Page 1076 – Christianity Today (2024)

Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams has long been an unjustly overlooked First Lady. Married to John Quincy Adams in 1797, she served a long and substantial apprenticeship for her role as First Lady, beginning with her years as the wife of the U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary at the royal courts of Prussia (1797 to 1801), Tsarist Russia (1809-15), and Great Britain (1815-17). For the eight years of James Monroe's presidency (1817-25) she was the wife of the secretary of state, in which capacity she served as an almost de facto First Lady, recognized as the leader of Washington society, setting precedents controversial at the time for entertaining foreign dignitaries and congressional leaders, hosting balls with hundreds of guests, and winning her rivalry with the wives of other cabinet secretaries. The climax of this role occurred on January 8, 1824, when the Adamses gave a giant ball for a thousand guests in their F Street mansion to honor the ninth anniversary of Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans. (John Quincy had hoped this gesture might encourage Jackson to become his running mate in the election that fall, but of course Jackson intended to run for president himself.) Washingtonians remembered the ball for many decades afterward. In retrospect, Louisa Catherine Adams remains one of the major First Ladies of the 19th century, comparable to Dolley Madison.

Two new books from Yale and Harvard presses should remedy the neglect of Louisa Catherine Adams, even though—unfortunately—neither one deals directly with her years in the White House. Margery Heffron's biography, Louisa Catherine, was tragically left truncated when the author died in December 2011, just at the point when her narrative would have taken up John Quincy Adams' election as president. LCA herself wrote neither a diary during her husband's presidency nor a memoir about it later, so there is nothing from this period in the volume of her writings edited by Margaret Hogan and C. James Taylor. (It would be surprising if no letters she wrote as First Lady survived, but Hogan and Taylor make no mention of this.)

Religion provides one of the significant aspects of LCA's career here recorded. Raised in the Church of England, though she attended a Roman Catholic convent school during the part of her childhood spent in France, she retained her Episcopal identity even after marrying into the Congregational Adams family. The half-century primarily covered by the two books under review, 1775 to 1824, was also the period when the Congregational Church split first into Orthodox and Liberal wings and finally into two separate denominations, one remaining Congregational and the other becoming Unitarian. The Adamses and their local church in Quincy, Massachusetts, followed the Liberal and then the Unitarian persuasion. But Louisa Catherine herself remained aloof from this development, continuing to attend Episcopal services when the opportunity presented itself. Her private comments deplore Unitarian theology, even though she could praise the sincerity and devotion of individual Unitarians (who included, of course, her husband). Religion clearly played a part of day-to-day importance in LCA's life; many of her journal entries take the form of prayers.

Louisa Catherine Adams alludes to political issues in her writings, particularly the Missouri Question. Her family were originally from Maryland and went back there after her father's European business failed. She shared her husband's strong anti-slavery principles yet once confided mixed feelings to her journal, because she knew at first hand that southern whites feared emancipation would lead to race war (LCA, Dec. 24, 1835). She deplored the decline of American politics since the days of Washington, blaming it on factionalism and (after 1829) on the rise of political parties. She strongly urged her husband to campaign more overtly for the presidency in the run-up to the election of 1824, though he resisted her advice out of high principle. He eventually won when the House of Representatives chose him on the first ballot in February 1825, the only time since the passage of the Twelfth Amendment that the Electoral College has failed to deliver any candidate an absolute majority.

In private life, Louisa Catherine Adams was often very unhappy. Her husband insisted on leaving two of their boys, aged six and eight, with his parents while he and she went off to European diplomatic duties for the next six years (1809-15). In the words of her biographer, LCA "never forgave him—or herself: 'Oh this agony of agonies! Can ambition repay such sacrifices! Never!! And from that hour to the end of time life to me will be a succession of miseries.' " Fulfilling her prophecy of misery, those two sons both died in their twenties, one of them in an accident that may have been a suicide, the other an alcoholic. LCA also suffered several miscarriages, a stillbirth, and the death of her one-year-old daughter. Only one of her offspring, Charles Francis Adams, survived to have the distinguished career his parents desperately wanted for all of them. LCA's father's business failure prevented him from paying the dowry he had promised her, which she felt for many years as a humiliation, even though her husband and his family handled it tactfully. She often records arguments and quarrels with her husband; both of them could be cross and prickly. John Quincy Adams always prevailed, his wife invariably deferring to the patriarchal customs of their time. Louisa Catherine Adams also suffered from frequent ill health, including recurring bouts of erysipelas and depression.

