If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right by Christopher Douglas (review)

Literary critics love to turn and turn and turn, as in the hit song of 1965 by The Byrds (a song based on the words of a much more ancient author). In recent years, much attention in American literary scholarship has been given to the announcement and examination of yet another, new "turn," that of the postsecular. In literary circles, a handful of key novels is said to illustrate a turn against a previously hegemonic disdain for the religious and the spiritual. One result is the clamoring of certain influential and wellplaced critics in American literary studies who together have recognized that we must reject the old wineskin of secularity and "turn" to discover a new wineskin of sorts, resulting in the genealogy of this new theoretical buzzword called the "postsecular."

By positing yet another set of "turns"—the turn away from an outdated concept of the secular, and the turn to the terrain of a more progressive and enlightened view of how the secular has been previously misunderstood—several critics have confounded our understandings of what we might even mean by such problematic terms as "the religious" or "the secular." Definitions are always problematic, of course. Among other things, the postsecular constitutes a powerful rejection of the so-called "secularization thesis" to which many had appealed as an organizing narrative of culture in America throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. This narrative featured a steady diminishment of the authority of religion, a growing disenchantment among intellectuals, and a certain demise of the power of religion in the long run. Secularization, it was previously thought, was as sure as the rising of the sun; or perhaps, we should say, its setting, if that sun represents faith or enchantment of some sort.

But in recent years, and led by the conclusions of such influential works as John McClure's Partial Faiths (2007) and Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief (2010), the study of the postsecular has become perhaps the most stunning development in the study of recent American fiction, at least among the denizens of R&L. Admittedly, this scholarship has at times seemed thin in its sketches of the religious and spiritual context in which literary works have been composed. Some scholars have also seemed to critique religious life from a dismissive or at times even uninformed position, one not fully comprehending what supernatural belief itself entails. One powerful illustration of this phenomenon is in Hungerford's well-known construction of what she calls "belief without content": a trendy theoretical concept perhaps, but one that in real life is slippery, and pretty hard to locate, at least in my own limited experience and as testified to by numerous confused questions from some of my graduate students. In point of fact, the concept does not tell us very much about what real humans actually "believe." And in any case, as Robert Orsi and the other proponents of the "lived religion" movement have explained, belief and experience both always already require and demonstrate a perceptible content.

Thus, in this still nascent context of what we might call postsecular criticism, it has seemed to some observers that the theorists themselves need to dig deeper, and unearth a meatier account of the real-life contexts in which a particular literary text has been formulated. To be blunt, what has sometimes been missing is a full and convincing account of the religious and spiritual contexts in which these "usual suspect" novelists have produced their works. What would then seem to be the next logical move in this emerging field of interest would be a deeper investigation into how precisely important novels actually engage with and make assertions about crucial social and policy issues of our culture. Such an account would give far more sustained attention to the "Christian resurgence" that arose in the 1970s and which still influences mainstream culture...