"They came in masses: teachers, social workers, even the odd biblical scholar, filling the 420-seat Walters Art Museum audi-torium and spilling into the hallway. Some drove for an hour or more on a work night to watch five people sit on stage and talk about a book. Such is the appeal of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's fictional treatise." So begins the front-page article of the Today section of the Baltimore Sun for Monday, October 24, 2004, referring to a program entitled "Cracking The Da Vinci Code: Four Perspectives on a Literary Phenome-non," a collaboration among the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, Goucher College, and the Walters Art Museum that took place the previous Thursday evening.

"Cracking The Da Vinci Code" brought together a panel of scholars to reflect on the question, "What makes The Da Vinci Code so phenomenally popular?" Joining me on the panel, which was moderated by Goucher College President Sanford Unger, were: Gail Husch, Professor of Art History at Goucher College; Richard Leson, Zanvyl Krieger Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum; and Jonathan Pevsner, Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and an expert on the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci.

For months following the publication of Dan Brown's book, people would ask me, "Have you read The Da Vinci Code? Is it true?" At first, I would just shake my head and say, "No, it's not true." But after a while, I began reflecting on the nature of the question. These were intelligent folks. Surely they knew that a book purchased from the fiction section of their local bookstore was not true. Why were so many so willing to believe that a work of fiction is true? Here is what I have concluded.

For the past forty years, Americans have witnessed the erosion, if not the utter collapse, of every commanding public moral authority. From Richard Nixon's Watergate to Oliver Stone and the countless conspiracy theories regarding Ken-nedy's assassination; from the war in Viet Nam and the Mei Li massacre to Enron and Tyco; from Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to the 2004 pre-presidential imbroglio involving CBS, Dan Rather, and President Bush's National Guard service; from Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Baker to the priest pedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, no longer does any public figure command our attention or deserve our trust solely on the basis of the office or position he or she holds -- not the President of the United States nor any politi-cian, not bi-partisan investigative commissions nor corporate executives; not televangelists nor bishops nor generals. No one is any longer above suspicion. We are in the midst of the collapse of a public consensus regarding who it is that we should trust. We watch the news and read the newspaper with a not-so-still, small voice in our heads droning the mantra taught us by Mulder and Scully over ten years of The X-Files: "Trust no one."

The air of public discourse has become so polluted by dis-claimers and retractions, by lying and cheating, by the rampant abuse of power and scandal of every sort, by the utter disregard for the public's trust, that as a society we find ourselves somewhere between total disillusionment and a deep-seated longing to be able to trust again the word of our civil servants and religious leaders. In short, we are ripe to believe that a work of fiction is true precisely because we have nothing else in which to believe. Everything that we thought was fact turns out to be riddled with fiction.

Thus, I contend that the extraordinary success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code can be explained, in large measure, in this way: Forty years after Watergate, Americans view public figures through the lens of massive conspiratorial cover-ups motivated by vested self-interest. We interpret our world using a hermeneutic of suspicion. Wearing such interpretive glasses, we read The Da Vinci Code and believe it to be true because conspiracies are all around us ... and where better to locate a conspiracy than at the intersection of murder, intrigue, and a religion that has itself elevated secrecy and the oppression of women to an art form?

The question I pose is this: What happens to us -- as individ-uals, as a society, as communities of faith -- in such a climate? Trusting fewer and fewer people, we have separated ourselves from our institutions and our traditions. We have become the sole arbiters of what is "true" and "not true," of what we are to "believe" and what we no longer "believe." Living out of a deep-seated suspicion that "they all lie," we look increasingly to ourselves -- and to our own experience -- to confirm or to decide what is "true."

Of the many challenges this presents, let me focus on just one, namely, the challenge to our respective religious com-munities. Both Judaism and Christianity make a similar claim regarding their foundational or master story: Each rests on historical revelation. That is, Jews claim that God was impli-cated, in some way, in what happened at Sinai; Christians claim that God was present, in some unique way, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. At Sinai and in Jesus, God has "entered" history to disclose something de-finitive regarding what God desires of and for us humans and for the world that we inhabit. Religions that are grounded in historical revelation for their identity and their raison d’etre, however that process is understood, rest on the profound yet simple assertion that those who precede us are trustworthy bearers of the truths of our traditions. Both Judaism and Chris-tianity treasure their sacred texts and traditions, proclaiming them to be absolutely worthy of our trust. We can believe them to be "true" precisely because we place our trust in those who have come before us.

Like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is a dangerously slippery slope precisely because it fuses a sacred story with artistic license. By so doing, it creates such a skillful blend of "fact" and "fiction" that many a reader has difficulty distinguishing one from the other. Once they have accepted this fiction-as-fact premise, readers come to believe that they have actually discovered something that has been intentionally withheld from them about the circum-stances and meaning of Jesus' death or about the life of Leonardo, Jesus, and Mary of Magdala.

Few, I think, would contend that The Da Vinci Code is a lit-erary masterpiece. It is, perhaps, a compelling beach book, replete with secret codes that explain the evil in our world and covert operatives willing to risk even their lives to keep the truth from us. But in the final analysis, The Da Vinci Code is a quick fix to a deep longing, a pat on the back that confirms in its readers precisely what we have suspected all along: Pow-erful forces continue to conspire, and will stop at nothing to keep the truth from us. How is this anything but junk food for the soul ... delicious while partaking of it, but full of empty calories?

Dan Brown's book invites us to doubt. Indeed, its plot depends upon our willingness to doubt. But what if we were to apply this "invitation to doubt" to The Da Vinci Code itself? Would that doubt propel us back to our respective religious traditions to undertake the oftentimes arduous task of sustained study? If we were willing to engage our sacred stories and traditions with critical rigor and steady hope, would we perhaps redis-cover in and through them something or someone worthy of our trust?