ABSTRACT
There are obviously porous boundaries between religious fiction and religious fact. Films and popular fiction compete spiritually and culturally for the ‘religious imaginary’ in ways that religious intellectuals and institutions find hard to comprehend, even less to control. In this discussion, I compare two recent but very different examples from popular culture namely Dan Brown’s The da Vinci Code which came out in 2003 and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ which was launched on 25 February 2004. The former angered the authorities within the Catholic Church, because it appeared that many lay people were attempting to follow the trail for the Holy Grail in imitation of the novel’s main story line, and in many Asian societies it was seen to be politically disruptive as well as religiously offensive. Brown’s book became the target of several ‘scholarly’ criticisms such as Darrell Bock’s Breaking the da Vinci Code (2004), and the subject of a legal charge of plagiarism. Both the book and the film enjoyed large global sales. Nine months after it appeared, there were four and a half million copies in print. Brown’s other novels have also been enjoying high sales. The Passion was also a major commercial success. It had within two months of its release generated box office receipts of around $387 million. The film was directly promoted at the grass roots by ministers of Evangelical churches, conservative Roman Catholics and Charismatics. This mass marketing strategy had the support of local church leaders who encouraged their congregations to attend, often through blockbooking tickets (Maresco 2004). The film was also promoted through various ancillary markets. More than one million ‘witness cards’ were printed and circulated in support of the evangelical aspect of the film. The soundtrack was promoted by Sony Music and Integrity Music. Four million copies of the film were sold on the first day of its release, and The Passion. Photography from the Movie has gone into its eighth printing and sold over 650,000 copies.