Both of these books portray their subject highly favorably and make a persuasive case on her behalf. Nevertheless it did occur to me that they also provide evidence to confirm at least one of the accusations made by her contemporary critics (naturally, her husband's opponents too). They called her an alien to American life; and indeed, her youth and young adulthood in Europe had left a mark on her, in addition to her fluency in French. She never felt entirely comfortable with the New England culture of her husband's family, and she did hold the unrestrained strivings of Washington society contemptible compared with the well-defined etiquette of European courts.

Despite such secret feelings, and her frequent frustrations, bereavements, and sicknesses, Louisa Catherine Adams rose magnificently to the challenges of high society in both Europe and America, significantly assisting her husband's diplomatic and political career. She was even a feminist in the present sense of the word. She wished that the letters of her mother-in-law, Abigail Adams, would be published "to gladden the hearts of many a timid female whose rays too feebly shine, not for want of merit but for want of confidence… . [Woman should demonstrate a] native mind clear full, and vigorous in its perceptions, as capable of solid attainment, and enlarged improvement; as that of man." LCA decided to write up her dangerous trip across Europe from St. Petersburg to Paris, made in 1815 without her husband but with a baby, just after Napoleon's tumultuous and bloody retreat from Moscow. She wanted her account to "show that many undertakings which appear very difficult and arduous to my Sex, are by no means so trying as imagination forever depicts them—And that energy and discretion, follow the necessity of exertion, to protect the fancied weakness of feminine imbecility."

When Louisa Catherine Adams died in May 1852, Congress adjourned for her funeral, an unprecedented honor paid to a First Lady. At her request, the funeral was an Episcopal service.

Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and professor emeritus of history at UCLA. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When I was a child, I read and re-read books. To the frustration of my parents, my reading was decidedly indiscriminate: Frances Hodgson Burnett, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and The Baby-Sitters Club. Little Women, Elisabeth Prentiss' Stepping Heavenward, and those series from Christian presses—the Mandie and Elizabeth Gail mysteries I found in the little-used church library (in which I, being the only child of the only pastor, and living in the parsonage next door, spent many lovely solitary hours browsing and reading).

In those days, I conceived of the world and most people and their varied creations—books, films, art—as being clearly split in two: Christian on one side; non-Christian (and possibly anti-Christian) on the other. If I doubted the validity of this assessment of the world, I did not know how to articulate it. When, in my reading of "secular" books—any that would not be sold at the Christian bookstore—a character happened to pray or go to church or refer to a biblical story, my response was joyful surprise: maybe Ramona Quimby was saved, after all.

Paterson's books did not appear on the shelves of our church library or upon those at the Christian bookstore.

Neither, in those days, was I able to articulate the difference between greater and lesser quality. I read everything—classics and junk—voraciously and repeatedly. It was, however, the books I now recognize as "better"—the books my parents were pleased to see me reading—that I re-read more frequently than the others, thus inadvertently proving C. S. Lewis' contention in Experiment in Criticism.

Among the books my parents were pleased to see me returning to were those by Katherine Paterson. My favorite, then and now, was Jacob Have I Loved, the story of Sara Louise "Wheeze" Bradshaw, who lives on a fictional island in the Chesapeake, and in the shadow of her tremendously gifted and beautiful twin, Caroline, struggling to make her own way in a world where her options seem to be narrowly circ*mscribed. Sara Louise stops praying and stops going to church; at one point, she says, "if I had believed in God I could have cursed him and died." She doesn't curse God, and when at last she finds her calling, God's grace and providence are subtly invoked.

At the time I had no idea that Paterson was a pastor's wife, and that she had been a Presbyterian missionary in Japan; the daughter of missionaries, Paterson was born in China in 1932. Her books did not appear on the shelves of our church library or upon those at the Christian bookstore. They are full of irreverence and doubt, cussing and bad attitudes. Indeed, Paterson's most highly acclaimed books—including Jacob Have I Loved and also Bridge to Terebithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins—have been among her most frequently banned and challenged, not least by Christians fearful, for example, of the supposedly pagan dabbling in certain passages in Bridge to Terebithia that most readers would probably be inclined to describe as "children playing imaginatively in the woods."

