Sherry Weddell…

warns about getting your information from the movies. Agora is yet another bowdlerization of history a la Dan Brown, Kingdom of Heaven, or the recent Robin Hood.

The hopeful thing is that Americans are generally averse to “historical films”, so it’s unlikely it will do well at the box office. Historical films used to do well, but with the dumbification of mass culture over the past 50 years, audiences increasingly prefer to *feel* as though they are intellectually superior without actually have to go to the trouble of learning anything that challenges their dimestore knowledge of the past. The fact that the Da Vinci Code is taken as gospel is all you need to know. Fifty years ago, a mass audience could watch Lawrence of Arabia, or an adaptation of a Dickens novel and follow it. These days, the only way you can make a film about characters from the past is to inject characters with thoroughly postmodern ideas and attitudes into the past and then have them stand around and pronounce on how stupid our ancestors were. We have almost completely lost our capacity to engage cultures and ideas that are not post-modern suburban American. When the environment around us changes (by economic turmoils or war or some other trouble) we will be as helpless to adapt as a rare orchid in a drought.

The Church will, however, survive because it has deep roots in history and a wide diversity of cultural experience and does not labor under the notion that Smug Millennial Suburban America is the summit toward which all human history is laboring.