The other day I was listening to the Diane Rehm show on NPR and she had several Catholic priests on a panel discussing reaction to The Da Vinci Code and the fact that the book and movie do not present the Catholic Church in a favorable light.
I only caught a few minutes of the show, but got the general impression that the priests' opinions ranged from "we need to give the reader/moviegoer credit enough not to judge the Catholic Church based on a work of fiction" to "we should boycott this book/movie because it is extremely disrepectful, potentially devasting to people with fledgling faith, and if it were presenting Judaism or Islam in such a light people would be outraged."
Some of my thoughts:
(1) I am a supporter of freedom of speech, a believer in taking literary license when writing fiction, and in my ideal world people actually think about what they read and are conscious about how it shapes their view of things that are outside their realm of experience.
(2) On the other hand, a neighbor (who lives in the real world, not in my ideal world) told me that after they saw The Da Vinci Code, her husband said he just knew there was something sinister about the Catholic Church and the movie confirms it.
(3) I believe in being respectful. As a member of an often maligned and misunderstood church, I relate on a deep emotional level with the priests' concerns. It makes me uncomfortable and, yes, defensive to think that people's views of Mormonism (which is far less known than Catholicism) are formed by reading books like Under the Banner of Heaven, which spent years on the best seller list.
(4) On the other hand, it's sort of exciting to see that in any given publication season there are a handful of titles being published by national, well known publishers with LDS characters or backdrops. Granted, most of them are negative (read: more lucrative), but they do put Mormonism on the radar screen (there's no such thing as bad publicity?).
(5) In the end, I believe it is important to have both the freedom to put ideas out there (fact, fiction, and even weird, mutated interpretations of fact) and the freedom to boycott them. And hopefully in the whole muddled mess of it all, some of us will gain greater understanding.
3 comments:
Ha, loved what you said about your 'ideal world'. I can totally relate. You could agrue (what you said about your neighbor) that kids are effected by what they see on tv and so forth. I hate that! Because obviously both of us have OUR own opinions, but how in the hell did we get this way? Maybe they should look at the source, the parents. Anyways, interesting.
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