Page 4559 – Christianity Today (2024)

Religion and regionalism have been intertwined in America since John Winthrop baptized New England and declared its purposes of God. The Latter-day Saints have dominated Utah and its environs since the nineteenth century. Even Garrison Keillor’s splintered Brethren seem to embody a region. But no regional identity has been more bound up with religion than that of the American South. It has become a sine qua non—or a clichae, depending on your perspective—for those discussing southern identity to quote Flannery O’Connor’s description of the region as “Christ-haunted.” And with good reason.

For decades, however, scholars ignored southern religion. If, as Catherine Clinton has claimed, women are the half-sisters of southern history, then religion has long stood as the poor cousin. Ten years ago, John B. Boles could only modestly report that “the issuance since 1980 of at least a dozen books on southern religious history demonstrates the current interest in a topic sadly neglected in the scholarship until recently.” Today, it is fair to say that southern religion is a cottage industry.

Seven recently published books on southern religion share two elements. One element seems obvious, the other less so. With the exception of two essays in Religion in the Contemporary South, these books are entirely devoted to Christianity, six of the seven to evangelical Protestantism. This perhaps cames as no surprise, since poeple usually mean Christianity when they speak of “religion in the South.” As Samuel S. Hill put it, “Any real acquaintance with southern religious history equips a person with the knowledge that the evangelical family of Protestant Christianity has long been the region’s largest and most influential heritage.” Which is what renders the second shared component of these books so remarkable: commentators on southern religion have, without quitting their devotion to Protestantism, caught up with the rest of the world and turned their attention to diversity.

Charles Reagan Wilson’s latest book offers an elegant and evocative portrait of the “cultural implications of evangelical Protestantism’s long hegemony over southern life.” In essays covering such varying topics as Bear Bryant’s funeral, church fans, Calvinism’s influence on William Faulkner, and beauty pageants, Wilson illuminates “how the dominant strain of southern religion seeped into many features of regional life.” Like most of the authors discussed in this review, Wilson is concerned with the relationship between southern religion and southern culture more broadly construed. John Eighmy posed the problem in his 1972 Churches in Cultural Captivity, suggesting that southern churches were complicit in the evils of southern society, captives to, rather than shapers of, their own culture. Scholars of southern religion, turning Niebuhr’s church/culture model on its head and inside out, have been debating the question ever since. For Wilson, religion does not stand “in isolation from other aspects of southern culture but” interacts with them.

Wilson is concerned with popular religion—”the religion of the people, rather than of leaders or institutions”—and, following up on a theme from his 1980 Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, civil religion. I am charmed and fascinated by Wilson’s forays into the former, but unconvinced by the latter, possessing, as I do, an old-fashioned and unsophisticated inability to entertain the concept of civil religion. Despite the efforts of Wilson, Robert Bellah, Edwin Gaustad, and others, it seems to me no coincidence that Rousseau coined the term when he did. I do not share Wilson’s perception of beauty pageants as somehow religious, civil or otherwise. Defining “religion” is, of course, a tricky endeavor (and more interesting than defining it, I suppose, is understanding who has the power to do so), but “civil religion” has always struck me as encompassing all the characteristics we might associate with religion—sacred texts, pilgrimage, iconography, for example—and leaving out God. It is a bigger leap than I am willing to take to suggest that, mutatis mutandis, Miss Mississippi contests function as religious ritual. In Wilson’s scheme, Miss America and Elvis Presley stand in for God; that smacks more of idolatry than religion.

That quibble notwithstanding, Judgment and Grace in Dixie is an excellent introduction to the nexus of religion and regionalism in the South. Wilson expertly demonstrates the multifaceted ways that Protestantism has defined southern identity. No one interested in southern culture, religious or otherwise, will close this book disappointed.

It is the challenge that increasing religious diversity poses for Protestantism’s “long hegemony over southern life” that Religion in the Contemporary South and The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South take up. O. Kendall White and Daryl White recognize that “like the nation, the South now confronts problems of religious diversity, maintaining community, and preserving religious and regional identities as we move into the twenty-first century. … [T]he issues of multiculturalism and religious pluralism that grip the rest of the nation resonate in today’s South.”

However, the collection of essays White and White have edited is not adequate to the task of addressing these conundrums. Having chosen to “neglect … Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, mainline Protestant denominations, Mormonism, and some of the new religions,” contributors to this collection hardly convey that religious pluralism even echoes in “today’s South.” The “alien” in Brenda G. Stewart’s essay “Strangers in a Strange Land: The Non-Christian As Alien in the South” turns out not to be a Jew or Hindu, but a Unitarian-Universalist! Furthermore, these essays are cast in often impenetrable academese, an obstacle for even the most devoted reader.

One who is interested in challenges facing today’s southern churches would do better to turn his attention to Marion D. Aldridge and Kevin Lewis’s outstanding volume, The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South. Although anthologies tend to be uneven, these essays, presented at a 1995 conference addressing the ways in which southern Protestantism is changing as we enter the twenty-first century, are uniformly thoughtful and thought-provoking.

The concern of contributors to this volume is twofold: How southern is the South today, and how can Protestantism withstand the flood of non-Protestant and “new” religions entering the region? As sociologist Wade Clark Roof points out in his essay “Southern Protestantism: New Challenges, New Possibilities,” the two questions are intimately bound up with one another. More than mint juleps, big hair, and etiquette, Protestantism is a major component of the South’s “southern-ness.” For all the doomsayers who bemoan the decline of southern exceptionalism, I feel confident that regional identity still persists in Dixie. Nonetheless, the concern of contributors to Changing Shape is not unwarranted. There is no denying that with television and the Internet, with the increasing Wal-Martification and McDonald’s-izing of the country, regionalism is on the decline and will prove a less significant force in the American future than it has in the American past (although, on a recent trip to Maine, I noticed McDonald’s offered lobster sandwiches, fare seldom available at fast-food eateries in North Carolina).

The second concern is more pressing. Despite the findings of a February 1997 poll conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for Research in Social Science where 69.3 percent of southerners identified themselves as Protestant, in contrast with just 47.9 percent of nonsoutherners, religious diversity has come to the South. The puzzles that immigration posed to northeastern Protestants in the nineteenth century now confront their southern cousins. Asian Americans have introduced Hindu and Muslim worship practices in increasing numbers, and a mushrooming Latino population has made the presence of Catholics more widely felt. Lawrence H. Mamiya argues persuasively that although “the greatest challenge … [for black Protestants] will be how black churches respond to the growing class differentiation occurring in the black community,” Islam and African-based religions, brought to the South by Jamaican, Haitian, and Latino immigrants, will tempt many African Americans, further jeopardizing the influence of the black church. Wicca, Goddess worship, and other forms of New Age spirituality are, according to Wade Clark Roof, increasingly prevalent among southerners whose parents might have attended the Baptist or Episcopal church.

Nancy A. Hardesty emphasizes the challenge and opportunity posed to Protestantism by Goddess-based feminist spirituality. “Many women,” she writes, ” … have totally repudiated their former Protestant Christian faith. Some prefer to call themselves ‘witches.’ ” Hardesty hopes that the increasingly appealing alternatives offered to women from outside the church will force Protestant churches to pay attention to many women’s needs and desires for “basic recognition and equal inclusion in language, leadership and congregational decision making. Honesty, integrity, sensitivity, and scrupulous non-abuse from church leadership. More intimacy and honest emotional sharing with other members. Meaningful and participatory ritual. A theology that values the experiences of women and children.” Hardesty warns that “if Protestant churches are not going to be places where women are respected, renewed, and refreshed, then women are going to continue to leave.”

Perhaps because my own mother, daughter of generations of Southern Baptists, put down the Bible long ago in favor of Empowering Women books, I take Hardesty’s adumbration the most seriously of any presented in the book. Women have, throughout American history, constituted the majority of church participants. Across regions, denominations, and classes, women have outnumbered men in Protestant churches. As historian Ann Braude recently put it, “women have made religious institutions possible by providing audiences for preaching, participants for rituals, material and financial support for religious buildings, and perhaps most important, by inculcating faith in their children to provide the next generation of participants. There could be no lone man in the pulpit without the mass of women which fill the pews.”

Hardesty’s vision of the church sans women should give pause to all Christians. Still, Hardesty is cautiously optimistic; like the other contributors to The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South, she views the South’s increasing religious pluralism as an opportunity for rejuvenation inside the church. She hopes the church will evolve in order to fare better among women in the increasingly competitive religious market. As Wade Clark Roof notes, “loss of establishment status may well be invigorating.” Although that has not been the case for mainline churches in the past half-century, let us hope that it will prove true for the southern church in general.

Three decades ago, Samuel S. Hill, founder of the modern study of southern religion, prefigured Aldridge and Lewis’s concerns about the future of the Protestant church in the South. “As Southernness becomes less important,” Hill wrote, “uncritical subscription to church religion is apt to follow a parallel course. This constitutes the crisis of the Southern churches.”

Having throughout his career dealt with the waning of the Protestant church in his contemporary South, Hill demonstrates in his newest book, One Name but Several Faces, that the diversity of southern religion is not a new phenomenon. Throughout southern history, there has been a great, if heretofore unrecognized, diversity within Protestant denominations themselves. Although Hill contends that denominations remain useful analytical categories, his essays on the Baptists, the “Christians” (denominations such as Disciples of Christ, that claim the name Christian for their title), and the “of God” bodies (such as the Church of God) complicate our thinking about denominations, showing that—as Hill’s title suggests—even within a single Protestant name-group, there can be significant variety.

If southern historians remain entrenched in the debate spurred by C. Vann Woodward’s 1951 Origins of the New South—the debate of continuity versus change—Hill asserts that, at least as far as religion is concerned, change is one of the persistent characteristics of the South. Each of his three examples demonstrates “discontinuity in the religious life of the people of the American South.” The Protestant hegemony, while perhaps unchallenged by non-Protestant alternatives, was, from the eighteenth century, not as homogeneous as we have thought. As Hill writes,

Most of us who studied the subject in the early years of the recovery of southern religious history—especially a few venerables like me—ended in claiming virtual continuity from the late colonial season to the present. We were enticed to that view by the persistence of the evangelical heritage and by the relative homogeneity of the regional population when a demographic revolution was unsettling the rest of the country.

To be sure, religious diversity historically posed a less dramatic challenge to the Protestant South than to the rest of the nation, but “disruption and dislocation have been endemic to regional life. Pain, risk, uncertainty, and damaging consequences have bored deep into human sensibility in the more conservative, less progressive region, as they have everywhere else.”

Hill himself fails to address satisfactorily that most basic “variety” in southern religious life. Although he does touch on black southerners (even citing the formation of independent black churches and denominations in the second half of the nineteenth century as one of the “four major transitions, shifts, turning points” in southern religion), Hill does not treat black Christians in anywhere near the detail he does their white coreligionists. Black Christians remain the exception to a white rule.

For example, in his discussion of the “Christian” denomination, Hill argues, following Nathan Hatch’s work, that Christians seized upon the political freedom let loose by the American Revolution and applied it to religion. “Since the Christians of the Stone-Campbell movement in particular placed their fingers precisely on the pulse of the national drive towards freedom,” Hill writes, “treating their history affords an ideal context for a detailed examination. An ideal context, perhaps, but not the only one, for southerners (white citizens, that is), have been declaring their freedom throughout their history, sometimes with such effectiveness as to change the course of human history, often in the face of great peril.” In fact, the southerners who most notably “declared their freedom”—certainly altering history, and certainly at great risk to themselves and their families—were not white citizens, but black slaves.

Indeed, it has become something of a commonplace in the study of southern religion to call for a recognition of the interpenetration and interconnection of black Christianity and white Christianity. Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild, in their introduction to “Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down,” caution that

it is important to keep in mind that whatever level or dimension of religious life one is addressing … one must not isolate the black religious experience from the rest of southern religion, for there is more interaction between them than has often been recognized. In fact, there has always been a symbiotic relationship between the development and the structure of the religious life of African Americans and the religious life of non-African American southerners.

Unfortunately, “Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down” fails to deliver, as it incorporates the religious lives of white southerners even less than Hill incorporates the religion of black southerners. If Sunday is still the most segregated day in the South, religion remains the most segregated subject in southern scholarship.

Paul Harvey, however, in Redeeming the South (the title’s jeu de mots should not be lost on us), rises to the challenge of incorporating black Christianity and white Christianity into a single story. Chronicling the tale of all manner of southern Baptists (not just the sbc) from Reconstruction to 1925, Harvey offers a detailed and thorough account of a symbiotic development for Baptists, black and white. The establishment of independent black churches, writes Harvey, “did not preclude intriguing parallels and interactions between white and black believers in belief and practice.” Harvey does not pretend that black and white coreligionists lived in harmonious acceptance of one another. He understands that whatever black and white Baptists may have “learned from each other … their mutual cultural influence hardly mitigated the racial violence and hostility of the so-called southern way of life.”

But southerners did not spend their lives in a vacuum labeled “the race question.” All Baptists in the South muddled through the quandaries posed by modernization and industrialization. Pastors black and white, seeking to professionalize the clergy and make the church respectable and orderly, came into conflict with congregations hesitant to trade communal baptism and lined-out singing for decorum and protocol. Finally, Harvey demonstrates that black and white worship practices developed from one another. “Southern white and black worshipers borrowed freely (if sometimes unwittingly) from each other. … Whites taught blacks the Christian story. African Americans showed Euro-americans compelling physical expressions of experiencing the sacred.” Scholars such as Donald G. Mathews have taught us for years about the interpenetration of black and white religious life in the antebellum South, but Harvey’s treatment of the postbellum South is pioneering.

Another recent chronicle of Southern Baptists (this one treating the sbc almost exclusively) fails to recognize any religious variety in the South. Keith Harper’s The Quality of Mercy is distinctly out of step with the trend to grapple with the heterogeneity that Hill and Harper suggest is not new to southern religion. Arguing that Southern Baptists, contrary to what most historians think, were in fact practitioners of the Social Gospel, The Quality of Mercy takes an unconvincing stand on a narrow historiographical debate that is not of much interest to anyone but a handful of scholars. Harper is perhaps correct when he claims that “at a practical level … the Social Gospel has no real consensual definition” among students of American religion. However, most historians concur that the Social Gospel involves not mere acts of benevolence, but some actual critique of social institutions as well. Harper ably demonstrates that white Southern Baptists at the fin-de-siecle engaged in benevolence—although that claim is hardly contentious. If, however, one accepts his evidence for a Southern Baptist Social Gospel—primarily that Southern Baptists established orphanages and mountain mission schools and were engaged in “racial uplift”—one must expand the definition of the Social Gospel to something so broad that it becomes meaningless. Any good works become the Social Gospel, which means that Hebrew Bible Israelites, following the biblical injunction to care for the fatherless, would be practitioners of the Social Gospel, as would any missionary who has ever founded a school. Three times in The Quality of Mercy’s last two pages, Harper argues that the critic who contends that Southern Baptists had no Social Gospel because they offered no sustained critique of society “misses the point.” Sadly, at the end of this book, one is left wondering just what the point is.

