Fact conveyed through fiction -or not

After posting yesterday about the Da Vinci Code I came across this article which develops some of my concerns quite well. The article says: "Among inaccuracies they list: The characters' claims that belief in Jesus' divinity appeared in the fourth century rather than the first century; that the four New Testament Gospels became authoritative in the fourth century rather than the second century; and that the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic writings (deemed heretical by the church) contain the earliest Christian records -- though one Gnostic text does have some scholarly promoters.

"Da Vinci" also supposes that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired a royal Judeo-French bloodline that still exists -- and that sinister Christians suppressed information about this. The scenario comes from a 1982 book titled "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," which a New York Times reviewer called "rank nonsense." "
Just so.

Then to make things worse the author claims that these details are, in fact true; "At first, "Da Vinci" drew little religious opposition because people "didn't subject it to the same kind of scrutiny they would a nonfiction book," Garrett says. But when Brown told NBC that "absolutely all of it" is true, the Rev. Darrell Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary decided the novelist wasn't just having fun but was undermining Christianity. "

Bock has written a book refuting the 'factional' implied claims; it is called "Breaking the Da VInci Code". And apparently the RC's are publishing a book shortly called "The Da Vinci Hoax."

A lot of the article is about the Left Behind series -somehow I can't get as worked up about it; yes it is a publishing phenomenon -but is that so in the UK? -I think not. I suspect that the Da VInci Code is outselling the LaHaye series by quite a bit in Britain because we over here don't really by that premillenial stuff and the churchgoing rates are so much smaller that the cookiness of premillenialism doesn't really fascinate, intrigue or even interest over here.

I wonder whether premillenialism is to contemporary USA what postmillenialism was to the British of Empire days? -A religious underpinning to ideology? In the case of the ritish empire it underpinned the ideas of progress and empire as the agent of progress. In the case of the USA, it allows for a sense of goodies and baddies in the world [yeah and we know who is who] and also to disregard the long-term consequences of policies [eg environmental] because things won't last that long and someone else will bail us out. There must be a fuller analysis out there somewhere -if you know where let me know.