Integrite Spring 2024

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Editor

John J. Han, Missouri Baptist University

Editorial Review Board

Matthew Bardowell, Missouri Baptist University

Todd C. Ream, Taylor University

C. Clark Triplett, Missouri Baptist University

Advisory Board

Bob Agee, Oklahoma Baptist University & Union University

Jane Beal, University of La Verne

Eric Shane Bryan, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Andy Chambers, Missouri Baptist University

Arlen Dykstra, Missouri Baptist University

Matthew Easter, Missouri Baptist University

Lorie Watkins Massey, William Carey University

Darren J. N. Middleton, Baylor University

John Zheng, Mississippi Valley State University

Editorial Assistants Webmaster

Terrie Jacks Mia McIsaac Jenna Gulick

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal (ISSN 1547-0474 and 1547-0873) is published in spring and fall by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University. Published both online at https://www.mobap.edu/aboutmbu/publications/integrite/ and in print copy, the journal examines historical, philosophical, theological, cultural, and pedagogical issues related to the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. All submissions are critically reviewed for content and substance by the editor and the editorial review board; in some cases, scholars in specific fields are invited to evaluate manuscripts. The opinions expressed by individual writers in this journal are not necessarily endorsed by the editor, editorial board, or Missouri Baptist University.

SUBMISSIONS: Submissions of scholarly articles, short essays, book reviews, and poems are welcome. Send your work and your 100-125-word author bio as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. We accept submissions all year round. For detailed submission guidelines, see the last two pages of this journal.

SUBSCRIPTIONS & BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Intégrité subscriptions, renewals, address changes, and books for review should be mailed to John J. Han, Editor of Intégrité, Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missour i 63141. Phone: (314) 392-2311/Fax: (314) 434-7596. Subscription rate s: Individuals $10 per year; institutions $20 per year.

INDEXING: Intégrité is listed in the Southern Baptist Periodical Inde x and the Christian Periodical Index.

Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2024

© 2024 Missouri Baptist University. All rights reserved.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2024): 3-14

Searching for the “Spiritual” in the Spiritual Descendants of Sherlock Holmes

Bryan Mead

Introduction

My wife and I recently revisited a few episodes of Psych, the American television show about a private detective with such incredible powers of observation that the police, and many others, believe he is actually a psychic. It is a show we have previously watched in its entirety. The main character, Shawn Spencer, uses his “gift” to find clues the “regular” police overlook, ultimately leadi ng him to solve each episode’s mystery. The formula for the show is nothing new, nor is the character type. Many popular shows over the past two decades feature main characters who possess a gift for detail and deduction at solving mysteries beyond the normal human capacity. In fact, my wife and I hav e also watched the television shows Monk, House, and Sherlock, all of which follow a similar pattern. Sherlock, of course, makes the most direct connection to the progenitor of this narrative paradigm, Arthur C onan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

In many ways, calling Shawn Spencer, Adrian Monk, Gregory House, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s modern rendition of Holmes “spiritual descendants” of the original Sherlock makes a lot of sense. Each character relies heavily on powers of observation, lives a somewhat isolated life save the companionship of a loyal sidekick/confidant, holds an obvious intellectual advantage over the establishment, and can neatly summarize a mystery at the end of the night’s narrative . With these traits apparent in the television detectives, it is easy to see “the shadow of Sherlock Holmes” lurking behind each one (Davis 11).

Yet, the term spiritual descendant becomes misleading when discussing the spiritual component of these television shows as they relate to the original stories. In fact, each of these series contains at least one episode devoted to refuting the existence of a spiritual, supernatural reality, along with many other examples throughout the series of the main characters rejecting the existence of God and any ot her apparently supernatural occurrence. Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes neatly summarizes the feelings of all these characters when he says , “God is a ludicrous fiction, dreamt up by inadequates who abnegate all responsibility to an invisible magic friend ” (“The Six Thatchers”). The entire premise of Psych even refutes the supernatural, with the main

character exploiting the naïve extra-sensory beliefs of the other characters. While the Watson-like sidekicks and many other characters may end up believing in the possibility of supernatural events, the main characters never fully succumb to belief in events outside the realm of scientifically observable human existence. Even though these secondary characters within the story may believe, it is the main character, and ultimately the narratives, that disprove and reject supernatural events along with the religious figures who espouse them.

The main objective of this article is to show that, contrary to popular belief and his modern decedents, the original Holmes sees the intricacies of human life and the distinctions between right and wrong as evidence of a divine hand. God, in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, acts as both divine judge and director of human action. While by no means an orthodox Christian, the original Holmes does acknowledge the presence of a spiritual reality, and he sees the miraculous as part of everyday existence.

Reconciling the Scientific with the Spiritual

To be sure, much of what modern Holmes -like figures exude on screen resonates with the original literary detective. He is known for his “science of deduction” which takes a cold, calculating view of facts and waits to determine any conclusions from those facts until there are enough to support any hypothesis. He refers to his mind as a “racing engine” (890)1 and subscribes to a very utilitarian notion of gathering information, viewing a brain as “like a little empty attic” which “you have to stock with furniture . . . as you choose,” making it a “mistake to think that the little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent” (21). He often warns others about allowing emotions to get in the way of facts, even claiming that there is nothing “more deceptive than an obvious fact” ( 204).

Holmes is also more skilled and observant than his police counterparts, even commenting on his ability to “hit upon some other obvious facts which may have been by no means obvious to Mr. Lestrade , ” and that he is not boasting when he says that he “shall either confirm of destroy [Lestrade’s] theory by means which he is quite incapable of employing, or even of understanding” (204).

Yet, focusing solely on Holmes as a detective machine free from spiritual influence is missing something important about the nature of his character. Scholars have long struggled to reconcile the spiritual aspects in the Holmes stories, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, particularly due to Doyle’s much-publicized belief in, and writings on, spiritualism. In his Wanderings of a Spiritualist, Doyle writes of his att empts to promote spiritualism (psychic encounters, seances, and the like) around the world after his own reported encounters with the dead. He writes that spiritualists are “Unitarians with a breadth of vision which includes Christ, Krishna, Buddha, and all the other great spirits whom God has sent to

direct different lines of spiritual evolution which correspond to the different needs of the various races of mankind,” and that his “information from the beyond is that this evolution is continued beyond the grave, and very far on until all details being gra dually merged, they become one as children of God” (24). Thus, Doyle’s own beliefs followed a Unitarian -like idea of God but did “not accept vicarious atonement nor original sin,” but rather believed “that a man reaps as he sows with no one but himself to pull out the weeds” (24-25).

Angela Fowler points out that one of the main reasons such discussions of Conan Doyle’s spiritualism rarely make it into Holmes scholarship is scholars see the spiritualism as “ant ithetical to his more rational Sherlock Holmes” (456). In fact, some suggest that a “strong component of the character’s ongoing appeal and success is his k nowledge of science and frequent use of the scientific method,” things held by many to be in direct contrast with belief in an unseen spiritual re alm (O’Brien xiv). Mark Knight writes of Holmes as “the ultimate modern professional, a figure who eschews rel igion and brings a relentless scientific method to bear on every problem” (127), while Rosemary Jann describes scholarship as exalting Holmes as “ a resonant symbol of the late Victorian faith in the power of logic and rationality to insure order” (385). Fo r Jann, though, this viewpoint is only perpetuating the “myth of [Holmesian] rationality” at the expense of the more multifaceted character Holmes is in the stories. Attempts, then, to position Holmes in “a purely scientific paradigm” turn out to be “highly inadequate” (Chatterjee 96).

Holmes and Adaptation Studies

Therefore, examining the differing spiritual viewpoints of Sherlock Holmes and the heirs to his detective throne remains an important task in studying and teaching Holmes, but also for those of us teaching adaptation studies, even though the most recent trends in the field are mean t to remove issues of fidelity from discussion. As with most post-structuralist critiques of structuralist criticism, Robert Stam suggests an approach “more rooted in contextual and intertextual history” which sees adaptations through many lenses, includin g “readings, critiques, interpretations, and rewritings of prior material” (“Beyond Fidelity” 7576). Another important intertextual scholar, Linda Hutcheon, argues that “adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places” (176).

Rather than being “inferior or second -rate,” adaptations are “traveling stories” that “adapt to local cultures” and evolve “by cultural selection” (176). Viewed in this way, adaptation studies look both at a discernable narrative structure able to move between media and at the cultural milieu of any sto ry’s formal iteration. To quote Stam, the “source novel, in this sense, can be seen as a situated utteranc e, produced in one medium and one historical and social context, and later transformed into

another, equally situated utterance, produced in a differ ent context and relayed through a different medium” (“Introduction” 46). In other words, the current tendency in literature, film, and media studies is to examine the cultural milieu producing a given iteration of a story to say something about the culture at large rather than just about the individual text. David Bordwell called this type of resear ch “Grand Theory” because its arguments “are framed within schemes which seek to describe or expla in very broad features of society, history, language, and psych e ” ( “Grand Theory” 3).

The most intriguing aspect of Sherlock Holmes adaptations is that the “Grand Theory” approach to scholarship seems to have done more to shape recent Holmesian characters than the culture in which the original Holmes stories emerged. Conan Doyle wrote his stories during what many see as the modernist turn in Western thought. Max Weber famously referred to the loss of religious belief and increase in capitalistic rationality and bureaucracy during the turn of the 20 th Century as the “disenchanting of the world.” Weber argues that “rationalization and intellectualization” led modern humans to “no longer need to adopt magical means to control or pray to the spirits” (18). Many argue the rise in popularity of the fictional detective coincided with the increas ing secularization of society. Carole M. Cusack, citing the “retreat” of organized religion during the fin de siècle and the difficulty in believing “that good and evil d o not go unpunished” sees the detective as one of modernity’s repla cements for the priest, capable of “ascribing meaning to the otherwise random minutiae of existence” (161). Others also view the “seeming clairvoyance in [an] investigation” (Walton 458) possessed by fictional detectives as showing a secularized version of “the unmediated access to the self’s mental states often assigned to certain classes of punitive supernatural being” (Carney 204).

It is especially popular to view Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes as t he progenitor of this rationalistic, anti-spiritualism. Many see the great detective as “archetypal” because he is “rational, scientific, calculating and infallible” (Phillips 140). Even when scholars attempt to show a more nuanced look at the spiritual realities of turn-of-the-century Britain, Holmes is held up as t he prototype for anti-spiritualism. Thus, when examining how pervasive “enchantment” remained during the age of reason, Michael Saler argues Sherlock Holmes “represented and celebrated the central tenets of modernity adumbrated at the time not just rationalism and secularism, but also urbanism and consumerism,” ultimately making “these tenets magical without introducing magic” (603). Additionally, scholars in adaptation studies desire to research to move away from “the morally loaded discourse of fidelity” and its “implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 7). However, these scholars do not simply relegate the “morally loaded discourse” to narra tive fidelity alone. The not-sosubtle implication is also an avoidance of “morally loaded discourse” surrounding the morality of one era influencing the reading of more

current morality in another era. Yet, Christian scholars must avoid the academic bent to make morality culturally subjective. Therefore, instead of utilizing such “Grand Theories” in our examinations of literature, film, and other mass media, Christian teachers and students must examine adaptations with an eye toward morality and ethics whi le still not expecting adaptations to remain faithful to their progenitors.

Bordwell’s suggestion of “middle-level research” which builds “theories not of subjectivity, ideology, or culture in general but rather of particular phenomena” seems an appropriate approach for the Christian academic (“Grand Theory” 29) . While we can agree with the current scholarship that changing a character’s spiritual nuance from one version of a story to another does not necessarily make one version better or worse, we cannot agree in arguing that changing spiritual components in a character does not make that character more right or wrong than other incarnations. The following is an attempt to view some popular incarnations of Sherlock Holmes with an eye toward each version’s spiritual mindset.

Spiritual Absence in House

Following the dominant view of Holmes as capturing the modern, anti-spiritual zeitgeist, most contemporary descendants of Holmes accentuate this trait to the exclusion of the original’s more nuanced view of spirituality. The House episode “House vs. God” provides b oth an appropriate title an d a clear example of the anti-spiritual bent present in contemporary Holmesian characters. After a young faith healer collapses during a service, he is sent to recover at House’s hospital. While there, the healer wanders the hall s in a delirium and lays hands on a woman dying of cancer. As the episode progresses, it becomes clear that the woman starts feeling better and that the woman’s tumor has also shrunk. These positive signs challenge House’s rejection of spiritual intervention, and House does everything he can to figure out the true cause of these seemingly miraculous events. Throughout the episode , House even finds his prized whiteboard being used as a scoreboard pitting House against God, with God leading the tally most of the way. However, by the episode’s end, House both discredits the supernatural healing of the cancer patient and discredits the integrity of the faith healer by correctly diagnosing the healer’ s malady as a herpes virus, which, being transmitted through touch to the cancer p atient, temporarily shrunk the tumor. While the whiteboard may end in a 3-3 tie, House can very convincingly contest one of God’s tallies since the tumor only shrunk because of the herpes transmission. Even though House’s closest friend Wilson explains it is possible to believe in something and not live up to it, the episode has made clear that the scientific mind can explain even the most miraculousseeming miracles while also tarnishing the reputation of those who claim miraculous healing powers.

Spiritual Absence in Monk

A similar episode shows up in Monk’s “Mr. Monk and the Miracle.” While investigating the murder of a homeless man, Adrian Monk does his best to debunk what appear to be miracles happening at a fountain outside a monastery. After mysterious paintings of the fountain appear in sick people’s houses, the residents of those houses flock to the fountain, drink from it, and find their pain healed. The miracles br ing recognition to the monastery, but no monetary gain. The monastery was planning to remove the fountain and build classrooms on the site before the miracles began, leaving little room to suspect the monks as nefarious.

One of those healed happens to be Monk’s friend, Captain Stottlemeyer, who finds relief from crippling back pain after he visits the fountain. The miracle affects Stottlemeyer’s psyche so much that he joins the monastery, giving up his life on the police force. Monk, howeve r, is not convinced, and he eventually reveals an elaborate ruse orchestrated by a local pharmacist who, years earlier, killed his business partner (who we come to find was a man of faith, hung a cross in the pharmacy, and ultimately embezzled money from t he store) and buried the body under the fountain. To avoid anyone finding the body, the pharmacist began switching his patients’ pills with placebos, painting the fountains on their doors, and then distributing the real medicine after the patients drank from the fountain.

As in the episode of House, science again trumps miracles, and a man of faith turns out to be living a sordid life. There are, however, two interesting aspects of this episode worth mentioning. The first is the portrayal of the monastery, which does not come across as crooked or illintentioned, even if their belief in a higher power may come in conflict with the evidence Monk uncovers throughout the show. The second is the final scene where Monk, who throughout the series struggl es with obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, visits the fountain, and contemplates taking a drink. Though we never find out if the great detective succumbs to his hope against hope in the healing powers of the fountain, these two aspects do bring a bit softer touch to the antisupernatural sentiment of the modern Holmesian character type. Yet, the episode has already made clear human actions, no matter how intricate, are ultimately the cause of the supernatural.

Spiritual Absence in Psych

Psych provides another example of the rejection of supernatural belief in “The Devil is in the Details…and the Upstairs Bedroom.” In the episode, sidekick Gus tries to coerce “psychic detective” Shawn to investigate an apparent suicide that took place at a Catholic University. Gus’s interest in the case stems from his connection with one of the school’s faculty members, Father Westley, who was Gus’ s Sunday School

teacher and mentor. While lead detective Lassiter believes foul play was involved, and Shawn thinks suicide is the easiest explanation, Father Westley posits his theory of spiritual possession. Westley’s theory is quickly brushed off by all except Gus until another student starts behaving erratically and exhibiting typical traits of spiritual posses sion, including speaking different languages, knowing secret information, and c ontrolling the electricity in a room without flipping a switch. Ultimately, Father Westley is called in to exorcise the demon, and after hours of work, he seemingly succeeds. Yet, Shawn’s skepticism does not allow him to fully believe in what appears to be supernatural reality. After further investigation, Shawn discovers both students are only appearing possessed because they’ve been given L -Dopa, the drug Father Westley takes for his Parkinson’s disease. When given to people without Parkinson’s, L-Dopa causes emotionally erratic behavior. Even though Shawn initially suspects Westley of the crime, believing the priest was attempting to resurrect his “exorcism” heyday, he eventually finds the real criminal is the second “victim,” absolving the pri est of any wrongdoing. As in Monk, the show presents the actions of the faithful as well -intentioned even while discrediting their belief in the supernatural. Yet again, religio n may temporarily appear to explain events, but science eventually provides the true answer. The faithfu l are refuted, and the skeptic is shown as correct in rejecting spiritual rationale.

Spiritual Absence in Sherlock

Finally, the Sherlock episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” presents a spiritual crisis in the life of the popular m odern incarnation of Sh erlock Holmes. The show follows Holmes and Watson as they investigate the mysterious appearances of a gigantic, supernatural hound terrorizing a young man who, twenty years earlier, witnessed this same hound kill his father. Holmes quickly dismisses the supernaturalness of the hound along with all the people who flock to the town in a quest to find the beast. However, by the episode’s mid-point, both Holmes and Watson have seen the hound, shaking Holmes to the core of his being. How could the precise, scientific mind of Holmes witness a beast so outside the realm of scientific possibility?

Rather than caving to the supernatural explanation, Holmes digs deeper and finds the truth to lie in covert scientific experimentation and hallucinogenic chemical weapons. Yet again, the supernatural turns out to be explained away with rational science, and those who believe turn out to look naïve and silly. This becomes particularly evident when Holmes humorously toys with Watson by locking him in a laboratory and using sound effects as the latter, scared out of his mind and suffering from the hallucinogenic, thinks the hound is attacking him. Sherlock, along with the other shows mentioned here, eliminates the possibility of supernatural events, even when all signs initially point to supernatural circumstances.

Although this article has focused on individual episodes, it is important to note how pervasive this anti-supernatural worldview is in each of these television series rather than a one -off rejection of a particular seemingly supernatural phenomenon in a single episode. The main characters, and the shows, consistently disprove anything related to spiritual intervention in human events. These protagonists are quick to prove psychics as frauds and ghosts to be elaborate hoaxes. In these modern incarnations, the Holmesian character is a clear skeptic and avowed atheist. In the Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of Wister ia Lodge,” Holmes says that “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data” because “insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts” (163) . For these television series, the narratives set up the characters believing in spiritual reality as the ones attempting to “fit” data around “theories” while the main characters wait for all the data to invariably debunk religiously inspired thought.

Spirituality in the Sherlock Holmes Literary Canon

Yet, contrary to popular notions of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes forming this anti-spiritual mold in the original stories, there are many instances when the original “consulting detective,” and the canonical Holmes stories, acknowledge the existence of a higher power. Th is is not to say Sherlock Holmes never discredits seemingly supernatural events. Th e famous Hound of the Baskervilles, as inspiration for the above-mentioned Sherlock episode, clearly depicts Holmes as more than skeptical that a gigantic hound of supernatu ral origin could exist. Doyle’s novel also sets about proving Sherlock correct. How ever, the Holmes canon provides the original Sherlock Holmes with a more nuanced worldview than his modern descendants, one in which God’s hand plays a continuous role in shaping human activity.

One example of Holmes acknowledging a power higher than the human mind shows up in “A Case of Identity.” While sitting with Watson in their quarters on Baker Street, Holmes opines the following:

…life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (190-91)

It is amazing how similar Holmes’ s sentiment here is to G.K. Chesterton’s claim that truth “ must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to i t” (136). While it’s not clear here whether or not Ho lmes has the same intent as Chesterton to prove a divine hand over human events (Holmes does solve the strange case that follows his quote, proving his mind to be at least at the top end of the human spectrum.), it does open up the possibility that a higher power must be behind the intricate and non -predictable chain of human action.

This sentiment becomes more pronounced in the well -known “Five Orange Pips.” Early in the narrative our narrator , Watson, sets up the reality of things as outside human control. He writes, “All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand -made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the pr esence of those great elemental forces which shriek at manki nd through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage ” (218). The images of “hand-made London” as the “bars of civilization” r epresent modern humanity’s desire to insulate itself from the recognition, or acknowledgment, of forces outside its control. These are appropriate metaphors representing Weber’s disenchantment which I mentioned above. Yet, the story ends with those “elemen tal forces” passing judgment on the culprit more powerfully than any human court, with Captain James Calhoun, murderer and member of the Ku Klux Klan, being shipwrecked and lost at sea before Holmes could even enact his plan to catch the criminal. While Ho lmes may have discovered the criminal’s identity, it took a supernatural “deus ex machina” to enact judgment.

God’s judgment superseding that of human courts is also a subject in “The Boscome Valley Mystery,” when Holmes tells a dying criminal, “You are yourself aware that you will soon have to answer for your deed at a higher court than the Assizes ” (217). This is one of the clearest indications of Holmes acknowledging a spiritual realm in which human deeds are judged by a divine power. Holmes does not ju st stop there, but also more definitively recognizes a divine hand over human action when he says, “I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter’s words, and say, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes ’” (217). Thus, in the span of a few lines, Doyle’s Holmes recogni zes a divine being who both judges and directs human action, and he gives God the credit for keeping him on the “side of the angels,” as Sherlock’s Jim Moriarty would say.