Two conclusions stand unquestionable: Protestantism has been, and continues to be, the dominant religious force of the South; but the South now wrestles with the same challenges of diversity facing the nation as a whole. All Christians, not just southerners, should be concerned about the fate of the church in the face of an increasing array of religious options (and an increasingly prevalent mindset that religion is to be shopped for like so many back-to-school clothes). Concerned, but not anxious. Marion D. Aldridge’s advice is sage. We should embrace the challenges now facing the church rather than running from them. “As Christians,” Aldridge reminds us, “we must not be merely nostalgic, clinging to tradition, hankering for the good ol’ days. In Jesus, Christians have hope for the future.” We ought not gaze longingly at halcyon days gone by: In Isaiah 43:18-19, God chides us not to “consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.” As Aldridge writes: “Can God go with us, as a church and as individuals, to those places we have never been before? Of course God can.” Selah.

What’s Judgment and Grace in Dixie:Southern Faiths fromFaulkner to Elvisby Charles Reagan WilsonUniv. of Georgia Press202 pp.; $14.95, paper

One Name but Several Faces:Variety in Popular ChristianDenominations in Southern Historyby Samuel S. HillUniv. of Georgia Press128 pp.; $20

Religion in theContemporary South:Diversity, Communityand IdentityEdited by O.Kendall White, Jr.,Daryl WhiteUniv. of Georgia Press172 pp.; $20, paper

The Changing Shape ofProtestantism in the SouthEdited by Marion D. Aldridgeand Kevin LewisMercer Univ. Press85 pp.; $15, paper

Redeeming the South:Religious Culture andRacial Identities amongSouthern Baptists, 1865-1925by Paul HarveyUniv. of North Carolina Press333 pp.; $49.95, cloth, $17.95, paper

The Quality of Mercy:Southern Baptists andSocial Christianity, 1890-1920by Keith HarperUniv. of Alabama Press176 pp.; $21.95, paper

Ain’t Gonna LayMy ‘Ligion Down”:African AmericanReligion in the SouthEdited by Alonzo Johnsonand Paul JersildUniv. of South Carolina Press141 pp.; $19.95

Lauren F. Winner is Kellett Scholar at Clare College, University of Cambridge. She is at work, with Randall Balmer, on a book about contemporary American evangelicalism.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

Religious thought and practice in Britain is of perennial interest to Americans. Many of us have been influenced by the Anglo-American evangelical movement with its roots in the transatlantic activity of George Whitefield and the Wesleys. Some of us go down the Canterbury trail, and with the expatriate American T. S. Eliot, we sense we have come home—and know the place for the first time—when we go to England. Other Americans are struck by the undiluted charm of an English parish church; we who hail from places with mundane names (Park Street Church, Twelfth Reformed, Central Avenue Baptist, First Methodist) can be swept away with delight and nostalgia by, say, the parish church of Saint Catherine, Chiselhampton, Oxfordshire, as the poet John Betjeman once was:

Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.

Other Americans, with theological and historical interests, wonder about the state of religion in the mother country. One often hears that the churches are empty and that religion in the land of Wesley and Knox, of Cardinal Newman and Archbishop Temple, of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott, is in parlous condition. And if we actually visit a British church, we may wonder, with poet Philip Larkin,

When churches fall completely out of
use, what
we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
a few
cathedrals chronically on show, their
parchment,
place and pyx in locked cases, and let
the rest
rent-free to rain and sheep, shall we
avoid them
as unlucky places?

The books under review here help us to sort out several important questions: If Britain is more “secular” than America, what would that amount to? If there is a religious crisis in Britain, can we detect the antecedents of that crisis? And if there is a diminishment of religion, what in the cultural history of the islands can explain it?

David Hempton is professor of modern history at Queens University, Belfast. His prior work on Methodism and revivalism may be known to some readers of . Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland sets the tone for our consideration in this essay in two respects: it avoids the mistake of assuming that Britain is England writ large in that Hempton unapologetically spends a great deal of time with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (the “Celtic fringe”); and it avoids sealing off religion into some entity called “historical theology,” in that Hempton contextualizes religion by asking the questions we expect from scholars in social history and the sociology of religion.

Hempton’s historical tour uses the various regions of the British Isles to emphasize the intersection of religion and national identity. In England, the established church was to be universal and unitary; it was meant to be everywhere and unchallenged. The church was to be not only “the religious arm of the state, but a framework of loyalty and allegiance within which other activities had their meaning.” It was a powerful social vision, but one that could not tolerate pluralism or religious loyalties based on class and region. In the four or five decades following the French Revolutionary era, this Anglican consensus was destabilized by the rise of Methodism, which challenged established religion in the name of religion.

Wales and Scotland are contrasting cases. The Welsh reply to the English conjunction of Conservative party and Anglican church was a Welsh identity based on the Liberal party and Nonconformist religion. In Scotland, on the other hand, a non-Anglican communion enjoyed established status. But the Scottish ideal of a “godly commonwealth” could not be realized, despite the considerable efforts of the Scots, most notably the redoubtable preacher, theologian, and savant Thomas Chalmers. In 1843, Chalmers led dissident Presbyterians out of the Established Kirk to form the Free Church of Scotland—an action that led in time to a much-altered financial situation for the established church. For these reasons and more, the Scots had even greater cause to value their own “national identity” and to resent their forced association with England.

Ireland is the region of the United Kingdom furthest from the center of Britain, but the recurring nineteenth-century political crises over Ireland were to have far-reaching consequences for religion in Britain. Catholicism’s politicization under Daniel O’Connell drove Irish Catholics away from Britain. However, in Ulster—later to become Northern Ireland—evangelical Protestantism pushed northern Protestants ever closer to England (whereas in Wales, evangelical religion weakened connections with England). Moreover, the later political crises in Ireland—from the Home Rule debate of the 1880s to the founding of the Irish Free State in 1918—provoked a religious crisis in the rest of Britain: If the Reformation settlement did not hold for all parts of the British Isles, what did the settlement amount to? If Victoria was not to be monarch of all the peoples, in what sense could she be “defender of the faith”? Indeed, the seeds of toleration and pluralism had long since been sown. The Home Rule crisis was to bring a pluralist Britain to full flower.

Religion and Political Culture
in Britain and Ireland: From
the Glorious Revolution to
the Decline of Empire
by David Hempton
Cambridge Univ. Press
191 pp.; $49.95, hardback; $16.95, paper

Hempton’s suggestions about religious decline in Britain are remarkable in both insight and scope. He highlights some cultural themes that had supported, even inspired, British religion and shows how their transformation signaled religious decline. Anti-Catholicism had been a pivotal feature of British Protestantism, and its decline by 1900 removed the most important single element in forging British national identity, leaving Ulster sullenly and rebelliously alone in keeping up the anti-Catholic drumbeat. Empire had brought with it a consciousness of British responsibility to the world, and the decline of the imperial idea—first in Ireland, later elsewhere—caused a decline in evangelical responsibility. Social policy, or the influence of religion in constructing social policy, declined proportionately to the rise of state power. Evangelicals in the free churches could not break out of the dilemma of a personalized religion in the impersonal world of market economies. Anglicans, especially William Temple, did construct a comprehensive vision for social policy, but they failed precisely because the church was the Church of England, whereas the nation was the United Kingdom.

Hempton ends with a modest conclusion about the patchwork quilt of British cultures and religious patterns, noting that they rarely overlap in a coherent way. But he insists—rightly, in my view—that religion and culture are inherently intertwined: a perspective that does not diminish the explanatory cultural power of religion, but emphasizes it.

Hugh McLeod’s Religion and Society in England, 1850-1914 is as particular in scope as Hempton’s book is broad. McLeod takes a fairly small slice of British socioreligious life and subjects it to a minute analysis. By focusing on the mid-Victorian to Edwardian periods, McLeod is able to ask specific questions about the undisputed Protestant consensus that prevailed in England in 1850 and about why it had diminished so markedly, without entirely breaking down, by 1914.

An attractive feature of McLeod’s presentation is his reversal of the typical historical method. That is, he showcases his sources rather than burying them in the endnotes. His work is broadly informed by relevant secondary literature, but he draws particularly on three oral history projects. This is “history from the bottom up” done in a convincing way because the author is historiographically sophisticated.

McLeod takes us through the national religious census held on March 30, 1851. Fifty-nine attendees for every 100 people in the population were reported. We learn some very interesting things about who belonged where and why on census day and the years thereafter. In his assessment of patterns of religious belonging, McLeod cannot say normatively who believed what, but he can see why people behaved the way they did in terms of class, region, and gender.

Social class was a major determinant of who was in what church on census day and throughout the whole Victorian period. The vicar of the parish was most often the social better of those in his parochial charge, and this disparity increasingly rubbed the working classes the wrong way.

A factory worker from Preston reported never having seen the vicar on the streets of his section of town. The Salvation Army would visit, but the vicar would call on the better areas of Preston, “Like Westcliffe, for instance, where it wouldn’t be beer, it would be wine and the rest of it.” Such sentiments, if widely shared, could account for defections to Nonconformist chapels.

Religion and Society
in England, 1850-1914
by Hugh McLeod
London: Macmillan
267 pp.; £37.50, hardback; £11.99, paper

Region was also a significant index of where people belonged. In 1851, some 44 percent of those in church on census day were not in “church” (i.e., the Church of England) but in “chapel” (i.e., Nonconformist services). The majority of worshipers in large towns and cities were at Nonconformist chapels by 1900. This can be seen very clearly in a regional sense. The church dominated most of southern England, except Cornwall, and in the south and west midlands and in Cumbria. Chapel was ascendant in a belt running from Bedfordshire to Norfolk, in the north midlands, Yorkshire, and the northeast.

Gender, as a category of analysis, intersects with and punctuates McLeod’s analysis of class and region. While attendance by the Victorian-era working classes was less than other classes, it was far from negligible (e.g., in London, 22 percent of mothers, 18 percent of fathers; in Lancashire, 40 percent of mothers, 32 percent of fathers). Still more fascinating, at least to this reviewer, was the apparent relationship of religious participation by men and women to the nature of the economy in a particular area. McLeod observes that in textile towns, where gender roles are less defined by work, the sexes participated more equally and frequently than in towns dominated by engineering, where women were limited to home-based jobs. In short, the greater relative equality of work roles apparently allowed for, and possibly enabled, greater equality of religious participation.

The most challenging part of Religion and Society in England is McLeod’s discussion of the religious crisis that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. There is no real doubt that secularization occurred. What McLeod does well is to give social location to that process. If we recall one of the author’s central theses—that “decline” can be best understood in relation to the competitive and costly “boom” of church-building in the early Victorian era—we can see that the boom paralleled the expansion of the middle classes. Not only was religion found more among the middle classes than the working classes, but also the boom of religion was part of the expanding confidence among the earnest folk of the middle classes. Thus, if secularization undoubtedly followed the boom time, and if it continues throughout the twentieth century, it is useful to recall the social location of the decline. As McLeod writes, “Certainly the declining participation by this most powerful group had fateful consequences for the social role of religion.”

McLeod, in conclusion, realizes that his periodization may be questioned. While still believing that the religious crisis should be dated 1890-1914, he admits that other historians, such as David Hempton, see a longer-term process. McLeod’s analysis is unsatisfactory to the extent that he seeks the answer to a crisis mentality in English religion exlusively within England. Had he looked to Britain more generally he might have found another clue. As Hempton makes clear,1 the Home Rule crisis in Ireland was a profound shock throughout all Britain. In short, if English nationality and religion are not coincident with the British state, then thinking about both religious and national identities is due for revision. I accept that McLeod’s intention was to discuss and decode the crisis of religion in England, 1850-1914. All the factors for decline offered by McLeod are apposite; placed in a British context they would be more persuasive and powerful still.

We conclude with Religion in Modern Britain, by Steve Bruce, professor at the University of Aberdeen and one of the leading sociologists of religion in Britain and America. His previous books have tended to focus on conservative Protestantism’s linkage of religion and politics, hence Bruce’s interest in the Reverends Ian Paisley and Jerry Falwell. Religion in Modern Britain is written in jargon-free English and is accessible to the student and lay audience for which it is intended. It provides a context in which to connect Hempton’s and McLeod’s findings as well, especially on the crisis of religion and secularization.

Religion in Modern Britain
by Steve Bruce
Oxford Univ. Press
134 pp.; $35

In the twentieth century, the religious statistics are gloomy (5.4 million practicing Protestants in 1900, 3.4 million in 1990, a general decline in which the Church of England by itself dropped from 2.8 million to 1.5 million). But within the statistical pattern there is a quirky area, and it puts to question the matter raised by McLeod of just when the “religious crisis” ensued. The statistics do not tell a story of straight-line decline. In the Church of England, for example, there were actually more church members in 1950 than in 1900, and as late as 1970, almost as many as in 1900. But since 1970, the decline has been precipitous indeed. In Methodism, there was also a rise from 1900 to 1930, but then a straight-line drop of nearly 50 percent by 1990. If “the crisis” was largely in place by 1914, or even before, how do we explain the increases by 1930 for Methodists or by 1950 for Anglicans? And how do we explain the bottom falling out since 1970?

Once again, the story seems to turn on class and gender. The churches could not hold men of any class within their fellowships. While there were—and are—more middle-class than working-class men, the total number of men has declined. Whereas in 1990 the sexes are nearly balanced in the general population (51 percent women, 49 percent men), frequent attendance in church or chapel is 63 percent female, 37 percent male.

