First, let me say that Robinson is an excellent writer. Her prose is clear, concise, and at the same time infuses a lyrical grace into her sentences. I think this is the reason that the literary elite have so embraced her books and awarded this novel the Pulitzer Prize. But I believe there are many problems with her approach to this book and to her fiction in general. As many have pointed out, half of this novel is basically a long-winded sermon, and as I read this book, I often thought that she really wants to write a theological treatise, not a novel. What saves the book from utter boredom is the quality of her prose. But the problem goes beyond her interest in theology. She really is deeply nostalgic, and not in a good way. As the hymn that we used to sing in my childhood says, “Give my that old time religion, it’s good enough for me.” It may be good enough for Robinson, but it isn’t good enough for me.
I feel that the reason that the literary elite has embraced her so readily is that they have failed to realize that Robinson is deeply conservative. She reminds me of the saying “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” She’s a conservative in liberal clothing. And that has fooled many people unfamiliar with American conservative religion. I grew up in West Texas, in the middle of the Bible Belt. All the people in my family were long-standing Methodists with several ministers in the family genealogy. In fact, my father was a Methodist minister. My family was also deeply conservative, and every single member of the family was a Texas Republican at a time when a majority of Texans were Democrats supporting Lyndon Johnson. So I feel that I can see through the surface liberalism that Robinson seems to evoke when she speaks at a university or some other more liberal setting.
The reason I think this is important is that this novel is really a propaganda piece for conservative religion. John Ames, a Congregationalist minister in the imaginary town of Gilead, Iowa, is the perfect ideal of what a minister is suppose to be. He questions himself on theological matters, he tries to be a good person and not sin, and he shows concerns for Jack, the wayward son a his best friend, another minister in the town. This is all well and good. The problem stems from the fact that her presentation of the religious characteristics of of her imaginary town and Iowa is a complete fantasy. This fantasy is captured at one point when Ames comments, “This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. And then Ames quotes from the Bible. “Thou wast in Eden, the garden of God...” Gilead is like some sort of American Garden of Eden, although for good measure she does touch upon the poverty and problems that Americans have suffered, from the loss of life during the Civil War to the suffering of rural folk during the Great Depression. But I must emphasize that she only touches upon these inconvenient realities. No mention of the thousands of pig farms polluting the drinking water of Iowa and causing a significant rise in cancer. We don’t want to talk about that!
For the most part Gilead is a religious utopia. She never really investigates the other side of American conservative religion. My experience with fundamentalist religion was apparently quite different from hers. Although there were many good people in the churches I attended in my childhood, and many of these people were generous human beings, there was a profoundly disturbing side to the religious life of these communities. When I was 12 years old my father, the good minister, was absolutely joyous when Martin Luther King was murdered. Even at such a young age I was shocked by his reaction. How could a man who preached “love thy neighbor” on Sunday turn around and celebrate the assassination of another person just because that person was black and was working for equality. And sadly, he wasn’t the exception to the rule. My entire family, and most of the people in my church, were racist to the core. Of course, they would have denied it vehemently. They would say that they have no problem with Blacks, so long as they stay on their side of the tracks, and leave white women alone. That event, and others like it, made me begin to question the ideas I was hearing in church every Sunday.
Robinson tries to address these issues through her character Jack. But isn’t it telling that the one person who questions religion, and also brings up questions about racism in the heartland of America, is also a deeply troubled man who steals in his youth and gets into serious trouble as an adult. Consciously or unconsciously, when Robinson creates a character who questions religion, or questions the contradictions in conservative America, they are always troubled people.
I’m sure many apologists for fundamentalist Christianity in America would say that you can’t judge the entire ideology based on a few bad apples. But why is there almost a direct correlation between deeply held religious belief and narrow minded attitudes. Although there are many exceptions, from what I’ve observed through my many years in the Bible Belt, the more religious a person is the more likely they are to being narrow minded, judgmental of others who don’t share their beliefs, and anti-intellectual. Why is it that most of the people who reject science are also conservative Christians. Robinson never even begins to address these concerns because it would damage her comfortable religious beliefs. A question I continued to ask myself as I read this novel is - if her characters were alive in 2016 how would they have voted in the election. I feel certain that they would have overwhelmingly voted for Trump. If Robinson, who has stated that she is opposed to Trump, really feels that way, she needs to ask herself why her novels so support the kind of people who would vote for someone like Trump.
And since Robinson spends so much time talking about theology we should take a closer look at some of her ideas in this area. For instance, she thinks John Calvin has been unfairly maligned. When I first heard her say this I was absolutely dumbfounded. Remember, this is the man who ordered the execution by burning alive of a man by the name of Severus simply because his ideas didn’t agree with his own beliefs. Calvin was also anti-Semitic. In his book, “Objections of a Certain Jew” he argued that Jews misread their own scriptures, and that Jews are a rejected people who must embrace Jesus to re-enter the covenant. Remember also that Luther, the founder of the Protestantism that Robinson so loves, wrote one of the most violently anti-Semitic books ever written, a book that inspired the Nazis to commit many of the thousands of atrocities against Jews. For both Calvin and Luther, the basis of their anti-Semitism, was their deeply held religious beliefs. After the Holocaust, how can Robinson possibly defend someone like Calvin.
In a review of Robinson’s latest book “Jack” by Jess Row in the Los Angela’s Times, Row states that Robinson is “willing to gloss over a century’s worth of inconvenient facts - from the racial history of Iowa to the doctrinal splits in Calvinist denominations that have produced today’s conservative extremists - in service to an idealized common Americanness that fades as soon as you try to bring it into focus.” And the great literary critic James Wood has stated that “Robinson is illiberal and unfashionably fierce in her devotion to this Protestant tradition...”
For all her gifts as a writer, it seems to me that Robinson is a person so deeply immersed in her religious beliefs that she can’t really see the reality of America, both its historical reality or the reality we face today in this country. But Isn’t this is the one thing that we turn to literature for? When we open a book don’t we yearn for insight, for maybe a little better understanding of the complexities of the world we live in? Robinson is unable to give us that.
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