Another clear example of Holmes’ s recognizing God’s hand over human life comes from one of the most famous lines in all of the Sherlock Holmes canon. In “His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes,” the great detective sees the Great War approaching like an “east wind” toward his native England. Speaking to Watson, Holmes says:

Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. (980)

Rather than God being a “ludicrous fiction” as he is in the eyes of the modern-day Holmesian detectives, the original Holmes sees God as a supernatural judge and guide over human events. From war to Holmes ’ s personal decision-making, the miraculous guiding hand of God is present in the everyday occurrences surrounding humankind.

Conclusion

The distinction between Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and his recent “spiritual descendants” is, therefore, one re lated to the nature of divine intervention and miracles. Writing about miracles, C.S. Lewis notes that our “featureless pantheistic un ities and glib rationalist distinctions are alike defeated by the seamless, yet ever -varying, texture of reality, the liveness, the elusiveness, the intertwined har monies of the multidimensional fertility of God” (“Miracles” 117). He continues by saying that to think the spiritual reality of our world “was a fable, a product of our own brains as they are a product of matter would be to believe that this vast symphonic splendour had come out of something much smaller and emptier than itself” (“Miracles” 117). Even though Doyle’s Holmes has very high regard for the human brain, he still maintains a grasp of this “vast symphonic splendor” which no human mind could cre ate. He would most likely still reject what we typically classify as miracles, or supernatur al occurrences outside the laws of nature, and would rather fit into a category of person Lewis describes as having “an almo st aesthetic dislike of miracles” since God’s breaking of the “laws He Himself has imposed on His creation seems…arbitrary, clumsy, a theatrical device only fit to impress savages” (“Miracles” 110). Yet, Holmes’s recognition of nature’s laws is a recognition of a divine being who created those laws. On the other hand, modern iterations of the Holmesian -type fit more closely to those who Lewis describes in his famous “God in the Dock” essay. Whereas “ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge,” moder n man reverses the roles (“God in the Dock” 36). Now man is the judge, and “God is in the do ck.” Lewis says modern man views himself as “quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the go d who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen” (“God in the Dock” 36). Our descendants of Sherlock Holmes would add “ if God would only perform a clear miracle that I cannot disprove with mere science” to this list. Of

course, as Mark 8:12 s ays when Jesus was asked for a miraculous sign to prove his divinity, “He sighed deeply and said, ‘Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it. ’” We also can sigh deeply, enjoying recent descendants of Sherlock Ho lmes for the entertaining ways they resemble their spiritual ancestor, but mourning the loss of the “spiritual” in their dispositions.

Note

1 All citations from Sherlock Holmes stories come from The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Full bibliographic information is listed in the Works Cited.

Works Cited

Bordwell, David. “Contemporary Film Studies and Vicissitudes of Grand Theory.” Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, Wisconsin University Press, 1996, pp. 3-36.

Carney, James. “Supernatural Intuitions and Classic Detective Fiction: A Cognitivist Appraisal,” Style, vol. 48, no. 2, 2014, pp. 203-218.

Chatterjee, Arup K. “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Theosophy: Spiritual Underpinnings of the Science of Deduct ion.” The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, vol. 35, no. 2, 2023, pp. 96-113.

Chesterton, G.K. The Club of Queer Trades. Harper and Brothers, 1905.

Cusack, Carole M. “Non-Mainstream Religion as ‘Other’ in Detective Fiction.” The Buddha of Suburbia: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference for Religion, Literature and the Arts 2004, edited by Carlole M. Cusack, Frances Di Lauro and Christopher Hartney, RLA Press, 2005, pp. 159-174.

Davis, J. Madison. “Mr. Monk and the Pleasing Paradigm.” World Literature Today, vol. 83, no. 3, 2009, pp. 11-13.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Doubleday, 1930. . The Wanderings of a Spiritualist . George H. Duran & Co., 1921.

Fowler, Angela. “Arthur Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist British Commonwealth: ‘The Great Unifying Force.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 59, no. 4, 2016, pp. 456-472.

“House vs. God.” House, Season 2: Episode 19, written by Doris Egan, FOX, 2006.

Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.

Jann, Rosemary. “Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body.” ELH, vol. 57, no. 3, 1990, pp. 685-708.

Knight, Mark. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Adverts and Sacraments in Chesterton’s London.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2009, pp. 126-136.

Lewis, C.S. “God in the Dock.” C.S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity, and the Church, edited by Lesley Walmsley, Harper Collins, 2002, pp. 33-37.

. “Miracles.” C.S. Lewis Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity, and the Church, edited by Lesley Walmsley, Harper Collins, 2002, pp. 107-117.

“Mr. Monk and the Miracle.” Monk, Season 7: Episode 9, “written by Andy Breckman and Peter Wolk, USA Netowrk, 2008.

O’Brien, James. The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Cas e with Science and Forensics. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Phillips, Bill. “Religious Belief in Recent Detective Fiction.” Atlantis, vol. 36, no. 1, 2014, pp. 139-151.

Saler, Michael. “‘Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’: Mass Culture and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890-c. 1940.” The Historical Journal , vol. 46, no. 3, 2003, pp. 599-622.

Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp. 75-76.

. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation. ” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 1-52.

“The Devil is in the Details…and the Upstairs Bedr oom.” Psych, Season 4: Episode 4, written by Steve Franks and Bill Callahan, USA Network, 2009.

“The Hounds of Baskerville.” Sherlock, Series Four, written by Mark Gatiss, BBC, 2012.

“The Six Thatchers.” Sherlock: Series Four, written by Mark Gatiss, BBC, 2017.

Walton, James. “Conrad, Dickens, and the Detective Novel,” NineteenthCentury Fiction, vol. 23, no. 4, 1969, pp. 446-462.

Weber, Max. “The Scholar’s Work.” Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures, edited by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, translated by Damion Searls, New York Review of Books, 2020, pp. 1-42.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2024): 15-27

To Gain the World: Elmer Gantry and the Crossroads of Christian Leadership

Julie Steinbeck

October 14, 2014, saw the resignation of Mark Driscoll, the pastor of one of the largest megachurches in the United States: Seattle-based Mars Hill Church. The reason for Driscoll’s resignation was an open secret: his bullying behavior, manipulative tactics, agg ressive demeanor, and other persistent sinful behavior led to the overnight crashing down of a ministry monolith. A years-long Guidepost Solutions investigation uncovered in May of 2022 the Southern Baptist Convention’s “taking concrete and intentional steps” to hide decades of abuse by previously revered figures (Smietana). Credible accusations against Paul Pressler, Johnny Hunt, and Paige Patterson, showed stunned congregations that the misconduct seen in Driscoll’s work is not exclusive to him (Smietana) . Intimidation and bullying have been the usual methods for dealing with “divisive voices” to Christianity’s great detriment for decades.

The conversation on what to do about this misconduct becomes more pressing as cases of abuse step into the light . While American author Sinclair Lewis would not normally spring to mind when discussing issues in church leadership, Lewis holds a mirror up to the manipulation and chicanery that he saw as common in the pastorate following the loss of his Christian faith in 1906 (Borrego 465). For Lewis, traditional Christianity had more of an emotional hold than an intellectual one, especially as he attended Yale University and did not have the tools to reconcile his intellectual pursuits with his faith. As Lewis wrote as a co llege sophomore, “If there be saints they are Voltaire as well as Christ; Shelley as well as St. Paul” (Lewis qtd. in Borrego 465). Thus, Lewis uses later novels to explore religious failings and the conclusions he arrives at when questioning the simple Christianity of his childhood.

Lewis’ s 1926 satirical novel Elmer Gantry opens with a drunk titular character, a student at Terwilliger College, whose hobbies include drinking, carousing, and getting into fights (Lewis 2). Gantry is introduced as a football star who is not particularly interested in his studies, but after a couple of encounters with a traveling athlete -turned-evangelist, he pushes aside his former prejudices and converts to Christianity at the behest of his mother. Buoyed by the crowds and the popularity, Gantry realizes just how much he enjoys being the center of attention . He moves through several preaching assignments in and out of churches, spending his time in various un-Christian activities and using his charm and

imposing personality to get away with his misdeeds. After Gantry loses a preaching assignment due to being drunk, has sexual misadventures with several women, escapes being blackmailed for his cheating, and inadvertently kills over 100 people, the book ends with Gantry beginnin g a nationwide effort to “purify” American arts and entertainment, to the adoring approval of his congregation, having not learned a single les son in abstinence or self-control (274). Though Lewis’ s novel is meant as a caricature of the pastorate for those outside Christianity, its portrayal of the consequences of allowing unqualified, unaccountable leadership stands today as a warning for those within the church. Elmer Gantry proves that congregations desiring to follow a Godly shepherd must accept only a Godly shepherd instead of leaving leaders untouchable.

Gantry’s Disqualifying Behavior

In establishing what should happen in cases like Gan try’s, it is imperative to examine the behavior he displays. The most famous passage describing the qualification for a church elder or overseer (what most would refer to as a minister or a pastor) is written in Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “Therefore a n overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (The Holy Bible I Tim. 3.2-3). Likewise, Peter writes that elders should care for the church “as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge” (I Pet. 5.2 -3). Elmer Gantry displays several of these characteristics that would disqualify most from Christian ministry while neglecting the traits he should display. He is not able to live above any appearance of si n or to remain humbly self-controlled in the work that he does. One of Gantry’s most prominent misbehaviors, especially early in his ministry career, is drunkenness (Lewis 2). He spends a good portion of his college time drinking and “ hell-raising” with his roommate, Jim Lefferts, and his alcohol consumption generally leads to an explosive temper that looks for fights: “Elmer wept a little and blubbered, ‘Lez go out and start a scrap.’” (2). Even after Gantry converts to Christianity an d attempts to discern his call to ministry, a moment that for most would be one of the more sober moments of life, Lefferts offers him some whisky, which he accepts, and it takes hold quickly:

By the middle of his second glass he was boasting of his ecclesiastical eloquence, he was permitting Jim to know that never in Terwilliger College had there appeared so promising an orator, that right now they were there praying for him, waiting for him, the president and the whole outfit! […] He was a master of the world, and only a very little bit drunk. (44)

Somehow, Gantry manages to hide his love of drink ing throughout his early ministry training, thanks to either inobser vant superiors or his ability to charm his way out of being caught. For his second pulpit assignment, Gantry is given a temporary job in a church in Monarch, Kansas. As he travels to Monarch to prepare for the Easter morning service, he yearns inwardly for a drink and tries to keep up his façade of piety, but submits again to the temptation when he meets a traveling team of salesmen (95). He meets up with them over dinner and drinks so much in their company that he is unable to preach the next day. Though Gantry “did a good deal of repenting and groaning,” he still gives in for his “first drink of the morning” and tells himself that he will “tell the committee [he] was taken sick” to cover his drinking with extra deception (98). Though he spends plenty of time preaching against being taken up by drink, Gantry is often led into it by the company he k eeps and does not offer much resistance to the temptation.

When Gantry isn’t misusing alcohol, he will readily use anger for domination and intimidation. At first, he is easy to get along with, but only if others do as he wishes. The problem with Gantry’s temper arises when “he was merely astonished when he found out you did not understand his importance and did not want to hand over anything he might desire” (7). He describes himself as “impulsive” and liable to make mistakes like anyone else, but those confessions merely serve to deflect further blame when those mistakes are brought up (83). Gantry learns quickly that even if he cannot start a physical altercation, he can use his anger to intimidate others or escape an unpleasant situation. For instance, when wanting to leave his first church in Schoenheim and rid himself of Lulu Bains, whom Gantry has seduced, he sets up a situation where he scares her off for years, shouting at and berating her in front of others, until “Lulu huddled, with shrunk shoulders, her face insane with fear” (92). Having broken Lulu’s spirit, he is then allowed to resign from Schoenheim without question, his own dignity intact. Once he gets married several years later, his wife, Cleo, is afraid of him and his aggressive advances from their wedding night onward. Rather than reassuring his nervous wife, Gantry instead browbeats and bullies her to achieve what he desires :

[Elmer] became more ardent, whispered to [Cleo] that she was beautiful, stroked her arm until she trembled. […] When he had loosened his clasp, she retreated, the back of her hand fearfully at her lips, her voice terrified, as she begged, “Oh, don’t! Not now! I’m afraid!”

“That’s damned nonsense!” he raged, stalking her as she backed away. (188)

As a result of this encounter, their marriage is forever frigid, with their eventual children growing up afraid of their father’s wrath (203) .

Gantry’s anger does not stop with his family. When Gantry learns years later that his seminary colleague Frank Shallard is ministering in the same town, Gantry in his jealousy attempts not to hurt Shallard himself, but to turn the townsfolk against him. Gantry uses his pulpit to incite a mob to go after Shallard and his congregants, calling them “those atheists out at Dorchester” and Shallard an “Infidel” (244). Gantry’s railings continue until Shallard is accosted by a n anonymous gang of selfproclaimed Christians, who beat Shallard such that he loses sight in one eye and is left disfigured and unable to work ( 250). Gantry, famous by then for his raging tirades, is implied to have spurred the mob into action, though the incident is not discussed further (250). These displays of rage, unbecoming of a pastor, serve as a mechanism for keeping colleagues and congregants unable to confront him about his behavior. Occasionally, others do attempt to hold Gantry up to the standard one would expect of a minister; however, he excels at charming, deceiving, and manipulating his way out of uncomfortable situation s. His greatest skill is turning any confrontatio n of wrongdoing back onto his accuser , using intimidation and others’ deeds to avoid scrutiny . Back at their shared assignment in Schoenheim, Frank Shallard challenges him on his misconduct with Lulu Bains. Gantry immediately returns the accusation, calling his colleague “a real rubber -necking old woman!” and a “Suspicious, dirty-minded Puritan, that’s what you are, seeing evil where there ain’t any meant!” (68). The tension between the two men escalates as their work goes on. Shallard eventually threatens Gantry, saying that he will go to the dean of the seminary since Gantry obviously isn’t fit for the pastorate (82). Gantry furiously replies with the following:

I’ve been waiting for this! I’m impulsive sure; I make bad mistakes every red-blooded man does. But what about you?

I don’t know how far you’ve gone with your hellish doubts, but I’ve been listening to the hedging way you answer questions in Sunday school, and I know you’re beginning to wabble. Pretty soon you’ll be an out -and-out liberal. God! Plotting to weaken the Christian religion, to steal away from weak groping souls their only hope of salvation! The worst murderer that ever lived isn’t a criminal like you! (83)

Despite passively acknowledging that mistakes were made, Gantry successfully minimizes his role in the situation; he then throws Shallard off his nerve, accusing and browbeating him until Shallard resigns from the Schoenheim church.

Even confrontation by victims of his misconduct does not lend any accountability for Gantry’s actions; he simply heaves accusations off with his usual rhetorical sl eight-of-hand. When Lulu Bains wants more from the relationship than Gantry wants t o give, he again turns the sin back onto her: “I don’t suppose I have done altogether right, maybe. Though I noticed you were glad enough to sneak out and meet me places!” (87).

Gantry later seduces another woman and is threatened with blackmail by her husband, but he still manages to escape any exposure of his actions thanks to his bringing up “the time [she] did time in New York for shoplifting” (272). He continues his pattern of acknowledging that perhaps his deeds are not correct, but those mistakes are certainly nothing compared to what others are doing thus, he continues to escape the consequences of his actions.

Even drunkenness, anger, and manipulation can be forgiven and trained by someone with enough humility to allow it , but Elmer Gantry is not one of those people. Instead of wrestling with the sinful aspects of his character, he puts these flaws asid e to satisfy the trait that fuels all the others: his ambition. While not necessarily a fault, ambition can allow for other toxic traits to come forward in a person’s thirst to satisfy their pride. Gantry is an attention-seeker from the beginning, and his desire for approval from others leads him to yearn for status more than the real work of ministry. Just before his conversion, Gantry is impl ored by multiple people at a YMCA rally to go forward, which he does, feeling “exalted […] to hot self-approval” even though “[t]he willing was not his but the mob’s,” and his initial embarrassment changes to “a robust self -satisfaction” (32). Gantry is asked to speak immediately after his supposed conversion a folly that sparks the fire of prideful ambition within him as he yearns for “popularity almost love, almost reverence” (33). Instead of wanting to know more about his experiences or what the church can offer, Gantry chooses to focus on his status among his peers. As he contemplates his future career, he decides on the ministry not because he has a passion for God or for helping others lead a Christian life, but because “ [w]here could Elmer find a profession with better social standing than the ministry thousands listening to him invited to banquets and everything” (41).

Gantry’s want for notoriety only grows as his career takes off. After spending some time as a salesman, he becomes an independent evange list working with Sharon Falconer. As his audience (and his salary) grow s, “he saw himself certain of future po wer and applause as a clergyman. His ambition became more important than the titillation of alcohol, and he felt very virtuous and pleased” (134) . The pulpit becomes not an avenue of delivering the Gospel to those needing the love of Christ but a power grab, with Gantry viewing a later ministry position as “all his; his own, and as such it was all beautiful” (171). Contrary to how he acts, Gantry acknowledges the need for humility. He passionately preaches over the radio that ambition can lead to sin and th at “the fellow who is eaten by ambition is putting the glories of this world before the glories of heaven!” (253). But in preaching those words, he neglects that faith is fulfilled by works that his words need to be shown through honest and transparent living (Ja. 2.22-3).

At the close of his story, Gantry plans to instate the National Association for the Purification of Art and the Press, a massi ve anti-vice organization headed, obviously, by himself . Such a position would at last fulfill his desire for power and deference, and Gantry describes himself as

“the Warwick of America, the man behind the throne, the man who would send for presidents, of whatever party, and give orders… perhaps the most powerful man since the beginning of history” ( Lewis 260). The only goal large enough to satisfy Gantry’s ambitious nature is not proclaiming good news to the poor only a nation full of rapt, adoring, obedi ent crowds will do.

Others’ Failure on Gantry’s Behalf

Good leadership requires good company to motivate, learn from, call to account, and ask for advice. Paul encourages these strong examples when he recounts that “ [b]ad company ruins good morals” (1 C or. 15.33), and that older men should teach younger men to h ave sound doctrine, to remain self-controlled, and to show integrity (Tit. 2.1-7). Paul’s warning to Timothy comes true when new converts are allowed into positions of power, becoming “puffed up with conceit” (I Tim. 3.6). Without the example of close friends or mentors, recent converts will either be too new to be in leadership to be effective or have so terrible an attitude that they drive any needed mentorship away and the result is damage to th e Church at large.

None of Gantry’s behaviors drunkenness, anger, lack of selfcontrol, the love of money an d status are acceptable for a minister of the Gospel. How, then, does one who fails so spectacularly in the basic characteristics needed for the job get installed into pulpit after pulpit, even with his faults on plain display? The difficult answer is not in Gantry’s behavior alone. He can stop himself from drinking, seducing women, and letting his anger and ambition control him. H owever, he is failed from the ground up by family, by the men he could call friends, by congregations that did not hold him accountable or value knowledge and love of the Word of God, and ultimately by his early leadership. He is placed in situations that are not healthy for a new convert or one who has not shown himself worthy of the trust needed to run a church well.

Gantry does not have a large family; the only living relative that readers are told about is his mother, w ho is the only person whom he holds actual affection for at the beginning of his story (19). She is described as “owned by the church,” a hardworking widow who desperately wants her son to become a preacher, even in his boyhood (19). She has this goal for him but does little to truly point him toward God: she is fervent in prayer but does not show her son how to be. She consults with ministers but does not ask for mentorship, only for his classmates to help her work on him (19). Gantry is raised in the ch urch, even baptized at age sixteen, but despite the churchgoing habit, he does not have “any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason” (19) , which are all vital for the work of a clergyman. What could have been taught to him as he grew, either of doctrine or Biblical events and themes, was not. Gantry has a good mother who cares for him, and he adores her, but her pressuring him

to become a minister without nurturing the basics of the Christian faith while he is young means that he does not have the foundation he needs to lead.

In the same way, only two young men that Gantry interacts with throughout his studies at Terwilliger College and Mizpah Seminary question Gantry and his motivation, but ultimately neither one cares enough about him or his future congregants to call him t o account. Frank Shallard comes close but is too overwhelmed by Gantry’s Gish gallop to succeed, fading away instead of being abl e to give Gantry the accountability he desperately needs. Eddie Fislinger makes it his mission to see Gantry converted to Christ, and while he and Gantry study at Mizpah Seminary, Fislinger realizes that Gantry’s aptitude for the pulpit is motivated by his want for money and popularity: “You’re commercial! […] Good heavens, Gantry, is that all your religion means to you?” (55). Past this sort of conversation, though, Fislinger does not discourage Gantry from continuing in his chosen career path; furthermore , Fislinger becomes too wrapped up in following Baptist doctrine over being a faithful Christian. He, too, fades away as Gantry leaves for his first and second preaching assignments.