This particular irony is not lost on Paterson, who, in her new memoir Stories of My Life, remarks on the theological conservatism of her parents—both of whom loved those of Katherine's books they lived to read. Paterson, who served a term as the National Ambassador for Children's Literature, also describes being viewed suspiciously for her Christianity: "It seems in this day and age it would be more forgivable to say you were once a prostitute than to reveal the fact that you were once a Christian missionary."

As Paterson tells it, she went to Japan as a missionary because she didn't want to burden the world with "another mediocre writer." When, after reading a beautifully written essay of Katherine's, a professor suggested she try her hand at writing professionally, Paterson demurred. As a lifelong reader and a summa cum laude graduate in English literature, the young Katherine Womeldorf was sure she "knew what great writing was," and "had no intention of being a writer."

"Maybe," her teacher replied, "that's what God is calling you to be."

Katherine could not yet fathom why God might need HER for such a purpose, so for a time she lived and worked in Japan as a missionary—a transformative experience, as she tells it. Katherine's family, the Womeldorfs, had had to flee China several times in the 1930s and '40s, including just prior to the infamous "Rape of Nanking," and though she tells the story gently, it is clear that Katherine, who strongly identified with Chinese culture (at age two, she spoke Chinese more fluently than most Chinese two-year-olds), harbored a share of prejudice that was resolved, finally, by living among and learning to love Japanese people: "to be loved by people you thought you hated is an experience I wish everyone could have," she writes.

Later, after she married a pastor, John Paterson, and started a family of four children (two "the old fashioned way" and two adopted), Katherine felt the urge to create something that wasn't torn up, dirtied, or eaten by the end of the day. And so she began to write—"something every day," "sometimes in five minute snatches." Her first published work was called Who Am I? (a volume intended for the Sunday school curriculum, commissioned by the Presbyterian church), but it was stories that she loved and longed to create. After years of having short stories and poems rejected, Paterson resolved instead to write one chapter of a novel each week; even if no one published it, she reasoned, this practice would, at the end of a year or so, give her a book, and therefore a sense of accomplishment. Her first novel, The Sign of the Chrysanthemum, was published when she was 41 years old.

Since then, Paterson has won the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award twice; she has received the Hans Christian Andersen Award (often referred to as the Nobel Prize of children's literature) and other noteworthy prizes. But the modesty of her ambitions after winning her first Newbery (she resolved never to buy dried skim milk again, and never has) persists to this day. "Gratitude, unlike fame, is something you can actually feel," she writes. Her joy is in the creation of her work and in the pleasure and instruction it has offered to her readers. Stories of My Life—itself appropriate for young readers, but of potential interest to those who write for children and to all fans of Paterson's work—is graced with her humility and her gentle humor; it also offers insight into her novels.

Due to her family's frequent relocation, young Katherine was often the "new kid," an outcast who spoke English with a British accent, wore cast-off clothes, and ate odd, meager lunches. As a first-grader, she was the only child in her class who didn't receive a Valentine card. When her mother suggested that she write a novel about that day, Katherine replied, "Why mother […] all my books are about the day I didn't get any Valentines!" Indeed; it is the marginal, the lonely, the poor and the poor in spirit whom Paterson renders most affectionately, and this preferential option for the wretched has its seeds in Paterson's own experience. "Some of my best writing," she remarks, "has its seeds in [an] awful year"—a year in which she underwent treatment for cancer and in which her young son David's best friend, Lisa, was killed by a bolt of lightning. These events helped to shape Bridge to Terebithia, still one of her best-known books.

Toward the end of Bridge, Jesse Aarons reflects on how Leslie, now dead, "had taken him from the cow pasture and into Terebithia and made him a king." That is what Paterson's vision does; as she told Christianity Today in a 2007 interview: "hope and grace are going to infuse my work—not that I put them in, but because I can't help having them there."