Bruce offers some incisive analysis that will interest conservative Protestants on both sides of the ocean, though they may not like it. He admonishes liberal clergy who sought relevance at the expense of orthodoxy: “Those liberal churchmen who argued that the supernatural elements should be removed from religious beliefs so as to make them more palatable to modern people made a big mistake.” However, lest anyone suggest that “liberalism ruined the church,” Bruce offers some facts. The resilience of some conservative parts of British Christendom is not explained by people leaving liberal churches in dissatisfaction. Detailed analyses of membership rolls reveal that people leave churches by death, not displeasure, especially if one looks at the Church of England and Church of Scotland. Those churches could neither recruit nor hold their own offspring, thus causing the decline. The relatively few conservative successes (remember that 86 percent of adults do not attend any church in Britain) did not occur by attracting disappointed long-term members of mainstream churches but by recruiting and holding their own offspring.

Finally, on the question of secularization, Bruce is both compellingly insightful and accessible. Some scholars of religion think that modern society really has not secularized, and that secularization is a bankrupt theory. Bruce begs to differ:

Although not regarded with any great hostility, our churches are unpopular, their teachings are ignored by the vast majority of the population, their leaders no longer have the ears of our rulers, their efforts to glorify God are barely noticed, and their beliefs no longer inform the presuppositions of the wider culture.

Bruce then takes us through a reprise of secularization theory that explicates the work of scholars such as Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, and David Martin, as well as his own with the late Roy Wallis. Here secularization is seen as the natural working out of the logic of Protestantism in interaction with larger social and cultural trends—a line of argument that descends from Max Weber.

Nowadays it is often said that Weber was wrong in predicting religious disappearance; apologists today, citing the United States, proclaim that religion has not disappeared but relocated. Well and good, says Bruce (and this reviewer would agree), but a religion that has lost its social meaning and exists only in a private, “religious” sphere may not even be Christianity at all, but its echo and memory.

If it is true that the very method of the Protestant movement—the thrust toward personal autonomy and private conscience—was a major engine of secularization,2 what follows? What if “the secular,” rather than being an alien force, is at the marrow of Protestant divinity? The evidence, Bruce suggests, seems clear:

What appears at first as a practical freedom—we can worship at any altar or none—has profound consequences for the way we think about that worship. Religious belief is now obviously a matter of choices. We may still choose to believe, but we cannot easily hide from ourselves the knowledge that we choose God rather than God choosing us.

We began this essay by asking, with poet Philip Larkin, “When churches fall completely out of use, what shall we turn them into … ?” Another difficult question is this: How shall we explain a church filled by people exercising their “freedom to choose”? The books under review here cause us to ask again, and with serious purpose: What happened to religion in Britain?

Ronald A. Wells is professor of history and director of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship at Calvin College.

1. See also James Loughlin, Ulster Unionism and British National Identity (London: Pinter, 1995).

2. For a concise statement of this argument, see Harry Stout, “Puritanism Considered As a Profane Movement,” Christian Scholar’s Review, Vol. 10 (1980), pp. 3-19

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

You could safely bet the price of this book—in fact, the price of several copies—that over the recent Jewish high holy days no cultural or political topic provided the hook for as many rabbinical sermons as Elliott Abrams’s Faith and Fear. In the Jewish community, one hears references to it constantly. That is good news, because the book is not only important for what it says, but also for what it doesn’t say.

The argument here can be condensed to three points:

1. The orientation of the official Jewish community—its most powerful leaders and the organizations they run—is driven fundamentally by a fear of and flight from Judaism. Abrams, who is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, would have done well to have provided a definition of what he believes authentic Judaism is. There are several contenders for the title, ranging from the Reform Movement—which rejects the main tenets of the Judaism that existed for three millennia before anyone heard of Reform—to Orthodox Judaism, which upholds those tenets (i.e., an eternally valid Torah, given to Moses at Sinai along with an oral tradition explaining it). Yet, despite this omission, it’s clear he means that the official representatives of the community fear some version of the religion as defined by ancient tradition.

Otherwise, how to explain the two most striking features of contemporary Jewish leadership? The first is antireligious agitating, such as the persistent demands for legislative and judicial action to curb the influence of faith in American life and the general atmosphere of anti-Christian suspicion found in statements like the Anti-Defamation League’s notorious attack on the Christian Right. Both are typically explained as a reaction to Christian anti-Semitism, present and potential. Yet Abrams painstakingly documents the evolution of Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical thinking in the direction of acceptance verging on embrace of Jews and Judaism.

In fact, it isn’t so much that Jewish leaders fear Christianity per se. Liberal Jewish groups insist equally on striking at Jewish religious excursions into the public square, including patently milquetoast ones like a Reform rabbi’s attempt to read a prayer at a high-school commencement. (A secular Jewish girl in Rhode Island, for whom “it was too much to ask … [that she] stand quietly or sit silently when others prayed,” brought that case, which ended up in the Supreme Court.)

Combine this with the other striking fact about American Jewish life—the obsessive search for substitute religions, whether Zionism, liberalism, ethnic Jewishness, Holocaust veneration, or the preoccupation with phantom anti-Semitism—and you begin to get the picture. Abrams calls it “the Jews’ widespread anxiety about Judaism.”

One might add that this anxiety was predictable. Judaism imposes prodigious demands on all aspects of the Jew’s everyday life. It is a burden King David regarded as joyous (see Ps. 19:9); but many other Jews, from Saint Paul to Marx and Freud to the current leader of the Reform Movement, have felt otherwise. As long as there have been Jews, factions among our people have sought methods of escape. Pious Christians, who observe more of the strictures of Judaism than many Jews do, excite Jewish resentment because they remind us of the commitment to biblical faith that so many of us have given up. It’s a common human response to dislike people who make you feel guilty.

Faith or Fear:
How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America
by Elliott Abrams
Free Press
237 pp.; $25

2. This aggressive secularism has resulted in a demographic catastrophe. The substitute religions, liberalism and the rest, were intended to secure the future of American Jews in safety and liberty. Whether they helped at all can be debated, but one thing is clear: they have proved increasingly powerless to attract the commitment of young American Jews. Presented with the argument that they should identify themselves with their people because Israel needs financial support (increasingly it doesn’t), or to fight anti-Semitism (barely in evidence in America), or to deny Hitler a posthumous victory (what he failed to do with his ovens may be accomplished by assimilation and intermarriage), young Jews shrug. In the appalling stories told by “survivors,” a word typically used without a modifier as if to say survivors of calamities other than the Holocaust aren’t worth mentioning, they see no reason to alter their plans to marry whomever they fall in love with, Jewish or not.

No one should have been surprised by the 1990 statistic that more than half of Jews who get married now marry non-Jews. Nor by the fact, also cited by Abrams, that “20 per cent of the ‘core’ Jewish population has left the Jewish religion.” Their parents never convinced them—probably never even hinted—that in the question of Jewish identity there is anything particularly urgent at stake. Abrams is the first writer to put this statistical and sociological argument on record at book length, and he has done so with great clarity and force. No wonder Jews are talking about his work, and not only talking. They are agreeing, which Jews rarely do about anything. Whether they will act on the remedy he offers is another matter.

3. To revive the prospects of American Jews, writes Abrams, the community must give up its false gods and return to—Judaism:

For what is required in American Jewry now is a change in the publicly acknowledged goals and standards of the community. It would be a far cry from the present attitude of disdain, or at best indifference, that is so often directed at those Jews who reject the community’s assimilationist norms. It would make the financing of religious education a central community activity, so that no Jewish family that seeks a religious education for its children is prevented by the issue of costs. It would mean making the link to Israel far less a matter of financial support, and far more one of personal contact and commitment. It would mean bridging the gap between the lay organizations—above all, the Federations—and the community’s religious institutions—its day schools and its synagogues. …

But far more important than the necessary changes in budget and programs is the change in understanding. The new understanding would not be that Orthodoxy is better than the Conservative or Reform movements, but rather that the fundamental proposition on which the Orthodox operate is in fact correct: Judaism, not Jewishness, must be the heart of a Jew’s life and of the community’s life.

Abrams is calling for a religious revival of far greater scope than the one that has been going on for several decades now, namely, the return of tens of thousands of secular Jews to the faith in Torah that their great-grandparents rejected. Tens of thousands aren’t enough. Abrams rightly argues that without a much broader return to traditional Judaism, American Jewry will continue to shrink, leaving only an Orthodox remnant, passionate but small.

It’s in the nature of his book, however, that it can only point the way to such a revival. It will not incite one.

After all, Faith or Fear is basically a secular book. It could not really be otherwise. Abrams identifies himself as a “somewhat observant Conservative Jew,” but he remains cagey about what, religiously speaking, he himself believes. Certainly he believes in the Jewish people, but in this book I count only three references to Judaism which imply that he believes in G-d. He speaks of a wish to convey to his children his “faith” that “the covenant of Abraham abides today,” yet he puts the Supreme Being between quote marks: “it is now very clear that the ‘presence of G-d’ is the only guarantee of Jewish continuity.” He couches his argument in terms of the mere survival of the Jews per se.

That is, Abrams in effect says, if a century from now we want there still to be a substantial community of Americans who call themselves “Jews,” then on the part of Jews living today there must be a return to tradition. Whether Jewish tradition possesses value beyond serving as a bulwark against ethnic disintegration—in other words, whether it is in any ultimate sense true or not—is not a question Abrams chooses to pursue.

He can’t be blamed for that, for the audience he has set out to persuade is composed, as he notes, of Jews who fear Judaism. According to our tradition, all Jewish souls were present at Mount Sinai and thus possess the intuition that something is asked of them by G-d. They sense that the demands of the Torah apply to all Jews. Many of us find that implicit knowledge deeply threatening. These are, in short, the Jews who get nose jobs, whose discomfort with their identity as Jews can be so great that they will pay a surgeon literally to cut it out of their faces. Others, squeamish of knives, defend themselves against the claims of G-d by adopting the secular ideology called liberalism, with its assumption that man, not G-d, is the arbiter of all values. Anyway, they don’t want other Jews telling them to observe the Sabbath or keep kosher because G-d asks them to. Any reference to him that isn’t between quotation marks would disrupt Abrams’s purpose, to put it mildly.

Yet at some point the question of truth must be forthrightly addressed. Is it true that G-d has a mission for the Jews, crystallized in his Torah, or isn’t it? If not, then no program for the preservation of the Jews as a distinct people can claim anything better than a sentimental justification. Elliott Abrams has changed the terms of debate among American Jews, regarding the survival of our community, by forcefully arguing that young Jews can no longer be appealed to on sentimental grounds alone.

Now that the definitive secular case has been made for a return to Judaism, the ground may soon be ready for the religious case. There would be a certain aesthetic appeal—the appeal of symmetry, of putting one shoe on after the other—if in a few years Elliott Abrams published a book, complementing this one, that argued that G-d lives, that he cares about our commitment to him, and therefore that, as Abrams had said earlier though for different reasons, Jews must return to Judaism.

David Klinghoffer is literary editor of National Review.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

In 1934 a graduate student from the University of Iowa was regularly hitchhiking the 50 miles to Rock Island, Illinois, to teach at Augustana College. At half-time, four courses a semester, he constituted the English department. It was hard work, but $900 a year was fair money in the Depression, so the young teacher was sorry to receive a letter from the board demanding to know if it were true that he was an agnostic and atheist, a disbeliever in the Augsburg Confession. Wallace Stegner wrote back to the Lutheran board “that he didn’t see how he could be an agnostic and an atheist at the same time—which seemed to him philosophically difficult—and that as far as the Augsburg Confession was concerned, he couldn’t remember ever having read it.”

This is the kind of profile in courage that Jackson Benson sketches so approvingly in his biography of the late novelist Wallace Stegner. Not surprisingly, Benson’s book has been scorned in the New York Times Book Review as an injudicious exercise in hero worship. But if Benson seems adulatory—and he is—most readers of Stegner will affirm there is much to admire, both in the man and in his work. Benson’s biography, the first on his subject to appear, serves as an illuminating if somewhat awestruck retrospect on the long lifetime of professional, civic, and literary effort that has made Stegner (1909-93) a national treasure.

It was John Milton who said that a good poet must first of all be a good man. Benson in effect argues that few writers of the twentieth century have taken this dictum to heart, and that Stegner was one who did. Benson’s emphasis on the moral seriousness of the writer and his work is terribly unfashionable, but in the long run it may have been these very moral qualities that have made Stegner so durable. In over half a century as an active writer, Stegner published twelve novels, ten volumes of essays and short stories, and six works of history and biography. Many, if not most, of these books are still in print.

Though Stegner was in no deliberate sense of the word a professing Christian, he was nevertheless dedicated to exploring Christian values of community, caring, and personal integrity. “What saves us at any level of human life,” Stegner once wrote in an essay, “is union, mutual responsibility, what St. Paul calls charity.” Almost every one of his novels attempts what Benson calls “forgiveness.” Reading him, I am reminded of the Victorian earnestness of George Eliot, who, like Stegner, hoped we could be good without God.

Benson explains Stegner’s devotion to constancy as the result of a pioneer childhood and the reaction to an unscrupulous father, both of which are chronicled in his first major novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943). Born on his Norwegian grandfather’s farm in Iowa, Stegner moved with his parents and older brother in quick succession to North Dakota, Washington, and Saskatchewan, where his father filed a homestead on the Montana line. The idea was to grow wheat to sell at a high price during World War I, but the weather didn’t cooperate, and his father turned to bootlegging. Stegner’s early years in Saskatchewan form the root of his most lyrical work, Wolf Willow (1962), a unique combination of history, fiction, and memoir. His father’s bootlegging business took them to Great Falls, Montana, for a year or so, and finally to Salt Lake City. The family moved 20 times in nine years to stay one step ahead of the law. Big Rock Candy Mountain records the shame the brothers felt, the magnetic yet abusive personality of their father, and the longsuffering patience of their mother.

The adolescent Wallace Stegner escaped the shadow of his father first through the many activities offered by the Mormons. He thought their beliefs preposterous but felt their warmth and care as profound. He was to honor them with two books of history, Mormon Country (1942) and The Gathering of Zion (1964). In the former he writes, “Among garden-variety Saints, one finds rather more human kindness, more neighborliness, more willingness to devote time and trouble to the assistance of their fellows, than one will find in most sections of the United States.”

Stegner’s second escape from his father took the form of academic achievement. From the University of Utah he went on to graduate school in English at Iowa and Berkeley and later found teaching posts at Utah, Wisconsin, and Harvard. In the meantime, his brother died of pneumonia, his saintly mother died of cancer, and his father committed suicide in a cheap hotel in Salt Lake City after shooting his woman companion. It was Wallace who nursed his mother until her death, his father having abandoned her, and these events marked him for a lifetime. The lone survivor of his family, as a young man he turned to the writing of Big Rock Candy Mountain to try to understand his past. Much later in life, with the novel Recapitulation (1979), he returned to the same ghosts.