In several denominations, congregations can pick and choose who their pastor will be and may hire or fire their leaders. Ideally, if their pastor is caught in moral failure, he can be disc harged from his ministerial duties until he goes through the steps of restoration. But in Gantry’s case, several congregations take little notice of his behavior, let alone do anything about it, refusing their responsibility to do away with bad leadership. For instance, not until Lulu Bains’s demeanor changes does Deacon Bains confront Gantry not even to fire him, but to force him to marry Lulu to maintain her respectability, despite the damage to her already being done (88). Bains may know that such behavior is not becoming of a minister of the Gospel, but he does not meet with other deacons or even suggest that Gantry should leave the congr egation. On the contrary, Deacon Bains begs Gantry for forgiveness and allows him to resign after catching Lulu in a comp romising situation of Gantry’s making (92).

In fact, only two of the organizations by which Gantry is hired take it upon themselves to fire him. The first is the church in Monarch, which refuses Gantry’s preaching when he is caught too drunk to take up th e pulpit the overall sentiment of one of the church’s deacons is summed up in his snappish “Nope, nope, nope” when Gantry asks about a semipermanent position (98). The second is an independent organization, not affiliated with a church but with the up -and-coming New Thought Movement. Though the standards of morality are looser than in an actual church, Mrs. Riddle, the leader of the Pros perity Organization, still notices when Gantry steals money from their collection bin and throws him out (150). Her emphasis is not on the morality of what Gantry has done or how it reflects on him and the organization; rather, Gantry has impeded Mrs. Riddle’s jealousy of the money they collect at their gatherings and has

triggered her suspicious streak (150). The care is less for the people they speak to than for the cash they turn over. Gantry is not encouraged to lead well in this capacity but to bring in people willing to give. In every other preaching job that Gantry has, from Schoenheim to Zenith, he either leaves of his own accord or, when he switches denominations from Baptist to Methodist so that his previous colleagues have less chance of finding o ut his misdeeds, he is promoted to larger congregations, never coming faceto-face with the sins that he commits.

It is Gantry’s leadership in college and seminary that failed him to the greatest extent. In college, Gantry makes it clear that he does not value his studies and that he struggles with heavily intellectual work, but because of his public conversion and his powerful speaking voice, he is vaulted into his first speaking assignment only minutes after he supposedly accepts Christ. President Quarl es of Terwilliger exults in Gantry’s charisma: “It was a genuine conversion! But more than that! Here’s a true discov ery my discovery! Elmer is a born preacher, once he lets himself go, and I can make him do it! O Lor d, how mysterious are thy ways! […] I Thou, Lord, hast produced a preacher. Some day [sic] he’ll be one of our leading prophets!” (40). Quarles’s ambition f eeds Gantry’s: Quarles insists his “discovery” will lead to Gantry being famous , so he sends Gantry out into a world of temptation without offering to mentor or guide the new convert. He prays that Gantry would discern his call into the ministry, but he misses that Gantry comes back to him that evening drunk and shoos him away, satisfied in his discovery and blinded to what he allows.

Even other faculty, who ought to provide further support to a burgeoning minister, do not take up the burden as they sh ould. Terwilliger Dean, who witnesses the conversation between Gantry and Quarles, only mumbles “God be praised” instead of asking any further questions (45). The Dean admits to his wife later that evening that he cannot like young Gantry but he does not bother speaking up about his doubts to anyone else, not wanting to exert the effort into what is necessary to ensure the integrity of a supposed brother in Christ (46).

In seminary, the biggest offender of failing leadership in Gantry’s life is the Dean, Jacob Trosper. While Trosper is described as someone who “looked through students and let them understand that he knew their sins and idlenesses,” he certainly does not do anything about those sins (61). Rather than calling Gantry to account for his be havior with drinking and women, Trosper instead sends him and Shallard out to Schoenheim, telling Gantry that “[Shallard] has a particularly earnes t spirit which it wouldn’t entirely hurt you to emulate, Brother Gantry” and that “you may kindle there such a fire as may some day illumine all the world… providing, Brother Gantry, you eliminate the worldly thing s I suspect you of indulging in!” (61). Tr osper is fully aware of what Gantry is liable to do, of the sins that he is bound to commit, but he still ins ists that he should go and preach rather than having Gant ry remain under supervision or at least have a solid mentor figure to whom he can report back.

Trosper only mentions that others might have attributes that Gantry should emulate, but he does not act upon that suggestion to ensure that he gets the desired result. As long as Gantry shows “appropriate” remorse, Trosper is satisfied with the perfo rmance and sends him off to a second church, despite his inkling that Gantry lacks “that humility, that deeper thirsting after righteousness […] despite your splendid pulpit voice” (93). Because Trosper does not “want Mizpah mixed up in such a scandal” h e allows for Gantry’ s graduation from seminary and his ordination (99). Trosper reminds Gantry that he could call for the cancellation of his preaching credential and that he could expose Gantry for the deeds he has committed…but he does not. Rather than for ce Gantry to face real consequences for his actions, he allows Gantry to take a hiatus from ministry, walk free, and cause trouble somewhere else. Trosper has laid aside the opportunity to show that sinful behavior without reformation is a disqualifier fro m leadership because he holds his own leadership position in greater honor.

The Church’s Response

The question then arises of what the church today must do with Gantry’s negative example. The problems of pastoral hypocrisy, lecherousness, abuses of power, prideful ambition, and love of money are increasingly obvious to a population to whom the Christia n faith b ecomes less and less winsome. Despite the Biblical directive that pastors have a good reputation with outsiders (1. Tim. 3.7), public trust in c lergymen has declined steadily for the last twenty years (Shellnut). This “Gantry effect” that Lewis describes in his novel is less a satire mocking the institution of the church and more a mirror that emphasizes mistakes that the church at large can slip into if congregations cannot address their leadership and present themselves respectably to the pub lic sphere. The church at large can take the lessons and examples that Elmer Gantry presents and offer several steps in return: the living of a transparent l ife, the avoidance of mere “Christianizing,” and the raising up of leaders who value the Word over their own ambition.

A problem with friendly outward appearances, according to Daniel O’ Connell, is that to address issues significant to the public, the ch urch can “lose touch with the peculiarities of the Christian tradition” as it tries to reach more people; likewise, that “in an effort to protect the distinctive character of the Christian faith, the person or community may not engage the public in a persuasive and effective manner” (11). In an effort to be, as the Apostle Paul says, “all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9.22), the church risks losing both itself and the respect of the public.

One key to stamping out the Gantries that poison the church and it s ability to reach others for the Kingdom is to not merely be approachable, adaptable, and likable. Instead, the goal is to live “authentically, with a genuine voice and an honest lifestyle,” where “there is a coherence

between what is said, and the practice of the person or community doing the communicating” (O’ Connell 10). To achieve that coherence, congregations unlike Gantry’s tendency to preach against something in public yet indulge in private must not only condemn vice, but honestly and transparently live out a moral life and only accept and support leadership (both lay and vocational leaders) that will follow suit for “God is spirit, and those who worship him must wo rship in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4.24). If a church leader is found in moral failin g, as in the case of Johnny Hunt, shying back from imparting appropriate discipline only encourages the wrongdoing to continue and hurts the victims of the perpetrator’s misdeeds. Christ Himself warns against the dependance on outward piety and the hiding of private sin in His comments to the Pharisees, that they deserved their condemnation for wash ing “the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and s elf-indulgence” (Matt. 23.25). Without the transparency of an honest life, the churc h risks losing any potential impact to its own hypocrisy and swallows the camel of abuse while straining out the gnat of a glass of wine with one’s dinner (Matt. 23.24).

Others debate that while the church can provide moral guidance to significant issues, it is not the responsibility of the church to do so (de Villiers 2). Certainly, withdrawing into itself would prevent selfish ambition from manifesting in the ways that L ewis portrays with Elmer Gantry’s character. The problem with this approach is that i t defies what Christ commands of His disciples at His ascension: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28.19). One mistake that congregants tend to make, and one that Gantry wants to take to the highest levels of church and government, is forgetting that liberal democracies such as the United States cannot be expected to legislate based on Christian values (de Villiers 4).

Unlike Gantry’s drive to force all American arts, press, and entertainment into a neat Christianesque morality (with him as its figurehead), the real responsibility of the church is less to Christianize the society and more to, as de Villiers puts it, “demonstrate to the world what the new life in Christ entails” (3). What that demonstration e mphasizes is putting aside individual and congregational ambition to avoid simply adding to the rolls for growing church numbers’ sake or being too involved in political grandstanding to display care and compassion for those outside the congregation to live a sermon rather than merel y preach one. Yes, it can look nice on the surface when a dynamic and charismatic pastor like Gantry preaches on sober living or the evils of the outside world . If the church does not show the benefits of Christ through their works, on the other hand, their faith is dead, and there is little to be done to further the kingdom until they set themselves aside (Ja. 2.26).

Finally, Gantry demonstrates one of the larger risks of raising up pastoral leadership, and that is the lack of firm mentoring, discipleship , and accountability that young converts wishing to preach desperately need. When President Quarles insists that Gantry “say a few words to us

you must we all need it we’re thrilled by your splendid example!” (Lewis 32) he is putting a new convert into a p osition where he is in authority over others when Gantry is certainly not ready for it. The only th ing motivating Gantry to speak or continue any ministerial training afterward is his love of popularity and social standing. Never is he truly tested about his faith only the usual fact-regurgitation questions at his ordination interview (Lewis 51). No one, even his professors in seminary, comes alongside him to ensure that he learns good Bible study habits, develops a love for the ways of God, or is living a righteous life or working to eliminate the sins in which he continues to find himself. In appointing Gantry to positions of leadership within only a few years (or minutes) of his conversion, President Quarles and Dean Trosper violate the command given in 1 Timothy, that an elder “must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with con ceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim. 3.6).

With that command in mind, one of the main responsibilities of churches, when they find someone with leadership potential, is to nurture and train them not to immediately put them in front of a class or a congregation to speak or even to pressure them to do so. Until they can be assessed and tested to see if their faith is genuine , would-be leaders need to be taken in by someone else who has proven leadership skills , can demonstrate what strong Christian leadership looks like, and is willing to ensure that a new convert is taught sound doctrine and has right motivation to lead. Kevin Hall points out that “ Personal development is an important first step because observations of and experiences with the leader will be highly influe ntial in the observer’s development” (35). Gantry is never given the chance to observe what good Christian leadership looks like, thus losing out on the ability to model himself after someone worthy of emulation. Instead, he falls into the trap described by Christ in the parable of the blind men: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Lu. 6.39-40). Gantry has become like his teachers who have failed him in that he is shown that someone’s sin doesn’t matter, even if they wish to lead, and that a good pulpit presence and the ability to bring in congregants is more important than developing the necessary spiritual state. Rather than allowing this kind of scenario, new converts, instead of being vaulted into positions that are unhealthy and unsafe for them, can be trained up until other mature Christians can be assured of the convert’s sinc erity and abilities even if it seems that the person does not necessarily need or want discipleship.

Of course, that need for evaluating would-be leaders means that congregations themselves must continually work towards understanding of the Word: too often in Elmer Gantry does someone quote Scripture, only for it to be out of context or misunderstood. Even Quarles is guilty of this, telling Gantry, “The Lord will give the wor ds if you give the good will” when Gantry resists speaking at a YMCA meeting mere days after his

conversion (36). The unnamed congregations that recommended Gantry’s professors to their respective positions are told, “We consider you scholarly, Brother, rat her than pastoral. Very scholarly,” neglecting that the two are not mutual ly exclusive and implying that it is beyond the average mind to want to understand and study Scripture (77). Gantry takes advantage of his congregation’s lack of scriptural knowledg e, often misquoting Scripture to force unpleasant situations to his ends, as in his final words to Lulu Bains before he leaves Schoenheim: “Oh abomination abomination, and she that committeth it shall be cut off!” (92).

The words of God are meant to convict, to build, to encourage, and to test not to be manipulated and twist ed to a situation where they do not fit. They are also meant for all believers, not just those in positions of authority. Had the congregants at Schoenheim and other assignments been more willing and able to know the Scripture, they would be less likely to be manipulated by words that sound Scriptural and would have known the responsibilities to evaluate the leaders that they had, to judge the fruit of those within the church, and to ult imately confront and discipline leaders that are not fit according to t he standard that the Church is given.

Conclusion

Sinclair Lewis’ s Elmer Gantry is a charismatic, charming, and dynamic leader and speaker. He knows how to draw a crowd and put together a speech that will sway the masses to his bidding. He is also drunk, manipulative, abusive, bullying, and thoroughly unfit for the job he strives to hold. As with Mark Driscoll’s ability to continue pastoring a huge congregation and making a new name f or himself without going through a proper restoration process, Gantry still gets away with his misdeeds and attracts adoring, willing congregations that will defend him and his work even if he is caught in deeds that would disqualify most others for ministry.

Because pastors are human, t he ideal leader who always upholds the ideals commanded in the New Testament does not exist. People will fail to put to death the sin within them, even if they are sincere believers. Rather than throw up our hands and declare the endeavor completely lost, it is imperative for the church its congregants and its lay leaders and elders to continuously strive for the goal that was set for it: to love mercy, live justly, and walk humbly with our God (Mic. 6.8). Doing away with the “Gantries” in the church’s midst requires difficult work: each congregant , elder, and lay leader living honest and transparent lives for Christ, valuing knowledge and study of the Word of God, guiding those who would eventually be in positions of leadership, and humbly upholding the standard of leadership that shows the value o f Christ and His church. The church must be ready and willing to remove lay leaders and elders who prove unqualified for ministry, either because of some moral failing or

because the person has not yet been assessed and trained for church work. All these tasks are the responsibility of the church at large not just vocational eldership.

Such stories as Driscoll’s, Pressler’s, and Hunt’s reflect not the good of Christ in the church but the sin that stains His bride. Lewis’ ss work warns against valuing mere charisma and large crowds, and, despite Lewis’ s distrust of religion, he echoes the words of Christ : “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and for feits his soul?” (Matt. 16.26). Instead of taking Lewis’ s story at face value, shrinking back against mockery, or lashing out at the evidence of supposed cultural persecution, the church can use this outsider’s perspective as an instruction, that it can purge the toxicity and deceit that mar it, and in so doing preserve its soul.

Works Cited

Borrego, John E. “If There Be Saints: Faith in the Novels of Sinclair Lewis.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church , vol. 47, no. 4, Dec. 1978, pp. 463-72. EBSCOhost, https://openurl.ebsco.com/c/afholi/EPDB%3Arfh%3A2%3A22925 78/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink&id=ebsco%3Arfh%3AATLA00007 68866&x-cgp-token=afholi.

de Villiers, D. Etienne. “Does the Christian Church Have Any Guidance to Offer in Solving the Global Problems We Are Faced with Today?” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies [Online], 76.2 (2020): 9 pages. 13 Sep. 2023.

The Holy Bible. English Standard Version, Crossway, 2001. Hall, Kevin. “Leadership Modeling: Christian Leadership Development through Mentoring as Informed by Social Learning Theory.” The Journal of Applied Christian Leadership , vol. 14, no. 2, 2020, pp. 28-48.

Lewis, Sinclair. Elmer Gantry. Victoria, Reading Essentials. 1926. O’Connell, Daniel. “The Church and the Public Sphere.” Doctrine and Life, vol. 57, no. 10, 2007, pp. 2-12.

Shellnut, Kate. “Above Reproach? Fewer Americans See Pasto rs as Ethical.” Christianity Today, 25 Jan. 2024, www.christianitytoday.com/news/2024/january/pastor-trustcredibility-reputation-gallup-poll-clergy-ethi.html. Accessed 2 Feb. 2024.

Smietana, Bob. “Southern Baptist Leaders Mistreated Abuse Survivors for Decades, Report Says.” Religion News Service, 22 May 2022, https://religionnews.com/2022/05/22/sbc-abuse-report-fordecades-southern-baptist-leaders-denied-abuse-misled-trusteesmistreated-survivors-guidepost-johnny-hunt/. Accessed 15 March 2024.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2024): 28-39

“If you believe with your whole heart”: The History of Acts

8:37 and Its Reception

Matthew C. Easter

In Acts 8:26-40, Philip meets an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. As Philip approaches the chariot, he sees him reading Isaiah. Philip explains the passage to the man and shares the good news about Jesus. As they approach some water, the eunuch says, “Look, water! What prevents me from being baptized?” (8:36). Then , in the next verse, the chariot stops, they go into the water, and Philip baptizes him (8:38). What happened to verse 37? Those who typically read the Bible from a modern translation may not have noticed the missing verse. Every modern English translation I checked p uts this verse in a footnote or in a bubble on the YouVersion app.1 Among modern translations, only the NKJV includes the verse in the main body of the text, which is to be expected. The NKJV is an update of the KJV, which includes the verse: “And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” (KJV).

In this essay, we are going to explore this “verse in the footnote:” Acts 8:37. Why is this verse missing in the modern translations? When did the verse first appear? How was this added verse interpreted in the history of the church? Finally, I’ll problematize the theology of this added verse.

The Textual History of Acts 8:37

We do not have the original autographs of any book of the Bible. That is, we do not have the original manuscript written by the author (or his secretary). What we have are handwritten copies of copies, none of which agree completely. Textual critics examine the manuscripts we have, weighing the variant readings, in hopes of arriving at the best representation of the Ausgangstext, “the ancient form of the text that is the ancestor of all extant copies.” 2 Acts 8:37 is missing in our earliest extant manuscripts, which suggests Luke (the likely author of Acts) did not write this verse.

1 See CSB; ESV; NASB; NET; NIV; NLT; NRSV/NRSVUE

2 Amy Anderson and Wendy Widder, Textual Criticism of the Bible, Revised Edition, Lexham Methods Series (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 7.

Greek Manuscripts

Our earliest manuscripts, none of which have Acts 8:37 , date to the 3rd century:

Acts 8:37 Omitted

Selected Manuscripts Approximate Date

�74

�45

3rd century

century ℵ (Codex Sinaiticus)

(Codex Vaticanus)

(Codex Alexandrinus)

C (Ephraemi Rescriptus)

century

century

century

century

The unanimous attestation of the earliest extant manuscripts with this story in Acts 8 is lacking verse 37. However, later manuscripts add a verse between verses 36 and 38, which usually read as some variation of, “And Philip said to him, ‘If you believe with your whole heart, you will be saved.’ And answering he said, ‘I believe in Christ the son of God’” or “And he said to him, ‘If you believe with your whole heart, it is possible. And answering he said, ‘I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God’” (8:37) .

Acts 8:37 Included

The earliest extant manuscript including Acts 8:37 dates to the 6th century, approximately 300 years after the earliest manuscript without 8:37. After this manuscript, the next earliest ones with Acts 8:37 do not show up until the 10th century.

Manuscripts in Other Languages

Greek manuscripts of Acts were translated into various languages, and some of these other early versions include a passage like Acts 8:37. The earliest non-Greek text containing Acts 8:37 is an old Latin manuscript dating to the 7th century. A Syriac translation dating to the 7 th century also includes Acts 8:37, but with an asterisk. The verse also appears in Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Slavonic t ranslations, but each of these translations dates later. In fact, earlier Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic versions lack the verse. Acts 8:37 later appears in the Clementine Vulgate, issued by Pope Clement VIII in 1592, but is lacking in the earliest versions of the Vulgate. So, even in languages outside of Greek, Acts 8:37 appears late in the game.

Church Fathers

As we have seen, the earliest extant manuscript containing Acts 8:37 does not appear until the 6 th century. However, the verse does appear in the writings of a few church fathers prior to this.

The earliest likely reference to something like Acts 8:37 appears in Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, written around 180 AD. Commenting on this story in Acts, Irenaeus’ eunuch, when requesting to be baptized says, “I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God.”3 Notably, here Irenaeus quotes only the latter half of Acts 8:37, with no reference to “believing with your whole heart.” We cannot be certain that Irenaeus was unfamiliar with this part of the tradition, but it is notable that Acts 8:37a is missing from his quotation. Similarly, in Augustine’s (354-430) retelling of the story, Philip asks the eunuch, “Does thou believe on Jesus Christ?” The eunuch replies, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” and he is baptized forthwith.4

The earliest church father who includes the condition to “believe with your whole heart” is Cyprian. Writing around 250 AD, Cyprian’s Philip says, “If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest.” 5 Pontius the Deacon, who served under Cyprian, similarly references the eunuch’s wholehearted belief. 6 Bede, writing in the early 8th century, notes how another translation includes Philip saying, “If you believe with all your heart you will be saved” and the eunuch replying, “I b elieve in Christ, the Son of God.” Bede believes these quot es are original to Acts and were

3 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.12.8, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Reprint of 1885-1887 ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), vol 1, 433.

4 Augustine, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament , Sermon 49, 11, in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of Nicene and Post -Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Reprint of 1886-1889 ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), vol 6, 419.