In the final chapter of Stories of My Life, Paterson—now well into her eighties—recounts her beloved husband's "final gift" to her. His last week of life, dying at home of multiple systems atrophy, was "the most blessed week" of Katherine's life: "He showed me in his dying that there is nothing to fear in death."

Paterson and her work still defy easy categorization. Is she a Christian writer? Are her books Christian fiction? But maybe those are the wrong questions to ask. This autobiography, coming late in life from one of the most distinguished contributors to American literature for children, evokes a life lived in wildly varied times and places, with unexpected honor and fame, along with loneliness, mundane troubles, and tragic loss. From beginning to end, it offers a profoundly grace-filled vision—not unlike the one that shapes her novels—in which no one, not even the most foul-mouthed and awkward, is beyond the reach of grace.

Rachel Marie Stone is the author of Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food (InterVarsity Press).

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Nothing in my life makes sense, outside of God.—Father Gregory Boyle

You've got to be able to imagine lives that are different from your own.—Wendell Berry

What happens when you give a prison chaplain an MFA and the freedom to write whatever he wants? You get soaring descriptions of topography and weather: rain-soaked fields and flights of white herons. You get a curious, cautious eye describing migrant worker camps in the Pacific Northwest, high-speed police chases with young Latinos, a gentle reflection on what it means to bless a locked-up man with your own two hands, to watch the Spirit work in ways mysterious and joyful and heartbreaking. You get a book which is not bound by the usual constraints—neither a simplistic "message" nor a collection of motivational stories. Instead, you get a collection of essays in the original sense of the word—wandering, surprising, multiple attempts to translate the story of a young man who found a God he could love and follow in the most unexpected of places.

The radical vulnerability and honesty that is a hallmark of so many people at the margins of society is Wanted's greatest gift to the reader.

The book in question, Chris Hoke's Wanted, was something of a revelation for me. I am a girl raised on missionary biographies, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and strategic missional journals, an avid attender of both Bible colleges and mission conferences. I am also drawn to searing, emotionally honest narratives on the fringes of culture—addiction memoirs, journalistic tomes written on poverty and racism in America, essays mining the depths of contradictions and personal vanities and vulnerabilities. But in all of my reading, it is extremely rare that my two worlds would collide. Christian writing is often divided up into academic, memoir, or "Christian living"—a euphemism for selling the promise of a certain kind of life—and without fail in all three genres the author must be perceived as spiritually successful. There is little surprise left for the reader; we have come to expect what we shall learn from our spiritual guides.

This is where Wanted surprises, and shines. While subverted, the narratives that Hoke weaves back and forth are all a part of his own spiritual autobiography—searching for God in more traditional settings such as church and college and even organic farms—and finding him instead inside jail cells, opposite tatted Latino gangsters. As Hoke tells story after story—of hanging out in the seasonal migrant camps, of traveling with undocumented workers, of Bible studies with groups of incarcerated men, of zipping through a Latin American slum on a dangerous motorcycle—he surprises the reader with his emotional honesty and his unswerving commitment to peeling back layers of the narrative. A deeply poignant and beautiful metaphor he spins out in regard to an inmate's attempted suicide takes a hard left turn, leaving me speechless with both sorrow and a glimmer of understanding. Harsh, compelling statistics about the current rates of incarceration are embedded in a non-traditional redemption narrative. A story detailing violence in Venezuela is juxtaposed with stories of the Holy Spirit falling in visible manifestations, and then finished with a charged look at spiritual disappointment. Each essay ends in a place where you don't expect it.

Based on all of those missionary biographies I consumed, I suspect there are many other Christians in the world hungry for news that is good—eager to know that God is at work and moving in our world, and that he uses damaged people to accomplish his work. We want to know that evil can be overcome, that people can rise out of and above their situations, that repentance and forgiveness are real. We want to know for certain if this is all true.

