Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America

11. How the Church Became Invisible: A Christian Reading of American Literary Tradition

159 = 11 How the Church Became Invisible A Christian Reading of American Literary Tradition Stanley Hauerwas and Ralph C. Wood It is surely a scandal that “a nation with the soul of a church,” as G. K. Chesterton famously described our country, should have produced so few writers who are Christian in any substantive sense of the word.1 Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Frost, Faulkner: nearly all of our eminent writers are heterodox at best, atheist or even nihilist at worst. Only such major-minor writers as Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy can be called distinctively Christian: writers whose artistic vision and work derive from the scandalous claims of God’s own self-identification in the Jews and Jesus and the church. The perhaps obvious answer to this conundrum is that brilliant minds gifted with artistic imagination have seen biblical faith for the delusion that it is and thus have refused to make its false claims essential to their work. Our task is to make the countercase that our major writers have little substantive regard for Christianity, because our churches have made it virtually impossible for them to do so. Despite our nation’s inveterate religiosity, exceeded perhaps only by that of India, we maintain that the church has become virtually invisible in America. It has so fully identi fied itself with the American project that our artists have had little cause to heed any unique and distinctively Christian witness in the churches. After accounting for this strange invisibility, we will examine some of the ways in which Christians remain profoundly indebted to our national literary tradition despite its sub-Christian character. Finally, we will look at two instances of overtly Christian kinds of fiction that we believe to be exemplary for a church tasked with making its witness in the one nation founded almost entirely on an Enlightenment basis. 160 Stanley Hauerwas and Ralph C. Wood Literature and the Gospel of U.S. Culture Our first claim is that the Christian witness in American literature has been watery and thin because our churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, have made the gospel of Jesus Christ seem all too much like the gospel of the United States. The trumpets of ecclesial America have been virtually indistinguishable from the nation’s own buglers, leaving our major writers but little cause to make Christ and the Kingdom central to their work. What a Jewish rabbi once declared about his own faith we believe to be true also for us Christians: “While America has been good for Jews,” he said, “it has been bad for Judaism.”2 It is surely a good thing that Jews have not been subjected to American pogroms and holocausts and that their talents and capacities have been allowed to flourish here as virtually nowhere else in the world. And yet this new birth of freedom from persecution and for prosperity has often meant the ruin of Judaism as a radically communal and countercultural way of life: the life of the synagogue, the life devoted to things higher than, other than, and even opposed to mere individual flourishing, and the life of communal worship and service given to the one true God: Yahweh. So it is with us Christians. Were it not for our brave ancestors who, at great risk, left the old world for the new, many of us would still be pounding rocks in Europe, living in perpetual peonage to our backs rather than our brains. Like our Jewish counterparts, however, we have come to equate American opportunity with the human good, yet with a notable difference: we have made American opportunity virtually coterminous with Christian freedom. Contra Chesterton, therefore, our churches have had the soul of a nation. Rarely has the Christian herald sounded the good and therefore dangerous news that, though they indeed intersect and at times overlap, the Christian church and the American nation will always remain alternative regimes, often scandalously in conflict with each other. The city of God and the city of man cannot be conflated, as Augustine rightly insisted more than 1,500 years ago. The acculturation of the Gospel is not unique, of course, to Christianity in America. As the Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac discovered, the early church regarded the Eucharist as the mystical body of Christ while the gathered community was understood as the real body of Christ. The Real Presence lay not in the bread and wine alone so...