Holy Heretics

This is a review of the one article devoted to Shaw in Marc DiPaolo’s very interesting collection of kindred essays, Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture. DiPaolo’s introduction states the problem of a Christianity that all too often does not seem to act in a “Christian” way, then provides context for the critique of or attack on such “unchristian” behavior by “heretics” who ironically seem to be more “Christian” than their “orthodox” critics. The reason there are so many quotation marks around words above (and below) is that this is as much a study of the language of religion as of religion itself. What do these words really mean?

The “heretic” challenge to putative “orthodoxy” is presented in two parts, in Part I focused on “Rewritten Bibles, Alternative Christs” (Jefferson, Kazantzakis, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Shelley, Shaw, Whitman, and, surprisingly, a Platonic Origen) and in Part 2 on “Angels and Demons among Us: The Politics and Economics of Heaven and Hell in Popular Culture” (in comic books, science fiction, films, and in the interactions of religion with politics and economics). This collection obviously doesn't cover all the bases, but the selections make a convincing case within these limitations. Rodriguez Martin’s “Shaw’s Subversion of Biblical Language” fits into the general theme of the book that these “heretics” have made a strong case for the need of Christianity to be “rebooted,” to borrow a metaphor from both DiPaolo’s introduction and McFarland’s website summary of this book. For more of that perspective, see www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-o-7864-678o-8.

Since the focus here is mostly on misinterpretations and misapplications of scripture rather than on the question of the scriptures themselves as trustworthy documents, “rebooting” seems an apt metaphor for what’s needed; we perhaps just need to understand scripture better and the Jesus portrayed there to be better Christians. But “rebooting” as applied to computers may be inexact as a metaphor for the entirety of this collection, for there are suggestions in some cases that we should consider as well the more radical idea that institutional Christianity has “crashed” so thoroughly that something more extreme than a “reboot” may be needed, namely, the replacing of the operating system with a completely new one. That more radical “replace the OS” view might seem to include Shaw, and that is certainly a valid reading of how radical Shaw’s proposed “Creative Evolution” is, but recalling Jacques Barzun’s argument that “Shaw was a fundamentalist Christian,” there is also a way to read Shaw that shows him as trying to return to religious basics rather than simply overthrow them, to give them a live meaning. However, Rodríguez Martín concludes his article by quoting Shaw’s quip that “Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it,” which could be read as supporting the “rebooting” paradigm but in a way that also totally questions it, for what’s the point of rebooting a religion that, according to Shaw, was never “booted up” to begin with?

This ambiguity can be found throughout Shaw’s work and public speeches, evidence of the tension he felt between a desire to reform the world (reboot it) or to revolutionize it (replace the OS). The wobbling of Shaw between reformer and revolutionary was in every step he took to change the world, a high-wire act with a wildly swinging balancing pole that sometimes may have led to thrilling, chilling missteps but somehow never a fall.

It seems to be all in how you word things and understand the words, and that linguistic relativity is at the core of the discussion in this collection. For example, I've titled this review “Holy Heretics” rather than “Godly Heretics” just to play with the idea for a moment that “Godliness” may not be at the core of the arguments...