In the 20th century, the United States was widely regarded, across a range of denominations, as one of the most observant Christian countries in the world. Arguably, it still is. A New Yorker article recently noted that “Although only about two-thirds of Americans now identify as Christians – compared with just under ninety per cent in the 1990s – a recent Pew Research Center survey concluded that the erosion in belief has likely leveled off. New data from Gallup show a surge of religiosity among young men. It seems possible that Christianity is once again on the upswing in America.”
This historical data may well be part of the explanation for what we might regard as a literary phenomenon: the canon of literary fiction emanating from the United States is far less hostile to religion than that from the rest of the Anglophone world – and indeed the Western world’s literature in general. It may be argued that some of the most important authors of the last century – and into the present century – are not only lacking the indifference to and even hostility to religion that we find in modern British and European literature. We find them weaving religious awareness and sensibility, consciously or unconsciously, into their work in a way rarely noticeable in authors from the Old World.
I had a friend who, some years ago, did a doctorate at the Sorbonne examining the reasons for this hostility in the context of Irish and other European authors. His findings were complex but bore out his premise. What we want to look at here, however, is the evidence that the dispositions of many American authors seem devoid of any underlying aversion to the Christian faith. They may not all be adherents of that faith, but they have few, if any, hang-ups about it.
There is a substantial tradition of major North American novelists whose backgrounds were deeply shaped by Christianity – Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or broadly biblical cultures – even when their fiction became secular, ambiguous, or tragic.
Cormac McCarthy, for example, was raised in an Irish Catholic family in Tennessee. His fiction is not devotional, but it has a definite biblical cadence: sin, judgment, apocalypse. His Outer Dark is nothing less than a graphic description of a character’s encounter with other characters in the outer darkness at the gates of hell. No less so is the entire scenario of Blood Meridian. In Suttree there is a brief suggestion of a moment of possible reversion to the protagonist’s original faith. The Road in essence is a glimpse of redemption.
Flannery O’Connor, within the genre of Southern Gothic novels, is one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century and perhaps the clearest case of an explicitly Christian literary imagination in American fiction. A devout Catholic, her stories dramatise grace, violence, redemption, and spiritual blindness.
In one of her most famous short stories, Revelation, a glorious setting sun is seen as a symbol of the Eucharistic Host and the background image for the conversion of a hard-hearted, judgmental woman. Mrs. Ruby Turpin is a respectable, prosperous Southern woman who prides herself on being a good Christian and on knowing exactly where everyone belongs in the social hierarchy. One evening, she sees this setting sun, and she experiences a vision – a vast procession of souls ascending toward heaven. They are poor whites, African American people, the marginalized and despised. She herself takes up the rear.
Interpreting O’Connor’s novels and stories within the Southern Gothic idiom in which she writes can sometimes be challenging. However, you always know where she stands. If there is any doubt about this, go to the collection of her letters, written over the last ten years of her short life and edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald. It is entitled The Habit of Being.
Fitzgerald writes in her introduction to the collection:
There is much discussion of books in Flannery’s letters, not just her own but all kinds of books. Understandably, reading was one of the great pleasures and interests in her life. She exchanged books with friends, and commentaries in turn. She liked to discuss ideas, and she liked to discuss theology, and she made a striking apologist for Catholicism, which was, to say the least, an arguable system of belief and thought to many, even most, of the people she wrote to.
This faith was her intellectual and spiritual tap-root, and it deepened and spread outward in her with the years. Her real love for Christianity and for the Church as its guardian is inescapable in her letters, and so is her impatience with fatuity and obtuseness among Catholics.
Other notable Catholic writers, writing either in an explicit Catholic context or with detectable underlying Christian values, are Alice McDermott, Walker Percy, Donna Tartt, and Ann Patchett.
Among the many non-Catholic but Protestant Christian writers unashamedly referencing either their faith or former faith are people like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Penn Warren – maybe the only American who understood what T. S. Eliot was really saying in The Waste Land. We can even include Ernest Hemingway among these. He briefly converted to Catholicism, but although his sojourn in the fold was short, his sensibilities were very Catholic all his life. Religious themes are often submerged but persistent in his novels: sacrifice, ritual endurance, and moral testing.But among contemporary American novelists, Marilynne Robinson is one who stands out, not only as a writer but as one of the country’s leading public intellectuals. Robinson’s œuvre is relatively short – just five novels. But it presents, in the last four works certainly, a Christian vision of the world. Her tradition is Presbyterian, but the range of characters reflects the broad Christian struggles of very ordinary people with faith and life.
Her Gilead sequence, completed by Home, Lila, and Jack, is a masterwork of modern fiction. This short extract is from Jack, her last novel to date, and gives a flavour of the Christian sweet spot she can touch in her work. It is from an intimate conversation between Della, a teacher and the daughter of a black Methodist bishop, and Jack, a white, unbelieving ne’er-do-well son of a Presbyterian pastor. They are in love with each other but are trapped by the miscegenation laws of America, still unrepealed in most states in the 1940s. Given their situation and his surface fecklessness, he finds it hard to understand why she loves him. She says:
“I’ll tell you my thinking.”
“All right.”
“We all have souls, true?”
He laughed. “Please go on.”
“We do. We know this, but just because it’s a habit to believe it, not because it is really visible to us most of the time. But once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You’ve seen the mystery – you’ve seen what life is about. What it’s for.
“And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it.”
Her eyes were lovely with seriousness, he knew, though she didn’t look at him. Still, he had to laugh.
“Am I to understand that you are speaking here of one Jack Boughton?”
She nodded.
“I learned this from you. From meeting you. It wasn’t as immediate as I’ve made it sound, but I began to realize…”
“So I am immune from all judgment, on account of my celestial nature?”
“Other people are, too, or they should be. But since it’s your soul I’ve seen, I know better than to think about you the way people do when they judge. The Lord says, ‘Judge not,’ because when He looks at people, He just sees souls. That’s all. I suppose I’ve seen a few others. Kids at school. Yours is the brightest.”
“A mystic.”
“Think what you like.”
I’ll leave the last word to William Faulkner, the final witness for my case, with his background in Southern Protestant biblical culture. He was not a doctrinal writer, but was deeply shaped by certain Christian conceptions of guilt, inheritance, and fallenness. In his address at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950, he explained his values.
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
He went on to say that, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.