Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010: Your Top 10 List

Welcome back to our contributor to Everett Hamner, who's been goofing around doing research and teaching at Western Illinois instead of spending time on the all-important business of blogging. Below are his thoughts on ten recent pieces of American literature, of all genres, which show the vitality of religion in American literary culture. Feel free to add your own suggestions for a top ten list in the comments section.

Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010
by Everett Hamner

As one of the literary types haunting this blog, and in small recompense for all I learned about American religious history from my just-graduated Young Scholars in American Religion cohort, I thought some of you might appreciate these recommendations of 21^st-century novels and graphic narratives to teach, reference, or just enjoy. Beyond their individual quality, my only criteria for inclusion was that they significantly engage religious questions and that they had not been discussed before at Religion in American History. The resulting list is neither exhaustive nor even my own “top ten.” But it is relevant and eclectic, featuring postmodern doorstoppers and plot-driven page-turners, science fiction and realism, with main characters ranging from African American Protestants to a Catholic-Islamic-Hindu syncretist. I hope many of you discover something intriguing.

1) E. L. Doctorow, City of God (2000). The back cover promises “a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a Lower East Side church only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue.” That just scratches the surface. This postmodern collage of literary forms, including emails, jazz lyrics, free verse, and prayers, is definitely about something missing, but not so much the cross as the God presumed to have hung upon it. Yet this is not merely another expression of Dover Beachian despair. Featuring dark matter and quantum physics, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, Tillichian theology and “Evolutionary Judaism,” and early Christianity and modern filmmaking, the novel is worthy of its namesake. As an early passage has it, “That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated … is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.” A.

2. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001). Martel’s novel is one of only a couple on this list that is neither by an American writer nor about American religion. Instead its settings are India, Mexico, Canada, and most of all, the Pacific Ocean. At one level, this is a fairly simple adolescent adventure story, a tale of shipwreck and survival. The twist is that the ship in question was carrying a zoo, so Pi’s lifeboat companions include an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger. Too fantastic, you say? Then let me assure you that this half-comedic narrative is framed so as to render the entire novel a study in epistemology and an inquiry into the nature of fiction, allegory, and metaphor. Oh, and because the main character believes that “religion is about our dignity, not our depravity,” he assumes that a loving God won’t mind if a growing boy is simultaneously a pious Catholic, Muslim, and Hindu … even if he doesn’t tell his priest, imam, or pandit. Pluralism, anyone? A-.

3) Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, and José Marzán, Jr. Y: The Last Man (2002-08).

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative is thriving in the new millennium, and I don’t just mean Left Behind. Now collected in book form, this widely-acclaimed comic series will turn off some with its graphic violence and sexuality, but those who tackle it will be rewarded with much more to ponder than the average superhero tale. Utilizing a premise going back to Mary Shelley, this globetrotting narrative interrogates potential mutations of feminism, homophobia, racism, genetic engineering, US nationalism, global terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. True to the genre, there is plenty of hyperbole, special effects, and tongue-in-cheek humor, but these lush panels are as consistently evocative as the plot is relevant. Surgeon General Warning: strangely addictive. B+.

4) Joe Sacco, Palestine (2002). And now for something intensely historical, just to counterbalance the colorful future of that last entry. Joe Sacco does in-depth reporting through immersing himself in the world’s least stable environs. Rather than a feature in The New York Times Magazine, however, the result is graphic narrative. This account of two months in the Occupied Territories in 1991-92 is an effort to uncover the personal dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. There are certainly references to larger-scale political maneuvering, but the core of this work is its on-the-ground tales, which come from both sides of the fences. The wounds of rock-flinging juvenile operatives, the devastation of a neighborhood’s olive trees (and thus some residents’ primary sources of income), the torture of political prisoners, women’s feelings about the hijab, and the obliviousness of Western tourists … material religion, indeed. B+.

5) Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2003). Richard Powers is best known for his mastery of scientific detail and his insights about human responses to new technologies. Like his stellar National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2005), this novel foregrounds evolution,but here the transformations are primarily of music, race, and religion. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the civil rights movement and its legacy, this is not only a 600+ page meditation on jazz, opera, and classical music, but a compelling argument about America’s need to embrace racial hybridity, confront class divisions, and search deeper than religious labels. With a Jewish immigrant father and an African American mother, the brothers who are the novel’s main characters face the same sort of dilemmas observed by their father decades earlier. Among them: “If I want to get ahead, I must become a Christian. But if I use Christianity to get ahead, I lose my soul!” A-.

6) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). “Faulkner without the pretension,” I thought upon reading Gilead’s last sentence. The Pulitzer selection committee must have felt similarly, and among these recommendations, Robinson’s interwoven novels are the most certain to appear on future American literature syllabi. But greatness is only one element of their appeal. If you need antidotes to megachurch spectacles or clergy sex scandals, these quiet works consider far more mundane matters. Very little occurs plot-wise, and even some of the major events take place offstage. What we do get is immense theological depth, attention to ordinary beauties and graces easily overlooked. We find main characters who are largely admirable andindeed wise rural Iowan pastors. Seriously, this is possible. Need more? Well, race plays a major role. And in covering the same events from the two old men’s perspectives, the novels become a single, very successful narrative experiment. They are also full of understated humor, as in this description of a home health care book: “It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus.” Taken as a whole, what Gilead’s narrator says of a verse in the gospels may be what even the most informed readers feel about American Protestantism after finishing these masterpieces: “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completelyignorant of it.” A+.

7) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2007). I debated listing this novel, as I’m not sure it says anything explicit about religion, at least not if defined narrowly. But a single scene from its sparing journey through a barely recognizable, post-apocalyptic American wilderness should be enough to convey the work’s significance. Having walked for days with little to eat, a father and his small son find an underground emergency bunker in the yard of an abandoned home. If the reader has not already accompanied this pair through the bleakness of the preceding hundred pages, the sensory impact of the moment is impossible to fully convey, but suffice it to say that I will never look at a tin of canned fruit the same way. “He turned and looked at the boy crouched above him blinking in the smoke rising up from the lamp and then he descended to the lower steps and sat and held the lamp out. Oh my God, he whispered. Oh my God. What is it Papa? Come down. Oh my God. Come down. Crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. […] He held his forehead in his hand. Oh my God, he said. He looked back at the boy. It’s all right, he said. Come down. Papa? Come down. Come down and see.” A-.

8) Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2010). Speaking of food, here is one of the best science fiction novels of the decade, and the problem here is calories. Imagining a twenty-third century in which international oil obsessions have given way to scarcities of food production, the setting and artificial beings involved are remindful of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, but the setting is Thailand. As in Life of Pi, the religion here is syncretistic, but the strange combinations in play—Buddhists overlapping with Grahamites, with stories about “Noah Bodhisattva, who saved all the animals and trees and flowers on his great bamboo raft and helped them cross the waters”—are taken for granted. This is a compelling contribution to the cyberpunk tradition that invites readers to extrapolate from current religious, ethnic, and global economic tensions and then to reinvest in that future’s history. B+.

9) Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting … (2010). Ralph Ellison worked for more than forty years on his follow-up to Invisible Man, but never could bring himself to finish. The reasons were legion, and have recently been thoroughly explored in Adam Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress and Arnold Rampersad’s biography. Scholars of race and American literature are well aware of this struggle, but as I will likely argue in a future essay, those who study American religion should be, too. This 1100-page volume contains a wealth of archival material painstakingly organized and introduced by Bradley and John F. Callahan, including the most coherent 300+ pages of the second novel (which were originally published in 1999 as Juneteenth). Such an unfinished monstrosity may prove too massive for some to engage, but be not afraid: it includes many bite-sized excerpts that deal powerfully with civil religion, African American Protestantism, and the increasingly hybrid religious realities evident at the turn of the millennium. See especially the eight excerpts published by Ellison during his lifetime that appear at the volume’s conclusion. A-.

10) Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010). I’m cheating with this one, as I just discovered it myself and am only a hundred pages in. Given the praise garnered elsewhere, though, that’s enough to recommend it. With the 36 chapters receiving such titles as “The Argument from the Improbable Self” and “The Argument from the Irrepressible Past,” philosophers and theoretically-oriented historians of religion and science may be most immediately attracted, but this is compelling reading for anyone in the humanities whose afternoons are commonly devoted to faculty meetings and university lectures. Although several main characters are unapologetically brilliant, Goldstein holds nothing back in critiquing the posturing and petty divisions that characterize too much of academic life. Meanwhile, the novel’s equally serious and humorous reflections on the relationship of faith and knowledge and on modern dynamics of religion and secularism suggest an ear very close to the ground. A-, so far.

