to think like a hammer is to see only nails wherever I look and that whenever I imagine a conspiracy, I create a “them” out there somewhere—and the greatest blasphemy is to see someone, anyone, as another one of “them,” a nameless person outside the love of God.
Because I, too, am tempted by conspiratorial ways of thinking, I have to remind myself that love is not the weapon with which we fight the conspiracy, but rather love is that which makes us more human. And that is our calling—to love each other, to know each other as human beings, each one of whom is loved by God. In the face of that, no conspiracy—whether rooted in Freemasonry or fundamentalism—can survive.