God is the one who is wanted, after all, in all of our hearts. In a chapter all about praying with schizophrenics, Hoke tells the story of when he found the God he wanted to follow. As a coterie of nice middle-class white people meet in a conference room downstairs to talk about "listening prayer," Hoke is huddled in his upstairs bedroom with a young man who climbed in through his window, growing increasingly agitated and restless as he detoxes from meth. Chris gently suggests the young man pray and ask God any question—and then wait for the answer. The end result is that the young man hears a beautiful word from God that could never have come from his own broken sense of self, and he is able to curl up and sleep on the floor in peace. As Hoke writes, "that night, on the floor of my room with a suicidal schizophrenic, I fell in love with whatever voice said that to my self-hating friend." Earlier, Hoke describes how he had to turn to the mystics in order to accurately describe how he felt when in contact with the prisoners, seeking God together. "I felt like I was falling in love … I wasn't sure if I was falling in love with all of those broken lives at the table with me or the One through whose eyes I was possibly learning to see." For those of us who have seen and felt the glimmers of this amazing, great, good God, one who is constantly speaking life and light to those who are the closest to the graves of despair and shame, Wanted remains an important reminder to continue to seek out this voice—and a reminder that oftentimes, we might have to re-arrange our lives in order to do so.

While most Christian readers are comfortable with redemption narratives, even from surprising places, perhaps we don't want to look too closely at the unbelievably messy trajectory of resurrection—how it moves and works in fits and starts. Perhaps, as Shane Claiborne says, it is because "when people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity."

Hoke's personal journey takes him from being the son of a loving Christian family to the wilds of depression and listlessness in college to finding himself under the tutelage of Bob Ekblad, a longtime prison chaplain and author of Reading the Bible with the Damned. Bob and his wife, Gracie, moved to the Skagit valley in Eastern Washington after years of working with people in Honduras; there, they started a ministry working with the migrants scattered throughout the lush Washington valley. Chris starts visiting the prisons with Bob, learning, as he says, "how to open my heart both to the intimidating and angry men and to ancient supernatural phenomena." Where Ekblad offers in his own book a more scholarly, step-by-step approach to the mechanics of what it means to minister among those whom the world has locked up, Hoke takes the same themes with the eye and ear of an artist. Both are eager to share with their mostly Western-educated readership the joys of reading the Scriptures with those whom they were primarily written by and for—the oppressed of the world. They are also quick to point out the failings of our moralistic interpretations, and how they weigh the heaviest on those at the bottom of the totem pole.

As Hoke meets and prays and studies with the men, both in and out of jail, he scribbles their insights and answers in a notebook. The men notice, and ask him if he is planning on writing a book. A bit sheepish, he admits he has toyed with the idea. They get excited about the idea, chastening him "not to make them sound too white" and scoff at the idea of changing names. They know what the world thinks of them—throwaways, criminals, out of sight, out of mind—and they are beginning to understand what it means when God is on your side, when he thinks the absolute world of you. They recognize in Hoke a desire for true beauty, a world ordered the way it should be, with the last being first, and they are exuberant for these stories to be shared—failures, tragedy, and all. It is this, the radical vulnerability and honesty that is a hallmark of so many people at the margins of society, which is Wanted's greatest gift to the reader. We are invited into the same space that Hoke was—into a space of relationship. A table, as it were, far outside the camps where we've always believed that God resided.

We think of the world of MFAs—"the literary scene"—as completely distinct from the world this book takes us into, with "theology" yet another world of its own. But Chris Hoke shows us that it isn't necessarily so. A voracious reader, a student of words that are pleasing to the tongue and convey moving images in the mind's eye, he draws on Wendell Berry to describe patterns in gang relations and sees similarities between how David James Duncan writes about endangered salmon and his own work with marginalized young men. (Not to be missed: at one point in the book Chris and two of his friends from prison enroll in Duncan's famous fly-fishing class, and the results are both moving and unexpected). I hope many pastors, chaplains, missionaries, and practitioners of all sorts will follow Hoke's example.

D. L. Mayfield lives and writes in the Midwest, where she currently is a part of a Christian order among the poor. Mayfield's writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Image, Christianity Today, and The Other Journal, among others. She has a book of essays forthcoming from HarperOne in 2016.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

So, here's a proposition: The novel was an art form—the art form—of the modern Protestant West, and as the main strength of established Protestant Christendom began to fail in Europe and the United States in recent decades, so did the cultural importance of the novel.

