After wasting an hour or two too many several years ago on the much-ado-about-patent-nonsense controversy surrounding Dan Brown’s laughable blockbuster, The DaVinci Code, I have of late been sedulously avoiding all references  to “Dan Brown”, “Angels and Demons”, “Ron Howard”, or “Tom Hanks”. But when I stumbled across Ross Douthat’s spade-calling op ed piece in The New York TImes, I had to take five to look. And it was well worth the read.

A brief excerpt:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

Bingo.

For the rest of the excellent piece, go here.