Without doing either, I’d like to register my concern at what the Washington Post describes as a growing trend: the dissemination and enjoyment of videos portraying real violence. The Post profiles a number of people including Blake Cater, who says “I’m not in any way a violent person,” but regularly records himself in “brutal” fights. And there’s Rogier Both, who picks fights with rival soccer fans, enjoying video replays:

“It’s like an addiction,” he adds. “You can’t leave it. When there is a good football fight, the best sex is not better. . . . People who have never been in football matches in Europe will never understand it, but it’s like a second life.”

His description reminded me of a friend of Augustine’s, who though having left enjoyment of the gladiatorial games was drawn back into it by his friends, at first against his will:

But he, closing the passage of his eyes, forbade his mind to range abroad after such evil; and would he had stopped his ears also! For in the fight, when one fell, a mighty cry of the whole people striking him strongly, overcome by curiosity, and as if prepared to despise and be superior to it whatsoever it were, even when seen, he opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in his soul than the other . . . .

For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto, yea, a true associate of theirs that brought him thither. Why say more? He beheld, shouted, kindled, carried thence with him the madness which should goad him to return not only with them who first drew him thither, but also before them, yea and to draw in others.

What actually happened was that Stephen Colbert, a comedian, recently delivered a speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (was it funny? imagine a junior higher having just learned about sarcasm, trying to insult someone).

Part of his speech contained these lines: “By the way, Senator McCain, it’s so wonderful to see you coming back into the Republican fold. I have a summer house in South Carolina; look me up when you go to speak at Bob Jones University.” Folks, Colbert was making jokes, not reporting the news.

Sadly, it’s no surprise so many people who read The Da Vinci Code think they’re learning theology.

The press also applauded Hanks when he was asked if he had been under any pressure by the Greek Orthodox community, of which he and his wife Rita Wilson are members. “No, absolutely not,” he replied. “My heritage and that of my wife communicates that our sins have been taken away, not our brains.

“I view this film as I would any number of films,” he continued, “as a great opportunity to discuss and to perhaps clarify one’s own feelings about their place in the universe and the cosmos and the mind of God. This was just one of a great many pieces of fiction that could spur, I think, a better understanding of that for the individual.

I’m not sure how a mystery thriller is supposed to be “a great opportunity to discuss and to perhaps clarify one’s own feelings about their place in the universe and the cosmos and the mind of God,” but then again I’m among the half-dozen people that haven’t read the book or seen the movie.

What I have observed is a disproportionate amount of skepticism directed at orthodox Christianity, something Joseph Loconte addressed in today’s OpinionJournal (HT: SharperIron). I think he’s right: let’s spread the skepticism around.

[C. S.] Lewis, I suspect, would also point out that theories about massive coverups presented in fanciful works such as “The Da Vinci Code” ignore an elephant-sized fact: There are any number of people and events in the Bible that are frankly embarrassing to believers. Recall, for example, that the family tree of the Messiah includes a prostitute (Rahab), a king who commits adultery and murder (David) and another king who leads his nation headlong into religious idolatry (Manasseh). Yet the earliest Christians failed to excise these characters from their story.

The first “conspiracy theory” about Jesus, in fact, actually appears in the Gospel of Matthew. After the crucifixion, religious leaders ask Pontius Pilate to post a guard at the tomb of Jesus because they suspect his disciples “may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead.” Why keep a story about a possible conspiracy lodged at the heart of your sacred text if you’re determined to cover up a deception about the credibility of that text?

Here is the real harm of these modern conspiracy theories: They may appeal to our emotions, but they violate our common sense. They reject reason, just as surely as they reject revelation. “I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds,” Lewis explained. “I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.”

Sounds like good advice to moviegoers this week–for the skeptics as well as the faithful.

What, I ask, were her first impressions of him? “Oh, I loved him. Loved him, of course I did. I was in the kitchen helping Mrs Moore with the hen food when I first met him. I turned round and knew this was something momentous. Jack was naturally very gregarious, he liked exchanging ideas. He enjoyed the pub, and walking.

“I had read the Screwtape Letters and, being a good little Catholic at that time, his famous book Christian Behaviour, but I didn’t know then that Jack Lewis was CS Lewis. I had no idea. Two weeks later I saw his books on the shelf, then I made the connection. I realised that this man I was staying with was my literary hero.

“I didn’t know where to put myself. I couldn’t look at him or speak to him for about a week because I knew from reading his books that he understood human nature horribly well and I just thought, ‘He will know all my faults, all my nasty little foibles’. I felt completely exposed. I got over it, of course.”

