The Living Word

Reading literature with a Protestant ethic.

I hated the Bible as a teenager. I hated being being asked if I had “read my Bible” that day, or “spent time in the Word” lately—though thankfully my parents, usually the ones asking, didn’t use that phrase that I found irritating even then.

I don’t think I hated the Bible itself; I was unnerved by the lack of guidance I had for approaching it, the uncertainty about whether what was “supposed to happen” actually would. Sometimes more intellectual or zealous evangelical men would become Bible nerds in their old age, reading alongside a Greek or Hebrew commentary. I certainly had a teen-marketed devotional or two throughout the years, and my family had a copy of My Utmost for His Highest I would sometimes pick up instead of the Bible. But generally speaking evangelicals reject outside authority over their reading of scripture.¹ You aren’t supposed to need an extra book, or expertise, for God to speak to you through his word. It’s supposed to be a direct, mystical connection that can come alive no matter what you know.

And sometimes that would happen. I would be struggling, feeling sad or alone or sinful, and some passage would seem like it was speaking to exactly what I was feeling, like I had somehow been guided to it at that particular moment. It usually didn’t happen—that was the frustrating part—but sometimes it did. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how that worked: when you are already conditioned to understand your feelings through the themes, tropes, and vocabulary of Christian scripture, it’s no surprise that you’d find them reflected there. The books of the Bible I read most often—Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—are aphoristic wisdom literature onto which one can easily Rorschach your thoughts. But nevertheless, even if I didn’t always find it, maybe rarely did, I thought I was supposed to have this dynamic interaction with the text, for it to come alive and speak something to me. To come away changed, with new inspiration and direction.

I thought about this recently while mulling over the intense, almost devotional way I tend to read fiction, and, in a more general sense, the Christian residues in my soul that I do not always recognize as such. I used to think of these in terms of ideas and propositions: for all its supernaturalism, fundamentalist evangelicalism is a modernist form of Christianity that took shape as a rationalist, argumentative response to the rise of American Progressivism. From there flowed all of the presuppositions that shaped my early beliefs: the Bible is not just spiritual, it’s not sacred literature, it is a total intellectual system, a repository of scientific fact and irrefutable argument.

Young evangelicals who experiences crises of faith usually argue their way out of this (patently absurd and untenable) conception of scripture with a similar set of tools: the Bible is not a scientific text, it’s wrong, it’s false, etc. Once you have done with those arguments, once you have refuted them, you are no longer a Christian. I realize now how deeply evangelical it was to conclude I could not continue to practice Christianity, or find meaning in its practices, because it would be hypocritical to do so while not believing its propositions. (This is completely in accordance with the fundamentalist conviction that most people who profess to be Christians, casual churchgoers and Catholics, for example, are not actually Christians, because they merely practice without belief.) Because Christianity is imprinted upon you as a such a matter of intellectual proposition, you attack the ideas themselves and work your way toward “truer” ideas—either a less propositional Christianity or some type of atheism.

The longer I have “not been” a Christian, however, the more I realize that there are whole dimensions of Christianity that are not contained in those propositions that I argued through logically and formally rejected. They are more stylistic, ethical, or even aesthetic. For one thing, Christian scripture is a literary inheritance, a set of references that still echo in my language and phrasing. Then there is a whole range of “softer” beliefs that would fall into the category of interpersonal ethics or stances: things like belief in human equality and devaluation of external markers of status and achievement, or a sense of intrinsic worth and an instinctual revulsion toward instrumentalism. Considering the varieties of interpersonal generosity—understanding, forgiveness, love—to be purer, and of higher value, if they are given gratuitously and without condition. The sense of personal calling, of being put on the earth to carry out a mission, not just to exist or to enjoy oneself. The habit of intense self-examination. And so on.

I wonder if that early experience of communion with scripture instilled the expectation of a certain kind of interaction with texts, a stance or approach, if you will. I know for a fact that I once read philosophy that way, looking for some kind of capital-T truth. I’ve often said I like novels that feel like they are reading me, not the other way around—that seem to have looked into my soul and spoken back to me. I first remember having that experience with novels in my early twenties and thought, I thought that was just something in my head, I didn’t know it was a thing other people think about. There was a passing line in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, to take a tiny example, about a young character “not being sure yet if he was a hard or a soft person”—something that had occurred to me vaguely when I saw what other people were doing with their lives and realized those things required a kind of hardness toward the world that I would never have. I subconsciously search for that feeling in literature, writers who seem to have had my thoughts before me and, perhaps, have worked farther ahead and might show me the next turn. With certain writers or novels, the chemistry is so immediate that it feels like hearing from God. I’ve initially read them so devotionally that I adopted their categories, their phrasing, their logic as a lens for understanding my own feelings and behavior; only after multiple rereads could I begin to dissociate, to understand that it was “just a book.”

This is not necessarily a good way to read, certainly not a very critical one! It is more reflexive than considered. But it does give reading a certain kind of stakes that I personally find appealing and motivating. With some additional reasoning, I could perhaps expand that impulse into something more defensible: I don’t insist on identifying directly with a character, story, or writer, but I do expect a good novel to interrogate the world with an intelligence similar to the one I bring to reading it—to at least take its questions as seriously as I take mine, even if the questions themselves are different. Those are usually some deep question of human meaning, but they can also be political, historical, or even formal. I think this is why I am especially impatient with novels—contemporary literary fiction is a frequent offender—that feel merely aesthetic, that are exercises in style and skill without having anything in particular to say. That feel like they exist simply because the author wanted to be a writer, not because they burned so hot inside someone that they had to be written. That lack, for want of a better term, existential oomph.

Is there something puritanical about this? Something overzealous and evangelical? Too propositional and mission-driven? I certainly have nothing against novels that are entertaining, that don’t take themselves too seriously, that are just an exciting story, equivalent to a well-made TV show. (They are infinitely preferable to the worst kind of novel, the kind that takes itself too seriously while also having nothing to say!) I read one of these recently: distinctive voice, completely engrossing, page-turning, a pleasure from cover to cover. I’d call it a very good novel and would be proud if I could write something so accomplished. Deserves any word of praise the New York Times wants to give it. But I found myself disappointed that it had begun to slip out of my mind only a few days later, that there weren’t passages I wanted to return to and marinate in, that it left me with nothing to think about. Is it too much to ask for it a book to, you know, change my life?

1. This is surely not what theologically literature, educated evangelicals believe, but it is very much the popular evangelical attitude.