But life went on, and Stegner built his own circle of family and friends. He married Mary Page in his graduate years in Iowa, and they had a son whose birth in 1937 coincided with that of his first novel, Remembering Laughter. These events form part of his last novel, Crossing to Safety (1987), a quiet book about a long friendship between two very different couples. One couple is based on the accommodating Stegners, the other on Phil and Peg Gray, a scintillating but troubled pair whom the Stegners met while at Wisconsin and often summered with in Vermont. Readers familiar with Crossing to Safety will be intrigued with some of the details behind it, from Stegner’s expressed motivation in writing the book (as a private memoir to share with his wife) to the reception of it by the Gray children (enthusiastic in spite of the ambivalent portrait of their mother).

In his New England years, Stegner found two important mentors while teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference—Bernard DeVoto and Robert Frost. DeVoto had also grown up in Utah, and he encouraged Stegner’s interests in western history and geography. In later years he goaded Stegner into taking a forthright environmental stand. Stegner was to write DeVoto’s biography, The Uneasy Chair (1974).

Frost’s influence was more diffuse. According to Benson, Frost gave authority to Stegner’s allegiance to individual effort and responsibility, his tendency to find drama and meaning in ordinary lives. He transmitted to Stegner an ironic, tolerant, distanced view of human fallibility and reinformed his lack of sentimentality. Not least, Frost’s influence crept into Stegner’s sense of language. It became Stegner’s conviction that “there ought to be a poet submerged in every novelist.” Frost liked to take Stegner on long hikes after midnight under the stars. Years later, Stegner returned the favor with a long walk in the countryside on the day Frost found that his son had committed suicide.

It was DeVoto’s influence, however, that resulted in the book that established Stegner as a voice for the environment. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) is a biography of John Wesley Powell, the first man to descend the Colorado River. Stegner dispenses with this adventure rather quickly to focus on Powell’s long government career as the founder of the United States Geological Survey and Bureau of Reclamation. Powell understood before almost anyone else the essential aridity of the West, the importance of planning settlement wisely. He was virtually ignored in his own time, and Stegner took it upon himself, in this book and many others, to repeat Powell’s message for the present. The biography has had a profound influence on at least two secretaries of the interior, Stewart Udall under Kennedy and Bruce Babbitt in the Clinton administration. Udall made Stegner his special assistant for part of his time in office.

In the 1960s, at the urging of his friend Ansel Adams, Stegner twice served on the board of directors for the Sierra Club. In the 1980s he likewise sat on the governing council of the Wilderness Society. Stegner did not particularly like these advising and committee duties, but he felt bound to do what he could to help in a cause he deeply believed in. Predictably, it was his pen that helped most of all. In an essay published in The Saturday Review, for example, Stegner argues for the creation of a Redwoods National Park: “In no sense … can any tree-farm forest, even an honest one, replace the depth and silence, the druidical green peace, of the ancient groves. In a way, the redwood lumber companies are like slave owners before the Civil War: they are engaged in a bad but legal business.” More than anything else, Stegner is remembered by fellow environmentalists for the “Wilderness Letter” he wrote to a government functionary in 1960, in which he memorably characterized the American West as “the geography of hope.” This became a manifesto that helped bring about the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.

After World War II, Stegner was invited to start a graduate program in creative writing at Stanford. The Stegners were happy to move back West from Harvard and made their permanent home in Los Altos Hills. Wallace Stegner directed the writing program at Stanford for 25 years, and fellowships there still bear his name. Benson portrays him as a dedicated but no-nonsense sort of teacher who took pains to help his students as he could. Among his better-known pupils were Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, and Wendell Berry. Berry was his favorite student, Kesey his least favorite. Berry’s ethical concern for land and community are a natural fit with Stegner’s values. Kesey, on the other hand, represented to Stegner the chaos and self-indulgence of the sixties. While Stegner taught the writing seminar on campus, Kesey orchestrated an “anti-seminar” in his home that turned to drug experimentation.

Kesey seems to have a presence in one of Stegner’s more interesting novels, All the Little Live Things (1967). The narrator, a retired literary agent with a house and wife much like Stegner’s own in California, confronts a young man on a motorcycle, supposedly a graduate student, who has begun to camp without permission on their property. Remembering his own son, now dead, the narrator tries to reach out in tolerance while battling his irritation. But the squatter breaks a long series of promises and soon has started a commune of sorts. One can see Stegner the teacher trying to come to terms with a whole generation of students who “seem to throb rather than think.” All the Little Live Things also concerns a young married woman, a neighbor of the narrator’s, who, like Stegner’s mother, embodies an almost saintlike love and dies a terrible death from cancer. The contrast between the irresponsible, healthy student and the doomed young mother is almost too painful to bear.

Wallace Stegner:
His Life and Work
by Jackson J. Benson
Viking
472 pp.; $32.95

Stegner retired from teaching in 1971 with a sense of defeat, no longer able to cope with the arrogance and disrespect he felt from his students. As he later told Benson, “There was a real sense of letdown. A sense that I had wasted a lot of years of my life. I was really disgusted with the teaching business.”

In one of life’s rare compensations, in the year of his disillusioned retirement he published the novel that won for him the Pulitzer Prize, Angle of Repose. The novel evolved from an actual collection of letters from Mary Hallock Foote, a nineteenth-century artist and writer who married a civil engineer who took her from the genteel East to the raw West. As they move from one remote mining camp to another, the woman bristles with a sense of resentment and loss. At the same time, paradoxically, she writes and draws quaint sketches of the camps for the fashionable magazines back East, in effect leading a double life as a local colorist who actually hates the local color. It is the unlikely relationship between western husband and eastern wife that fascinates the narrator, their grandson. “What really interests me,” he says, “is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.” In this and in other of his novels (particularly The Spectator Bird) Stegner is—as Benson calls him—”the balladeer of monogamy.”

Benson notes that the New York Times Book Review did not review Angle of Repose and, when it was awarded the Pulitzer, blasted the choice of the judges (the editors preferred Rabbit Redux, by John Updike). Neither did the NYTBR review his next novel, The Spectator Bird (1976), which won the National Book Award. Stegner was hurt by these snubs, and Benson upholds the complaint, which may partly account for the caustic review his own biography receives. Perhaps it did not help that Stegner had on more than one occasion accused the eastern literary establishment of snobbery toward the West. (Angle of Repose is, in fact, about this very snobbery.) At any rate, Stegner himself was conscious of being a misfit in his own literary generation, a “generation that appears to specialize in despair, hostility, hypersexuality, and disgust.” This he wrote in a 1964 essay on the dilemma of western writers, which he titled “Born a Square.”

Stegner’s most concentrated and eloquent thoughts on being a westerner are contained in his small book The American West As Living Space (1987). The three essays in this book are also reprinted in his last collection, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992). In these essays he rebukes our unwillingness to admit the West’s aridity, reviles the violence and rootlessness of much of western American culture, but finally chooses to celebrate “the visible, pervasive fact of western space, which acts as a preservative.” These open spaces, Stegner argues, can promote a largehearted sense of freedom that expresses itself in a love of the land and a preference for being out of doors. He claims, in fact, that small university towns like Missoula, Montana, and Corvallis, Oregon, far from being backwaters, are close to being ideal communities, combining the loveliness of the land with a small dose of college culture—something, he says, that the eastern academic visitors Leslie Fielder and Bernard Malamud proved themselves incapable of noticing.

Having grown up in Corvallis myself, I am delighted to have been suddenly granted an ideal childhood. But I cannot say that I disagree about the effect of open spaces. My family has shuttled for four or five generations between California and Oregon, and the mountain ranges that join these states have bred themselves into my bones. I have gone to college in the suburbs of Chicago, taught for a spell in the low hills of western New York, and visited the confinements of England, but all at the cost of claustrophobia and depression. My heart knows when it is home; the saddest sight is the Rocky Mountains receding in a rearview mirror or slipping away under the wing.

Reading Stegner, I also know that I am home. And I suspect that others, from both east and west, have felt the same. For these and for readers of Stegner to come, Jackson Benson’s biography will stand as a suitable appreciation. Can a writer who “extols the old verities of love, friendship, sacrifice, compassion, and forgiveness … find a place in the literature of the 1990s?” Benson asks. One certainly hopes so. And to relinquish some of my own western chauvinism, it is only fair to note that Wallace Stegner wanted his ashes strewn across a Vermont hillside. Perhaps the ashes of a few choice copies of the New York Times Book Review could be scattered with them.

Paul Willis is associate professor of English at Westmont College.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

After undergoing a relative eclipse as a cultural force in the decades following World War II, the Bible is making a comeback in American culture, though more as an academic movement than a grassroots phenomenon. Bill Moyers’s pbs discussion group on Genesis became a media event. Time magazine was so bold as to speak of an “unmistakable Genesis revival in American culture.”

We must not overstate the extent of the revival. There was a time when the Bible was the central text of English and American culture, permeating its civil institutions, law, morality, and artistic expression. By contrast, the current scholarly ferment about the Bible is a coterie phenomenon. It is not on the verge of making the Bible the pervasive presence in American society that it once was.

C. S. Lewis, musing on the likely fate of the Bible after a majority of people have ceased to accept it as an inspired religious book, predicted that it would continue as a force in two spheres—in the specialist’s study and among the believing minority who read it to be instructed. My focus in this article is on what is happening in the scholarly forum, with spillover effect at the local secular bookstore (though not at the community Christian bookstore). The chief importance of what is happening will be its eventual impact (or lack of it) on how the Bible is viewed by the segment of society that in the past has obeyed and believed the Bible as a sacred book.

The renewed prominence of the Bible in the academy has been mainly a literary phenomenon. Literary approaches to the Bible have become a fashion and even a fad among both literary critics and biblical scholars. The Bible is now part of the canon of works taught by professors in departments of English and comparative literature. Several years ago the president of the Modern Language Association claimed that all the needs of a core curriculum in literature could be accomplished through the teaching of just one text—the Bible.

Publishers include books on the Bible in their literature catalogs. Specimen book titles from scholarly presses include Literary Criticism and the Gospels; Reading the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory; The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory; and The Literary Guide to the Bible. In the initial exuberance of the Bible-as-literature movement in the early sixties, Northrop Frye advocated the view that “the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along later can settle on it. … The Bible … should be the basis of literary training.” While Frye’s vision was never fully realized, in a modified sense it has been fulfilled.

The growth of interest in literary approaches to the Bible has been even more dramatic among biblical scholars. Book titles and subtitles tell the story: Matthew As Story; Irony in the Fourth Gospel; Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel; The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles. Indeed, literary terms are often smuggled into book titles where their presence seems gratuitous: Call to Discipleship: A Literary Study of Mark’s Gospel; The Christocentric Literary Structure of the Fourth Gospel; Revelation in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Mode and Theological Claim. Even more telling than all of this are the blurbs that publishers put into their catalogs and on book covers. It is no exaggeration to say that publishers are falling over themselves to claim a stake in the brave new world of literary approaches to the Bible. Several presses now have Bible-as-literature series (e.g., Indiana University and Westminster John Knox), and Sheffield Press in England has made a virtual industry out of literary studies of the Old Testament.

At least four main strands may be discerned in current literary approaches to the Bible. One is the prominence of the Bible-as-literature in “cutting-edge” discussions of the theory of interpretation in both literary and biblical studies. A second is actual commentary on the Bible, which increasingly shows an interest and even preoccupation with literary aspects of the text under discussion. From a different angle, contemporary imaginative writers, sensing that readers want to take a fresh look at the Bible, are turning to biblical materials as they ply their art. Finally, all of this ferment has prompted anthologizers to look again at the long history of biblical presence in the Western literary tradition. No landmark books dominate the landscape I have sketched, and the specimens I have selected should be viewed as representative rather than definitive.

The Postmodern Bible

A road map to current literary approaches in the nonevangelical academy is ready at hand. It is entitled The Postmodern Bible: The Bible and Culture Collective. Authored jointly by a group of ten scholars, it is a genuinely collaborative effort produced by a committee, not an anthology of essays by individual authors. While this novel venture is unlikely to initiate widescale imitation, it is a fact that a number of literary studies of the Bible are jointly authored projects, including The Literary Guide to the Bible(1987), edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, and A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible (1993), edited by Leland Ryken and Tremper Longman III. Although The Postmodern Bible is an anomaly in eschewing to label itself a literary approach at a time when many authors and publishers advertise their approaches as literary even when they are not, the approaches covered in the book are, nonetheless, the ones currently dominant in the discipline of literary studies.

Anyone expecting actual analysis of biblical texts need not turn to The Postmodern Bible. Instead, the book belongs to the now-dominant fashion in literary scholarship compendiously summed up by the formula “the triumph of theory.” The primary texts for scholars in this movement are not works of literature but works of theory and criticism. Literary texts are useful only as a repository into which to dip for “proof texts” used to support generalizations about theory and culture. Frank Kermode—who has more recently lamented the full flowering of the very movement he helped to establish—sounded the keynote in his book The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), a harbinger of trends to come, when he acknowledged that “this book is about interpretation, an interpretation of interpretation.” Another big-name critic concluded a discussion of the story of David and Bathsheba with the comment, “The real issue of the discussion was not the text but the critics” (Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories [1987]). For The Postmodern Bible, too, the Bible serves as the occasion for, rather than the subject of, discussion.

The Postmodern Bible is thus wrongly titled, since it tells us little about the Bible itself. What interests the authors is contemporary theory as applied to the Bible, and one can hardly improve on this book as a guide to current literary theory, which is systematically broken into its constituent parts, described, and critiqued. The 70-page bibliography is itself virtually definitive, nicely buttressed throughout the book by a copia of references to specific critical and theoretical texts. Whereas two decades ago one might legitimately have spoken about “the” literary approach to the Bible, the approaches surveyed in The Postmodern Bible—reader-response, structuralist/ narratological, poststructuralist, rhetorical, psychoanalytic, feminist/womanist, and ideological—show the pluralism that now prevails.

