In the world of The Da Vinci Code, the Catholic Church is an institution mired in the past yet blind to its own history. It is a male-centered hierarchy which ignores the teachings—and life—of its own prophet, Jesus Christ. The difference between religion and spirituality is appropriate for this context. “Religion” is the structural, brick-and-mortar organization dominated by tiers of men—priests, bishops, cardinals, archbishops, etc.—who decide rules, rituals, and codes of ethics.

According to the novel, the Church’s rules were set primarily in the third century during the Council of Nicaea convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine. The New Testament was propagandized for nearly two millennia as the literal word of God and was in fact a political compromise to maintain the unity of the Roman Empire. Many accounts of Jesus’s life were omitted in favor of the ones that conformed to the agreed upon orthodoxy: namely, that Jesus was a divine entity, the son of God, born of a virgin, and sent to Earth as a martyr to redeem the sins of humankind. For centuries, this narrative was easy for the Church to propagate. Most of the Church’s followers were illiterate, new information was difficult to disseminate, and the Church controlled its flock through fear and the promise of a divine afterlife.