Dan Brown's America

If you want to understand the state of American religion, you need to understand why so many people love [DaVinci Code, Angels & Demonsn ovelist] Dan Brown . . . . In the Brownian worldview, all religions . . . have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition. . . . You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both. NY Times