Despite that diversity, it is possible to ascertain the tendencies shared by current literary approaches to the Bible. Narrative is the preferred genre of analysis. In fact, literary approaches to the Bible are almost synonymous with an interest in biblical narrative to the relative neglect of other genres. A strong revisionist impulse drives the enterprise. The idea of producing alternate readings or counterreadings to the dominant reading is now fashionable. In a book that created a small scandal when it appeared in 1990 (The Book of J), Harold Bloom aspired to nothing less than “a reversal of twenty-five hundred years of institutionalized misreading” of the Old Testament, a feat that would require “a reading that is partly outside every normative tradition whatsoever.” The dominant image for the scholar writing on the Bible is no longer the interpreter or travel guide but the jailbreaker, unlocking the prison house of conventional interpretations of the Bible and freeing those who have been enslaved by them. A principal aim of The Postmodern Bible is “to read against the grain of the biblical texts and the institution of biblical scholarship.”

The comment about reading against the grain of biblical texts suggests that, in addition to resisting traditional interpretations of the Bible (and the methods on which they are based), current approaches also approach the biblical text itself with a hermeneutics of suspicion. A main thrust is to render biblical texts problematical—contradictory, filled with gaps that need to be filled by the ingenuity of the reader, obscure, opaque, indeterminate. One of the critics surveyed in The Postmodern Bible summarized what she had done with a biblical narrative thus: “It is an extremely sophisticated piece of literature. Embedded in a complex and, in its very complexity, problematic narrative structure, it is also an extremely sophisticated narrative unit. As an example as well of an extremely complex confusion of gender relations, it makes a case for a problematic of representation as related to gender” (Bal, Lethal Love). The key terms in this summary—sophisticated, complex, problematic, confusion—illustrate the myth of complexity that currently governs biblical interpretation. It leads to a distinct anti-didacticism as the Bible ceases to teach anything definite; indeed, it is often hard to see that biblical texts are about anything at all other than a scholar’s theory. As I flounder in the alleged complexity of the Bible, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s stricture against the humanists of the sixteenth century that they “lost the power … to respond to the central, obvious appeal of a great work.”

The Postmodern Bible: The Bible
and Culture Collective
edited by Elizabeth A. Castelli et al.
Yale Univ. Press
416 pp.; $35

> Compromising Redemption:
Relating Characters in the
Book of Ruth
by Danna Nolan Fewell and David Miller Gunn
Westminster John Knox
128 pp.; $13, paper

The Book of God:
The Bible As a Novel
by Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Zondervan
864 pp.; $27.99, hardcover;
$22.99, paper

Chapters into Verse:
Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible
edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder
Oxford Univ. Press
Vol. 1, 481 pp.; $25
Vol. 2, 391 pp.; $25

The effect of the trends that I have noted is to desacralize a book that has traditionally been held by a majority of its readers to be an authoritative religious and moral guide to belief and conduct. Exactly how does one desacralize a sacred book? The answers that The Postmodern Bible provides include the following: by debunking traditional religious views of it; by wresting it from pious readers; by discussing it in specialized language and jargon understandable only by a coterie of academic initiates; by denying determinate meaning to it; by eliminating any presuppositions about the uniqueness of its origin and authority; by rendering it so complex that ordinary people cannot hope to understand it; by divesting it of didacticism and turning its study into an intellectual game; by replacing the traditional goal of interpreting the Bible with critiquing it (that is, denigrating many of the ideas about God and people espoused by the biblical writers, until it becomes obvious that many of the scholars writing on the Bible do not approve of it).

Whereas literary criticism of the Bible began as a methodology for describing and interpreting the Bible, in a volume like The Postmodern Bible it has become an ideology whose dominating ideas include a disbelief in the Bible’s special status or authority, a distrust of traditional interpretations of it (especially by a believing community), skepticism about the ability of language to express determinate meaning, and a radical political-social agenda in the form of feminist and liberationist movements. The book itself answers any question we might have about how evangelical scholarship relates to the movement I have sketched by excluding it from its survey, except for a handful of published sources that are cited only to be used as whipping posts. Suppressed from view is a possibility that still flourishes in some circles, namely, literary criticism as a methodology for unfolding the form and content of the Bible.

A distinction made long ago by C. S. Lewis between receiving a text and using it remains a helpful framework for analyzing what is happening. To receive a text is to open oneself as fully as possible to what it says, whereas using it means to impose one’s self and beliefs immediately on the work. In the words of Lewis, “The first demand any work … makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive.” To obey the Bible as an authoritative word from God, along the lines of the Bible’s formula “thus says the Lord,” requires a stance of surrender. That such surrender is never absolute should not be allowed to obscure the high degree to which it can be done, nor how different the effect is compared to what happens when the Bible is made to fit an existing agenda.

The principle underlying many postmodern approaches to the Bible has been delineated by David Clines of the University of Sheffield (in The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible) as “customized interpretation.” He explains:

If there are no “right” interpretations, and no validity in interpretation beyond the assent of various interest groups, biblical interpreters have to give up the goal of determinate and universally acceptable interpretations, and devote themselves to producing interpretations they can sell—in whatever mode is called for by the communities they choose to serve.

The Postmodern Bible customizes the Bible for various interest groups, with traditional Christians and Jews not among them.

Reading Biblical Narrative

Despite the triumph of theory over criticism, commentaries on biblical books of course continue to be written. When we turn to them, we find that ideas do, indeed, have consequences, and that current literary theory produces a predictable type of commentary. Compromising Redemption: Relating Characters in the Book of Ruth, by Danna Nolan Fewell and David Miller Gunn, may serve as a specimen. The book is part of Westminster John Knox’s series Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation, edited by Fewell and Gunn, who also jointly published two “weathervane” books in 1993—Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story and Narrative in the Hebrew Bible.

A revisionist impulse permeates their commentary on Ruth. The authors set out to subvert the traditional reading of the story as a pastoral idyll and idealized love story in which an exemplary couple is divinely favored for their loyalty, generosity, and love. The methodology on which the challenge to traditional readings rests is literary, with a focus on characterization. Before proceeding to commentary, the authors retell the story, based on a commendable literary conviction that “talking about a story is no substitute for actually telling it.” The retelling, though, is a prosaic expansion of the biblical text in which the stylistic beauty and laconic terseness of the original are lost as the authors stack the interpretive deck before we even get to their commentary.

The commentary consists of three chapters, devoted respectively to Naomi, Boaz, and Ruth. In keeping with their avowed purpose to focus on what previous interpreters have missed, Fewell and Gunn spend most of their time exploring what they see as selfish motives instead of altruistic ones in the lead characters so that this story of redemption is “compromised” by suspect behavior. The cynicism emerges already in the listing of the story’s “dramatis personae,” where Boaz is described as someone who married Ruth in order to perpetuate the name and property of Mahlon, “or so he said.”

One of the salient features of current literary approaches is that Freudian readings are much in vogue as critics see sexual overtones everywhere in the Bible. Compromising Redemption runs true to form. References in Boaz’s speeches to vessels, drinking, and eating are “subliminal” sexual references. The “sheaves and grain can be seen as phallic.” Ruth’s request on the threshing floor that Boaz spread the skirt of his cloak over her pulls Boaz’s religiosity “to the most basic level of human interaction—sexual intercourse.”

In other ways, too, the heroic figures of tradition are cut down to size. Ruth’s eloquent statement of loyalty to her mother-in-law in chapter 1 is said to belong to “a world of hyperbole, on the edge of the absurd.” As for Ruth’s loyalty itself, it “is not without mixed motives,” nor is it “a love that recklessly loses sight of the self.” The goal of Naomi’s plan for the encounter on the threshing floor is “entrapment” of Boaz, the man of substance: “sexual intercourse, if not pregnancy, will enforce either marriage or a pay-off.” Boaz, fearful that he may have had intercourse with Ruth in his inebriated state, is motivated to marry Ruth as much by a desire to protect his reputation as by a concern for Ruth.

Literary criticism can follow other paths than this, but here we find in microcosm the current state of literary criticism of the Bible: iconoclastic and subversive of traditional interpretations, debunking of received views of biblical characters and events, preoccupied with sex and with the human element in the Bible to the relative neglect of the divine.

A reviewer of Compromising Redemption spoke volumes about the current scene when he praised the authors for walking “the line with apparent ease between celebrating indeterminacy on the one hand and reading for ideological subversion on the other,” and for giving us “a provocatively playful reading of the Book of Ruth.”

Contemporary Literary Authors and the Bible

With the Bible enjoying celebrity status on the cultural scene, imaginative writers are turning to it as a seedbed for their creative efforts. A recent specimen is Walter Wangerin’s The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel. The subtitle is a misnomer, since the book relies little on the novelistic staple of extensive realistic detail. The book instead preserves the spare, unembellished style of the Bible itself, smoothing out the plot line in the interests of clarity. Wangerin’s retelling of the Bible’s story highlights the master plot of salvation history, beginning with the call of Abraham and ending with the passion and resurrection of Jesus. One can see here the privileging of narrative (and more specifically plot) that dominates contemporary literary interest in the Bible.

Implicit in The Book of God is the working premise that the Bible would benefit from a reshaping of its format to fit the needs of a culture that lacks the tools to find its way with ease through the Bible as given. There is a case to be made for such a reshaping: the Bible is a kaleidoscope of varied genres, written by dozens of authors over many centuries. People whose education has allowed them to master this heterogeneous mass of material and to see its overall unity probably minimize how difficult it is for the common reader to experience the Bible as anything other than a collection of self-contained fragments.

The solution that Wangerin gives us is a literary one—to render the Bible instead of commenting on it and to smooth out the seams and rough edges into a continuous narrative flow. The result is a book for the common reader, unlike the academics’ Bible sketched above. In another way, though, Wangerin’s venture is in the mainstream with other contemporary approaches: it is willing to experiment with the Bible and defamiliarize it, offering us an alternative Bible—not in any sinister sense, but in the sense of a book discernibly different from the conventional Bible.

The Bible as it came down to us is a patchwork or mosaic of heterogeneous material and genres. Its narratives are collected cycles of stories, for example, not unified plots in the manner of the novel or short story. Technically, the Bible belongs to a recognizable genre—the anthology of diverse genres—but compared to modern anthologies it is more variegated, and its overall effect merits the epithet that biblical scholar C. H. Dodd pinned on the Gospel of Mark, “rather scrappy,” when judged by classical aesthetic standards.

Faced with the difficulties posed by such a book, three responses have been forthcoming in our day. One is to allow the Bible to remain what it is for most readers—a collection of relatively self-contained units, with individual passages experienced mainly as daily devotional readings or the basis of Sunday sermons. A second response is to smooth out the rough places, and by selectivity and a uniform prose style make the Bible a continuous narrative, with nonnarrative parts of the Bible receding from sight. A third approach is that of traditional literary criticism: to accept the diversity and ancientness of the anthology as it has come to us but to give readers the critical tools of analysis and interpretation that will equip them to cope with individual texts and the book as a whole. The third approach remains truest to the Bible, though contemporary taste wants something more revolutionary.

The facet of the Bible that Wangerin’s masterplot is designed to handle is its overabundance of diversity. Although Wangerin sometimes embellishes the biblical original with additional characterization or context, he is more likely to shorten the account, and in any case, The Book of God accepts as normative the Bible’s prevailingly simple and cursory narrative style in which only the necessary details are included.

A complementary approach is represented by Frederick Buechner’s novel Son of Laughter (1993), which works in the opposite direction of using the fictional imagination to elaborate the sparse details of the Genesis text. For Buechner, characterization is more interesting than plot, and the individual chapters of Son of Laughter are vignettes of characters and situations rather than stories built around a plot line having a beginning, middle, and end. Buechner prefers realism to idealizing; in contrast to Martin Luther’s view that “we must not think that [the patriarchs of Genesis] are ordinary people but, next to Christ and John the Baptist, … the most outstanding heroes this world has ever produced,” in Son of Laughter the patriarchs are ordinary, often caught in physical gestures and scenes that are unidealized and even sordid.

The publisher’s blurbs on the books by Wangerin and Buechner are useful cultural pointers, whether or not they accurately represent the authors’ intentions. Annie Dillard claims that Buechner has “breathed life” into the story of Jacob. An endorsement on the cover of Wangerin’s book similarly claims that the author “has done us a great service by breathing life into the pages of the Old and New Testaments.” Such statements accord with the movement I am surveying in this article—an assumption that the Bible is a problematic book that needs buttressing, elaboration, clarification, perhaps even transformation and rehabilitation if it is to be a vital force in contemporary life.

There is nothing pernicious in principle about wanting a fresh view of the Bible; the Bible itself enjoins us to sing a new song instead of being content with familiar forms. But gains in the form of fresh perspective are accompanied by an inevitable price tag. For readers who do not find the original lacking in vitality and imaginative force, the price tag naturally seems larger than for people who struggle with the Bible as given. For the former, John Steinbeck’s quip after seeing a movie based on the Bible is likely to suffice: “Saw the movie, loved the book.”

The Bible in Literature

A final spinoff from the new literary interest in the Bible is a revived interest in the Bible as a presence in Western literature. Anyone familiar with the history of English and American literature knows that the Bible is its single greatest source and influence, even in this century. What is new is the stature that imaginative writers are now accorded for their insights into the Bible. David Rosenberg, the editor of Genesis: As It Is Written(1996), a collection of pieces by contemporary novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists, claims that such writers are better qualified than biblical scholars to explicate the Bible.

Everything depends on the presuppositions with which one appropriates the Bible as literature

The result has been a burgeoning of anthologies (and again we can observe the communal aspect to current literary interest in the Bible). Rosenberg’s 1989 anthology Congregation: Jewish Writers Read the Hebrew Bible spawned a companion volume, Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (1990), and in 1996 Rosenberg kept a good thing going with Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives, which was preceded a year earlier by Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, edited by Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel. The insights that these collections of impressionistic essays provide into the Bible are not predominantly literary in nature, and this itself is significant: anything that can advertise itself as representing a literary view of the Bible itself, even if by way of book title or list of contributors, has immediate status.

More important than anthologies of essays by authors are anthologies of imaginative literature (chiefly poetry) based on material from the Bible. Among these are The Poets’ Book of Psalms: The Complete Psalter as Rendered by Twenty-Five Poets from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, edited by Laurance Wieder (1995), and two volumes edited by David Curzon: Modern Poems on the Bible: An Anthology (1994), and The Gospels in Our Image: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry Based on Biblical Texts (1995). Preferable in range and quality of selections, though, is the two-volume Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible, edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder. Though limited to short lyric poems, Chapters into Verse succeeds in conveying the beauty and vitality of imaginative literature based on the Bible. (A similar volume, Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry, edited by Robert Atwan, George Dardess, and Peggy Rosenthal, has just been published by Oxford University Press.)