5 Cyprian, The Treatises of Cyprian, Treatise 12, Book 3.43 (ANF 5:545).

6 Pontius the Deacon, Life and Passion of St. Cyprian 3 (ANF 5:268).

removed through scribal error. 7 Similarly, the 16th century Reformed theologian Theodore Beza notes the missing verse in some manuscripts but attributes this to its having “been expunged.” He sees in Acts 8:37 “a clear summary of the formula of confession which was required from baptized adults, truly used in apostolic times.” 8

Conclusion

Even though Acts 8:37 or portions thereof appear in the writings of some early church Fathers, the overwhelming manuscript evidence leads nearly every scholar to agree that Acts 8:37 is not original to Acts. On top of the manuscript evidence, it is hard to imagine why a scribe would choose to omit Acts 8:37, if such a passage were in his Vorlage. Nevertheless, the verse has worked its way into the tradition . Erasmus of Rotterdam produced his Greek New Testament in 1516, using several late Greek manuscripts. These manuscripts included Acts 8:37 in the margins. Erasmus’ Greek New Testament became the basis for the Textus Receptus (“the text received by all” ). The Textus Receptus became the standard Greek text for several centuries. William Tyndale translated the first Greek-to-English Bible translation from the Textus Receptus in 1526. 9 Tyndale’s translation became the basis for the King James Version in 1611. 10 Since these English translations are translated from the Textus Receptus, which is based on Erasmus’ Greek New Testament complied from late manuscripts including Acts 8:37 in the margins, Acts 8:37 found a permanent home in the most widely used English translation of the Bible (even to this day). 11 Because of the inclusion of Acts 8:37 in Erasmus’ work, the Textus Receptus, and later in the KJV, many interpreters had no reason to question its authenticity. This brings us to the main part of our investigation: how have interpreters used this verse and what – if any – theological concerns might this added verse pose for Bible readers today ? We turn to these questions next.

7 Bede, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, 8.36B-38, in Francis Martin and Evan Smith, eds., Acts, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament V (Downers Grove: IVP, 2006), 102.

8 Theodore Beza, Annotations on Acts 8:37 in Esther Chung-Kim and Todd R. Hains, eds., Acts, Reformation Commentary on Scripture, New Testament IV (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2014), 117.

9 Acts 8:37 also appears in the Coverdale Bible (1535) and the Great Bible (1539).

10 Anderson and Widder, Textual Criticism of the Bible , 118–19.

11 According to the American Bible Society, “The KJV is still the most widely owned and used English translation in the United States” (“A Brief Description of Popular Bible Translations,” American Bible Society Resources, accessed February 20, 2024, https://bibleresources.americanbible.org/resource/a-brief-description-of-popularbible-translations.)

How Have Interpreters Used Acts 8:37?

The earliest uses of something approximating Acts 8:37 are likely lost to history. Something like Acts 8:37 could have been an early profession of faith before baptism. Bruce Metzger sees the formula, “I believe Jesus Christ to be the son of God” in Acts 8:37 as a confession that “was doubtless used by the early church in baptismal ceremonies.” 12 This fits the likely baptismal practice in the early church. The baptismal practice attested in the Didache (probably dating to the late first or early second century) calls for the catechumen to be baptized in the Triune name, preferably in cold running water ( Did. 7.1-2), and for “the one who is to be baptized to fast for one or two days beforehand” (Did. 7.4).13 Given the requirement to fast, the baptismal candidate is presuma bly old enough to handle such a discipl ine. Accordingly, the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches writes in its “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” document from 1982, “While the possibility that infant baptism was also practised in the apostolic age cannot be excluded, baptism upon personal profession of faith is the most clearly attested pattern in the New Testament documents.” 14 This personal profession of faith likely looked something like the eunuch’s confession in Acts 8:37 : “I believe Jesus Christ to be the son of God.” Without Acts 8:37, the eunuch would have been baptized without expressing such a clear profession of faith . For this reason, a scribe likely added something like Acts 8:37 in the margin of his copy of Acts, with this marginal note working itself into the textual tradition by at least the 6 th century. 15 Perhaps such a marginal note explains how Irenaeus and Cyprian include something like Acts 8:37 in their retelling of the encounter with Philip and the eunuch. Later interpreters understand Acts 8:37 in this baptismal context , with the verse becoming an oft -used reference when debating infant vs. believer’s baptism. Several 16th-century Anabaptist theologians reference Acts 8:37 in their defense of believers’ baptism, such as Balthasar Hubmaier, 16 Menno Simons, 17 Dirk Philips, 18 and several stories in the

12 Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second ed. (New York: American Bible Societies, 1994), 315.

13 Translation from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 355.

14 “Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry; Faith and Order Paper No. 111” (World Council of Churches, 1982), IV.A.11.

15 Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 315.

16 Hubmaier, On Infant Baptism Against Oecolampad in H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism, Classics of the Radical Reformation (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1989), 279.

17 Menno Simon, The Complete Works of Menno Simon, vol. 1 (Aylmer, ON: Pathway, 1983), 29, 46. Menno Simon, The Complete Works of Menno Simon, vol. 2 (Aylmer, ON: Pathway, 1983), 64, 258.

18 Dietrich Philip, Enchiridion or Hand Book of the Christian Doctrine and Religion, Compiled (by the Grace of God) from the Holy Scriptures for the Benefit of All

Martyrs Mirror. 19 Hubmaier is convinced “if we had no other Scriptures than these [in Acts 8], they would be enough to prove that baptism should be given to believers and not to young children – until they also have been instructed in the Word of God and faith, confessing and expres sing the same with the mouth.” 20 Much later, the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon used the verse when preaching on “Who Should Be Baptized?” in 1859.21

The Magisterial Reformers, on the other hand, insist Acts 8:37 does not undermine infant baptism. The Lutheran theologian Johannes Brenz acknowledges that the eunuch is not baptized until he shows he i s a believer, but he sees in this an example rather than a rule we must follow. Brenz considers those using Acts 8:37 to question infant baptism to be “irrational” and “ridiculous” for thinking “from this example their abomination and error can be pressed out.”22 Similarly, John Calvin insists the verse does not call infant baptism into question , for only “fanatics stupidly and wrongly attack infant baptism on this pretext.”23 Acts 8:37 shows, for Calvin, that “those who have previously been outsiders, should not be received into the Church before they have testified that they believe in Christ,”24 but this requirement for belief before baptism applies only because the eunuch is such an outsider . If the eunuch had been born to believing adults, he would already have been ingrafted into the family of the Church, and so would not need to show faith prior to baptism. The eunuch in Acts 8, though, is an ou tsider, and for this reason alone he must express faith prior to baptism. Contrary to “fanatics” like the Anabap tists and (later) Spurgeon, Calvin insists Acts 8:37 does not teach faith as a precondition to baptism.

Neither side in this debate had access to the earlier manuscripts showing how Acts 8:37 is likely not original to Acts, so this verse became an important supporting text (for the Anabaptists and Spurgeon) or challenging text (for Brenz and Calvin).

Lovers of the Truth, trans. A. B. Kolb (Elkhart, IN: Mennonite Publishing, 1910), 21, 59.

19 Thieleman J. van Braght, The Bloody Theater or Martyrs M irror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Savior, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660 (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2006), 64, 100, 235, 272, 948.

20 Hubmaier, Old and New Teachers on Believer’s Baptism in Pipkin and Yoder, Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism, 262.

21 Unlike the Anabaptists, Spurgeon admits that he does not commonly preach on baptism, as he reckons “many of [his] hearers learn the Scriptural teaching concerning it without much help from [him].” Spurgeon, “Who Should Be Baptized?” (No. 2737) in C. H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons Preached by C. H. Spurgeon. Revised and Published During the Year 1901, vol. XLVII (Pasadena, TX: Pilgrim, 1977), 349.

22 Johannes Brenz, The Acts of the Apostles 8:37 in Chung-Kim and Hains, Acts, 116.

23 John Calvin, The Acts of the Apostles 1-13, trans. John W. Fraser and W. J. G. McDonald, Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 253.

24 Calvin, 253.

Theological Concerns with this “Verse in the Footnote”

Acts 8:37 raises a potential theological issue. The eunuch asks, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” in Acts 8:36, to which Philip replies in 8:37, “If you believe with your whole heart, you will be saved.” But is this criterion for salvation – that is, believing with your whole heart – consistent with the rest of Scripture? I don’t think it is.

The phrase “believe with your whole heart ” does not appear elsewhere in Scripture when describing how to get sa ved. “If you believe with your whole heart” (ἐαν πιστεύεις ἐξ ὅλης τῆς καρδίας σου; ean pisteueis ex holēs tēs kardias ) appears only here in both the NT and the LXX. Outside of Acts 8:37, t he word ὅλoς (holos; “whole”) appears with καρδία (kardia; “heart”) 44 times in the LXX and four times in the NT (all of which are quotes from Deuteronomy). None of these 48 times, however, pair “whole” and “heart” with πιστεύω (pisteuō; “I believe”). Most of the time, a person does not “believe with your whole heart” (as in Acts 8:37), but “loves” the Lord, 25 “serves” the Lord,26 “obeys” the Lord or the law,27 “(re)turns to” or “follows” the Lord, 28 “seeks” the Lord,29 “acknowledges” the Lord,30 or shows God piety31 with the whole heart.32

The closest parallel to “believing with your whole heart” is Prov 3:5 : “Trust in God with your whole heart.” But this verse is not an exact match to Acts 8:37. The word “trust” here in Prov 3:5 in the LXX is not πιστεύω (pisteuō) as in Acts 8:37, but πείθω (peithō). In the NT, πείθω (peithō) is used of a person’s trust in God only five times, none of which are in LukeActs.33 Similarly, the preposition used in Prov 3:5 (ἐν; en) is different from that in Acts 8:37 ( ἐξ; ex). Deut 13:3 and 30:6, which urge Israel to “love the Lord your God with all your heart ,” use ἐξ (ex). The Synoptic Gospels quote something close to Deut 13:3 and 30:6 (and 6:5, but the Shema in the LXX does not include “heart”). One or a combination of these passages – not Prov 3:5 – is likely the source for this preposition in Acts 8:37 . Most significantly, Prov 3:5 is not giving instruction for attaining salvation , as in Acts 8:37, but for guidance in wisdom (as is made clear in Prov 3:6).

25 Deut 13:3; 30:6; Matt 22:37; Mark 12:30, 33; Luke 10:27

26 Deut 10:12; 11:13; 1 Sam 12:20, 24

27 Deut 26:16; 30:2; 2 Kings 10:31; 2 Chr 34:31; Ps 118:34, 69

28 Deut 30:10; 1 Sam 7:3; 1 Kings 2:4; 8:32, 48; 2 Kings 23:25; 2 Chr 6:14, 38; 35:19; Tob 13:6; Joel 2:12; Jer 3:10; 24:7; Dan 3:41; Ode 9:41

29 2 Chr 15:12; 22:9; Ps 118 [119 MT]:2, 10, 58, 145; Wis 8:21; Jer 36:13

30 Ps 9:2 [9:1 MT]; 85:12 [86:12 MT]; 110:1 [111:1 MT]; 137:1 [138:1 MT]; Sir 7:29

31 4 Macc 7:18; 13:13

32 Zeph 3:14 extols Jerusalem to “be glad and be delighted with your whole heart,” which does not fit any of the listed categories.

33 Matt 27:43; 2 Cor 1:9; Phil 2:24; 2 Thess 3:4; and Heb 2:13 (qu oting Isa 8:17). Luke uses πείθω (peithō) 20 times in Luke-Acts, but never in the context of trusting God. He usually uses the word to mean “convince” or “persuade” (Lk 16:31; 20:6; Acts 5:36, 37, 39; 12:20; 13:43; 14:19; 17:4; 18:4; 19:8, 26; 21:14; 23:21 ; 26:26, 28; 27:11; 28:23). Only in Luke 11:22 and 18:9 does he use πείθω (peithō) as “trust,” where the subjects trust in themselves or in their armor.

Proverbs is not teaching soteriology like Philip is clearly doing in Acts 8:37. In sum, “believe with your whole heart” is not a n idiom common to Scripture, especially with reference to salvation.

To be fair, Christians often use idioms foreign to Scripture to describe conversion. For example, how many have “accepted Jesus into their heart,” “decided to follow Jesus,” “walked the aisle,” or “prayed the sinner’s prayer”? Or perhaps, like Wesley, their “heart was strangely warmed,” or they hit Billy Sunday’s “sawdust trail”? These expressions may have some roots in Scripture, sure, but none match the Scriptural idiom exactly. Perhaps “believe with your whole heart” fits in this category.

The requirement to “believe with your whole heart” to be saved still presents a further theological difficulty: namely, requiring a person to “believe with your whole heart” to be saved creates an entrance barrier that no one can cross. No one can make themself believe anything they find unbelievable, much less believe an unbelievable thing with their whole heart. For example, if I insisted that I could beat John Cena in arm wrestling, few would believe me (and those who do shouldn’t have!). No fair-minded person would believe I could defeat John Cena in an armwrestling contest. But if I raise the stakes and say, “Your salvation is dependent on this: you must believe I can out arm wrestle John Cena or you’re going to hell for eternity .” Many may claim to believe I can accomplish such a feat of strength. Nearly all of them would be lying, and those who aren’t lying likel y would not believe this “with their whole heart.” A person cannot choose to believe wholeheartedly. A person can choose to fake believe, but one cannot choose to “believe with your whole heart,” especially if the thing to believe is something they find unbelievable.

To be sure, other passages of Scripture – although not many – do describe believing with the heart. For example, Paul tells the Romans: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe (πιστεύσης; pisteusēs) in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Rom 10:9). No question, a person wishing to be saved needs to believe. (Although I have argued that a better translation is “trust” rather than “belief.”) 34 John 3:16, Acts 16:31, Eph 2:8-9, and others likewise connect salvation to trust/belief, but without the “heart” metaphor. In none of these cases, including Romans 10:9, must a person “believ e with your whole heart” to be saved.

Other Scriptures prescribe believing with the whole heart using different language, but not for salvation. For example, Jesus tells his disciples that a person who “does not doubt in their heart, but believes what they say will come to pass” can throw a mountain into the sea (Mark 11:23) , the author of Hebrews exhorts his hearers to “approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Heb 10:22) , and James instructs his hearers to “ask in faith, never doubting” (Jam 1:6). None of these passages

34 Matthew C. Easter, Faith and the Faithfulness of Jesus in Hebrews , SNTSMS 160 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 218–21.

are teaching how to get saved ; instead, they are showing the power of faithful prayer (Mark 11:22-24); the need for ongoing faithfulness (Heb 10:19-25); and the way in which God grants wisdom (Jam 1:5 -8). Wholehearted belief is not the criterion for entrance, but the goal for a person already in.

Requiring a person to “believe with your whole heart” to get saved is asking that person to accomplish an impossible feat while simultaneous setting them up for a lifetime of struggling with assurance of their salvation. After all, how does a person gauge when they have “believed with their whole heart?” Could I be believing with only 85% of my heart? 60%? A cold 32%? Our hearts do not exactly have a “belief fuel gauge” to measure these things. Enlisting evidence for the object of belief will not rescue us. Back to my arm-wrestling match with John Cena. The only way a fair-minded person could truly believe I can beat John Cena would be to organize a charity telethon, convince Mr. Cena to arm wrestle me on live television, and then watch me beat him. And eve n then, one would have reason to believe the match was fixed and John Cena let me win because I bribed him or “‘cause he’s just that kinda guy.” Doubt would remain. To change the illustration: I believe in the existen ce of Mars. I’ve never been to Mars. I’ve never even seen Mars through a telescope. But I’ve seen enough photos from NASA and watched enough Futurama episodes to believe Mars exists. Do I believe in the existence of Mars “with my whole heart”? I guess so. But how can I be sure? Do I need to ren t a telescope from the library and take a look? Do I need to interview an astronaut or two? Do I need to travel to Mars myself? Would I believe more if I did these things? If so, does this mean I do not believe in the existence of Mars “with my whole heart” now? If there is room to grow, I presumably have not reached my whole-hearted belief potential yet. My answer to questions like these, according to Acts 8:37, has eternal ramifications. We can evoke as much evidence for the existence of God, the resurrection, the reliability of Scripture, and the rest, but if these are the reasons for our belief in God, then God is no longer the one in whom we believe. Our belief is not in God, but in the arguments that we find convincing. Faith is not placed in the initi al object under consideration, but in the datapoints supporting the believability of that object. That is, I don’t believe more in Mars, but in my eyes that saw Mars or the astronaut who told me about the planet. The strength of our belief in the original object under consideration is contingent upon the believability of the evidence in favor of this object, evidence which itself must be believed to be considered credible evidence. It’s turtles all the way down.

The issue at hand is a question facing many Christians: “have I believed enough?” If, as Philip seems to tell eunuch in Acts 8:37, salvation comes “if you believe with your whole heart,” can a person ever be sure they have believed enough to be saved? Pasto rs have noticed this problem,

prompting such books as J.D. Greear’s Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You are Saved . 35

Addressing this very question arising from Acts 8:37, John Calvin suggests faith with the whole heart is not about the strength of belief, but about a faith that “has living roots in the heart, and yet desires to increase every day.”36 He expands further on this question in his Institutes, where he explains that “believing with the whole heart” is “not to believe Christ perfectly, but only to embrace him sincere ly with heart and soul; not to be filled with him, but with ardent affection to hunger and thirst, and sigh after him.” 37 But this is not what Philip says in Acts 8:37. He does not tell the eunuch “to hunger and thirst, and sigh after” God. He tells him to “believe with his whole heart.” Calvin, it seems, is fixing the theological issue in Acts 8:37.

Menno does something similar. Menno understands the words to “mean to believe without deceit and hypocrisy.” 38 But by making “believing with your whole heart” about believing “without deceit and hypocrisy” both activities Menno makes belief an action rather than a state of mind. A person can only “believe without deceit and hypocrisy” if they, as Menno later says, show “in their work and service” they are not hypocrites. 39 But how much “work and service” is necessary to demonstrate wholehearted belief?

Spurgeon, likewise, subtly reworks Acts 8:37. Commenting on this verse in Acts, Spurgeon says, “Faith in Christ is never true unless it is the faith of the heart, unless the heart as well as the head gives assent to it, unless the truth is not only believed, but is also loved.” 40 The shift is subtle: “unless the truth is not only believed, but is also loved.” For Spurgeon, then, “believing with your heart” turns ou t to be a metonym for “love.” Perhaps the scribe who wrote Acts 8:37 should have had Philip instruct the eunuch to “love the Lord with your whole heart” instead. Neither Menno, Calvin, nor Spurgeon had access to the earliest manuscripts that lack Acts 8:37, so they understood the verse to be part of God’s inspired Scripture. In each case, they seem to recognize the same theological issue we are identifying on here: must a person “believe with your whole heart” to be saved? Submitting Acts 8:37 to the rest of Scripture, I tentatively conclude the answer to this question is: while belief

35 J.D. Greear, Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved (Nashville: B&H, 2013).

36 Calvin, The Acts of the Apostles 1-13, 253.

37 Calvin’s Institutes 4.14.8 in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. II (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), 496.

38 Simon, The Complete Works of Menno Simon, 1983, 2:64.

39 Menno instructs those performing baptisms to “first examine well the faith and foundation of those who wish to be baptized, before they baptize them, that they, in their work and service, may not prove hypocrites” (Simon, The Complete Works of Menno Simon, 1983, 2:64).

40 Spurgeon, “Who Should Be Baptized?” (No. 2737) in Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Sermons, XLVII:357.

(or, better, “trust”) is necessary for salvation, and a Christian should seek to grow in their trust toward wholeheartedness, wholehearted belief is not a criterion for initial conversion.

Conclusion

Despite Acts 8:37 likely not being original to Acts and perhaps introducing some potentially unhelpful theology, it remains an important text for understanding the theology of the church, particularly with respect to baptism. John Polhill’s assessment of Acts 8:37 is right: “This old confession is of real significance to the histo ry of early Christian confessions and would be appropriate to the baptismal ceremony today. To that extent we can be grateful to the pious scribe who ascribed to the eunuch the baptismal confession of his own day.” 41

Bibliography

American Bible Society Resources. “A Brief Description of Popular Bible Translations.” Accessed February 20, 2024. https://bibleresources.americanbible.org/resource/a-briefdescription-of-popular-bible-translations.

Anderson, Amy, and Wendy Widder. Textual Criticism of the Bible. Revised Edition. Lexham Methods Series. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018.

“Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry; Faith and Order Paper No. 111.” World Council of Churches, 1982.

Braght, Thieleman J. van. The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only Up on Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Savior, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2006.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge. Vol. II. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962.

. The Acts of the Apostles 1-13. Translated by John W. Fraser and W. J. G. McDonald. Calvin’s Commentaries. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965.

Chung-Kim, Esther, and Todd R. Hains, eds. Acts. Reformation Commentary on Scripture, New Testament IV. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2014.

Easter, Matthew C. Faith and the Faithfulness of Jesus in Hebrews. SNTSMS 160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Greear, J.D. Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved. Nashville: B&H, 2013.

41 John B. Polhill, Acts, NAC 26 (Nashville: Broadman, 2001), 226.

Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.

Martin, Francis, and Evan Smith, eds. Acts. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament V. Downers Grove: IVP, 2006.

Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament . Second ed. New York: American Bible Societies, 1994.

Philip, Dietrich. Enchiridion or Hand Book of th e Christian Doctrine and Religion, Compiled (by the Grace of God) from the Holy Scriptures for the Benefit of All Lovers of the Truth . Translated by A. B. Kolb. Elkhart, IN: Mennonite Publishing, 1910.

