What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  Putting aside for the moment the subject of truth, of how the word truth is to be understood, there is the issue I mentioned earlier, that is, the way we speak of and to one another, and the consequences that follow from the words we speak, as well as from the kind of speech we give our attention to. In Matthew 12:36–37, Jesus says, “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” This seems to me to imply that one’s spiritual state remains an open question until the end of life, so far as we can be aware. Be that as it may. It is interesting to note that the religious right and the dystopian news outlets arose together. I speculate that this Christianism I have spoken of needed proof of a radical qualitative difference between itself and society at large. So: Secularism bestrides the land like Gog and Magog, and Christians are treated with contempt and hostility. None of this is true, but it is a cherished belief that allows comfortable people to reckon themselves among the martyrs. This need to see unredeemed America as a netherworld has been served by tales of flaming inner cities and raging crime rates. The difference between reality according to Walter Cronkite and reality according to Glenn Beck is to be seen as a measure of decline in the culture, not as the recent exploitation of a burgeoning market for bleak and angry sensationalism. Again, the fact that these outlets are themselves vulgar and bent on inflicting injury is not a problem, since by these means they fuel the excitements of the religious right. This certainly ought not to be considered a benefit to them as Christians, but it does indeed consolidate them as a faction.

  Of course Christianity has never been innocent of this sort of thing. I grant that claims to traditionalism going back to antiquity can be made by those prone to unhealthy collective excitements. I am about to write a series of lectures on the Old Testament, a text with which Christian interpretation has always struggled mightily. My impulse tends to be to find my way back to an early stage in the development of an issue, since the trajectory it will follow is often established then. I have just read Saint John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Obscurity of the Old Testament. Chrysostom means “golden-mouthed,” a sobriquet given to him because of the famous eloquence of his preaching. He was the bishop of Constantinople, a prolific contemporary of Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome, a figure of great importance to the subsequent development of the church. To explain the obscurity, from the point of view of Christian readers, of the Hebrew Bible, he mentions the problems that always arise in translation, the difficulty of approaching any experience that is new to one, and so on. But the explanation he dwells on and elaborates is of another kind altogether: The Hebrew Scriptures, he says, are obscure because God did not want the Jews to understand them. Their prophets were actually writing for and in anticipation of Christians. He says, “They [the prophets] forecast many troubles for Jews as well as the fact that whereas they will be rejected, we will be given a place, and the fact that the Temple will be destroyed to rise no more, while Jerusalem will fall and be trampled on by all.” And “if they [the Jews] heard this from the inspired authors unmistakably, they would immediately have killed those telling them this,” being “frenzied and savage,” “bloodthirsty people.” He says, “They would also have burnt the inspired books themselves if they understood their contents.” He may not have invented the use of anti-Semitism as a hermeneutical tool, but he has certainly provided an explicit early instance of it. If his words have influenced subsequent interpretation, this is surely not their final, gravest consequence. In any case, this virus sleeps in the cells of even very modern biblical scholarship.

  Irony of ironies, Chrysostom turns from this diatribe against the Jews to an exhortation against speaking ill of people. There could hardly be a more terrible instance of the power of the evil he condemns than the impact of his own words on the subsequent history of Jews and Christendom. Do we hear comparable slanders now? I suppose that depends on whether or not we believe Hillary Clinton might really have been running a child prostitution ring from a pizza parlor. There seems to be very little limit to how bizarre or scurrilous these rumors can be and yet survive and multiply. As I have said, there are those who devoutly wish the worst to be true. So rumors have a medium conducive to their growth.

  When Chrysostom was wise he was very wise indeed, and his comments on evil or merely ill-considered speech are very relevant to our own historical moment. Again, he is speaking to Christians, now in terms of their obligations as Christians, which include that rather neglected virtue, self-restraint. He says, “Just as if we opened the tombs we would fill the cities with pestilence, so if we had no qualms about opening vile mouths we would fill all our associates with a worse disease. Hence the necessity of placing a door, a bar and a curb on our mouth.” And, “Let us teach the need to keep a curb on our tongue and not simply to give vent to everything that comes to mind, not to criticize the brethren, not to bite and devour one another. People who do this in words are worse than those biting the body: the latter bite the body with their teeth, the former bite the soul with their words, they wound reputations, they leave an incurable injury.” And, “Instead of bruiting abroad others’ vices let us cloak them over … Let us not bite and chew each others’ wounds.” This is a ghastly metaphor, worse than the other he offers, of vile talk as flies that land on wound after wound, carrying infection everywhere. Then again, this present time, when we find ourselves struggling to maintain our civic life because of our loss of the ethos of restraint, civility, and truthfulness, could lead us to consequences we can not yet foresee, when his metaphors will seem entirely apt. We know this can happen.