One of the most helpful frameworks for making sense of poems rooted in the Bible was bequeathed by C. S. Lewis in a famous monograph entitled The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version (1950). It is the distinction between the Bible as a source and as an influence: “A source gives us things to write about; an influence prompts us to write in a certain way.” Chapters into Verse naturally highlights poems that use the Bible as a source, accentuated by a format that prints biblical texts (in the King James translation) alongside the poems based on them.

The range of things that poets do when using the Bible as a source is part of the appeal of such poetry. Poets who use the Bible do as many as three things. Sometimes they use the Bible as a source of allusion, thereby elaborating the theme of their own work and potentially providing insight into the biblical text as well. They may also retell a biblical story or re-create a biblical moment, making it come alive in vivid imagined detail. Often, moreover, poets press beyond mere presentation to interpret a biblical story or character. Here their poetry becomes a source of biblical exegesis or midrash (as in the rabbinical embellishment of biblical material with imagined detail).

In all three instances, poets may write about biblical material as a way of expressing their own religious belief and experience (though a writer can be interested in the Bible for purely literary reasons—witness the comment of twentieth century playwright and fiction-writer Samuel Beckett that “I am aware of Christian mythology. … Like all literary devices, I use it where it suits me”). A poem that is unsurpassed in all these areas is one that was unfortunately not reprinted in Chapters into Verse (doubtless because of permissions hassles)—T. S. Eliot’s great dramatic monologue “The Journey of the Magi,” the first poem in which Eliot explored specifically Christian material after his public profession of faith.

Chapters into Verse is the only book discussed in this article that conspicuously reaches back from our own century to tap the Christian tradition of the past. The contrast between that tradition and the current cultural phenomenon of a literary Bible is obvious. The Bible of the believing Christian tradition is a Bible that is received as a sacred book, revered as the expression of God’s truth and beauty, eliciting submission rather than manipulated in the service of a political or ideological program.

It is not the literary approach itself that is suspect. We have a long and distinguished history, from Caedmon’s Hymn (the oldest extant work of Old English poetry) to T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” and beyond, of literature that heightens our understanding of the Bible and devotion to its content. Literary methods of interpretation, too, are themselves old. Martin Luther not only gave the world a literary Bible in his vernacular translation—he also wanted as many young people as possible to study literature because he believed that “by these studies, as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully.”

The idea of the “the Bible as literature” is as old as the Bible itself inasmuch as its authors sometimes use technical generic labels for their works, sometimes show an awareness of literary conventions in surrounding cultures, and almost always display self-conscious craftsmanship in their writing (the writer of Ecclesiastes sounds the keynote when he speaks of arranging his composition “with great care” and searching for “words of delight”).

Literary approaches to the Bible are still a viable option for Christian readers, scholars, and writers of imaginative literature. In principle, a literary study and appreciation of the Bible need not violate anything that a believing Christian asserts theologically about the Bible. Everything depends on the presuppositions with which one approaches the Bible as literature. The fact that in some circles the Bible as literature has been taken over by forces subversive of Christianity is no reason to abandon the venture itself. All it requires is that we read the cultural scene as Milton claimed we should view classical comedy—”with wariness and good antidote.”

Leland Ryken is professor of English at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

In the fall of 1997, the British mystery writer Dick Francis published his thirty-seventh mystery novel, 10-Lb. Penalty, which, like many of its predecessors, was selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and a Reader’s Digest condensed book and quickly made its way onto the New York Times bestseller list. As it happens, 10-Lb. Penalty differs in some significant respects from its predecessors, and I shall return to those differences. In many other respects, however, it manifests the essential features that have stamped all of Francis’s work with a unique and haunting quality.

Unlike many leading mystery writers, Francis does not use a single sleuth or team of sleuths (Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Inspector Morse) to establish continuity from one novel to the next. Rather, he writes each in the first person voice of its main protagonist, and only three of the 37 share a common hero, the former jockey Sid Halley, whom Francis was persuaded to bring back by the demands of his readers. The diversity of protagonists, however, does not compromise the reader’s sense that each new Francis mystery returns us to a familiar universe.

This sense of continuity owes much to the unity of Francis’s narrative voice, and the forthright directness and immediacy of that voice swiftly engages the reader’s confidence, which it sustains throughout, drawing us into the comfortable sense that the narrator is a man we should like to know and even, for regular Francis readers, someone we have met before. All of the Francis narrators are men, and most are not investigators by profession. Almost all have a direct connection to horses, and many are jockeys, former jockeys, or aspiring jockeys. A former steeple-chase jockey himself, Francis knows the world of British racing inside out and, in his mysteries, brings it vividly to life. It is impossible to read more than a few without acquiring a nodding acquaintance with British racecourses, jockeys’ unabating struggles to keep their weight down, the respective roles of trainers and owners, the intricacy and magnitude of betting, and the responsibilities of racetrack and Jockey Club officials.

This profusion of concrete information about the world of racing also adds to the sense of continuity from one Francis mystery to another, although not all of them take place within that world. That some do not concern racing, or concern it only indirectly, nonetheless suggests that something more than a familiar setting accounts for the underlying sense of unity among them. Francis does, properly and understandably, write primarily about people and a world he knows preeminently well, and his depiction of both assuredly engages readers’ interest and imagination. But, in the end, it is not so much the world of racing itself that engages us, although it does, as it is the way in which Francis represents it. We care about steeple-chasing or the ways in which it is possible maliciously and surreptitiously to prevent a horse from running to full capacity because Francis’s masterful evocation brings us directly into the inner workings of racing and introduces us to its mechanics. In other words, Francis’s real gift lies in his rare ability to present readers with a concrete understanding of the specific details that professionals would take for granted. When, in 10-Lb. Penalty, he turns to politics and a local election, the effect is the same.

What holds for Francis’s use of detail to bring a specific world to life also holds for his ability to evoke the character of his narrator-protagonist. Both literary tasks are accomplished with a breath-taking terseness and economy. One would be hard pressed to find an extra word in a Francis mystery, much less an extraneous paragraph, and yet the reader always has enough information to understand the narrator, the action, and the relevant attributes of the main characters. We always know enough, never too much. Francis never lulls us into complicity with a flow of chat or a soothing, if extraneous, description, and his bare-bones, stripped-down prose wonderfully enhances the taut suspense that informs most of his plots.

The tone is set from the opening line. In 10-Lb. Penalty,

“Glue sniffing jockeys don’t win the Derby.”

I’d never sniffed glue in my life.

All the same, I stood before the man whose horses I rode and listened to him telling me he had no further use for my services. He sat behind his large antique paper-covered desk fidgeting with his clean fingernails. His hands were a yellowish white, very smooth.

A few lines later, we learn that “I was not yet eighteen,” and, a few lines beyond, that the man whose horses he has ridden calls him Benedict.

Later in this first chapter, we learn that Benedict’s surname is Julliard, that his father, George Julliard, calls him Ben, and that he has “dark curly hair (impervious to straightening by water),” “brown eyes, thin face, lean frame,” and stands “five foot eleven (or thereabouts).”

Thereafter, relevant information about Ben appears, as we need it to follow the plot. At no point, however, does Francis break into the central narrative to give us a full account of Ben’s childhood and schooling. Only in bits and pieces do we learn that, while at school, he has become an expert skier and marksman as well as a talented apprentice jockey. What we do, however, learn, almost immediately, is that more than anything Ben loves horses and racing and has set his heart on becoming a professional jockey. The opening scene shatters those dreams, freeing Ben for the action of the novel, which turns on his role in his father’s run for a seat in Parliament. Indeed, as we rapidly learn, Ben’s father, having ascertained that Ben would be too large ever to be a top jockey, engineered the scene, instructing the trainer, Sir Vivian Derridge, for whom Ben was riding, to fire him in a way that brooked no discussion. Thus does the scene draw us into Francis’s real subject, Ben’s coming of age and the evolving relations between father and son.

Francis’s heroes typically live on the edge of dangers that would reduce most of us to jelly—dangers to which they are likely to respond with a rare combination of cool wits and sang-froid. And in Francis’s fictional universe the opportunities to display their self-effacing, understated heroism abound. A typical Francis mystery unfolds under the shadow of menace and frequently includes one or more scenes of heart-stopping violence. For Francis’s view of our world unquestionably includes a disquieting dose of genuine evil. This recognition of evil and of the havoc it wreaks upon bodies and souls testifies directly to what I take to be Francis’s deeper concerns, and they amply justify our serious attention.

Evil casts an ominous shadow of danger over most of Francis’s mysteries, and the sense of its lurking presence weighs equally upon the hero and the reader. Francis never hesitates to name evil and clearly wants his readers to grasp its true horror. At the same time, he never suggests that the evil, which percolates beneath so many ordinary, apparently peaceful situations, is normal. Pervasive it may sometimes be, but even at its most insidiously pervasive, true evil remains unambiguously aberrant.

None could be less naive than Francis about human vulnerability to temptation and propensity to sin. His novels abound with characters who rarely pass up a near occasion of sin. But he never confuses the ubiquitous manifestations of our fallen condition with genuine evil, and it is striking how often he endows run-of-the-mill hired thugs or petty cheats with some marginally redeeming feature that locates them within the pale of predictable human frailty. Typically, such characters agree to provide information to the hero in return for a payment or inadvertently let drop something about the nature of their bullying assignment that helps the hero to identify their employer, the real villain.

Thus, in Whip Hand, the second Sid Halley novel, the Scottish thugs who have been imported to rough up Sid and his man Friday, Chico, resist the command of a secondary villain to kill Sid and Chico. “Kill him yourself,” one retorts, “we’re not doing it.” And, when Peter Rammileese, the secondary villain, repeats the command, the hired thug continues, “Grow up mon. … We’d be gassed inside five minutes. We’ve been down here too long. Too many people’ve seen us. And this laddie, he’s won money for every punter in Scotland. We’d be inside in a week.” The Scots have enthusiastically showered Sid and Chico with punishing blows, but they draw the line at killing. And, in the end, the passing remark about having been down here too long proves an indispensable link in the chain of information that Sid is piecing together, and that finally enables him to identify the shadowy figure who has set the events in motion.

Time and again, Francis encompasses such figures within the predictable limits of ordinary human nature, which he never romanticizes. True evil, in contrast, exceeds the predictable, which it mocks and threatens. An important feature of Francis’s special talent consists in the ability to discriminate between the ordinary and the aberrant, and it is precisely his gift for evoking the ordinary that ultimately permits readers to recognize the full aberrance of evil. Francis’s heroes serve as a lens to focus our attention on evil, for, in Francis’s fictional universe, evil is always experienced in its full human dimension. It is, in other words, always represented as a deeply disordered personality that commits or orders the commission of actions against others, frequently against the hero himself, although almost as frequently against horses, who represent a moving combination of power and vulnerability.

10-Lb. Penalty
by Dick Franics
Putnam
273 pp.; $24.95, hardcover

In Bolt (1986), the ruthless villain kills a succession of racehorses to warn their wealthy, aristocratic owner of her vulnerability—her inability to protect the animals and humans she loves against predatory aggression—and she and Kit, her jockey and the novel’s hero, grieve for them as for friends. Kit thinks to himself that, on the scale of world terrorism, the killing of three great horses is a small matter, “but rooted in the same wicked conviction that the path to attaining one’s end lay in slaughtering the innocent.” In Come to Grief (1995), the third Sid Halley novel, a recklessly ambitious amateur-jockey-turned-talk-show-host fatally maims horses to recover the sense of thrilling speed that he experienced during races. In these crimes we see a cold, intelligent form of violence, worlds removed from the pummeling of the Scottish thugs—and even further removed from the calm accepting intelligence of the victimized horses. In Come to Grief, Sid dashes to Berkshire to help a woman whose colt has just been maimed. When he arrives, everyone but the colt is breathing worry and impatience:

The young horse watched me with calm, bright eyes, unafraid. I stroked my hand down his nose, talking to him quietly. He moved his head upward against the pressure and down again as if nodding, saying hello. I let him wiffle his black lips across my knuckles.

The calm nobility and intelligence of horses runs like a thread through Francis’s mysteries. In many, individual horses figure as minor characters in their own right, and each of those we come to know by name has his or her own personality, sometimes willful, sometimes courageous, always distinct. Their palpable reality confirms the essential goodness of God’s creation, which evil is ultimately powerless to negate.

The delicate contrast and tension between tenderness and violence marks all of Francis’s novels, not simply as a Manichaeism that pits good guys against bad but also as the conflicting tendencies in the human soul. The very heroes who dispatch threatening villains and push themselves and their horses to the limit in pursuit of victory evince a moving sensitivity to the women they love, who themselves embody fierceness as well as warmth. A web of nuanced human relations weaves through each of the novels, but Francis clearly ascribes a special importance to those between fathers and sons. Hot Money (1987), for example, places the relations between Ian Pembroke and his father, Malcolm, stage center, and 10-Lb. Penalty returns to this theme, which dominates the plot.

Indeed, compared to previous Francis novels, 10-Lb. Penalty is remarkably free of mystery, danger, and suspense. To be sure, there are several attempts upon George Julliard’s life and several ominous attempts to destroy his rapidly rising political career, but we are rarely in much doubt about who lies behind them and are rarely frightened that they will succeed. Even the novel’s representatives of pure evil, A. L. Wyvern and the loathsome, malicious journalist Usher Rudd, never assume the terrifyingly sinister proportions of earlier Francis villains. The true action of 10-Lb. Penalty lies in Ben and George Julliard’s coming to know and trust one another and in Ben’s growing from a boy into a talented, resourceful, and self-assured man—every inch, if in different guise, his brilliant father’s natural heir.

10-Lb. Penalty exudes a gentleness that has been latent throughout Francis’s novels, surfacing in specific scenes. It is a mellow book and one that the supercilious might well find too close to the sentimental. But such sentimentality as it contains is tough, not maudlin, and it wonderfully calls attention to the aspects of life Francis demonstrably values. Ben Julliard takes second place to none of Francis’s heroes in courage or intelligence, but he is younger and, unlike Sid, who has come up the hard way, he has always had the backing of his father’s money. What he has not had is his father’s presence, and this permits Francis, in highlighting the arresting similarities between the powerful, successful father and the unfinished son, to emphasize the importance of nature and genes in what any of us become. Without ever suggesting that nature will triumph over outright abuse and extreme deprivation (Ben has always been emotionally and financially cared for), Francis does firmly suggest that character and talent are not gifts that the world bestows. And, although the word never appears in Francis’s pages, it is hard for a Christian not to sense that his understanding of nature has as much to do with grace as with mere material life.

