Most writers are moral animals. Of course they are not moral in the sense that they lead exemplary lives, or that they advocate one moral system over another, although being a writer does not exclude these things. Writers deal in ideas, and their raw material is people – they experiment with the first, and observe the second. Few ideas are as interesting to them as morality, few situations as riveting as the man or woman caught in a moral dilemma. The worst fiction simply gives us a good guy and a bad guy slugging it out, while the best explores the territory between good and bad, and the feasibility of ever having an unchangeable moral standpoint, or even an objective one.

Read one way, the history of literature is a long list of observers who, by thinking about ideas and people and putting down their conclusions, reported and sometimes challenged the moral conventions of their societies and times.

Nikos Kazantzakis was one of the most consistently moral writers of the last century. His own life was a study in conflict – a passionate nationalist who lived his first years under foreign occupation, a devout Christian ruled by adherents to a different religion. Throughout his life he held deep moral convictions, struggling to reconcile his nationalistic and religious views with his just as strongly held socialistic ones.

His The Last Temptation of Christ, published in the 1950s, reflects years of thought, observation and internal struggle and is, by anybody’s standards, a masterpiece. His compelling portrait of Jesus is of a man who passionately identifies with the downtrodden and suffering, tempted to action, perhaps violent action, but restrained by what he slowly realises is his very special destiny. Kazantzakis explored the human side of the Jesus he believed in so deeply, developing ideas that are only implied in the Gospels, such as the duty of political action, the legitimacy of authority and revolt, and so on.

In 1988, director Martin Scorsese took Kazantzakis’ vision and turned it into a sensitive, thought-provoking film that, again, most cinemagoers would consider a classic. The Catholic Church’s reaction to this, as to any, imaginative exploration of the Jesus story was predictable – it banned it, and so did our film board.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a novel that can only be described as excruciatingly bad. Brown gives us semi-retarded characters, laughable dialogue and a plot implausible to a 12-year-old brought up on Tomb Raider. The aesthetic and moral gulf between Brown and Kazantzakis is immense. So why should I care if they ban The Da Vinci Code? In fact, as somebody who loves good books and films, I should be out there cheering at the idea of a piece of rubbish being removed from circulation. Or not?

Of course not. This isn’t about aesthetic qualities. It’s about power and the abuse of it. In Malta that means Church, State, and their relation to the people they serve, or should.

What do Dan Brown and Nikos Kazantzakis have in common that the Catholic Church should panic at the thought of what they write becoming easily accessible in the form of a film? Why is there at least a fighting chance that our government will bow to the Church’s wishes?

Both Kazantzakis and Brown portray Jesus as a man with a man’s normal inclinations, including a sexual drive he does not repress. This is where the Christian obsession with sex and celibacy comes in. This is an obsession not shared by either of the other great monotheistic religions. Jews and Muslims have absolutely no problem with the idea of Moses, David and Mohammed having sexual lives as well as holy ones.

This particular church uncompromisingly divides sexual habits into “natural” and “unnatural”, while not noticing that its ideal of celibacy is the oddest among them – an oddity of sexual behaviour, incidentally, that not one gospel ever directly attributes to Jesus. Perhaps it is not “unnatural” by their definition, but it is by almost everyone else’s, and it’s certainly unhealthy. Anyone who has spent impressionable years in a Catholic school, in the proximity and control of celibate men or women, will wince at the memory of the effects of sexual repression.

Speaking as a secularist with a great interest in the Jesus legend, portraying Jesus as a man who does not repress his instincts seems far healthier than any approach the Catholic Church has come up with so far.

However, the real point of the Church’s protest is not Jesus’ sexuality or otherwise, although that is the one most people will see. It is about hanging on to their monopoly as interpreters of a story that bears all the hallmarks of myth, one which conforms to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth in fact, with the inclusion of episodes that are skilfully crafted fiction.

The expulsion of the moneychangers from the temple, for example, is a wonderful story, fulfilling artistic expectations but – or thus – unlikely to have actually happened, at least with the ending we’re familiar with. A religious eccentric raves at working people doing their job, interferes with their legitimate livelihood, physically attacks them, upsets tables covered with their hard-earned money – blaspheming while he does so – then walks away without getting lynched? Imagine it on the front page. Great storytelling, unreliable reporting, most people would say, for the excellent reason that they know how life works, as opposed to a good story.

The main thing, however, that the Church wishes to avoid discussing is this. Any account of the life and times of Jesus – The Da Vinci Code, The Last Temptation, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus of Nazareth, The Passion of the Christ, and the dozen-plus gospels, only four of which the Church acknowledges – is a dramatisation. They are all, not excluding the Gospels, the creative shaping of a handful of rumours grown around a man about whom almost nothing is known, beyond his name, geographical location and historical period.