The proposition begins to unravel as soon as we offer it, of course. By the time we are done listing all the demurrals, adjustments, and trimmings, little seems left of the notion that the novel is an artifact of the Protestant West. Little, however. Not nothing. It's hardly a new thesis that the novel exploded out of 18th-century England to become a dominant art form of Western culture. In 1957, for example, the literary critic Ian Watt published a work called The Rise of the Novel, which claimed exactly that. And it's not much of a leap to argue that the Protestantism of those foundational English novelists would have an effect on the shape of the novel down through the ages.

Among academics, Watt is rather casually dismissed these days; certainly his work was significant back in the late 1950s, they might say in distant praise, but it valorizes male British authors, fails to appreciate the truly radical impulses suppressed by all organs of culture (including the publishers of novels), and implies that literature can be judged aesthetically beyond the determinations of power in social politics. All of which is a little odd as a criticism of Watt, for The Rise of the Novel was intent on finding solidly progressive and secularizing reasons for the rise of the novel. Watt looked, as a good socialist might, at economics, particularly the economics of book publishing. And he insisted, as a good rationalist might, on the scientific and industrial changes of society after the Middle Ages and the new understanding of the self as defined by the early modern philosophers, from Descartes to Locke.

What he overlooked is the religious root of it all. Aware of the multiplicities of Protestantism, in all the variety of its post-Reformation sects in Great Britain, Watt nonetheless missed the unities of Protestantism: the central current of manners and morals that Protestantism had created by the time it reached its full cultural victory over Catholicism in England in the 18th century. This general Protestantism was, in a sense, too big for Watt to see: the received setting and given condition of the fiction. It was the secret de Polichinelle of the English novelists, the thing no one bothers to mention because they assume that everyone already knows it. And for too many subsequent literary critics, it became simply unknowable, hidden by their sure and certain faith in the novel as the mirror (or even the motor) of secularization.

The truth is that even after all the necessary caveats and qualifications are registered, the notion of the modern novel's Protestant essence won't disappear—for something in the confident precincts of Western culture really did latch onto extended prose fiction in the 18th century, and it wouldn't let go as the centuries rolled by. Yes, there was poetry and a flowering of music through those long years. Painting, sculpture, dance: all the outpouring of European art from the Renaissance on. Nonetheless, for more than two centuries, the West increasingly took the novel as the art form most central to its cultural self-awareness: the artistic device by which the culture undertook some of its most serious attempts at self-understanding. And the form of that device was developed to explain and solve particularly Protestant problems of the self in modern times.

2.To get to a conclusion like that, of course, we have to understand what we mean by the novel—the Novel with a capital N; the novel as an art form. And that proves exceedingly difficult. No one has any compelling idea of what unites The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Fanny Hill, Notes from Underground, My Ántonia, Nausea, and Midnight's Children as a single type of writing. No one has any serious notion of what could possibly make the English writers Thomas Love Peaco*ck, Ann Radcliffe, William Harrison Ainsworth, A. A. Milne, Daphne du Maurier, and Anthony Powell a single kind of author, even though we say that they all wrote novels.

Are we then forced back to the broad category of the novel simply as an extended piece of fiction? If so, literary history gives us novels long before 18th-century England came to be. Perhaps we can set aside the epic myth-tellings of the ancient world—Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Ramayana, and all the rest—since they lack, we typically suppose, the self-conscious invention and falsity, the knowing fictitiousness, that we mean by the word fiction. And perhaps we can set aside works from the Latin Aeneid to the Old English Beowulf by holding a general insistence on prose (while admitting modern verse novels as specialty items in the canon, from Alexander Pushkin's 1831 Eugene Onegin to Vikram Seth's 1986 The Golden Gate).

Still, what are we to call the extended prose narratives of the ancient world—with the Romans giving us Petronius' Satyricon in the 1st century and Apuleius' Golden Ass in the 2nd? What about Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (c. 1020) in Japan? What about the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms (c. 1500)? If the novel is a modern, Protestant-inflected thing, then we are left without much of a category for Longus' 2nd-century Greek Daphnis and Chloe, the 7th-century Sanskrit Dashakumaracharita, and Thomas Malory's 1470s compilation of medieval romances, Le Morte d'Arthur—along with such 17th-century work as Marie de La Fayette's The Princess of Clèves and Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote.