  It may be the case that Chrysostom’s prohibitions against vile language pertain especially to “the brethren,” fellow Christians. Perhaps it is they who are to be spared these attacks. Certainly they seem always to have needed to have such restraint preached to them. Paul tells the church at Galatia, “The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” To the Ephesians he says, “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear … put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” We in this Christian country are consuming one another now, bringing disgrace to the faith with our internecine ferocities, then alarmed that the church’s numbers dwindle. A thing that does tend to be forgotten in all this is that Clinton is a Methodist, Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, as am I. Even if these protections Chrysostom calls for are narrower than we might wish, they should at least be broad enough to shelter the three of us. If Clinton were as notoriously corrupt as—I struggle and fail to think of a notoriously corrupt Methodist—on what grounds is she excluded from the flock? Just the same might be asked about Obama. Chrysostom says of Paul that “when he sees others also passing judgment on other people’s vices,” he warns them, “Do not judge before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and disclose the intentions of the heart.” If it is wrong to judge actual vices, how much worse must it be to condemn others for invented vices, concocted for no other reason than to slander and wound them? There are other inducements now, too—ratings, politics, the gratification of an audience that wants to hear the worst, then, perhaps, share it over coffee cake. Perhaps a new vocabulary is needed for new variants of old sins. Perhaps not.

  These days people can be heard wondering how we have come to this place of rancor and division, and how we can move beyond it. To effect change in a culture so vast and complex as this one would seem imponderably difficult. But there are a good many Christians among us, even if only the faction who consider themselves an embattled minori
ty can claim to qualify. They, and all the rest of us who accept the authority of Scripture, can find many passages that describe the Christian life, which is, as it says in Titus 3:2, “to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone.” In Galatians, on the one hand Paul says, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” And on the other hand, in the first chapter of Romans, he lists the sins of the worst pagans. Among other things, “they were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters.” The list is long. I quote from it to make the point that malicious speech ranks among the gravest transgressions. In the third chapter, again describing sinfulness, Paul quotes from Psalms and Isaiah: “There is no one who shows kindness, not even one.” And, “Their throats are open graves; they use their tongues to deceive.” And, “The venom of vipers is under their lips.” And, “Their tongues are full of cursing and bitterness.” He tells the Colossians that as Christians they must give up old sins. “You must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth.” To Timothy he says, “Avoid profane chatter, for it will lead people into more and more impiety, and their talk will spread like gangrene.” Peter says, “Rid yourself … of all malice and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.” Damaging speech, the use of words to do harm, is clearly both a mark of sinfulness and a major sin in its own right. Other kinds of evil actions proceed from it. So Scripture tells us, so history tells us.

  In the ordinary course of life we can evaluate what we hear and apply standards of plausibility. People who seem to respect the norms of courtesy and rectitude and abide by them are probably not up to anything too outlandish, so we give them the benefit of the doubt—unless we nurse a discreditable motive of our own for wanting to see them taken down a peg. Only if some kind of evidence emerges or if we see something with our own eyes are we inclined to consider a slander to reflect more discredit on the person who is its object than on the bearer of opprobrium. Gossips are a type, often resentful, generally looking to establish a bond of friendship or intimacy at the expense of someone’s privacy or reputation. If we choose to tolerate them, it is often because we can’t avoid them. But we know who they are, and this is another means we have of appraising what they say.

  But when the objects of slander are not individuals but groups, so that the departure of the generous, upright, intelligent individuals one actually knows from the characterizations that damn the group as a whole are to the credit of those individuals only, and can be excluded from evidence that the characterization of the group is false, then people lose the stabilizing tendency to consult experience in order to establish the limits of probability. And when no source can be identified for whispers and slurs, so that the source seems to be, or is, a consensus among a population with which one identifies, they are granted plausibility on these grounds. Historically one great consequence of all this is what we now call polarization, by no means a new phenomenon—Jews were ghettoized, African Americans were ghettoized—and increasingly most of us isolate ourselves, mutually in our case, as affinity groups or perhaps aversion groups, the division between us based not so much on origins or race or even faith as on our sources of information, or of what we credit as information. Even when we are not isolated from one another as, for example, urban and rural, even when, at holidays, we have dinner around the same table, many of us can no longer simply talk politics without igniting a battle of conflicting certitudes. A substrate of all this is religion—so, at least, many people say and believe. I acknowledge passion on the side that identifies itself as religious, but neither this passion nor the worldview that sustains it resembles religion as I understand the word. In any case, people who feel they are defending religion by looking at the world the way they do cannot, on principle, accept the legitimacy of another view of it.