No figure with outlines as shadowy can be accepted as indisputably historical. The story of the life, trial and death of Socrates contains no raisings from the dead, spectacularly-timed earthquakes, graves opening and the bringing forth of saints (all unnoticed by contemporaries), or in fact anything that fundamentally strains our credulity. Yet, in spite of contemporary and near-contemporary portraits of him by four observers (one writing comedies for an audience on day-to-day terms with Socrates), no one asserts that the accounts presented by Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon and Aristophanes are more than an approximation of reality. A claim of 100 per cent veracity would be laughed at, let alone divine authorship.

Unlike the chroniclers of Socrates, none of the authors of the Gospels had ever met their subject, the events they described and speeches they gave verbatim had taken place a generation before (in at least the case of the author of Mark, in a distant land), and practically every word was written down in a language different from that in which it was spoken. Catholics tend to shrug away these difficulties, because people who know better have told them not to worry their heads about details.

For all that, there is no really acceptable source for the details or even the broad outlines of this story. The Gospels are a fascinating set of documents, but we should rely on them for accuracy far less than we rely on Aristophanes’ plays for an exact portrayal of Socrates. And that is the subject which the Church wishes at all costs to avoid discussing.

The Church does not really believe that people will be misled by the Da Vinci Code into believing all kinds of fantastic conspiracy theories, though the subject of Opus Dei is another that does not really bear very close scrutiny. The Church reacts so strongly to writers as different as Kazantzakis and Dan Brown because it knows that its position as sole interpreter is safe only as long as people assume – and they do – that scholars much more learned than themselves have gone into the matter thoroughly and decided that yes, there was a historical Jesus, and this was his life.

This is the fact that the Church hates being brought up, to the extent of pushing for the censorship of both an honest exploration by a devout Christian and a moneymaking exercise by a hack writer.

In any case, the Da Vinci Code is not an attack on the Church. It is an attack on credulity, intelligent thinking and so on, but then so is all religion. For example, Dan Brown asks me to believe that a man-god, born of a virgin, had sex. The Church asks me to believe that a man-god, born of a virgin, did not have sex.

I do have a problem suspending my disbelief here, but it’s not the bit about sex that confuses me. I’m ready to believe almost anything people tell me about sex. The existence of man-gods born of virgins, however, is pushing it a bit.

Of course the difference is that the Da Vinci Code isn’t asking me to take it seriously, because it’s a work of fiction. The Church however, not only insists that its version is historically accurate, but does its best to prevent any other version reaching people over whom, we tend to forget, it has not the slightest legal authority. Membership of the Church is membership of a club, quite a large and quite a special one, true, but a club for all that. There is not the smallest rule or regulation that the Church can force its members to observe. The most it can do it kick them out of the club, which, like most last resorts, is very self-defeating.

So why does the Church still have such power over people’s minds? Perhaps we should not be so surprised at its reaction. It is after all a power structure, and power structures devote a great deal of time and energy perpetuating and justifying their existence, which means identifying and eliminating challenges to their legitimacy, even banal ones like the Da Vinci Code. It does however surprise me that people like Vince Marshall do not realise that a religion which needs defending is already dead from the inside out.

No, the real question here is how many people will voluntarily restrict, or at least try to restrict, other people’s freedoms in order to “defend our religion”.

What prompted me to write this article was Mr Marshall’s ridiculous comparison with the cartoons depicting Mohammed as a terrorist. A novel is by definition a work of fiction – a caricature is a claim on the truth. The whole point of a caricature is that the subject is recognisable, no matter how exaggerated or distorted. Does Mr Marshall realise that the cartoons were more than an attack on a religious figure – which the Da Vinci Code is not – but an attempt at delegitimising the beliefs of several hundred million people and hence questioning their position in any civilised society?

The only thing the Church really offers in the 21st century is a refuge from the real world of independent thought, and protection from ideas which one does not like but stubbornly refuse to go away. Dogma, any dogma, allows one to avoid being a moral animal and offers instead the sop of revealed truth – mostly the result of committee decisions made by people as fallible as you or I in distant times and now considered far from enlightened. The closest thing you can compare the Church to these days is a sanctuary, and the thing about sanctuaries, of course, is that once you go in, you can’t get out.

Many people have written and told Mr Marshall and his co-religionists ‘Just don’t watch it’, a sentiment I understand, but which is far from enough. The Church claims spiritual authority, and all authority, religious or secular, should, no, must be constantly tested. The basis of the Church’s authority is open to question, not through the Da Vinci Code specifically, but through gradual acceptance of the idea that the facts, such as they are, of Jesus’ life are open to different interpretations.

Both the Last Temptation and the Da Vinci Code, in vastly different ways, pave the way for people changing from dogmatic animals into moral ones. That is why the Catholic Church makes no distinction between them.