Curiously, C.S. Lewis wasn’t Freud’s only connection with the famous. Through C.S. Lewis she met J.R.R. Tolkien and Alexander Fleming, “about the time he was developing penicillin.” Her son married Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, and her husband is the grandson of Sigmund Freud.

When approached in 1954 about a possible animated film of The Chronicles of Narnia , C. S. Lewis replied, “I am sure you understand that Aslan is a divine figure, and anything remotely approaching the comic (above all anything in the Disney line) would be to me simple blasphemy.”

. . .

And what about the crucial figure of Aslan? Suffice it to say that neither the digitalized image nor the voice of Liam Neeson allows the character to veer toward the comic. Indeed, the awesome clarity of his redemptive role makes the efforts of Disney, working with a Christian marketing firm, to recruit evangelicals to see the film seem unnecessary. Lewis would probably have agreed with the prophet Isaiah: “And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken.”

Meanwhile, C.S. Lewis’s stepson and the movie’s actors don’t seem to see the “awesome clarity”:

Douglas Gresham, stepson of the late C.S. Lewis — the Oxford professor who authored the top-rated children’s book — called the religious emphasis “an American disease.”

“The Brits don’t give two figs about that aspect,” Mr. Gresham said in an interview from his home near Dublin.

. . .

Lead actress Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch, archenemy of the Christlike lion, Aslan, said of the film’s overtly Christian symbolism: “Faith is in the eye of the beholder.”

“You can make a religious allegory out of anything if that’s what you’re interested in,” she said.

Then again, Guardian reviewer Polly Toynbee finds enough religious imagery in the movie to make her puke:

[H]ere in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s earth.

Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, “There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory.” Well, here’s my huff.

Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and “make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life”. Holiness drenches the Chronicles. When, in the book, the children first hear someone say, mysteriously, “Aslan is on the move”, he writes: “Now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning …” So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children’s minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy – but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.

Any movie that elicits two-bit denunciations of Christianity must be doing something right.

Last fall, “The Incredibles” celebrated Ayn Randian libertarian individualism and the suburban nuclear family, while the naughty puppets of “Team America” satirized left-wing celebrity activism and defended American global power even as they mocked its excesses. More recently we have learned that flightless Antarctic birds, according to some fans of “March of the Penguins,” can be seen as big-screen embodiments of the kind of traditional domestic values that back-sliding humans have all but abandoned, as well as proof that divine intention, rather than blind chance, is the engine of creation. I may be the only person who thought “The Island,” this summer’s Michael Bay flop about human clones bred for commercial use, indirectly argues the Bush administration’s position on stem cell research, but I have not been alone in discerning lessons on intelligent design and other faith-based matters amid the spooky effects of “The Exorcism of Emily Rose.”

Okay, about half of those aren’t so bad, as long as we can drop any references to Ayn Rand. But his evidence for subtle conservative elements in Just Like Heaven is galling:

And who would bother to notice that the villainous, materialistic doctor, despite having the religiously neutral last name Rushton, is played by Ben Shenkman, a bit of casting that suggests a faint, deniable whiff of anti-Semitism?

Excuse me? What conservative religious group does Scott have in mind? Surely not American Evangelicals, who as a group seem almost Zionist in their support for Israel. If there’s one thing Evangelicals are not, it’s anti-Semitic.

And there’s his notion of what composes a conservative and/or religious philosophy of science (emphasis added):

While “Just Like Heaven” is content with a vague, ecumenical supernaturalism, “Emily Rose” wants to tell you, like the old Louvin Brothers song, that Satan is real. Or, at the very least, that we should be open to the possibility that demonic possession might offer a better explanation for the title character’s torments than the diagnoses listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Now, of course, this in itself hardly distinguishes the movie from others of its kind. As Ross Douthat, an astute blogger and journalist, has pointed out online, “the horror movie is the most conservative and religion-friendly genre in Hollywood, and the message of devil-related movies, in particular, is almost always that science is wrong.” But the means by which this message is delivered is a bit unusual, not only for its didacticism, but also because the movie’s climactic arguments are as much a plea for open-mindedness and pluralism as a fire-and-brimstone sermon on the nature of evil. Rather like the promoters of intelligent design, the filmmakers present a mild, almost relativistic argument, according to which the reluctance of scientific experts to rule anything out makes anything possible, and therefore likely to be true.

We hear this line so often–how science/reason and religion/faith oppose each other–that some of us religious types actually start believing it. But Christianity does not oppose science, and its history, with a few notable exceptions, generally shows support for science.

Hollywood and journalists like Mr. Scott cling to a stereotype of conservative Christians as knuckle-dragging bigots. I’ll wait until that stereotype bites the dust before I celebrate the fall of the liberal monolith.