  My teaching and writing have given me an unusual perspective on all this. When I applied for a faculty position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the job description said that candidates should be able to teach the Bible as literature. People always seem to be surprised to hear this. I suppose writers are assumed to be raffish sorts with self-destructive habits and an ironic indifference to the sacred in all its forms. This notion must have set in at about the time that French painters became forever associated with berets and waxed mustaches. In my experience, writers are estimable people with an extraordinarily broad range of interests and sympathies. It is appropriate to teach Scripture in programs like ours because the Bible is so important to our literature that young writers are usually interested in it, if only because it helps them to understand earlier writers they admire. Many of them were uncomfortable at being seen carrying a Bible on campus because the groups who have been so successful at claiming Christianity as their own exclusive province have also been successful in associating it with intolerance, guns, and hostility to science, among other things. In the present environment, Christianity is not scorned or rejected because it is the Gospel of faith, hope, and love but because this Christianity of theirs, on whatever pretext, is determined to bring bad news to the poor and the stranger, and is even self-righteous about this. People who claim to care for the future of Christianity should listen to their critics rather than falling back on resentment and indulging the notion that they are embattled and abused by rampant secularism. They would learn that the faith they urge on the rest of us is precisely deficient in Christianity. If slander is a factor in all this, the first object of slander, the one traduced, is Jesus of Nazareth. And this is not the work of the atheists.

  I write books that are straightforwardly Christian, and I write religious and theological essays. A question I am asked, almost always by Christians, is: Weren’t you afraid? This question truly, deeply gives me the creeps. I have been confirmed again and again in the belief that I live in a free country. I write about what is on my mind. I love the scale and poetry of metaphysical theology. It has a beauty appropriate to its subject, like Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I am unusual in my interests, but I have suffered absolutely no negative consequences for my attention to them. I have been given extremely generous reviews by critics in this country and abroad, who often say they have no knowledge of or attraction to religion. When I am reminded that there is the possibility of a kind of fear that might have kept me from living out my own interests, the thought appalls me. When I think how many people there must be who suppress their interests, fundamentally misdirect their lives, out of groundless and uncharitable fear of other people, I am appalled all over again. The worst part of it is that they imagine they are coerced by other people when they are in fact trapped in their own fears, and they resent those imaginary others for posing this dreadful threat. They imagine the outside world as being attended with every undesirable trait they associate with secularism, having invented most of them or learned them from the like-minded. There is a parable about this. It was fear that made the servant bury his talent. Of course he did in fact have an alarming master to fear, and still he was shamed and impoverished for his failure to summon a necessary courage. This present brand of Christianism speaks of itself as threatened and embattled, and it approaches the rest of the country cowering and threatening and wagging its finger, then declares it is on account of its exceptional piety that so many people find it unattractive. Paul says in Galatians 5:1 that it was “for freedom Christ has set us free.” We as a country claim to count ourselves fortunate in our forebears, who have, in a worldlier sense, made us free. And what is our freedom for? To be explored, lived out, enjoyed, enlarged. For freedom Washington and Lincoln made us free. The great surrender of meaningful freedom, the great cession of freedom, is the habit of fear. And we become a threat to the freedom of other people when, consciously or not, we shape our lives and our sense of the world around fearing them.

&nb
sp; Of course there are those who are afraid that the larger world might make them depart from their faith, in the church or in a conversion experience—not intentionally, merely in the course of its own rambunctious life. The assurance of salvation is, in every form, conditional under scrutiny, so that assurance itself can be a source of fear and anxiety—of doubt, in fact, which is for some the thing most to be feared. From time to time I am asked by people at religious colleges if I was not uncomfortable teaching in a big, secular, public university. In fact I love the humane, heroic openness of my big, secular, public university, and the phenomenon of American public institutions of every kind. By my lights, a middle school that admits everyone and tries to teach everyone is more effectively Christian than a school that practices any kind of exclusion, even if no specifically religious word is ever spoken there. Many people now think in terms of a Manichaean struggle between secularism and all we hold dear. On these grounds they have launched an attack on American civil society, formerly a famous strength, which they see as secular because it is nonsectarian. It seems to be assumed that any cultural or intellectual jostling that results from a diverse population together in one place must be hostile and threatening. Lord have mercy. We are normalizing cowardice.