Pipkin, H. Wayne, and John H. Yoder, eds. Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism. Classics of the Radical Reformation. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1989.

Polhill, John B. Acts. NAC 26. Nashville: Broadman, 2001.

Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson, eds. The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Reprint of 1885-1887 ed. 10 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994.

Schaff, Philip, ed. A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Reprint of 1886-1889 ed. 38 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996.

Simon, Menno. The Complete Works of Menno Simon . Vol. 1. Aylmer, ON: Pathway, 1983.

. The Complete Works of Menno Simon. Vol. 2. Aylmer, ON: Pathway, 1983.

Spurgeon, C. H. The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons Preached by C. H. Spurgeon. Revised and Published During the Year 1901. Vol. XLVII. Pasadena, TX: Pilgrim, 1977.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2024): 40-47

The Limits of Pragmatism in Frank Herbert’s Dune

Matthew Bardowell

Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune envisions a future conspicuously devoid of technology. This is a deliberate choice. Within the history of Dune, thinking machines did once exist, but the threat they posed to humanity led humans not only to do away with them but to place a religious prohibition against creating them. The danger these machines posed was not of life and limb but r ather a danger that threatened our essential human nature. They interfered with our human “sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments” (Herbert, God Emperor of Dune 263). Dune’s science fiction, therefore, is not bogged down by grappling with a dystopian AI future. Rather, the conflict of the story centers on human behavior and interpersonal as well as political relationships. The pragmatic use of informat ion to control others in the novel serves as a grim warning about wha t we become when we forsake our human nature and become machine-like in our pursuit of efficiency.

Dune is complicated work. It is an incredible achievement in science-fiction literature. Its dessert planet Arrakis and its fascinating ecological world-building are alluring and have had tremendous influence on science fiction ever since. Dune is also a cynical tale of religious and political manipulation in which the highest good is oft en unclear. Take Herbert’s account of the religious climate that sets the stage for the events that unfold in the novel. The catalyst for a major shift in religious attitudes came with space travel. Herbert envisions a future in which the ability to move through space causes a crisis of faith that would require humans to rethink the value of religion. Why should space travel induce such a crisis? According to Herbert, it seems that the expansion of the known world from simply “Earth” to the far most vast “Un iverse” would threaten to make the world’s religions irrelevant or at least, like software, in need of an update. In the mythology of Dune, what should guide such an update? How would a contemporary group even attempt to update a centuries -old religion? Well, in this case, you form a committee. Leaders from all major religions with more than 1 million followers are invited to join an ecumenical commission to discuss the needed revisions t o their respective faiths. It is notable that the ecumenical commissio n adopts a rather pragmatic stance toward its decision-making process. This pragmatic stance stands in stark contrast to what Herbert seems to view as the fanatical alternative. We can see this from the very first decision the ecumenical commission makes, which, in Herbert’s words, was to

determine what common ground each f aith shared. That common ground was represented by two claims. First, that “all religions had at least one common commandment: ‘Thou shalt not disfigure the soul’” ( Dune 502). What would count as disfiguring the soul, or, for that matter, what the soul is is a question Herbert does not answer. Perhaps because he thinks it is too obvious for comment. Whatever the reason, these matters fall outside the commission’s pragmatic ends. The othe r thing these faiths also have in common is the “belief that there exis ts a Divine Essence in the universe” (502). Here again, Herbert tips his hand in favor of pragmatism and, I think, humanism. To say that Zeus, Vishnu, Odin, Osiris, the Collective Soul, the God of the Israelites all fall under the category is Divine Essenc e is certainly true but too vague to have any meaning. I’ve heard of splitting hairs, but this seems like the opposite of that like calling the needle in the proverbial haystack just another piece of straw. It would be nearer the mark to say that all of these “Essences” are like the stick -figure drawings children make of their parents, but in Herbert’s universe, there are no parents no model to which each drawing refers there are only the stickfigures. There are substantial, qualitative differences between those “essences,” but this is how far out Herbert needs to zoom to create a plausible sense of agreement. When the highest good is pragmatism, these details aren’t really important. Next, we learn that the ecumenical council aims to “remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions. That weapon the claim to possession of the one and only revelation” (502). Here again, Herbert’s universe can accommodate only plurality but no truth, and this implicit view colors the way the powerful view their approach to governance and religious manipulation. To our modern ears, it may sound rather progressive to acknowledge that exclusivity in religion can lead to a number of ills. We know that it can and does. But to conclude, on those grounds, that all things are equally true is absurd. In any case, the committee becomes the Commission of Ecumenical Translators who draft a new holy book, the tenets of which every major religion can get on board with. The result is a book called the Orange Catholic Bible. Those in power realize that pragmatism will not satisfy all aspects of human nature, and there is one impulse that frightens them perhaps most of all: the messiah impulse. People will desire a grander narrative than the one sheer pragmatism can offer. They wil l want a Messiah, a hero in whose name they can wage holy war. In the novel, that messiah figure is Paul Atreides. If we track the rise of Paul from his beginnings as the son of a Duke to his eventual position as the Chosen One of the Fremen, the indigenous people of the desert planet Arrakis, we see multiple influences at work. N. Trevor Brierly has remarked that scholars tend to focus on Paul’s consumption of Spice Melange and its effect s on his super-human abilities as well as its role in his rise to pow er (127-28). Conversely, Brierly notes that scholars appear less interested in the role of the various religious influences to which Paul has been exposed from a young age. Brierly asks an interesting question, one in which I am also interested.

According to Brierly, it is only natural that violent and primitive religions such as that of the Fremen people would turn Paul towards a path of violence himself. It is perhaps less expected that t he influence of the Orange Catholic Bible would contribute to Paul’s tyrannical leanings as his character develops. Brierly observes that exposure to the Orange Catholic Bible “at a critical time” leads Paul into a sense of mystery and “terrible purpose” (137-8). In short, it gives Paul a narrative framework within which to place his burgeoning sense of himself as set apart from other normal humans. His religious upbringing, then, is the context in which Paul places his prescience. It is an ingredient other s who share the gift of prescience do not have. This sense of myster y and purpose gives Paul an unparalleled sense of self -assurance. There is no doubt in his own abilities. He can see farther than anyone and knows more possible futures than anyone. It is what leads him to go from simply succeeding his father as Duke to the fabled Kwisatz Haderach, a mythical messiah figure. Brierly makes some observations about the Orange Catholic Bible which I find puzzling. He analyzes the title in such a way as to sug gest that the book is a blend between Protestantism and Catholicism. Orange, Brierly suggests, is a color associated with Presbyterianism whereas “Catholic” is a term associated with the Catholic church. This seems to be a tautology a truth without content. I suspect the term Catholic is meant to be ecumenical as in the sense not of the “Catholic Church” but of the church “universal.” This ecumenicism aligns with the explicit mentions of the ecumenical leanings of the religious leaders who drafted the Orange Catholic Bible in the first place, and it aligns with the committe e’s pragmatic approach to its work. As Herbert tells us in the appendices of Dune, these religions came together over the tenets they could claim to have in common, which takes a lowest -common-denominator approach to religious faith. If we are feeling more charitably, we may prefer to call the work of the Commission of Ecumenical Translators an investigation into core doctrine, but even this phrase assumes a climate in which religious truths are taken seriously as possibly exclusive of other beliefs. But th e Commission of Ecumenical Translators seems to strip down their respective religious beliefs to two simple tenets: 1) that we must not disfigure the soul and 2) that there is some divine e ssence in the universe. The method for ascertaining what these prin ciples ought to be begins with a pragmatic interest in accord. Such pragmatism arises out of a humanist attitude that is so prevalent in Dune humanist because the real goods of the novel center on political stability, human survival , and advancement, and making the new frontier of space travel habitable for humanity. These are important questions for politicians and ecologists, or, in Herbert’s phrasing, a planetologist. But a philosopher or perhaps a theologian would have other questions that supersede these.

The last thing I want to do is give the impression that I intend to scoff at questions of material good for humanity. These are obviously important. I do not wish to ridicule the inte rests of politicians, who, ideally concern themselves with how the members of a pluralistic society can live

well together. Nor do I wish to dismiss the concerns of ecologists or planetologists who aim to make the world or other worlds safe places for humanity to live. These are worthy concerns that touch all of us, and we ought not to spiritualize the problems they aim to address. What I mean to suggest is that these questions would be best answered within a framework of ultimate good. In other words, we o ught not only to think of progress, which describes little more than steady movement forward, but we should give considerable thought to the destination. Where will we be after we walk the path of progress, and is that a place we want to end up?

With Dune, perhaps the best way into these questions is to consider the vision of human thriving it presents to the reader. To this end, it is worth observing the many places in the novel that betray the pragmatic values of the human society in Dune. The value runs deep and informs many characters’ approaches to their goals. Bec ause this approach is not embodied by a single character, I can only surmise that it is a cultural condition that has so permeated the inhabitants of this universe that it has become invisible. We tend to see this approach to world -building whenever characters aim to create on a grand scale and when they believe they are working for a common good. In some of these instances, Herbert seems to commend this practice. He does this with the invent ion of the Orange Catholic Bible, for instance. He also does it wi th the plan to terraform Arrakis so that it will become a lush, green planet instead of a barren, desert planet. Liet Kynes, the planetologist that the empire has placed on Arrakis, reveals the method he plans to use to achieve this grand design. He has learned a lesson about terraforming from his father: “To the working planetologist, his most important tool is human beings” (Herbert 273). The appeal his father makes is to “cultivate ecologic al literacy among the people” (273). On its face, this seems beni gn enough. We may think that this isn’t cynical pragmatism so much as education. No one is born knowing how best to cultivate their environment, and the Arrikean planetologists will teach the native Fremen how to live sustainably in a harsh natural habitat . But there are some signs even here that suggest pragmatism. For one thing, referring to human beings as “tools” hints at the goal of instrumentalization. He goes on to say , “We must do a thing never before attempted for an entire planet . . . . We must use man as a constructive ecological force inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape” (274). For the planetologist, humanity is merely another unit of “adapted terraform life.” A person may be inserted into an ecosystem just as a plant may be and used for practical end.

Consider the methods these planetologists are willing to use to persuade the native Fremen to cooperate with their terraforming plans. Liet Kynes’s father admits that the “masses” will not really understand how they intend to achieve their goal of making Arrakis a more habitable planet. But this is irrelevant. “Let them think anything they wish,” he argues, “as long as they believe in us” (275). Here we see that those in

powerful positions are willing to use belief as a pragmatic tool to induce compliance. Subordinating something as fundamental as religious faith to pragmatic goals is the same sort of thing the Commission of Ecumenical Translators does in writing the Orange Catholic Bible. Kynes’s father goes on to say, “Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same . . . . an act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties” (275-76). The aim of linking matter s of faith matters of politics is, then, is, at its root, cynical because it fails to view religious belief as a disinterested end and instead instrumentalizes it to achieve some mater ial end the vision of those in power however limited or short-sighted. This fact is something that Paul remarks on in Princess Irulan’s memoirs of his life. He remarks, “You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. The power struggle permeates the training, education, and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintain ing their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthod ox ethic” (401). In this passage, Paul recognizes the inevitable result of linking politics and religion. He doesn’t seem to think avoiding such a link of possible, but perhaps this observation speaks to the way religion is treated in Dune. So often, opportunism wins out.

That religion in Dune is little more than a pragmatic tool to induce compliance in the masses is evident on several levels. So far, we have seen it in the manufacturing of a new holy book and the large-scale plans to terraform Arrakis. We can also observe this religious pragmatism in forces the empire has sent into the universe to cultivate a false religious sensibility among the people. One such force is the Bene Gess erits, which are a secret matriarchal group devoted to promoting progres s across the universe. The Bene Gesserits are often considered witches because of their mysterious practices. They train themselves to be preternaturally observant of other people so t hat they can use the information they note to control others. The Empire tasks the Bene Gesserits with instilling pseudoreligious myths among the people. Whether they believe these myths or simply use them yet again to induce compliance is some times unclear. In this way, the Bene Gesserits are, as Kevin Williams terms them, “transcendental pragmatists” whose aim to is “educate or indoctrinate others into their way of thinking” (244). The Bene Gesserits visit remote planets and use their seemingl y superhuman abilities to inspire fear and awe in the inhabitants. This, in turn, p rimes the native population to accept whatever pseudo-religious myth the Bene Gesserits deem useful for the population to believe. Here the words of the planetologist echo it doesn’t matter what they believe as long as they believe.

Tomi Kikkonen et al. have argued that the universe of Dune has done away with thinking machines only to replace them with machine -like humans (87). Within the Bene Gesserit training, experiences ar e data points. The trainee must learn to suppress human emotional responses that rise and interfere with data processing. If the trainee can learn to

process data correctly and efficiently, they can wield untold power over the humans who have not formed their minds in the likeness of thinking machines. We can observe this when Jessica, Paul Atreides’s Bene Gesserit-trained mother, first meets the leader of a group of Fremen, a man named Stilgar. Because of her training, Jessica recognizes the Fremen speech immediately even though it is incomprehensible to Paul. As Stilgar continues to speak, she learns to get a fix on his personality with the hope that she might be able to use her own speech to control him. She attempts this with her first words to this man: “Jessica put all the royal arrogance at her command into her manner and voice. Reply was urgent, but she had not heard enough of this man to be certain she had a register on his culture and weaknesses” ( Herbert, Dune 278). Jessica’s mind is mechanized. She awaits data, and, once she has enough, she has him pegged. She would know his l ife story. She would accurately understand his weaknesses and be able to exploit them. There is no guesswork in this assessment. There is only high-level processing and analysis. Her abilities are super-human, and her aims are dehumanizing. She wants contr ol and mastery over this man, not discussion or understanding. As she continues to speak with Stilgar, she eventually gains enough data to have mastery. Jessica thinks, “I have his voice and pattern registered now . . . . I could control him with a word ” (280).

There are many places in Dune where those with this sort of training achieve a similar kind of control over others. When this happens, those whose minds are like machin es turn the minds of others into machines that must perform as programmed. Those who are programmed in this way not only lose their own agency but sometimes they lose physical control over their bodies. In Dune, there is a gladiatorial circuit where this practice is commonplace. Heroes, who are members of the noble houses, fight slaves as a form of entertainment, but to ensure that the heroes do not risk their lives, those with this programming ability can embed a word or phrase in the minds of the fightin g slaves that can cause them a moment of paralysis. This paralysis lasts just long enough for the hero to kill the slave in a mock show of physical superiority (333-5). What does Herbert envision as the trajectory of a society formed with pragmatism as its highest end? I have said that Herbert fears the Messiah complex of powerful leaders because he believes that this kind of religious fervor can only end in fanaticism and violence. In Herbert’s terms, the result is Jihad. By the end of the novel , Paul has been accepted by the native Fremen. They recognize in him the fulfillment of all the pseudo-prophesies that the Bene Gesserits have instilled. Politics and religion have fused, but, in this world, the religion was only ever a cynical ploy to instrumentalize the masses. Far from achieving the pragmatic goals of ruling class, toying wit h religious motivation has only made the masses more volatile. They are willing to fight and die for the cause. They are willing to kill for it. Jessica, the represe ntative of Bene Gesserit pragmatism, is frightened by this outcome. She observes that Paul has appropriated their expectations for a messiah as she thinks: “ He’s

accepting the religious mantle . . . . He must not do it! ” (426). Paul already benefits from his mother’s Bene Gesserit training. He has cultivated his faculties of observation of control. Now, with the faith of an army behind him as their savior, there is nothing to stop him from becoming a tyrant, and that is exactly what he will become.

The universe in which Dune is set has forbidden the creation of machines made in the image of human minds. The stated reason for this is that machines like these diminish us. They interfere with the mental faculties we possess that make us human: our judgments and o ur awareness of beauty. Yet the best and highest good that Dune seems to propose is an unwaveringly pragmatic and utilitarian future in which a ruling class has been founded to advance the survival of the species across a vast universe. They seek to impose their pragmatic goals upon the citizens of that universe mainly through deception and information control. The Bene Gesserits, the Empire, and the Commission of Ecumenical Translators all operate through harnessing religious devotion towards their narrow conception of the good. Herbert both fears and is fascinated by the Messiah Impulse, an d, because of all this manipulation is only another religious war of blind and militant sectarianism.

This raises a very important question: given this careful , meticulous terraforming and cultivation of human assets to lead humanity into this brave new future, why do we end up right back at our starting place? Why does humanity insist upon destruction, death, and war? Perhaps it is because when we begin with pragmatism, when we instill pragmatic methods of operation, our goals can only ever remain at the level of pragmatism. The civilization in Dune has recognized that AI presents a threat but misinterpreted the nature of that threat. The real threat of AI is not that our machines become human and usurp us. It is that we become our machines and thereby reject our humanity. The anthropology of Dune succeeds in prohibiting machines that resemble the human mind, but it has unwittingly made human minds in the image of machines. We should understand that this outcome is the result of the things the civilization values. We exchange the good for the expedient, and we stop interrogating our presuppositions about which aims are worthwhile. When we do this, pragmatism rules, and we are diminished.

Consider the application of such a lesson for the topic we are all here to discuss, namely how we as a Christian institution are to respond to AI in our classrooms, in our own work, but even more than these pragmatic concerns in how we assess its use as something worthy of our human participation. I would venture to say that if we pressed, users of AI would be able to point to little more than its pragmatic value. It saves us time. It helps us get started. It helps us find the words to fit the soulcrushing and dehumanizing tasks we set for ourselves in an increasingly dehumanizing work environment. Are any of these things good? Do we care as long they save us time and serve our pragmatic ends? Our voice as a Christian institution will only go as far as we care to answer these questions. And if we are like these political move rs and shakers in Dune,

we will decline to confront such questions. If we do, the danger will not be that AI will render our humanity obsolete; it will be t hat we begin to resemble our goal-oriented, mechanized world. It is no dystopian future to posit that one day soon we may have an academic situation in which our student essays are AI-written, AI-graded, and in this scenario, our lofty ambitions for Christian higher education will be consumed in an ouroboros of self-devouring pragmatism.

But I have faith that we will be willing to resist complete surrender to pragmatism. And I hope that in so doing we will reconsider what is good in Christian higher ed and not merely expedient. That the value of grappling with ideas until we learn to express them for ou rselves is a rewarding and humanizing struggle. That learning to value knowledge and not merely information will require us to understand the sources of that knowledge so that we do not parrot the machines we have taught to parrot us. That sometimes, often, the process of gaining sound understanding is messy, and our language can and should reflect that messiness. Ultimately, I hope that we see that using AI is not merely a shortcut that doesn’t affect the destination. On the contrary, AI is not merely a sh ortcut; it is a path that leads us to a destination different than the one we would have reached if we used our own minds to get there.

Works Cited

Brierly, N. Trevor. “A Critical Moment”: The O.C. Bible in the Awakening of Paul Atreides” Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert’s Epic Saga, edited by Dominic J. Nardi and N. Trevor Brierly, McFarland, pp. 127-141.

Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965. Ace Books, 1990.

_______. The God Emperor of Dune. 1981. Ace Books, 1987.

Kikkonen, Tomi, Ilmari Hirvonen, and Matti Mäkikangas. “‘Thou Shalt Make a Human Mind in the Likeness of a Machine’: Imitation, Thinking Machines, and Mentats.” Dune and Philosophy: Minds, Monads, and Muad’Dib, edited by Kevin S. Decker, WileyBlackwell, 2022, pp. 87-98.

Williams, Kevin. “Belief is the Mind-Killer: The Bene Gesserit’s Transcendental Pragamatism,” Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert’s Epic Saga, edited by Dominic J. Nardi and N. Trevor Brierly, McFarland, pp. 244-255.

A Faith and Learning

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2024): 48-53

The Christian Virtue of Serving Others in Harold Bell Wright’s Ozarks Novels

John J. Han

(Top) A bust of the author is displayed at the Harold Bell Wright Museum, Branson, MO. Photo taken by John J. Han, 22 Sept. 2022. (Bottom) Harold Bell Wright’ s signature in the public domain.

Introduction

In Mark 12:30-31, Jesus gives the two greatest commandments: love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. As a preacherturned-novelist, Harold Bell Wright (1872 -1944) considered his novel writing a form of ministry. In the words of Lawrenc e V. Tagg, writing

fiction was a “ministry of print” for Wright (32). Indeed, before publishing his first novel, That Printer of Udell’s: A Story of the Middle West (1903), Wright read a chapter in progress to his congregation at the Christian Church in Pittsburg, Kansas, each week. After writing his second novel, The Shepherd of the Hills (1907), which sold millions of copies, he decided that writing would be a more effective form of ministry than preaching. As he recalls in his autobiography, To My Sons:

I gave up my church work and set myself seriously to the work of writing. […] When I became convinced that, all things considered, writing was the work I could do best, I undertook that job in exactly the same spirit with which I had undertaken the work of preaching. I repeat, I did not seek the job of preaching; the job found me. It is just as true that I did not seek the work of writing: that job, too, found me. (219)

Among the dominant themes of Wright’s fiction is service to others. Christian service happens when we do something “primarily for the benefit and goodwill of another person or group of people. When we serve, we look outside of ourself [ sic], beyond our own problems, and seek to bring value to others” (Marquardt para. 5). This em phasis on self-sacrificial love separates Christianity from some religions that primarily seek happiness, prosperity, and retreat from society. As Stanley J. Grenz and Jay T. Smith point out, “Christianity has long championed the cultivation of compassion as one of its core moral imperatives” (22).

