The Gospel According to Barbara Kingsolver: Brother Fowles and St. Francis of Assisi in The Poisonwood Bible

About halfway through Barbara Kingsolver’s epic novel, The Poisonwood Bible, the character Brother Fowles articulates one of the author’s major thematic points. Orleanna Price, wife of central character Nathan Price, is exasperated upon learning of the generosity and interdenominational cooperation of the other Protestant organizations working in the Congo mission fields (including the American Baptist Foreign Mission Service) while her own Southern Baptist Mission League has cut off even the tiny stipend the Prices had been receiving. After a moment’s thought Fowles expresses his sympathy, noting that “there are Christians and then there are Christians.”¹ His meaning is simple: there is a myriad of competing and sometimes contradictory interpretations of the Gospel vying for primacy with each claiming authority for itself. In this novel Kingsolver invites the reader to compare and contemplate the authenticity of one particular (and not very appealing) brand of evangelical fundamentalism with Fowles’s (and her) seemingly Franciscan version of Christianity. However, by the end of the novel the question that must be asked is whether her interpretation of the Gospel is in fact Christian, let alone Franciscan. The answer, I believe, ultimately is no.

Kingsolver has described her novel as a “political allegory” intended to criticize European and American colonial and neocolonial intervention in Africa.² Through the alternating voices of her five central female characters, Kingsolver relates the gradual disintegration of the family of Reverend Nathan Price, a zealous, self-righteous fundamentalist American Baptist preacher who in 1959 took his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the jungle village of Kilanga in the soon-to-be-independent Belgian Congo on a one-year mission to convert primitive African heathens living in darkness. Recounting a year and a half of pestilence, disease, drought, floods, hunger, witchcraft, and finally the bloody political upheaval of Mobutu’s American-supported coup and assassination of independence Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the novel catalogues the ineptitude and arrogance of Price as he confronts and attempts to change a people (and a culture) he does not understand and who do not particularly desire what he has to offer. In the process Price and his religion become stinging metaphors for an equally inept and arrogant American foreign policy driven by a similar patronizing, self-righteous zeal and xenophobic loathing of competing political and socioeconomic ideologies.

On more than one occasion Kingsolver has rejected the notion that her novel is antireligious, anti-Christian, or antimissionary.³ Rather, while acknowledging that her central character is an “arrogant proselytizer” engaged in a form of religious activity that goes against her liberal principles, she quickly points to Brother Fowles, whose role in the novel she says is “to redeem both Christianity and the notion of mission . . . to represent Christian mission in a kinder voice.”⁴ At first glance Fowles indeed seems the epitome of a contemporary liberal Christian: he is open-minded and respectful of other systems of belief, recognizing they, too, contain valid expressions of God’s revelation to humankind; he does not proselytize, but rather engages in dialogue with the indigenous people among whom he lives; his ministry centers on advancing the work of the social Gospel, promoting such things as better health care, better nutrition (especially for infants), and better treatment of women in society; he approaches the scriptures with the tools, methods, and insights of modern biblical criticism; and he possesses a personal spirituality that is grounded in a near-mystical reverence for the natural world reminiscent (at least on the surface) of the spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi.

Yet, as admirable a character as Fowles is, a closer examination of his spirituality makes it difficult to call him a Christian in any conventional sense. His readiness to abandon the scriptures (even as interpreted with the tools of modern Bible criticism) as a primary source of revelation in favor of the immanent experience of nature, together with his pantheistic understanding of the nature of God (which mirrors Kingsolver’s), clearly sets him apart from mainstream Christianity, whether it be...