In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert by Terry Lindvall
  • Helena M. Tomko
God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert. By Terry Lindvall. (New York: New York University Press. 2015. Pp. xi, 347. $35.00. ISBN 978-1-4798-8673-9)

Writers with an inclination to satire invariably encounter the challenge of where to draw the line between admissible and excessive expressions of mockery and derision. Terry Lindvall’s ebullient and wide-ranging survey of the satiric tradition within Christian literary culture begins precisely by drawing lines. Conceding that the concept of a Christian satirist always approximates an oxymoron, he proposes a model for evaluating satirical texts in the form of two intersecting axes, the x axis running from ridicule to moral purpose and the y axis from rage to humor. This cruciform graphic appears once in each of his ten chapters, offering a useful visual measure of authors’ didactic intent (or lack thereof) and what Lindvall terms the “affective nature of the discourse,” that is, the emotions from which the satire originates and the responses it elicits (p. 8). Lindvall offers this “Quad of Satire,” not as an empirical evaluation, but as a helpful graphic for mapping out the perennial tension between the genre’s corrective and its destructive potential during various periods of Western history.

The historical scope of Lindvall’s study is panoramic, beginning with brief chapters on the Hebrew and Roman antecedents to the satires of Christianity and concluding with an account of the recent migration of the literary tradition of religious satire into mass media—whether in the irreverence of Monty Python’s Life of Brian or The Onion or in the “indirect satire” of the Sunday school-teaching, latenight TV host Stephen Colbert (p. 264). Lindvall’s argument assumes two guiding lights for Christian satire, which at its best, he believes, “combines laughter and a vision of reform” (p. 7). This uncontroversial, modest pair of claims—that piety must be moderated with laughter and that ecclesial corruption deserves mockery—at times fails to allow for the application of more fine-grained theological or historical scrutiny. For example, the conciliatory placement of the verbal adversaries Martin Luther and Thomas More together at the intersection of the Quad of Satire begs the question of whether vying Protestant and Catholic accounts of grace and [End Page 100] justification have different aesthetic and moral resonance in the history of satire (p. 80). The capacious notion of “reform” as the licit fruit of satire also results in the perhaps surprising choice to discuss the anticlerical satire of Voltaire and the anti-Christian satire of Nietzsche. If this is a study of “religious satire,” it is principally a study of Christian satire but not at the exclusion of satires of Christianity, whose purposes range from upbuilding to demolition.

Lindvall’s rollicking compendium of religious satire rightly proposes that a history of Christian humor belongs alongside, or within, our histories of Christian art, architecture, poetry, and literature. Given the often political and social nature of satiric discourse, this book offers the historian a rich companion to periods from the early Church to the Reformation and Enlightenment, from the flourishing of satire during the first half of the twentieth century in Britain to its apparent demise of late. Lindvall’s language at times replicates the humor of the texts and writers he discusses, bringing to life the historical contexts in which jokes were first cracked and satiric wounds first inflicted. Whether satire is, as Lindvall implies, inevitable in Christianity, his wide-ranging discussions of great Christian satirists—including Tertullian, Erasmus, Swift, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and many more—is a reminder that human levity is a cultural-historical force not to be taken lightly.

Helena M. Tomko
Villanova University
...

pdf

Share