In Wright’s novels set in the Ozarks, the main characters embody Christ’s command to love others in various ways. This paper discusses some of the service ministries in four of Wright’s six Ozarks novels. Specifically, we will examine the themes of education and counseling, protection of the weak and vulnerable, and bringing th e community together in That Printer of Udell’s , The Shepherd of the Hills , The Calling of Dan Matthews (1909), and God and the Groceryman (1927).

Education and Counseling: The Shepherd of the Hills

In this novel, which is still in print, Dad Howitt comes to the Ozarks to expiate for the sins of his son, who impregnated and then deserted an innocent Ozarks girl who later died during labor. Dad Howitt used to pastor the biggest church in Chicago, but he needs rest for his soul in the countryside. Soon, he feels attached to the Ozark hills, becoming a shepherd of the sheep, as well as a minister to the residents, hence the title of the novel. His congregat ion in Chicago wants him to return, but he declines because he feels God’s presence in nature. A s he reminisces, “|God is good and merciful. Every day out on the range with the sheep, [I] felt the spirit of the hills, and little by little their strength a nd their peace

entered into [my] life. […] The voices in the wilderness became friendly voices, for [I] learned their speech […]” (Wright, Shepherd 179).

As part of his ministry in the Ozarks, Dad Howitt serves as an educator and counselor for people. Hi s most prominent mentee is Sammy Lane, whose blossoming romance with Young Matt constitutes a sub plot of the novel. Dad Howitt recognizes her potential to be educated and culturally refined, and she follows his guidance. As she reads good books under his wings, her knowledge grows, she drops her Oza rk English, and she regains confidence in life in t he Ozarks. She no longer yearns for the city life she once craved, so she breaks her relationship with Ollie Stewart, a wannabe urbanite who lacks physical st rength masculinity Young Matt possesses. As she advances in her schooling, she even leads Young Matt to do the same so that he can “[drop] the habits and customs of the backwoods” (110). Dad Howitt embodies not only pastoral ministry but also educational ministry which was important for Harold Bell Wright.

Protection of the Week and Vulnerable: That Printer of Udell’s and The Calling of Dan Matthews

Harold Bell Wright came to national prominence with the publication of That Printer Udell’s, a thesis novel advocating a faith -based community center for the homeless and unemployed. He understood lowly people because he once was like them. He recalls,

I visioned a church that would never close its doors, night or day. A church with social parlors, and reading-rooms, and all that. I wanted to m ake it a home for the homeless, a refuge for those who needed a safe harbor. […] Having been one of these outsiders myself, I felt that I knew what was needed. (To My Sons 209)

The novel is set in Pittsburg, Kansas, a mining town on the northwestern edge of the Ozarks, where he pastored the Christian Chur ch. The main character, Dick Falkner, drifts from Kansas City to Boyd City in search of employment. When he sees a local church, he is excited about the prospect of finding someone who would help him. H owever, his hope turns to despair as the congregant s give him cursory greetings, hollow encouragements, and false hopes before moving on. Law enforcement officers force migrants like Dick to leave town as soon as possible. To make matters worse, he is not a Christian, which makes it even more difficult for him to get help. A printer named George Udell, a “mighty fine fellow” (Wright, Printer 65), hires Dick, and Dick proves to be a hardworking employee. Both George and Dick become Christians. In the meantime, the pastor of the Jerusalem Church in Bo yd City, James Cameron, begins a community center in which the underprivileged are nourished spiritually, physically, and intellectually. By providing a

reading room, music, inspirational speeches, and so und entertainment, the place teaches “good citizens hip, good health, good morals” in the name of Jesus (318). After the death of Cameron, Dick takes over the ministry, keeping the pastor’s and Harold Bell Wrig ht’s vision of “Applied Christianity” alive (197).

The Calling of Dan Matthews , a sequel to The Shepherd of the Hills, deals with the title character’s ministry. A son of Young Matt and Sammy Lane from The Shepherd of the Hills , he comes to the fictional town of Corinth (likely Lebanon, Missouri) w ith theological credentials. Officially the “Rev. Daniel H. Matthews” and nicknamed “Big Dan” (Wright, Calling 224, 411), he is a handsome bachelor with a strong body and a sound mind the ideal type of man in Harold Bell Wright’s fiction. He becomes romantically involved with Hope Farwell, a nurse from Chicago, and together, they partner in the work of Applied Christianity.

Dan Matthews, who grew up in the Ozark Hills under the care of good parents, protects people from a thug named Jud Hardy at the annua l street fair. Jud is a typical villain in Wright’ s Ozarks fiction who intimidates innocent people but is weak and cowardly. After threatening some men and flattering some women, he knocks down a town marshal . Then, he beats a crippled boy until the lad loses consciousness. Several men step forward to intervene, but ahead of them is Dan Matthews, “a well-dressed young giant” (221), who strikes Jud. His strength proves powerful: “With one clean, swinging blo w the man from Windy Cove was lifted fairly off the ground to fall several feet away from his sen seless victim” (221-22). His heroic feat earns admiration from the crowd, and the news spreads across town. As someone who newly arrived to serve as a pastor, however, he makes the elders feel odd about having a preacher who is also a fighter.

On her part, Hope Farwell represents ideal femininity in Wright’s fiction: she is a “strong, beautifully formed young woman” who resembles the Mother Mary in her lovin g care” (280). She reveals her character when she provides medical care to Grace Conner, a socia l outcast, without pay. Grace has been shunned in Corinth due to no fault of her own. Her father was sent to prison for the murder of a town marshal, her mot her died, and she is left alone as a young wom an. People, even those at her church, ostracize her, and she cannot find employment. She drifts to another part of town and lives among “some colored folks” (276). One night, she attempts suicide without success. Hope Farwell tells her that God loves her and the people who were mean to her did not unde rstand her: “All the cruelty in the world can't take God away from us if we hold on. […] People with the kindest, truest hearts sometimes do cruel things without thinking” (292). In response, Grace promis es to remain strong, and Hope’s ministry turns out to be a lifesaving event for Grace.

Bringing the Community Together: God and the Groceryman

God and the Groceryman continues Dan Matthews’s ministry which began in The Calling of Dan Matthews . At the beginning of this last book in the Dan Matthews trilogy, the title character has decided to move his business-based Christian ministry from Kansas City to an undisclosed location in the Ozarks. As a novel abou t Christian service, The Calling of Dan Matthews is concerned with protecting the vulnerable in a local setting. In God and the Groceryman , written almost twenty years after the publication of The Calling of Dan Matthews, the author is concerned with the moral decline of the entire nation caused by the loss of Christian principles in daily life. According to the title character, “[N]ever in our own country, at least, have the people been so irreligious. And this collapse of Christianity has brought us to the verge of an appalling moral bankruptcy. […] To save America we must worship God” (418 -19). The novel shows how the groundwork of moral rebuilding can be laid: by removing denominational barriers within a com munity, worshipping together, and working together “to save our homes, our children, our community and nation” (543). Different denominat ions exist because of different theological ideas, so this may seem like an idealistic solution to the widespread prob lem of irreligiosity. In Wright’s view, however, the Christian faith cannot be separated from all areas of life: “The Christianity of Jesus is a religion of the plow, the office, the store, the bank, of government, laws and education” (546). Accordingly, local churches should find a way to serv e people in creative ways. Specifically, the author proposes interdenominational churches which he calls “temples” (560). These churches shall be open around the clock so that anyone can come “for meditation or pr ayer or relief from the rush and distractions of our modern life,” serve those who are “naked and hungry and sick and homeless,” and provide “public preaching” as well as “counsel and advice” (560-61). The novel shows how, through Dan Matthews’s ministry, broken homes are restored, people renoun ce their sins, and the church becomes an important part of people’s lives.

Conclusion: Wright’s Progressivism and Conservatism

As a member of the Disciples of Christ, as well as an admirer of Charles Monroe Sheldon, the author of In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1896), Harold Bell Wright sided with the socially marginalized than with the rich and pow erful. Growing up in a dest itute, broken home, he tasted the sting of poverty, starvation, and homelessness. The poor people in his fiction did not grow out of his imagination; rather, they went through what he had gone through in his life. The a uthor’s compassion for other types of marginalized people the victims of domestic abuse, homeless people, and social outcasts grew out of his experience with lowly life. In this regard, he was a social progressive.

At the same time, Wright was a social conservative in his emphasis on personal responsibility and the dignity of work, especially manual labor. He advocates social programs for the poor and needy , but he does not believe in unlimited assistance. That is why, in That Printer of Udell’s , Dick Falkner “search[es] for work,” not for handouts (29). The primary goal of social programs is to provide opportunities to find work. According to Wright, local churches should take a leadership role in this altruistic effort. This is the way for Christi ans to practice Christ’s command to love God and one’s neighbors.

Works Cited

Grenz, Stanley J., and Jay T. Smith. Pocket Dictionary of Ethics. InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Marquardt, Dennis. “Thriving in Crisis: Serving Others.” Lytle Center for Faith and Leadership, 21 Mar. 2020, https://blogs.acu.edu/lytlecenter/2020/03/21/thriving-in-crisisserving-others/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2024.

Tagg, Lawrence V. Harold Bell Wright: Storyteller to America. Westernlore, 1986.

Wright, Harold Bell. The Calling of Dan Matthews. 1909. A Harold Bell Wright Trilogy: The Shepherd of the Hills, The Calling of Dan Matthews, God and the Groceryman , Pelican, 2007, pp. 193-401.

_______. God and the Groceryman. 1927. A Harold Bell Wright

Trilogy: The Shepherd of the Hills, The Calling of Dan Matthews, God and the Groceryman, Pelican, 2007, pp. 403-592.

_______. The Shepherd of the Hills. 1907. A Harold Bell Wright

Trilogy: The Shepherd of the Hills, The Calling of Dan Matthews, God and the Groceryman, Pelican, 2007, pp. 19-191.

_______. That Printer of Udell’s. 1903. Pelican, 2011.

_______. To My Sons. Harper, 1934.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2024):54-69

Book Reviews

McCampbell, Mary. Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022. 219 pages, $28.00.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

My students have a common objection to many of the readings I assign in my general education world literature course: that they’re too “depressing.” As my syllabus includes wo rks like Dante’s Inferno (a tour through hell), Virgil’s Aeneid (a refugee story set after the bloody fall of Troy), and The Death of Ivan Ilych (a novella-length meditation on the inescapability of death), I suppose I cannot blame them. More interesting, however, is how similar their objections are to some of those I hear from my peers. Members of a book club I’m in, for example, noted about Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, a book about the sustaining power of stories amid great hardship, that it is much darker than they thought it was going to be. Wouldn’t it be nicer, bo th my students and my book club mates suggest, if we read happy books? If what we got from stories was a nice little entertaining break? The world, after all, is dark enough already.

In Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves , Mary McCampbell guides readers through many different text s in several genres to show that it is, indeed, quite consequential what stories we choose to read (or watch or listen to) and why. “If a viewer can easily extract the meaning out of the story,” she writes, paraphrasing Scott Teems (who borrows from Flanne ry O’Connor), “then it is not a good story. It is reductionist or sentimental; it’s not true to the complexity of the lived experien ce” (114). Such reductionist, sentimental stories make for bad reading because they stunt or otherwise distort the imagination. Good stories, McCampbell argues, don’t just confirm our prejudices and keep us comfortable. Instead, they invite us to imagine our neighbors and their experiences. Not only that, but they can shape empathy in us empathy for others like us and unlike us, for our enemies, and even for ourselves in profoundly redemptive ways.

In her introduction, McCampbell critiques the kind of imaginationstunting, comfortable stories we might be drawn , describing them as imagination-constricting tools of empire, an idea she borrows from Walter Brueggemann. This “empire mindset” and the stories that keep us in it “[want] us to feel as if things are fine the way they are so that there is no

need for change” and “ [keep] the most powerful and socially acceptable in control” because they allow us to cocoon ourselves in comfort rather than challenging us, disturbing us, or even moving us at all (11). The “empire mindset” is connected as well to the way we are culturally trained to be consumers to the point that , for example, many university professors may be encouraged to view their students dehumanizingly as “customers,” as though an education were a product and not a deeply relational, formative set of human experiences. Because of this consumer training, we are inclined “to treat our practices of reading, watching, and listening as mere acts of consumption in order to get a quick fix of enjoyment ” (17). Here, McCampbell identifies the sentiment I mentioned above, the one voiced by my students and fellow book club members. Th is sentiment, she argues, “is a stumbling block to the kind of mature spiritual formation that leads to deeper empathy” (17).

The works of art that McCampbell spends her chapters exploring disrupt the “empire mindset” and refuse to leave readers in the shallows of reading-as-consumption. In each chapter, she explores a different set of texts to illustrate a different way in which her readers can cultivate empathy through their imaginative participation in various works of literature, film, and music. In the first chapter, “Art as a Model for the Empathetic Imagination,” she explores texts that go beyond merely asking readers to empathize with their characters, instead providing “a parabolic model for the practice of empathy.” The strongest example in this ch apter is the 2019 film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood , a film that depicts Fred Rogers’s empathy for journalist Lloyd Vog el and its transformative, redemptive force in Vogel’s life, thus providing a n image of empathy for viewers which they might imitate.

In the second chapter, “Empathy for the Wretched and Glorious Human Condition,” McCampbell invites readers to consider how works of art can expose readers to the beauty and wretchedness of humanity by “creatively inform[ing] our imaginations with the constant coexistence of human beauty and error, leading us away from a tendency to caricature” (46). One text this chapter considers is the TV series Better Call Saul, which McCampbell argues derives its power from its depiction of its protagonist’s “beaut iful humanity” and its coexistence with his pain and eventual self-destruction (64-5).

In chapter three, “Stories as Self -Reflection,” McCampbell reminds readers that narrative helps to better understand ourselves: “We cannot love and understand the other as ourselves if we do not have love and understanding for ourselves” (71) and our own “wretchedness and greatness” (73). Like King David, who needed t he prophet Nathan to reveal his own sin to him through the story of the rich man who stole the poor man’s beloved lamb, we need stories to provide us with opportunities for self-reflection (71-72).

In chapter four, “Who is Our Neighbor?”, McCampbell explores the arts’ ability to introduce us to people very unlike us, helping us to “become more attentive” to “the stories of those whom we tend to label, demonize,

or dismiss” (99). The refugee main character Valentino of Dave Eggers’s What Is the What? , the former prisoner Daniel Holden of the TV seri es Rectify are two characters whose stories, McCampbell argues , can help us expand our capacities for empathy and our definition of “neighbor.” So, too, can stories about those whom we would normally describe as e nemies, as McCampbell argues in chapter six , “Growing Empathy for Our Enemies,” in which she shows reader s how we can learn to love our enemies by engaging with stories whose characters we might normally describe not as strangers but as villains or rejectors of God. Such a character could be the misogynistic, abandoned son of an abusive father in the film Magnolia; he could also be Craig Thompson, the author of the autobiographical graphic novel Blankets about his loss of faith.

Chapter five, which feels a bit oddly placed (it makes more intuitive sense for chapter six to succeed chapter four directly, as I’v e discussed them here), entitled “Structured for Empathy,” explores several unconventional works of art that challenge their readers and viewers because of their very structure as well as their c ontent. Such artworks, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “focus on individual perception as opposed to objective linearity” and thus “help us vicariously participate in a protagonist existential experience” basicall y, McCampbell argues, their form forces readers into deeper participation with the characters than a more traditional narrative might.

Throughout the book, McCampbell makes a compelling case for not only the importance of cultivating empathy but the way art can help us do so. Indeed, the book’s foremost strength is that McCampbell’s knowledge and expertise are interwoven throughout with the very empathy she wants her readers to cultivate: the texts she explores have cultivated empathy in her, and she builds an empathetic connection between herself an d her readers as she seeks to help them discover the same rich ness in these works of art.

That strength McCampbell’s very apparent care for her readers is interwoven, however, with what I found to be the book’s primary weakness: it is not quite clear who McCampbell’s intended audience is. Often, the book reads as though it were written to an educated lay audience. Many of the texts McCampbell chooses are books and films that have more popular appeal, such as The Hate U Give, Better Call Saul , A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood , or Blankets. Some of her discussions of the more difficult texts deliberately choose less academic language; for example, in her discussion of Beloved in chapter five, McCampbell refers to the novel as part of the “ghost story” and horror genres, when I would a more academic book to discuss it in the context of the gothic tradition (136). In other places, however, her language is quite academic, such as in her discussion of Douglas Coupland’s Life after God , which she describes as “veer[ing] way from abstraction and the parabolic grotesque, pla cing a familiar contemporary, commodified Western cityscape in the forefront of its stories” (88). Many of the texts she chooses, as well, are less ac cessible

to a wider audience not because they are dark or depressing, but because they are structurally ch allenging.

Overall, I found McCampbell’s book to be de eply engaging and challenging in the precise way that she argues good art should challenge us and shake us out of an “empire mindset” into a posture of empathy and love toward others. While I would hesitate to recommend the book to a wide audience the non-English-major students and the book club members I mentioned above may not be the best audienc es for this book for the reasons I mentioned above I do think bringing its ideas to those audiences would greatly enrich their reading practices. Perhaps such a sharing of those ideas would help cultivate among us the kind of opportunity “to grow our empat hy and thus our agape love for one another” with which McCampbell closes her book (193).

Prior, Karen Swallow. The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023. 304 pages, $26.99.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

The Evangelical Imagination is a valuable contribution to the very crowded discourse about the state of American evangelicalism. This is quite fortunate I’ve lost count of the number of books, articles, social media posts, podcast episodes, and sermons I’ve seen or read over the past decade that try to make sense of American evangelicalism more broadly and, more particularly, its greater and greater willingness to become bedfellows with sundry political and social movements th at seem far more preoccupied with preserving power than with following the narrow, selfsacrificing way of Jesus. I’m in the middle of reading one as I write this (Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extr emism, published 2023); years before The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior contributed to another (Still Evangelical?, published 2018). I could, of course, name far, far more, and indeed, one of the problems inherent in adding another book to th is conversation is that it could beco me just more noise: another piece of content to be bought and sold to garner attention and further an author’s brand rather than help ameliorate a problem. Katelyn Beaty makes a similar point in her 2022 book Celebrities for Jesus, but we’re both really echoing the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 12:12: “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.”

Prior seems well aware of this risk, however, and The Evangelical Imagination adds a helpful voice to the conversation by encouraging readers not merely to consider what they (or what evangelicalism) believe but why they find those beliefs so compelling. In other words, Prior’s book is not about what we think but how certain habits of thought or, rather, how certain habits of imagining emerge among people as they live in a community with other people. “Collectively, the works of our imaginations reflect and create cultures,” she writes in the first chapter, and culture “in turn provides individuals with a precognitive framework a framework that includes unconscious, unarticulated, and unstated underlyi ng assumptions that directs, shapes, and forms our thoughts and desires and imaginations in ways we don’t necessarily recognize” (15 -16). Further, The Evangelical Information resists presentism, tracing the roots of many elements of the evangelical imagination in the Victorian imagination, itself very much interwoven with early English evangelicalism. Throughout the book, then, Prior is intent on helping her readers identify what of their beliefs are not (or not only) unassailable biblical tenets but rather

assump

tions they didn’t realize they were making and certainly didn’t formally invite into their hearts.

After spending the first chapter defining “i magination” in this context, Prior spends each subsequent chapter focusing on different assumptions inherent in the evangelical imagination. It’s important to explore them because, Prior argues, t hese assumptions, these “ingredients of the…evangelical imagination,” are “persuasive and formative” and “central to what has formed the evangelical imagi nation for three hundred years” (29). Understanding what we presume before we begin to articulate what we believe helps us to better understand why we might be dr awn to some patterns of thinking more than others and how we might imagine better ones. Each chapter offers, in my view, valuable insights into different aspects of the evangelical imagination: its emphasis on narratives of awakening, for example, or its preoccupation with conversion stories (always strange to my own Christian imagination, which was formed by pedobaptist Dutch Reformed Calvinism), or its idealization of domesticity and particular ways of imagining manhood and womanhood. Some chapters are more compelling than others, however: in particular, the chapters on sentimentality and empire.

Perhaps I am drawn to the chapter on sentimentality because of my role as a literature professor: I am not only personally but professionally invested in promoting good art and helping others understand that the difference between good art and bad is not m erely a matter of individual taste. Much of contemporary Christian art is bad, Prior argues, because it is sentimental: it exists to evoke emotion, yes, but more than that, “it attempts artificially to create feelings that exceed what the situation warrants” (126). And while it is true that there is such a thing as a virtuous and truthful emotional response, the risk is that we sidestep “true morality,” which is “in how we actually live, not how much emotion we feel from the imagined suffering portrayed in art and literature” (134); “virtue is an action, not just a feeling” (135). In an age where we have endless opportunities for our feelings to be aroused without t he requirement of action I’m thinking in particular of how scrolling through social media feeds gives us ceaseless images to respond to while we remain sitting still it’s well worth considering why training our minds and hearts in sentimentality can impact our souls and distract from the weighty requirements of virtue, which marries feeling with action.

