The Da Vinci Code Is Having an Effect

And it's a bad one:

LONDON (Reuters) - "The Da Vinci Code" has undermined faith in the Roman Catholic Church and badly damaged its credibility, a survey of British readers of Dan Brown's bestseller showed on Tuesday.

People are now twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children after reading the Dan Brown blockbuster and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect.

Read the rest of it for details.

I've said many times before that I can't understand why people would take fiction as fact, but a post over at Amy Welborn's blog is illuminating. She quotes an excerpt from an interview with Dan Brown in 2003. Among other things, Brown says this:

The only thing fictional in "The Da Vinci Code" is the characters and the action that takes place. All of the locations, the paintings, the ancient history, the secret documents, the rituals, all of this is factual.

That's a pretty egregious lie. He ought to be ashamed.