Nowhere in his novels does Dick Francis suggest he is a Christian, and indeed there are reasons to suspect that he may not consider himself a believer. Toward the end of Whip Hand, Charles Roland and Sid sit in the library at Aynsford, mulling over the events of the novel. Musing on Sid’s victory over the forces of evil, Charles asks Sid if he feels any temptation to gloat. Sid responds with astonishment. What did you do, he asks Charles, when, during the war at sea, you saw your enemy drowning, “Gloat? Push him under?” Charles answers that he took the enemy prisoner, to which Sid rejoins that the life of the corrupt racetrack official he has exposed will be prison enough. But then, Charles asks, “And do you forgive him as well?” Sid tells him not to ask such difficult questions and thinks to himself: “Love thine enemy. Forgive. Forget. I was no sort of Christian, I thought. I could manage not to hate Lucas himself. I didn’t think I could forgive; and I would never forget.”

But the conclusion of 10-Lb. Penalty does offer a surprisingly Christian image of manliness. Ben, now in his twenties and successful in his own work, simultaneously saves his father from Wyvern’s attempt to shoot him and exposes Wyvern’s malevolence that has been percolating since his father’s first election to Parliament, thereby clearing the way for George Julliard to become prime minister. Father and son stand together. “The next prime minister gripped my hand. I gripped his tight, as if he would give me comfort and security when I needed them badly. I gripped his hand as if I’d been a little boy.”

Readers may choose for themselves how much to read into Francis’s words, never sure how much he intends us to read into them. But it seems difficult to doubt that a writer of his consummate skill has offered us all of these possibilities without knowing he was doing so. At the very least, we may know that his novels repeatedly and with increasing forthrightness touch upon the central themes of Christianity, and, at the most, we may fairly view them through the lens of Flannery O’Connor’s thoughts about writing:

Art is not anything that goes on “among” people, not the art of the novel anyway. It is something that one experiences alone and for the purpose of realizing in a fresh way, through the senses, the mystery of existence. Part of the mystery of existence is sin. When we think about the Crucifixion, we miss the point of it if we don’t think about sin.1

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese teaches history, literature, and women’s studies at Emory University.

1. Letter to Eileen Hall, March 10, 1956. From A Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1979).

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

It has become a commonplace in recent years to lament the lack of emotional depth and variety of subject matter in contemporary American fiction. One of the catalysts for this discussion, and perhaps its most eloquent instance, was a now-famous essay by writer Tom Wolfe that appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1989, entitled, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” After singling out the schools of metafiction and minimalism as the major sources of the problem, Wolfe resoundingly calls for a return to the realist novel of the nineteenth century with its epic scope of events and ideas, which in his view is exemplified by his own novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Along the way, Wolfe approvingly cites Sinclair Lewis who, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “called on his fellow writers to give America ‘a literature worthy of her vastness.’ “

Wolfe rather narrowly assumes that such a return to the realistic novel entails using the “tools of journalism” to study the city, the seat of contemporary culture. But one might just as easily fulfill Wolfe’s call by borrowing the tools of the historian to examine a rich and neglected vein of America’s rural past. That is precisely what native Oklahoman Rilla Askew has done in her stunningly beautiful first novel, The Mercy Seat.

The story of the Lodi family’s sudden and unexpected migration in 1887 from Kentucky into Indian Territory encompasses the social panorama of western settlement, the particularities of which Askew renders in as loving detail as Wolfe could hope for. We come to know the interiors of cabins, wagons, and small-town general stores; we hear the staccato rhythms of western dialect and read Christian Scripture in its Choctaw translation. There are the sensual intimations that some of us even now recollect from our rural origins: the smell of sawdust and houses “thick with the smell of meat and biscuits.” Finally, and arrestingly, we come to know the making of guns in all their variety, for it is the illegal manufacture and sale of patented guns that has sent brothers Fayette and John Lodi and their families on their journey to Indian Territory, on the run from the law.

The Mercy Seat, therefore, bears the mark of careful historical investigation, the process of which Askew herself has discussed. The author of one previous work of fiction, a collection of short stories entitled Strange Business, Askew found the sources of her first novel in “old stories, handed down over generations, of how my family came into Indian Territory in the late 1800’s” and began the process of writing by “ask[ing] questions of the few relatives still living who had listened to the old stories.”

Ultimately, though, as in any great work of fiction, it is the novel’s characters that matter most, not its historical verisimilitude. Mattie Lodi is the novel’s chief narrator and the center of its moral universe. At the novel’s opening, on the night of the family’s flight from Kentucky, Mattie awakens to the sound of her mother crying and her father’s demand, “Martha Ruth! … Get up and light the fire, would you! Mama’s not feeling good.” Thus, within the first two pages are established the relations that will prove to be the family’s undoing: the genteel mother’s grief at leaving her home, the father’s tendency to depend on Mattie, whom he calls “Matt,” like a son, and Mattie’s unceasing, yet uncomprehending vigilance. From her child’s perspective, the story of their leaving becomes nothing less than the classic narrative of expulsion, and their travel by wagon westward a mythic journey, underscored by prose that has been justly described as Faulknerian. Indeed, in its cadences and trajectory, Mattie’s narration recalls the stream-of-consciousness journey of Thomas Sutpen’s family in Absalom, Absalom!:

In the same way that there was no sign when we left Kentucky, there was no single moment I can remember when we began to turn west, just the slow slide of sun to where it slanted left over the wagon in the daytime and hung a red ball in red sky before us at night. But it was after the sun moved and the land began to flatten and change that we started to come to the waters.

In the course of the journey, our awareness increases along with Mattie’s. Slowly she becomes aware of the widening rift between her Uncle Fayette Lodi and her father, her uncle’s increasing anger countered by resolute stoicism on the part of her father, the gunmaking genius. Like the feud between the brothers, the journey itself has biblical resonances. After a crossing of the Mississippi River (with farm animals) by wooden raft, and a freezing storm where hail “pelt[s] down together, jagged and frozen like shattered hell falling,” Mattie realizes that “this—this—[is] the place of no turning back forever.” Most tragically, Mattie observes her mother’s decline and progressive heartsickness, her desperate attempts to preserve in Mattie the civilization they have left behind by reminding her that “your grandmother Mary Whitsun … was born in London, England, where the King of all English-speaking peoples lives.” Even when her health and sanity have almost faded, she musters up the energy to recall, her voice “rising weak, like a halfhearted question, ‘I was married … in a dress … of white linen . …?’ ” Then she dies.

The Mercy Seat
by Rilla Askew
Viking
427 pp.; $23.95

Mattie, her father, and her siblings complete the journey, but by the time they join Uncle Fayette and family in the little Indian Territory town of Waddy Crossing, Mattie and her siblings are stricken with scarlet fever. After nearly dying herself, Mattie awakens to find her youngest sister dead and the family’s last remaining possessions gone, disposed of for fear of infection. Bereft and betrayed, Mattie becomes prey to debilitating epileptic fits, healed only by the enlistment of a Choctaw (but Baptist) healer named Thula Henry. When Mattie begins to be the recipient of mysterious visions and visitations, it is Thula who must attempt to guide her to an understanding of them.

The second most fully realized and compelling character in the novel, Thula herself struggles with the tension between a Christian faith that she fervently holds and the truths of Indian spirituality she cannot help seeing incarnated in the nature around her: “[I]t was through her mother’s faith that Thula understood the Holy Spirit, how the Creator and the Son and the Spirit were one,” the omniscient narration carefully notes, “but it was from her father, or more truly, her father’s people, that she understood the Sacred Four.” Thula’s attempt to help Mattie understand her gift of visions only serves to heighten the conflict in her own soul. At last, when Mattie is caught up “not in heaven or hell” but “in the other world,” Thula feels so lost between white and Indian worlds that she can only pray, in Choctaw, “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.”

Mattie’s visions enable her to enter the spirits of those around her, to recall their memories. She is therefore capable of a radical compassion, a Christian virtue realized through Indian spiritual means. The novel appears to hold out the possibility of a reconciliation between white Christianity and Indian belief—not a syncretism, but a nod toward a “transcendent unity,” to use philosopher Frithjof Schuon’s phrase. Mattie finds the visions both exhilarating and frightening, and in the novel’s most lyrical passage, she is given a culminating moment of sublime knowledge when she is able to penetrate to the heart of both human and divine Mystery, the day she is able to “see the trees bleed.”

At the same time, however, the old enmity between her Uncle Fayette and her father returns. Fayette again tries to enlist John in manufacturing black-market guns, and John’s persistent refusal exacerbates his rage. Filled with her own mounting resentment at the order of the universe that has allowed the death of her mother, Mattie rebuffs her mystical gift, withdrawing the possibility of compassion, and the novel bears toward its violent and inevitable end.

At this point, not only does Mattie’s first-person narration cease, but the novel withdraws from Mattie’s perspective entirely. We are left with a compendium of individual testimonies and commentary regarding the final tragedy, but the narration is fractured, and the perspectives contradict. Mattie recedes from the novel’s magnifying eye to become a cipher, no larger than the settlers scattered through the annals of the town’s events.

In the final analysis, what we have at the end of the novel is only history, without the unifying and redeeming force that grace, evidenced in Mattie’s visions and Thula’s love, provides. Since, biblically, “the mercy-seat” signifies the actualization on earth of God’s authority, the novel reminds us that it is in the circumstances of our lives as we live them, the realm of our choices, that we are judged.

Caroline Langston’s stories have appeared in The Pushcart Prize XX1, New Stories from the American South 1995, and in various journals. She is writer-in-residence at Rose Hill College.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

C. S. Lewis: Mere Christianby Kathryn LindskoogCornerstone Press Chicago292 pp.; $19.99

Journey into Narniaby Kathryn LindskoogHope Publishing HouseP.O. Box 60008,Pasadena CA, 91116227 pp.; $15.95, paper

C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer inthe Shadowlands:the EvangelisticVision of C. S. Lewisedited by Angus J. L. MenugeCrossway399 pp.; $17.99, paper

Simply C. S. Lewis:A Beginner’s Guide toHis Life and Worksby Thomas C. PetersCrossway270 pp.; $11.99, paper

In 1998, Christians all over the world will be celebrating the centennial of the birth of Clive Staples Lewis. This year-long Lewisfest will be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it will yield fresh insights. (Look for David Downing’s essay on Lewis and postmodernism in a forthcoming issue of B&C.) And the hubbub will attract new readers, not a few of whom may find their way into the kingdom. On the other hand, the sheer volume of talk about Lewis is bound to grate, even when it is free of the unctuous accents of hagiography.

Four new books give a taste of what we can expect in the coming year. The first is not really a new book but rather a new edition of Kathryn Lindskoog’s widely used guide. Lindskoog commands an encyclopedic knowledge of Lewis’s life and works, and she writes with contagious passion. She is also highly combative, particularly in her judgments against Walter Hooper, one of Lewis’s literary editors and the editor of many of his posthumously published works. Don’t miss the six appendices to Lindskoog’s book, the last of which is a lovely essay on Lewis and Christmas.

Lindskoog’s Journey into Narnia is also a combination of old and new, though here the proportion of new is much higher. This volume combines an early work, The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land, which elicited an appreciative letter from Lewis when it was first published in 1957, with a light-hearted but very well-informed guide to the Narnia books.

In C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands, we have a sample of academic approaches to Lewis. Though most of the 16 contributors to this volume are indeed writing from a college or university setting, they write with clarity and a minimum of jargon. And while the essays range widely, from Wayne Martindale’s reflections on the film Shadowlands to Gene Edward Veith’s concluding piece, “A Vision, Within a Dream, Within the Truth: C. S. Lewis as Evangelist to the Postmodernists,” they are unified by a focus on Lewis’s “evangelistic vision.” Lewis scholars, both professional and amateur, will want to add this collection to their shelves.

Finally, with Simply C. S. Lewis: A Beginner’s Guide to His Life and Works, by Thomas C. Peters, we have a specimen of the superfluous book. The back cover asserts that “Lewis can be terribly intimidating to those who know his reputation as an intellectual but haven’t yet sampled his writing.” Nonsense. As one might expect, given that sort of packaging, Peters’s book is execrably written, full of tediously prolonged summaries of Lewis’s sparkling works, potted intellectual history, and odd stylistic mannerisms. (For example, Peters frequently refers to Lewis by his full name when there is no reason to do so. After a few dozen occurrences, the effect is rather like the Chinese water torture.)

So it will go in the year ahead. Those who predict that the centennial will finally kill interest in Lewis are far too pessimistic, but there will be a lot of chaff to separate from the wheat.

—JW

Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the PresentEdited by Jerry Z. MullerPrinceton University Press450 pp.; $59.50, hardcover; $19.95, paper

When the noted economist Joseph Schumpeter considered writing a book on the meaning of conservatism, he remarked, “I am pretty sure that no conservative I have ever met would recognize himself in the picture I am going to draw.” Many conservatives I know will have that very reaction if they read Jerry Muller’s anthology.

Muller, a historian at the Catholic University of America, has penned almost 30 percent of the pages of this “anthology with an argument,” a large share for an “editor,” and his choices of other voices reinforce his own brand of conservatism. So, idiosyncratically, he finds his progenitor in David Hume, not Edmund Burke, though Burke is amply represented. He showcases “the social science cast of conservative thought,” another odd choice. Viewing conservatism as “a product of the Enlightenment” rather than a reaction against it, he gives primacy to the pursuit of earthly happiness through preserving legitimate social institutions. Even so, it takes considerable special pleading to include, say, Matthew Arnold, who presciently described himself as “a liberal of the future.”

Muller rigorously separates conservatism from orthodoxy. By contrast, Russell Kirk, widely honored as the father of modern American conservatism, lists, as the first of his six key principles, the belief “that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.” Muller’s demurral offers instead “historical utilitarianism” as the common conservative denominator, and religious belief figures in only as it is socially useful. Kirk himself put together his own anthology, The Portable Conservative Reader (1982). Of his 44 writers and Muller’s 23, only 4 appear in both collections. Thus, we see how protean is conservatism, how difficult to define, being (and here Kirk and Muller agree) less an ideology than a set of dispositions firmly rooted in the exigencies of the times and places of its adherents. It also remains too vital to have attracted the post- prefix that attaches to so many other isms nowadays.