The chapter on empire is especially compelling because of how clear-eyed and frank it is. White evangelicals, Prior notes in particular, were and are often “working out of a social imaginary built in an imperialist worldview” that assumed the suprem acy not just of Western culture but of Western Christianity and which could not imagine the far deeper roots of Christianity in North Africa or the Eastern world (199). Indeed, Prior goes on to note that “the spread of the gospel during the missionary age is so intertwined with the West’s expansion through imperialism that it is almost impossible to imagine an evangelical movement that is not an empire-building enterprise, not a movement

rooted in political and cultural domination” rather than humble submission to Christ (200). This is not a unique observation the books I mentioned earlier, particularly Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory and Beauty’s Celebrities for Jesus, both analyze and mourn the reality of the “imperialist worldview” that is dee ply interwoven with evangelicalism. Within Prior’s larger argument, however, this discussion of empire assumes a particular character in its focus on art and how it can either confirm or blow apart the assumptions inherent in the evangelical imagination. Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt,” Prior explains here, is one example of art that forces us to question assumptions. “All empires of man are empires of dirt in the end,” she writes, echoing the lyrics of the song. “That includes whatever it is of evangelicalis m that is of man, not of God. The kingdom of heaven is not an empire,” no matter how much we might imagine it to be so (221).

I’ve noted throughout that I consider Prior’s book to be a helpful additional voice despite its place in an already quite crowded convers ation. That does not mean this book has no weaknesses; indeed, Prior heads off some possible criticisms in the introduction, where she articulates clearly what she is, and what she is not, attempting to do: “I am not attempting in these pages to outline a historical linearity, a doctrinal critique, or any post hoc ergo propter hoc claim,” she says (5). What she will present in stead, she continues, is her own testimony: the book is “a picture of the evangelical imagination as [she has] found it” as she lived and worked as an evangelical Christian (5). Read as a well-researched testimony, the book is a helpful one. Read as an introduction to the idea of cultural imagination and how it might manifest in the American evangelical subculture, the book is also helpful. Its primary weakness, however, is that whatever Prior says about the limits of her project in it, it still is a relati vely short book that tries to cover a lot of ground. Each chapter could be a book on its own. The breadth of the book then requires a certain sacrifice of depth. Viewed optimistically, this relative lack of depth is a subtle encouragement to other writers (and not just them to the general reader him or herself) to use The Evangelical Imagination as an introduction to further research and writing.

I would never suggest that we not heed the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes, and not acknowledge that the hu man pursuit of knowledge, the making of many books, is ultimately futile unless we remember the conclusion of the matter: the fear of the Lord, who orders all of our efforts, and for whom nothing exists outside of His imagination, for from it He created all things. However, I do think th at, at its best, if Prior’s book does encourage the making of many (more) books, it also equips reade rs to do so in all humility and in the pursuit of truth, not power.

Hummel, Daniel G. The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battl e Over the End Times Shaped a Nation . Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023. 400 pages, $29.99 (Hardcover).

Reviewed by C. Clark Triplett

This book will ring a lot of bells for older pastors and students of theology who have grown up in evangelical churches. Many of the terms referred to have become everyday jargon within free churches in America. Many names are a familiar part of evangelical history such as Dwight L. Moody, Arthur T. Pierson, Reuben A. Torrey, A. J. Gordon, Andrew Murray, Albert B. Simpson, and Arno C. Gabelein, to name a few. Dispensationalism has inculcated a certain way of thinking abou t being a Christian that overlaps with several movements including fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, Christian nationalism, and, to some extent, New Calvinism. This theological point of view brings with it a particular hermeneutic for understanding the Bibl e and the world. It also places a central focus on prophecy and end times.

Daniel G. Hummel is a historian of religion who works at Upper House, a Christian study center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin Madison. In this detailed hist orical analysis, he discusses the 200-year development of dispensationalism starting with the ministry of John Nelson Darby in Ireland (1800-1882) and the Plymouth Brethren Church. Darby ultimately brought his theology to America where pastors and theologians developed their twist on “dispensational time” that , according to Hummel, would have a significant impact on American culture and politics. Americans were uniformly “premillennialists” and emphasized other areas of interest including revivalism, post-Civil War white sectionalism, commonsense realism, holiness teachings, and global missions. Many of the leaders of the early fundam entalist movement were identified with dispensationalism. However, what Hummel focuses on in this book is how much popular dispensationalism has shaped American culture so much so that it has become part of the mainstream culture without people being aware of it. Take, for example, the HBO series, The Leftovers, or, more recently, the “snapture” in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War. In these films and other cultural representations, the rapture is presented without any connection to the theology or beliefs of Christianity. Popular dispensationalism originated primarily with the work of Hal Lindsey and his extremely popular bo ok The Late Great Planet Earth which proclaimed that the rapture was imminent and that current events were fulfilling Bible prophecy. However, Hummel argues that over time, Lindsey and other popular dispensationalists such as Tim LaHaye, the author of the Left Behind series, started to disconnect from their theological moorings as current events warranted. Although there are

several dispensational seminaries, such as Talbot and Grace, Dallas Theological Seminary has been the flagship institution for schol arly dispensationalism. But as popular dispensationalism became more engaged with the culture, they consulted the theological scholars less and less. It was more important to speak to the current situation to stay viable “prophecy for the Now Generation” (235). This eventually led to a rupture between popular dispensationalism and “scholastic” leaders such as Charles Ryrie, John Walwo ord, and Dwight Pentecost. Although some of the seminary professors attempted to get into the geopolitical book market, they found that they could not compete with the more sensational popular dispensationalists.

A review in The Christian Century by Keri Ladner, who has written extensively on end-time politics, mentions the landmark study by George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, in which he dismissed the importance of premillennialism on fundamentalism and American culture. According to Ladner, “At the same moment when popular dispensationalists Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye top the list were organizing a voting block of conservative Christians, scholars influenced by Marsden were moving away from understanding dispensationalism” (81-82). These popular preachers and writers were talking to presidents, national leaders, and mainstream television programs about c urrent events. Hummel’s research is so relevant because so much of contemporary politics, particularly right-wing politics, is entangled in and shaped by dispensationalism.

Hummel’s research sheds light on the impact of populist dispensationalism on the politics of the right. Following historian Donald Dayton, he believes this connection may be partially the result of a mixt ure of dispensational ten ets and conservative Princeton theology, both of which “[traffic] in ‘the same tendency toward pessimism’ t hat ‘laid the basis modern fundamentalism’” (213). This fundamentalism was wrapped up in other-worldly visions and the retu rn of Christ. Although social justice, racial reconciliation, and concern for the poor had been embrace d by neo-evangelicals like sociologist David Moberg, who wrote The Great Reversal, dispensationalists did not have the same interest primarily because of the pessimism that undergirded end-time theology. What is the point in helping the poor and disenfran chised when Christ’s return is imminent? The dispensational hermeneutic divided Scripture in a way that made it a “toothless” framework for issues like racism and other social concerns. If the Sermon on the Mount is for Israel rather than the church, then there is not much of a moral mandate to care for those in need.

More and more fundamentalists and evangelicals aligned themselves with popular dispen sational causes. This was driven, to some extent, by the fact that liberal social concerns were often e xclusively identified with liberal mainline Protestant churches. So, fundamentalists such as William Bell Riley, J. Frank Norris, and John Roach Stratton, who were nationalist fundamentalists, led the charge for populist issues such as anti-evolutionism, free-market economics, racial segregation, nationalism,

and later, a particular approach to the state of Israel. In the Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America organization, there was a fixation on white separatism again linked, at least as a vocal rati onalization, between political and theological liberalism. Many of these issues would become “staples” not only of fundamentalist but also of many less oppositional evangelical churches.

As popular dispensationalism continued to show a lack of interest in scholarly theology even from their seminaries, a “spirit of adaptability” took over and was reflected in many books and films as well the new Christian politics as articulated in a recent book entitled The Trump Prophecies (2017): “By dispensing with the theological system, producers of pop dispensationalism managed to reach virtually every medium of entertainment in the twenty-first century” (326). With this deluge of information, Americans were given a prophetic, premillennial sense of the future that became a part of mainline conservative politics: “Americans of many backgrounds assumed a secularized premillennial expectation of declining social cohesion and rising existential threats that would end in era-defining catastrophe” (Ibid).

Both popular and scholarly approaches to dispensationalism are examined in some detail by Hummel. He makes a strong case that premillennialists like Falwell and LaHaye are not the same as theologians like Charles Ryrie, John Walwoord, and Dwight Pentecost or earlier writers like C. I. Scofield. At the same time, however, pop dispensationalism has thrived in culture, while the tenets of scholarly dispensationalism have begun to fracture even on the campuses of major seminaries like Dallas Theological Seminary. A younger generation of evangelical scholars have broken with the traditional dispensationalists like Pentecost, Walwoord, and Ryrie. These “progressive dispensationalists” are part of a coalition with more mainline theological views related to covenants, eschatology, and salvation. By the 1990s, progressive dispensationalism had become a school of thought “threatening to snuff out the ‘normative’ tradition e stablished by Scofield, Chafer, Walwoord, and Ryrie” (313). This new group of scholars questioned the traditional concept of a parenthesis in God’s redemptive history that postponed the kingdom and instead emphasized the continuity in God’s redemptive wor k throughout Scripture. They also questioned the distinction made between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God made by traditional dispensationalists. This was something New Testament theologian George Ladd questioned years earlier in several books, including The Blessed Hope, Crucial Questions About the Kingdom, and The Gospel of the Kingdom: Scriptural Studies on the Kingdom of God. It was not long until most of the institutions founded on traditional dispensational principles such as Dallas, Ta lbot, and Grace seminaries, as well as colleges such as Biola, Gordon, Multnoma, and Trinity, adopted predominantly progressive views. With this shift, the major tenets that distinguished dispensationalism from

other evangelical churches were modified or rejected. Thus, Hummel makes his case for the rise and fall of dispensationalism .

In this work, Hummel engages in a depth of historical analysis that illuminates the importance of a movement that has been ignored or dismissed by many historians of American religion. His review provides a complex synthesis of ideas and concepts that have been important components of many evangelical churches while being excluded from classic orthodox scholarship as well as some other alternative movements such as the emergent church, the evangelical left, the “exvangelical” community, Reformed theology, moderate Baptists, and Christian reconstructionism, many of whom have excoriated dispensationalists with their literalist hermeneutics and Christian Zionism. Somehow Hummel pulls all these strands together to tell a critical story of a movement that is one of the most resilient religious traditions in America. As Hummel argues throughout the book , “Properly situated, the rise and fall of dispensationalism contributes in unique ways to explaining the state of modern American evangelicalism” (4).

This book will be uncomfortable for some evangelicals because Hummel lays bare some of the entanglements of popular dispensationalism and contemporary culture and its “theologically thin” critical framework for shaping minds and discerning idolatrous trend s in culture. This raises questions about whether theology has much to do with some evangelical activities. This is the same question raised by Mark Noll in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Other readers may be delighted to read about the old-time preachers and writers like R. A. Torrey, renowned for his books on prayer and the Holy Spirit , and A. T. Pierson, known for his books on preaching and missions the preachers who were so much a part of the arsenal of young evangelical preachers. This is an important contribution to the study of the history of American evangelicalism and is a must-read for those who want to understand the ideas and forces that drive decisions and candidates in the current political landscape.

Austin, Michael W., and Gregory L. Bock, eds. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: C hristianity and Conspiracy Theories. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023. 300 pages, $24.99 (Paperback)

Reviewed by C. Clark Triplett

This book looks at conspiracy theories from multiple angles and diverse disciplinary perspectives. Its primary focus is to look at the complicated relationship between Christians and conspiracy theories. According to the editors Michael W. Austin, pr ofessor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University, and Gregory L. Bock, a ssistant professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Texas at Tyler, “ [T]hroughout the history of the church, Christians have been susceptible to conspiracy theories” (ix). Although there are many examples in history, it is even more pressing in contemporary society because of the internet, m ass media, and instant communication. Since most conspiracy theories are “demonstrably false,” belief in them leads to many dam aging outcomes including an increase in tribalism, the undermining of civil discourse, the loss of credibility of the church and gospel, and the interference with the call to love our neighbors.

The authors are concerned about the way that often political belie f determines religious belief. There are those, for instance, who automatically equate conservative theological beliefs w ith conservative politics or liberal theological beliefs with liberal political causes. This way of thinking becomes so locked in that it becomes impossible to engage in discourse outside the artificial intell ectual silos that are created to protect our limited view of the world. This is particularly problematic for those who believe in conspiracy theories when civil discourse breaks d own and people are threatened including school board members, public health officials, and members of the judiciary. “(W) hen Christians advocate conspiracy theories that are likely to be or even are demonstrably false, we undermine our own credibility as ambassadors for Christ and his kingdom” (xii).

The contributors to this work provide an in-depth analysis of how such bizarre beliefs have gained such a foothold in American life. According to Austin, when shared reason is no longer the basis for making arguments, then almost any claim may be accepted such as “(t)here are child trafficking tunnels under the White House, Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, Oprah Winfrey, and Tom Hanks are all pedophiles. Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and ‘you gotta smoke a l ot of dope in your momma’s basement not to believe that fact’” (67). When “Bible-believing” pastors make these kinds of claims, then there are real issues about truthtelling and moral responsibility at stake for those who follow Christ. Unfortunately, a significant number of Christians believe in current

conspiracy theories related to QAnon, the pandemic, mask-wearing, and vaccines, to name a few. A recent survey indicated that “49 percent of Protestant pastors agree with the statement ‘I frequently hear members of my congregation repeating conspiracy theories they have he ard about why something is happening in our country” (Ibid).

In this 24-chapter volume contributors represent many different fields including theology, communications, political sc ience, history, education, and information science. Michael Austin, profes sor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky and Fellow at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, in his chapter on “A Failure of Humble Proportions” focuses on the failure of humility in argu ments about conspiracy theories. He argues that we make a mistake when we think we have instant access to anything we want to know if we ask God. He makes a strong case that Christians need to learn the intellectual virtue of humility in the same way sci entists and other serious researchers do. Intellectually humble individual s have an appropriate awareness of the limits of wh at they can know; they can accurately assess what their intellectual limits are; and they can own their intellectual weaknesses. When people seem to know the truth about something contrary to an overwhelming consensus, including experts, on such things as immunology, virology, and public health, there should be some questions about the veracity of such truth-telling. Every person has a right to their opinion, but, according to Austin, “when a singl e person has deep convictions about most, some, or all of these issues, something is wrong” (70).

In a chapter titled “The Religious Rhetoric of QAnon,” Chase Andre, an instructor in Communications and Digital Learning at Biola University, discusses the way QAnon conflates God and country in a form of Christia n nationalism that resonates with many evangelicals. She looks closely at the rhetoric of Q, the shadowy figure behind QAn on, to illuminate his sway over evangelicals. She looks at five categories : civil religion, spiritual language, spiritual warfare, Christian content, and Christian nationalism. Civil religion refers to language that is common throughout American public life which pays homage to a God or Creator from which we receive certain freedoms by being American. Such phrases as “God bless Ameri ca” are used by public figures, but it’s meaning has little theological depth. The other categories deal primarily with the use of Christian language with a mixture, at times, of New Age “conspiritu ality” without any participation in the New Age culture. “For Q’s target audience, religious markers are as fundamental to their self -concept as their unwavering patriotism” (198). Christian nationalism is perhaps the key component of the architecture of QAnon. According to Andre, it is not synonymous with Chr istianity but is a cultural framework “that is undergirded by a combination of conservative political ideology, belief in t he Bible, apocalyptic visions of societal decline, and divine militarism” ( Ibid). The authors believe that QAnon is a form of syncretism that combines two distinct religions that uses Christian language to appeal to a particular evangelical audience.

J. Aaron Simmons and Kevin Carnahan make the case that “It’s Much Worse Than Y ou Think” when it comes to evangelicals accepting conspiracy theories. Simmons is a professor of philosophy at Furman University and Carnahan teaches philosophy and religion at Centr al Methodist University. These authors discuss why some individuals, more than others, might be predisposed to believe in conspira cy theories. Some psychologists suggest, for example, that there are certain individuals with a “conspiracy mind-set” as a generalized attitude regardless of beliefs. These disposed individuals formulate their views based on an “epistemology of irrationality” that “facilitate(s) and embrace (s) biases, rather than an attempt to overcome them” (88). A second kind of epistemological error is more social and depends on how conspiracies are facilitated and affirmed within a particular community of belief. W hile members of the community may recognize reliable sources, they may be led to incorrect conclusions because of the information system in which they live and work. That is, communicat ion is like an echo chamber in which an epistemology of isolation exists. Another epistemological error that may affect evangelicals is the belief that the world is full of propagandists and untrustworthy agents all trying to mislead them. “In short, conspiracism is not the errant conclusion of evangelical reasoning, but rather one of the background beliefs about the world they hold before they even start to draw particular conclusions ” (94-95), This is what Simmons and Carnahan call an epistemology of ig norance. These errors of thinking are particularly problematic for ev angelicals because they often operate within a closed system of discourse that is centripetal rather than centrifugal. This leads to what the authors describe as a Teflon hermeneutics “whereby all criticism slides right off as simply another example of the propaganda they are right to resist” (95) .

Daniel Bennett is an associate professor of political science and assistant director of the Center for Faith and Flourishing at John Brown University. In his chapter “Conspiracy Theories, Political Trust, and Christian Witness,” he explores political trust and the way it has been weakened by polarization and conspiracy theor ies. According to Bennett, political polarization has led to “affectiv e polarization” which is a more virulent disdain for the ideas and a ctivities of the other party. This also leads to a kind of partisanship that shapes the way people consume the media and how they respond to messages about something like the COVID-19 vaccination. Republicans, for example, are more likely to respond to an endorsement about the vaccination from Trump than Biden . In other words, people are more likely to believe a messag e coming from someone they trust. Bennett thinks that believing in conspiracy theories is part of our fallen nature and believing in consp iracy theories can be quite harmful. Interestingly, research indicates that “white Evangelical Christians were more likely to entertain conspiracy theories than any other group” (223). Bennett argues that Christians are called to bear witness to a world filled with information despite a climate of skepticism and disinterest: “But when we succumb to the tendency toward conspiracism

and comforting explanations for uncomfortab le realities, we are doing serious damage to our witness” (225). Christians should be different in their witness particularly as it relates to fear, divisiveness, and secrecy. It means breaking through our “homogenous silos” to engage our neighbors to rebuild hope.

Racism has been a major concern related to conspiracy theories. Marlena Graves, a Ph.D. student in American cultural studies, and Shawn Graves, professor of philosophy at Findlay University, discuss the idyllic promises of QAnon which seem to ignore the needs of people of some people over others in “Conspiracy Theories and Meaning in Life.” The message of QAnon taps into the fear of social isolation and the sense of identity that many people experience in contemporary society. They offer a grand narrative of a conspiracy that offers followers a “deep understanding, personal purpose, a committed and expansive community to belong to, a project or agenda much larger than themselves to join, and genuine personal significance” (47). Suc h narratives seem to offer a sense of fulfillment that brings meaning and gives them a sense that regardless of circumstances their lives count for something. The authors argue, however, that “(t)here’s no good reason to suppose that if I believe I have a meaningful life, that my life is indeed meaningful” (48). This can become a very selective way of thinking and/or quite mistaken about which lives are most meaningful. They give several examples of h ow this may become problematic. For example, the KKK m ember, Robert Chambliss, was convicted of bombing a Birmingham church that killed four girls . He may have found membership in a violent white supremacist movement quite meaningful and fulfilling. It should be very clear to Christians who hold to the teachings of Christ that this is not a meaningful way of life. Graves and Graves make the case that although God loves everyone without exception, they have incalculable worth and dignity. Thi s is not to say, however, that all lives are lived well morally. “A life marked by fully inclusive agape love is a life that seeks to promote the flourishing of all, to secure the good life for all, while desiring and pursuing cooperative community, or sh alom, with all” (53). Many conspiracy theories tend to be divisive and lead people away from this flourishing life.