The Religious and Fraternal Underpinnings of Sci-Fi Fandom

By John Crow

The semester is over at Florida State and next week begins the summer semester. I have already begun my summer reading which continues my interest in fraternalism, religion, gender, and the body. In that vein I have begun with Mark Carnes’ Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Yale UP 1989). In the beginning of the volume, he notes the significant changes that occurred to fraternalism after the antimasonic movement of the 1830s. Between the 1840s and 1860s, there was a move to upgrade fraternalism, to make it more palatable for the middle-classes, and to re-center the fraternal orders on ritual performance. While social interaction remained important, to some degree, it was the performance and belonging that mattered. Thus antebellum orders such as Freemasonry and the Odd Fellows swelled to significant numbers with the Odd Fellows having over 800,000 members in 1896 and the Freemasons not far behind with 750,000. For many of them, it was the performance in the rituals that cemented their involvement. They were able to reconnect with an imagined past and so-called ancient wisdom that was universally available.

Not surprisingly, these fraternal orders took the place of organized religion and church for many men. The rituals offered a universal morality couched in allegory that they performed. Members assumed costumes, imaginatively entering Solomon’s Temple in the Royal Arch Degree, discovering the lost word and Ark of the Covenant, or sitting around faux camp fires, connecting to an imagined primitive American past in the Order of the Red Men. In the Knight of Pythias, degrees were placed in Ancient Greece and the Medieval Europe. In many cases the degrees where anachronistic, combining historical figures and time periods in ways that were impossible. In response to non-historical claims, noted Masonic scholar, Albert Mackey, stated that the setting may be “true or false,” but the “lesson is still there, and the symbolism teaches it exclusive of the history.” All these movement promised connections to a world separate from the one the men knew, although it was imbued with symbols and allegories that pointed to a familiar Protestant morality. During these rituals, wearing masks and costumes, these men took on new identities imbued with deep and mystical meaning, though never straying too far from standard social conventions. As I read these lines, I wondered if today’s sci-fi fandom operates in a similar way for many in our modern culture.

Being from Atlanta, I thought of the largest fandom convention that takes place every Labor Day, DragonCon, and its cadre of costume wearing participants, reenacting sci-fi scenes from comic books, movies and television shows. These sci-fi conventions, or “cons” as they are called, occur somewhere in America every weekend. During these cons, fans step into their imaginative worlds similar to the masons and Odd Fellows. Instead of playing Hiram Abif, one may play to role of Obi-Wan Kenobi, similarly struck down by the forces of evil, only to be resurrected, not by the lost word, but by a universal “force,” which stresses a morality similar to that professed by masons. In fact, for many Jediism takes the place of more established religion. Some Jedi practitioners claim ancient pedigrees, not unlike many fraternal orders. Of course I could have picked Star Trek, with its secular humanism based Prime Directive, or some other vampire or anime series. In all these cases, the fans step into another world, assuming new identities. Carnes suggests that these new identities assist the performers in addressing anxieties. They certainly allow the creation of worlds that the members regulate and control. Ritual is a big part of that, as is social control. Just as masons can “black ball” and prohibit the membership of others, fandom groups police their boundaries in a variety of ways. Whether one must know the lines of a movie, the histories or genealogies of characters, or the proper conduct for the mythos or game, the boundaries can be stark and the participants unforgiving of violators.

Looking specifically at gender and the body, these imaginative worlds allow participants to explore and recast their bodies and gender in a variety of ways. While Victorian fraternal orders may have allowed men to adapt and re-inscribe gender roles in society, responding to the much discussed feminization of Victorian America, sci-fi fandom allows modern participants the ability to explore issues of gender and the body in complex ways. Cross dressing is common, as is the assumption of costumes that obscure gender altogether. Participants can have wings, become cyborgs, add additional limbs, or don non-gendered, non-human costumes, or even non-biological roles such as those of robots. Similarly, bodily extensions and modifications are common. In the opposite direction, participants may take on exaggerated gender features such is common in Japanese anime costume play, or “cosplay” as it is called. Another vibrant scene is the anachronistic steampunk movement, which attempts to fuse modern or futuristic technology with eighteenth century aesthetics.

The reasons men participate in fraternal orders now, as well as in the past, are complex and changing. Yet I think they give us some clues into modern worlds like sci-fi fandom, worlds in which religion and fraternalism manifest in very predictable ways. Capturing the religiosity of these participants can be difficult. They often fall into the ambiguous spiritual-but-no-religious segment of American society. Yet if we look for older models, such as Victorian fraternalism, we may be able to glean certain similarities which open possibilities for study. Though, on the surface, a mason dressed as Moses, participating in an initiation seems completely unrelated to a woman dressed as a Sith lord, wielding a light-saber, the underlying motivations may not be that different. Fraternal orders during the Victorian era addressed anxieties while simultaneously stressed conventional morality and middle-class virtues. While the sci-fi fandom world may seem completely unrelated, it too may be performing the same functions.