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Boomers aren't the only ones finding religion After I fell last spring and broke myself into five or six pieces, I lost count of the people who said they prayed for me. While three of my favourite new friends are priests, most of my acquaintance is drawn from cynical modernists, whose acknowledgement of another world might reach to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and no further, dammit. Even so, old friends put my name into the healing circle at their church, and the least expected would mutter, leaving the hospital room, that they were, y'know, putting in a word upstairs. A report on the front page of last week's Sunday New York Times claimed that 45% of Americans pray for health reasons, and 10 studies are currently being carried out, some funded by the U.S. government, trying to measure the effects of intercessory prayer. San Francisco cardiologist Dr. Randolf Byrd's 393 patient-strong study found prayer to measurably improve the health of the 192 individuals prayed for. Despite natural disbelief, people are insatiable for what does "work." The American National Education Association reported last summer that reading was down, except for the crack cocaine of Xtreme political rhetoric. But they didn't look at religious books. Publishers simply can't print enough to satisfy the marketplace. Sales in every sector, including religious fiction, post double- digit gains every quarter, and have been doing so for the last few years. Sales are even higher in the under-45 demographic, confounding easy assumptions that ageing Boomers are finally getting religion. An enormous spike was posted in 2004, triggered, publishers think, by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Funnily enough, while New Age books, once dominant, have been treading water, sales of books on the Christian faith are rising. Canada's entry in this sweepstakes is The Pagan Christ by Toronto Star columnist Tom Harpur. The Pagan Christ has sat comfortably among the top five bestsellers on both trade and consumer lists in Canada since its publication around Easter of this year. It has been sold in a half-dozen other countries, and shows no sign of letting up in its tramp towards mega-success. Harpur claims that the historical Christ did not exist, and that the myth was plagiarized wholesale from Egyptian folklore. Furthermore, he insists that the Church Fathers in the third century brutally suppressed all "gnosis" by destroying books that explicated the pagan symbol and mythos behind Christ's message, leaving only proponents of simple-minded, literal Christianity. Finally, profoundly (but lucratively) offending 90% of Christians on the planet, he argues that this "symbolic Christ" and his plagiarized message is even more holy than any actual man who might have died on that hill, because it is a universal message, the message of all faiths. The Gospels are anything but inerrant, says Harpur; in fact, they are almost purely allegorical. True meaning is to be sought beneath the surface. This is, in part, the selling point of The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown's book insinuates that the historical Christ lived on, married, had children, and that secret knowledge -- "gnosis", the grail, the "key to everything" -- is still out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Harpur is a lovely, clear writer, and his case is more than persuasive for a lay reader without a strong foundation in Egyptology and archeology, though some Canadian theologians, W. Ward Gasque, founder of Regent College, in particular, have taken an effective brickbat to his scholarly case. What bothered me, frankly, was the assumption that Christianity presents "insurmountable difficulties for reasonable educated people today." Well, I am a reasonable educated person, and I have no difficulties. I do have friends who have difficulties, but they are heathens. Heathens who are persuaded by the intellectualizing of Jung and Campbell. At no point does Harpur explain or even acknowledge the extraordinary success of the Christian faith, its meteoric rise in the developing world today, and its ability to integrate a working faith among educated and (this is important) uneducated alike. The version of the faith that Harpur believes "suddenly becomes dazzlingly alive with spiritual meanings as relevant as one's next breath" might be fabulous indeed for our modern intelligentsia, but it won't matter a hill of beans to the average Christian who believes in the unending benefits rained down from heaven as a result of the living God sacrificing Himself for our sins. Furthermore, Harpur's reinvented Christianity presupposes a class of people who "interpret" faith for the uneducated. The most dynamic quality of Christianity, however, is its persistent shedding of a priestly class that busily explicates "mythos." This constant shedding clears the way for direct communication between God and man and is arguably the foundational thought of democracy. In any case, The Pagan Christ is a beautiful journey through myth and symbolism. Perhaps its success means that the intelligentsia can sign onto Harpur's "true meaning of messianic fulfillment." Bring it on, I say. The more praying, the merrier.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.