I may not be a professor of “symbology,” but I have taught at Harvard and studied religious symbolism. So I feel in a particularly strong position to reveal the entirely unsecret conspiracy against patriotism, tradition, and religion hiding in plain sight on our movie and television screens, in our universities, and on the pages of the mainstream press. Conservatives have forgotten just how precarious our position is. One cable news channel, talk radio, and the blogosphere do not an invincible army make.

It only seems that way because we also have nominal control of the reigns of power. But lose our foothold in government, and conservatives are up a creek. The other side controls the levers of cultural power in this country, and we are the enemy in their eyes (and on their screens).

Conservatives need to face the fact that our position in this culture is genuinely precarious. If we lose our hold on power, we’ll scream bloody murder on our outlets at everything the other side does. Yet those screams may only confirm our helplessness.

The deep cultural dimension of our political battles makes an ordinary transfer of political power far more consequential than it was in the days when America had a bipartisan foreign policy and a broad cultural consensus.

Oh, you mean like the "bipartisan foreign policy" and "broad cultural consensus" we enjoyed during the Clinton administration?

We can dream about forcing Republicans to the right and then riding back into power two years later, but one big loss could easily turn conservatives back into a marginal cultural force for some time.

Why have Democrats been so angry? It’s because their taken-for-granted cultural superiority has been called into question by 9/11, the return of patriotism, a tough foreign policy, and the open defense of the sort of traditional values they thought were on the way out. Republican victories have punctured the cultural left’s sense of the historical inevitability of their triumph, and that is at the root of their rage.

Ah, so that's what psychologists mean by "projection".

By controlling the political agenda, conservatives control the cultural agenda as well (or at least a large part of it). But the truth is, other than the government, the left is still in control of our critical cultural institutions. Should the left recapture the government as well, it may well succeed in pushing traditionalists aside in the culture at large.

Okay, so maybe Stanley is just cynically trying to rally the weary wingnut troops with some culture-war blather. But he seems genuinely pissed off that people are lining up to see a movie that he doesn't want them to see.

The idea that The Da Vinci Code is being injected into the cultural debate by a shadowy, powerful cabal is loony. The book was a monster best-seller (for reasons beyond my understanding; I thought it was trash) and that made a movie version inevitable. And while a shadowy cabal might be able to force a movie into production, it couldn't force people to buy tickets.

For the umpteenth time, Stanley, studios make movies that they think will make money. And maybe you should take the advice of a famous Hollywood tagline: "To avoid fainting, keep repeating: it's only a movie....only a movie....only a movie..."