Muller is a highly sophisticated thinker supremely worth reading—and arguing with. His selected authors, several of whom would be surprised to appear in the company of conservatives, offer gems of insight time after time, whether or not read within his imposed framework. And however one defines conservatism, this book makes emphatically clear that America today lives under a liberal hegemony.

—Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State:Professionalism and Conformity in the GDREdited by Robert von HallbergUniversity of Chicago Press366 pp.; $57, hardcover;$27.50, paper

Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East GermanyBy Charles S. MaierPrinceton University Press440 pp.; $29.95

The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New GermanyBy Jane KramerRandom House293 pp.; $27.50

With a whoosh that still leaves the experts breathless, Eastern and Central European statist communism dramatically collapsed during the brief period 1989- 91. This was in reality a multifaceted story, with circumstances at the ideological and imperial center of the Soviet Union quite different from those in the Poland of Solidarity and Pope John Paul II, the Romania of summary justice for the Ceausescus, the Czechoslovakia of a velvet revolution, the Balkan lands of Bulgaria and Albania (which had the furthest to go), and not least the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) as the Soviet bloc’s industrially and athletically most developed nation. In quite different ways, these three books offer illuminating accounts of what happened with such suddenness in East Germany during the fall of 1989, but also about what can now be seen to have led up to the crisis and what has fallen out thereafter.

Charles Maier’s full-scale history makes good use of interviews, documents published from the archives of the gdr’s state security forces (or Stasi), and the literature that burgeons from all parts of German society on what is usually called die Wende (the turn or turning-point) of 1989. Maier is especially helpful on the way in which long-term economic difficulties had compromised East German aspirations to parity with the West, on the inability of the GDR’s Communist party to adjust to its citizens’ heightened political and material desires, and on the decisive bridge crossed when Gorbachev indicated that he would not mobilize Russian troops to put down demonstrations. Maier also pauses for carefully stated efforts to compare the parlous condition of late-East German communism with what he considers to be the less than ideal moral functioning of Western economies and ideologies. Maier is no knee-jerk anticapitalist, but (along with some of those who took to the streets of Leipzig and East Berlin in the fall of 1989) he is nervous about the costs, as well as the benefits, of unrestrained liberal capitalism. The book’s comprehensive scope allows only minimal occasions for hearing the voices of the East Germans themselves, but this is a minor drawback to one of the most satisfying accounts now available on the end of communism in any of the Eastern-bloc countries.

Jane Kramer’s Politics of Memory began as reports in the New Yorker. It excels at capturing the personal dimensions of life in and after die Wende, and on both sides of the former border. The book is sometimes flip (e.g., “They discovered [after 44 years of distraction] that it was hard to be ordinary folks—ordinary European folks—when you had a Holocaust in your history”). But its attention to the opinions of underemployed East German workers, Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest laborers, though sometimes in Germany for generations), former Stasi informants, and others conveys a flavor of living through tumultuous times that Maier’s more comprehensive study misses.

Robert von Hallberg’s book is a series of interviews with leading figures from what had been considered before 1989 the “advanced” East German literati. A handful of these writers, scholars, publishers, and assorted “literary intellectuals” will be familiar to American readers—the novelist and playwright Christoph Hein, for example, and the poet Reiner Kunze—but most would be known, if at all, only by specialists. Many of these were far gone in a now nearly unbelievable combination of romantic socialism, postmodernist amorality, and art-for-art’s sake ideology. When the collapse of the GDR was added to this bewildering intellectual melange, the result was further tension, disillusionment, and a not very successful struggle for adjustment. Especially pathetic was the last-minute appeal of writer Christa Wolf for some kind of beneficent postcommunist socialism that would keep the GDR separate from the Federal Republic of West Germany (a possibility that was obliterated in the post-Wende elections). Especially jarring is the profound betrayal felt by many of these artists when they learned that several of their closet comrades had for years been informants for the Stasi. Von Hallberg wants to show the dangers to vital literary life from a self-contained circle of discourse (or professionalism), but his book is more compelling as testimony to varieties of moral bankruptcy promoted by an intelligentsia whose political and aesthetic preoccupations made it largely irrelevant to the momentous changes in which it was engulfed.

Books like these are of interest first as useful chronicles of a key moment in recent Western history. But they also serve as reminders that, in the annals of humankind, stability of social and political conditions is a precarious commodity. In other words, besides considering the uniqueness of what went on in the collapse of communism, it might well be worth thinking about how Eastern European experience reveals what we too would be like if subjected to rapid, traumatic, and systemic change.

—Mark Noll

The Revolution of the Candles: Christians in the Revolution of the German Democratic RepublicBy Jurg Swoboda, translated by Edwin P. Arnold, edited by Richard V. PierardMercer University Press, 1996203 pp.; $22.95

In the early evening of Monday, October 9, 1989, a service of worship and prayer took place in the historic Saint Nicholas Lutheran church in Leipzig, East Germany. Two and a half centuries earlier, Saint Nicholas had basked in a measure of glory as one of the churches for which J. S. Bach prepared regular Sunday music. Now it would witness another liminal experience. The text for the evening was Isaiah 45:

I will go before you. … I will break down gates of bronze and cut through iron bars. … I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name . …I am the Lord, and there is no other. … Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker. … All the makers of idols will be put to shame and disgraced . …Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.

After the service, a public demonstration spread out from the church into the Leipzig city center. Seventy thousand people took part. They knew that the East German state security (the Stasi) had been mobilized to quash the demonstration, and that authorities at several levels were speaking ominously of a “Chinese solution” (with reference to the massacre in Tiananmen Square the previous June). But on the night of October 9, the Stasi did not shoot. A week later Erich Honecker, the repressive leader of the East German Communists, resigned. On November 9, free travel was allowed between East and West Germany and through the Berlin Wall. Only a few months later a divided Germany was on the road to reunion.

The Revolution of the Candles is a moving, if somewhat disjointed, collection of testimonies from East German believers who lived through these tumultuous days. Most of the personal accounts are from laypeople associated with Baptist or “free churches.” Their accounts record the tension leading up to and beyond October 9, the police brutality some experienced firsthand, the inner turmoil felt earlier at the flood of East Germans pouring into the West throughout 1989, and the catharsis experienced from the collapse of the Communist regime. Essays by editor Richard Pierard, who was present in East Germany as a visiting scholar in the fall of 1989, lend welcome structure to the book. But its greatest contribution is the voice it gives to the ordinary German Christians for whom fear, joy, struggle, and, above all, reliance on God became luminously palpable during one of the truly momentous events of this century.

—MN

Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880-1914By H. L. Wesseling,trans. by Arnold J. PomeransPraeger Press161 pp.; $75, hardback; $29.95, paper

Africa is in danger of falling off the map; falling off the map of the international economy and off the map of our moral concern. Some states are failing, spectacularly—Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo (Zaire)—and the democratic gains made by others in the early 1990s have now been reversed.

Why is this happening to Africa, and what is to be done? Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Nobel Prize-winning writer, has gone so far as to suggest that the only way to prevent future genocidal wars in Africa is for the continent’s borders to be redrawn. What has failed is the African state; and who determined the borders of these states? The Europeans when they carved up the continent at the end of the nineteenth century. H. L. Wesseling, in his survey of the partition of Africa, points out that the colonial age in Africa was of short duration, in general less than a century, sometimes barely half that, but its legacy persists: “Contemporary Africa, with all its territorial problems and the crises they bring in their wake,” emerged as a result of the partition.

At the time of African independence, African historiography as a discipline barely existed. This book makes full use of the tremendous gains that have been made over the last 30 years. There have been two main interpretations of the partition. The first, most favored by African nationalists in the 1960s, followed the logic of Hobson and Lenin that imperialism was a consequence of capitalism. The second is based on the more recent scholarship of the British historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, who argue in their book Africa and the Victorians that the partition was determined by strategic and political considerations rather than economic ones.

Wesseling shows how it was both changes in the international system and in domestic European politics after 1870 that led to the partition of Africa, so that any attempt to assess the relative importance of economic or political factors is a purely academic debate, albeit a debate that gained ideological importance during the Cold War. We can now see more clearly how these factors have interacted in different ways and in different regions to produce Africa’s contemporary political tragedy. This does not mean that only Europeans are to blame—since independence, Africans have made their own history—but Europe is morally culpable, for along with independence, Africans inherited conditions not of their own choosing.

—Scott Thomas

Fiction

A Stolen TongueBy Sheri HolmanAtlantic Monthly Press343 pp.; $23

In the closing pages of Sheri Holman’s A Stolen Tongue, the mad translator Ser Niccolo holds up the skull of a dead saint and says, “When a man wants to create … he has at his disposal only the barest tools: a rock, a nail, a mark upon a page. With them, he must construct thriving cities and history and works of great and lasting thought.” Holman’s remarkable first novel accomplishes just that.

A Stolen Tongue follows the pilgrimage of a fifteenth-century monk who wanders the world seeking consummation with his spiritual bride, Saint Katherine. Friar Felix Fabri travels a trail marked by bits of the saint’s body, stolen relics that may or may not be Katherine’s remains; he demands a message from Katherine, but how can a stolen tongue speak for a dead saint? They endure trial by water, fire, and earth, but the dry bones do not speak.

Seeking a saint, Fabri instead finds himself face to face with a whole host of sinners. The na•ve monk is used, abused, and confused by Ser Niccolo and his sister Arsino’, neither of them entirely sane. Niccolo the translator wants to translate his sister to sainthood and make the dry bones talk—but first he has to get his hands on those bones, and his attempts to do so are harrowing.

Even more remarkable is Holman’s deft use of a historical character. Friar Felix Fabri (1441-1502) wrote long accounts of his pilgrimages to Palestine and Sinai; Holman seamlessly weaves passages from the fifteenth-century work into her very modern novel.

Holman’s novel leaves Fabri feeling “disassembled,” as if his faith “has been snapped into a hundred little pieces and left like a trail of bread crumbs across this pilgrimage.” But just as he had followed bits of Saint Katherine across the desert to Sinai, he follows his crumbs of faith back home, determined to maintain faith even “in the face of indifference.” Holman said she wrote the book “in the spirit of putting new flesh on old bones,” and her novelization of Friar Felix Fabri’s pilgrimage makes the dead monk’s dry bones sing.

—Bev Hogue

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College. Bev Hogue is a doctoral candidate in American literature at Bowling Green State University. Mark Noll is inaugurating the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professorship of Evangelical Theological Studies this spring at Harvard Divinity School. Scott Thomas teaches in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Bath, England.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

David BebbingtonBetty Smartt CarterDavid DowningJean Bethke ElshtainChris ErdmanHarold FickettAlan JacobsGlenn LouryHabib MalikLucas MorelRichard J. Mouw

John Newton and English EvangelicalismHouses of GodC. S. Lewis and PostmodernismEverything for SaleBosniaWhy Read Fiction?Jeremiah DylanAmerica in Black and WhiteThe Christians of LebanonRace, Crime, and the LawMachiavelli’s Virtue

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & CultureMagazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.

Two years ago I nearly ditched the pastorate. I started focusing on the negatives of my job: the draining, Saturday-night sermon-anxiety attacks, a pitiful raise, the disintegrating basement tiles in the parsonage (“Don’t worry,” the trustees assured, “we’ll get to it within three years.”). Finally, as the financial secretary again bellyached about the church’s money woes (“This is it, folks, we’re really in trouble this time. Ya, you betcha ya, it looks grim. The ship is sinking for sure … ), I silently prayed, Here am I, Lord. Send me to Cancun.

I desperately wanted to escape people. Needy people. Petty people. Dysfunctional people. Spiritually obtuse church people. Moses’ prayer became my own: “Lord, why do you treat your servant so badly? I’m getting sick and tired of carrying these whiners on my back. If this is how you treat your employees, then I’ll work for someone else” (my paraphrase of Numbers 11:11-15).

After eight years of frantically meeting needs, pleasing people, and tracking down plant stands for weddings, I could identify only trace elements of spiritual growth in my congregation (at least with my measuring equipment). A dangerous ice slowly spread throughout my heart—the ice of cynicism, the ice of pastoral sloth, an attitude that didn’t care if people changed because of course they didn’t want to, anyway.

God didn’t answer my prayer to escape. Instead, God slowly resurrected the call to ministry. He granted us one key event on our family vacation to Libby, Montana.

Three small interruptions

While I was reading and praying in the Asa Wood Elementary School Park, three children with bag lunches, dirty clothes, and dirt-streaked faces plopped themselves on the grass beside me.

Before I could object or move, the oldest child launched into a complicated story of family dysfunction: “Hi, my name is Deanna, and I’m 12; my sister is Kristy, and she’s 10; and Mikey my brother—doesn’t he look fat in his Lion King t-shirt?—is 6. Actually, though, we all have different dads. My dad is dead; Kristy’s dad disappeared; and Mikey’s dad beats him up, so our mom is divorcing the creep. My mom and her fiancee, Larry, are at the casino because they need time alone, so she bought us all a barbecue burrito at the Town Pump and told us to stay in the park for two hours. Can we sit by you?”

In order to be polite, I said yes, then asked if they lived in town.

“No,” Deanna, the family spokesperson, answered again. “We used to live in town, but my mom lost her job. Now we live in a tent in Lower Granite. I wish my mom could get a new job. I don’t like living in a tent. By the way, what’s your job?”

Reluctantly, I whispered, “Well, I’m a pastor.”

After a long silence, she asked, “Mister Pastor, can you tell me something? I’ve heard stories about Jesus walking around healing people, loving people. Why doesn’t he do that anymore?”

Drawing on my training, I launched into a lecture on the Incarnation. Three children simply stared back at me with big, love-hungry eyes. I looked at Deanna and Kristy, with their limp burritos, and fat, little, abused Mikey with barbecue sauce smeared on his Lion King t-shirt.

I stopped lecturing. With tears welling in my eyes, I said, “Deanna, Kristy, Mikey, let me start over. Do you have any idea how much Jesus loves you right now?”

How did God rebuild my call to ministry? He broke my heart again—with his love for these three children.

I had lost touch with the tender love of Jesus, who wept when his friends hurt. There, on a playground in Libby, Montana, the glowing love of Jesus began to burn again in my heart—for Deanna, for Kristy, for Mikey, for all God’s prodigals, even for all God’s needy, petty, stubborn children.

—Mathew WoodleyCambridge United Methodist ChurchCambridge, Minnesota

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.