This review has only considered a sample of the 24 presentations in this book. All the chapters address the dangers of trying t o be a Christian in a culture with an increased number of conspiracy theories. This is just one in a spate of books dealing with the way extreme thinking influences evangelicals today including Faith and Fake News by Rachel Wightman, Bad Faith: Race and t he Rise of the Religious Right by Randall Balmer, and Christianity and Critical Race Theory by Robert Romero and Jeff Liou, to name a few. This important work and many others make it clear that this is more than just a political issue, it is a deeply theo logical and pastoral concern. It demonstrates a climat e of suspicion and hate that threatens the witness and ministry of the church. Many of the submissions in this text call for a renewal in the form of enlightened pastoral teaching, participation of diverse Christian voices, and old-

fashioned repentance. As Austin emphasizes, there needs to be a climate of intellectual humility that recognizes that we all have limit s in what we know and that we need to accept our intellectual weaknesses. Just because someone believes in God does not make them automaticall y omniscient. This work makes the reader aware of the impact of conspiracy thinking on the evangelical church. It calls for a more discerning approach to the socalled truth claims of current conspiracy theories. It is a book that pastors, teachers, and students should take time to read. It will be a helpful resource in many ongoing conversations.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2024): 70-99

Creative Writing

“Nothing to Compare” and Other Poems

Todd Sukany

Nothing to Compare

“God, . . . I was fifty before I managed to ‘live’ here.” Philip Levine

You have avoided eye contact with more humans today than I will see in several months.

Your walk to that sacred space, Walt Whitman’s poem stretched, etched, in its protective railing, the small, man-poured, jetty point in the river and below the Brooklyn Bridge. It, too, is filled with hurry.

You have yet to walk a path past cedars filled with fat cardinals and juncos, branches bent with feathery winter weight of seed, no vacancy in homemade feeders hugging a fence wrapped in grapevine. You have long ago blocked out the noise of city life, construction, and sirens, save the eternity inside your heart that makes you journey.

Another Evening at The Well

As a breeze moves across my face, I relax into a peace like white sand beaches during Spring Break.

A twinge of intoxication like coconuts and rum. My eyes drift into self-imposed darkness. Mumbling meditations. Two hands raised over my head wave. Swept away in this encounter,

I return to this world full of aliens, strangers to the promise, those without hope and without God.

Thanks Giving

After our fill of traditional dinner, we settle on the couches, a pair of couples, stuffed but still hungry.

We tell our stories, building one upon another until it seems appropriate to give ourselves over, to lift a song. The lines retell our stories, line upon line, precept after precept, transporting us to another place. Broken bread and fruit of the vine. From here, we are overflowing, but like sieves, longing for more and more.

Waiting on Validation

“When I was a child . . . .” –1 Corinthians 13:11

In the days before student loan forgiveness, I was conferred BS degrees in Element’ry Education and Religious Education.

Years later, I identify as a farmer; crops are my occupation.

I proudly purchased six steers, six roosters, and point six

acres of prime real estate.

It’s been 1.824 years, and I lean into your wisdom for when rooster eggs will roll and steer milk will flow.

“Way” and Other Poems

John Zheng

Way

“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”

Life is a crossroads that has stops and turns, one needs to stop before moving on.

Some people think it’s an expressway that needs no stops, but that's a way to death.

Faith is vital to mind like oxygen to life.

If mind is faithless, then life is lifeless

like a walking dead roaming his way.

Beside Quiet Waters

After Terry Bidgood’s photograph Jamaica

A mooring blue boat rocking in the lapping of blue waves is about to sail to sea.

When faith is a boat sailing in the vast sea life has its goal and meaning.

Interpretation

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” John 14:27

To turn pain into peace for the next life

is to empty the mind of selfness for a sense of selflessness.

Duality is the harmony of coexistence like sun and moon, sky and earth, day and night, man and woman, positive and negative, body and soul in the presence of All Mighty.

Christmas Eve

The moon moves gracefully over woods like a spectator at a first -night show

to enjoy the cheerful choir of starlings like children singing Christmas carols.

Churches

gravel road through cottonfields a line of drifting dust chasing an old Oldsmobile to church ~ riverside church

the creaking floor is awash with hallelujah shouted in unison

~ preaching in a way to delight and inspire even old pews stomp and shake ~ Easter night

viewing Jesus’ life

shining in the stained glasses ~

backroad trip

a weedy churchyard looks doleful with moss-covered headstones ~ hiking in the valley

striking of church bells an echo for the mind to look far

To Saint Teresa of Avila, Patron Saint of Writers, Concerning the Castle and the Parrot

Jane Beal

Dear Saint Teresa,

When I count backward a decade on the rosar y of my life, I see myself running down a green hillside from the perfectly intact, medieval walls of the tiny town of Avila in Spain. A Spanish friend, José-Marie, took the picture. I went to Avila to find you.

A wise woman I know, a spiritual director named Linda (which means “pretty” in Spanish, and she is), told me about your name: you are no t only called Teresa of Avila but Teresa de Jesús, because of your love for Christ. Linda said that once, Jesus appeared to you in a vision, and he said that he had another name, too: Jesús de Teresa! Because it meant something to Jesus to be loved by you, to be your friend, and your love and friendship gave him a new name. Linda thought that was extraordinary, and so did I.

In a courtyard in Avila, I saw a statue of your ecstasy, Teresa: it is larger than life. I know because when I drew close, seeing your face transfigured with glory in the stone, I climbed up into the statue’s sacred space and sat down in your arms.

Being close to you then filled me with inexpressible happiness. I do not know what mansion I was in at that moment, but the interior castle was illuminated by the light of May.

In your book, Teresa, which is called the Castillo Interior, you compare the Soul to a castle. Now that I have been to the town where you grew up, the metaphor makes so much sense! How could you not think of castles and castle walls, of rooms and mansions, growing up in sixteenth-century Avila?

But even from the beginning of your book, the Avila of the Soul is utterly transformed:

I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions.

Avila is transfigured in your words: Avila is a single diamond, a transparent crystal, and the Light shines through it. In your sanctified imagination, the words of Jesus have done their work: “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions. If it were not so, I would not have told you. I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14.2-3) They enabled you to see, Teresa, that heaven can be in the Soul, and the mansions of the Soul, taken together, can be a diamondcastle, a transparent crystal, where Jesus is.

This image of the Soul, which is so well known from your work, I admire greatly, but the humility of another image you reveal in the preface to your Castillo Interior I treasure, too.

I am like a parrot which has learnt to talk; onl y knowing what it has been taught or has heard, it repeats the same thing over and over again. If God wishes me to write anything new, He will teach it me, or bring back to my memory what I have said elsewhere.

How I love, Teresa, that you see the writer’s Soul as Parrot! When did you first see this brightly colored bird, brought to España from the New World, and listen to her speaking? How did you know that ou r Soul is not only like a castle but like a bird who has learned to speak?

When I was in Avila, I walked through the monastic house where yo u used to live, where you used to pray in a small, green, enclosed garden, and there I saw in a glass box the sole of your sandal with a small, dried, orange flower laid on it. The picture comes back to me now, vividly, with your castle and parrot. You took off your shoes, like Moses did, before the Holy.

I have taken off my shoes, too, Teresa, to write this letter to you. Remembering your life, I whisper to Jesus, Remember me when You come into your kingdom. When he remembers, we can slip into the heaven of our Soul, where he is, and learn to speak the words of Life.

Here, I begin again.

Con cariño, y amor, Jane Jane Beal / Juana Elena

Photo Essay

Christ-Haunted: Flannery O’Connor Sites in Georgia

John J. Han

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

I first learned about Flannery O’Connor in the fall of 1988, when I was pursuing a master’s degree in English at Kansas State University. Lowell Bliss, a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and a fellow M.A.

Flannery O’Connor (right) pictured with the novelists Robie Macauley (middle) and Arthur Koestler at Amana Colonies in Iowa, 9 Oct. 1947.

student, introduced me to her fiction set in the Deep South. I began to read her short stories, such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” and then her longer works. Eventually, I wrote a master’s report on Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor (57 pp.) at KSU and, years later, a Ph.D. dissertation on T. S. Eliot and Flannery O’Connor (255 pp.) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

O’Connor lived a short life. Born in 1925, she was diagnosed with lupus the disease that had killed her father in 1950 and died in 1964, at age 39. Her oeuvre is rather slim: she published two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and a collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), in her lifetime. Her posthumous publications include Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), The Complete Stories (1971), Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969), The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (1979), The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews (1983), Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works (1988), Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons (2012), A Prayer Journal (2013), and Why Do the Heathen Rage? (an unfinished novel published by Brazos Press in 2024). Her letters and interviews reflect her courage, stoicism, and even humor as she faces the prospect of death from a disease with no cure.

O’Connor’s fiction tends to leave an indelible impression on her readers. Her stories deal with Christian themes, but they sound grotesque, shocking, and often violent. Some of her characters cannot remove the presence of Christ from their minds regardless of their efforts. Others are self-professed “Christians” whose actions do not align with their belief that they are saved from sin. Still others are charlatans who use religion for personal gain. Her fiction also includes an arrogant woman with a Ph.D. duped by a “Bible salesman” who turns out not to be a gentleman, a pious grandmother who betrays her faith when she is confronted by a n escaped convict nicknamed The Misfit, and a very young boy who drowns in the river while baptizing himself, believing he will go to “the Kingdom of Christ.”

O’Connor’s Christian vision is intense, urgent, and prophetic. Through relatable, everyday characters, she portrays the mystery of God’s grace in an age of nihilism and disbelief. She disdains sentimentalism, emotionalism, and commercialism often associated with twentieth -century Christianity, as evidenced by the following lines from her stories:

 “Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead, ” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it ’ s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it ’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said

and his voice had become almost a snarl.” (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”)

 “She would’ve been a good [Christian] woman, ” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”)

 “Later he [Hazel Motes] saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he w as not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. ” (Wise Blood )

 “He [Francis Tarwater, a boy abducted and groomed by a self-ordained prophet to inherit his mantle] felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red -gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fir e that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his fac e against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood.” (The Violent Bear It Away )

I have had the fortune of visiting several sites in Georgia associated with O’Connor’s fiction. On my family trip to the South in 2007, I visited her birth home in Savannah. Thereafter, I visited Milledgeville, where she spent most of her life, to attend O’Connor conferences at her alma mater, Georgia College & State University, a few times. The following pages feature some of the photos captured during my travels. Except for the maps and the first photo, all images were taken by me.

Both Milledgeville and Savannah are located southeast of Atlanta, GA. Milledgeville is about 98 miles away from Atlanta, while Savannah is approximately 250 miles away. Credit: Google Maps.

(Top) Flannery O’Connor’s birth home is located at 207 E. Charlton Street in Lafayette Square, Savannah, GA. Photo date: 19 July 2007.

(Bottom) A marker in front of Flannery O’Connor’s birth home, Savannah, GA. Photo date: 19 July 2007.

Credit: Google Maps.

Andalusia, Flannery O’Connor’s country home and her mother’s dairy farm, is located along US-441 on the north side of Milledgeville, GA.

O’Connor graduated from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University), Milledgeville, with a B.A. in Sociology and English Literature in 1945. As a senior, she served as editor of the student literary magazine, The Corinthian. Upon graduation, she attended the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1947. She honed her creative writing skills under the supervision of Professor Paul Engle. Her other mentors at Iowa included Andrew Lytle and Austin Warren. Photo date: April 2011.

A local TV station announces the Andalusia walk -in tours conducted on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays. Photo date: 14 April 2011.

On local TV in Milledgeville, a preacher prays for a man. The screen reads, “Call Now to Receive Your Free Blood of Jesus Oil!” followed by a phone number. Photo date: April 2011.

Andalusia Farm signs along Highway 441 in Milledgeville. Photo date: April 2011.

The entrance to Andalusia Farm. Many of O’Connor’s stories were written on this farm. Photo date: April 2011.

A view of Andalusia Farm. Photo date: April 2011. Some of O’Connor’s letters in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald, Vintage Books, 1980) highlight the author’s life with her widowed mother on the dairy farm, often with a touch of humor.

O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” unfolds on a farm where an old woman and her daughter live together:

The old woman and her daughter were sitting on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time. The old woman slid to the edge of her chair and leaned forward, shading her eyes from the piercing sunset with her hand. The daughter could not see far in front of her and continued to play with her fingers. Although the old woman lived in this desolate spot with only her daughter and she had never seen Mr. Shiftlet before, she could tell, even from a distance, that he was a tramp and no one to be afraid of.

While residing with her elderly mother, Regina, on a mid-Georgia farm,

O’Connor could have easily envisioned such a fictional backdrop.

O’Connor was the only child born to her parents.

One more view of Andalusia Farm. Photo date: April 2011.

The Cline Mansion in Milledgeville, where Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother and three unmarried aunts while attending Peabody High School and Georgia State College for Women. In 1941, one year after O’Connor and her family moved from Savannah to Milledg eville, her father died of lupus, the same disease that would later claim the author’ s life. She was only fifteen when her father passed away. Photo date: April 2011.

Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville (established in 1874) which O’Connor attended. P hoto date: April 2011.

Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville where O’Connor and her family are buried. Photo date: April 2011.

(Top) Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s grave at Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville. Photo date: April 2011.

(Bottom) The O’Connor family lot at Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville. The author’s father, Edward Francis O’Connor, Jr. (1896–1941), and her mother, Regina Lucille Cline O ’Connor (1896–1995), are buried here as well. Photo date: April 2011.

(Top) Flannery O’Connor’s grave at Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville. Photo date: April 2011.

(Bottom) Across the street from Memory Hill Cemetery stands First Baptist Church Milledgeville (founded 1811). O’Connor was a staunch Catholic, but most of her characters are Protestants. Photo date: April 2011.

Selected Further Readings

Biographies of Flannery O’Connor:

Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. U of Tennessee P, 2002.

Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. Back Bay Books, 2010.

O’Donnell, Angela Alaimo. Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith. Liturgical Press, 2015.

Critical Studies of Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction:

Arant, Alison, and Jordan Cofer, ed. Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor. U of Mississippi P, 2020.

Basselin, Timothy J. Flannery O’Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity. Baylor UP, 2013.

Cofer, Jordan. The Gospel According to Flannery O ’Connor: Examining the Role of the Bible in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Giannone, Richard. Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist. 2000. U of South Carolina P, 2010.

Han, John J., ed. Wise Blood: A Re-Consideration. Rodopi, 2011.

Kirk, Connie Ann. Critical companion to Flannery O ’Connor. Facts on File, 2008.

Lake, Christina Bieber. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor. Mercer UP, 2005.

McMullen, Joanne Halleran, and Jon Parrish Peede, ed. Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction. Mercer UP, 2007.

Martin, Regis. Flannery O’Connor: Unmasking the Devil. Sapientia Press of Ave Maria U, 2005.

Walters, Dorothy. Flannery O’Connor. Twayne Publishing, 1973.

Wilson, Jessica Hooten. Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority i n the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cascade Books, 2017.

Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Eerdmans, 2005.

Notes on Contributo rs

Matthew Bardowell <Matthew.Bardowell@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University, where he teaches World Literature, British Literature, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. His research centers on Old Norse and Old English literat ure as well as the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and his recen t scholarship engages questions concerning emotion and a esthetics. His work appears in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Mythlore, and The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. He has served as a co-editor (with John J. Han and C. Clark Triplett) of Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction: The Moral Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Bardowell holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University.

Dr. Jane Beal (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) is Professor of English Literature at the University of La Verne in southern California. She received her BA, MA, and PhD in English, with specializations in medieval and early modern literature, and an MFA in Creative Writing. She also received a Certificate in Midwifery from Mercy in Action College of Midwifery and a Graduate Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Bay Path University. She has taught at Wheaton College, Colorado Christian University, and the University of La Verne, as well as UC Davis, and served as a midwife in the U.S., Uganda, and the Philippines. She is the author or editor of eight academic books and over forty peer-reviewed articles and chapters, primarily on the Pearl-poet, the Polychronicon, and the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien. She also regularly publishes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her poetry collections include Sanctuary, Rising, and Song of the Selkie, eight haiku micro-chaps, and three audio recording projects combining poetry and music, “Songs from the Secret Life,” “Love Song,” and co-created with her brother, the saxophonist and composer Andrew Beal, “The Jazz Bird.” She loves to share her legacy of learning with her students to help them grow as whole persons and fulfill their dreams for their lives.

Matthew C. Easter <Matthew.Easter@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Director of Christian Studies at Missouri Baptist University. He has published peer -reviewed journal articles on Hebrews, Paul, and the Gospel of Luke. His first book, Faith and the Faithfulness of Jesus in Hebrews (2014), is published with Cambridge University Press. He recently published the “faith in Christ” entry in the 2nd edition of The Dictionary of Paul and His Letters and a chapter on Hebrews’ parallels to 2 Maccabees 7 in Hebrews in Context. He holds degrees from Southwest Baptist University (B.A.), Duke Divinity School (M.Div.), and the University of Otago (Ph.D.).

John J. Han <john.han@mobap.edu> is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Theology at Missouri Baptist University. Han is the author, editor, coeditor, or translator of 35 books, including Wise Blood: A ReConsideration (Rodopi, 2011), The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature (Peter Lang, 2015), Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction (McFarland, 2018), Dawn Returns: The Haiku Society of America Members’ Anthology 2022 (HSA, 2022), and Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction: Essays on the Moral Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). He is co-editing, with C. Clark Triplett, a volume tentatively titled Cached in the Hills: Critical Essays on Ozarks Literature. A native of South Korea, he earned his M.A. from Kansas State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Bryan Mead <bmead@etbu.edu> is Assistant Professor of English at East Texas Baptist University where he also serves as the Director of Academic Success. Bryan teaches courses in film studies and composition and is the author of Writing in Film Studies, From Profession al Practice to Practical Pedagogy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024). He has also published numerous articles and reviews which can be found in journals such as the Journal of Religion & Film , Film & History, Americana: The Journal of American Popular C ulture, and The Journal of European Popular Culture , along with essays in edited collections such as J.R.R. Tolkien and the Arts: A Theology of Subcreation (Square Halo Books, 2021) and The Arts of Memory and the Poetics of Remembering (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Mead holds a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University.

Julie Steinbeck <Julie.Steinbeck@mobap.edu> is a St. Louis-area native, wife to William, and mom to Maria and Joanie. She enjoys the English language, dogs, hot beverages, music, and new recip es. As a pastor’s wife and family to multiple members of the clergy, she is also wellacquainted with church leadership culture. After graduating from Truman State University with her Master o f Arts in Education, Steinbeck began teaching college English in 2016 and is the Director of First-Year Composition at Missouri Baptist Universit y, where she teaches freshmen how to write and seniors how to parse sentences and finalize their capstone projects. She cannot be left unsupervised in bookstores.

Todd Sukany <tasukany@gmail.com>, a Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over forty years. He holds degrees from Southwest Baptist University and Southeast Missouri State University. His work has appeared in Ancient Paths, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité , and The Ekphrastic Review. Sukany co-authored four books of poetry under the title Book of Mirrors with Raymond Kirk. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing music, loving three children, their

spouses, six grandchildren, caring for three rescued dogs, and four rescued cats.

C. Clark Triplett <Clark.Triplett@mobap.edu> is Emeritus Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Psychology at Missouri Baptist University. He served as co-editor (with John Han) of The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature (Peter Lang, 2015), a co-editor (with John Han and Ashley Anth ony) of Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction (McFarland, 2018), and a co-editor (with John Han and Matthew Bardowell) of Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction: Essays on the Moral Imagination (Bloomsbury Academic, Feb. 2024). He is coediting, with John Han, a volume tentatively titled Cached in the Hills: Critical Essays on Ozarks Literature. Triplett’s poems have appeared in Cantos, Fireflies’ Light, and the Asahi Haikuist Network. He earned a B.A. from Southwest Baptist University, an M.Div. from Covenant Theological Seminary, an M.S.Ed. from Southern Illinois Univ ersity at Edwardsville, and a Ph.D. from Saint Louis University.

John Zheng <zheng@mvsu.edu> teaches English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor for two literary and scholarly journals: Valley Voices: A Literary Revie w and Journal of Ethnic American Literature. His books published in 2023 are The Dog Years of Reeducation: Poems (Madville Publishing), Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. (University Press of Mississippi), and Just Looking: Haiku Sequences about the Mississi ppi Delta (Buttonhook Press). He has published dozens of photo essays in journals including Arkansas Review, Intégrité, Mississippi Folklife, The Right Words: A Magazine of Nonfiction, and The Southern Quarterly.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Submission Guidelines

Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. Founded in the fall of 2002 with the Institu tional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College, it is published both online and in print copy.

Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles (15-25 pages double spaced), short essays on faith and learning (8-12 pages double spaced), book reviews (4-8 pages double spaced), and poetry (5-15 poems single spaced) for consideration. Along with your work, w e need an author bio of 100-125 words written in third person and in complete sentences. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1 for inclusion in the fall issue.

Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith -learning integration. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

 the current state and/or future of the church-related college

 history of Christian liberal arts education

 Christianity and contemporary culture

 a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity

 service learning

 academic freedom in a Christian context

 implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines

 Christian education in the non-Western world

 global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith-learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic. Articles are expecte d to be research-based but must f ocus on the author’s original thought. We also do not consider articles that use more than twenty-five secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especially lengthy ones, should be used sparingly.

Considering that most Intégrité readers are Christian scholars and educators not necessarily having expertise on multiple disciplines, articles, short essays, and book reviews must be written in concise, precise, an d easy-to-understand style. Writers are recommended to follow what William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White suggest in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write in a way that comes naturally; and avoid fancy words.

For citation style, refer to the current edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Articles and short essays should include intext citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Enter endnotes manually instead of using the “Insert Endnote” function in a wordprocessing program. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after direct quotations.