But it's exactly there, with a mention of the 1605 Don Quixote, that we begin to sense a change in those extended stories, a new and different world emerging, and Cervantes' work is always cited in this context: the first widely read book of fiction to be taken as modern. Before Don Quixote, we have novels with a sort of asterisk. Nod toward them as politely and judiciously as you want; they are nonetheless novels mostly by courtesy of their being works of extended prose fiction. After Don Quixote, we begin to have novels in the strictest sense anyone could want to give the word: book-length modern stories with a sense of spiritual development over the plot's timeline, characters with interior selves, a drive toward artistic unity, and an ambition for the book to be revelatory commentary on the human condition.

The history of literature is never tidy. For all that it is an art form produced by ostensible heroes, the novelist understood as solitary genius, every breakthrough in some aspect of the form proves to have predecessors—failed or unrecognized or unfocused attempts to achieve the new effect before authors and audience were ready to grasp it. One could find this fact, as we have, in the awkwardness of defining the novel as the art form of a particular era. Or one could find it in the question of what to do with Boccaccio, who predates Cervantes by 250 years. Indeed, we get the word novel from the Italian novella, which means new—the new style of shorter tales that the influential Boccaccio wrote in the Decameron.

For that matter, how are we to take Gargantua and Pantagruel, which Rabelais began publishing in France 70 years before Don Quixote appeared? In 2007, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera took to the pages of the New Yorker to insist that Rabelais belongs with Cervantes, and probably above him, as "the founder of an entire art, the art of the novel."

Most readers will understand what Kundera means. Gargantua and Pantagruel is a sprawling mess, true enough—a large, loose, baggy monster of a book, to use the phrase with which Henry James described Dickens' 1844 Martin Chuzzlewit. And in James' disparaging line we can hear the High Victorian goal of making the novel a tight and self-complete work of great art, as unified as a Beethoven symphony: symbol, plot, character, and diction all moving toward a single end. Rabelais had no such ambition, which tends to weaken Kundera's claiming of Gargantua and Pantagruel as the foundation of the modern novel. In his seminal 1965 study of the book, Mikhail Bakhtin identified the mad festival of Gargantua and Pantagruel as entirely premodern: a definitively Renaissance work by a bawdy Christian humanist very much in the line of Erasmus.

In this, I think, we have to side with Bakhtin. Only the thinnest account of Western literature would dismiss Gargantua and Pantagruel as merely a cul-de-sac and a curiosity. Nevertheless, there is a discernible difference between Cervantes and Rabelais, just as there is a difference between Cervantes and Boccaccio, for Don Quixote presents us with something new and distinct in the post-classical West: both more modern and more of what we recognize as a novel than anything that had come before.

Hearing an attempt to claim 'Don Quixote' as the very definition of the modern novel, we should shy a little. It's a long, improbable path from Cervantes' La Mancha to Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford.

I do not wish to hide the evaluation of Cervantes toward which I'm aiming. Hearing an attempt to dismiss Don Quixote as incidental to the history of the modern novel, we should leap to the book's defense. This is where the novel first emerges; this is one of the few truly great works of world literature, and without it we do not have much of what follows: No Cervantes, no Dickens. At the same time, hearing an attempt to claim Don Quixote as the very definition of the modern novel, we should shy a little. It's a long, improbable path from Cervantes' La Mancha to Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, and the possibilities of books as diverse as Daniel Deronda, Là-bas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Glass Bead Game are not easily discerned in the pages of Don Quixote.

Similarly, the 18th-century English works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—the writers on whom Ian Watt focuses in his account of the emerging novel—are not derived from Don Quixote quite as easily as literary histories often assume. In her 2000 study Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, the academic Diana de Armas Wilson attacks Watt as a narrow-minded British nationalist and quite possibly an anti-Hispanic racist for undervaluing Cervantes in an effort "to install Daniel Defoe as 'the first key figure in the rise of the novel.' "

But surely we can distinguish Cervantes and Defoe without being accused of chauvinism and bigotry, for the two authors are writing different forms and aiming at different ends. Something has changed between Cervantes and Defoe. Something separates the Catholic Spain of 1605 in which Don Quixote appears from the Protestant England of 1719 in which Robinson Crusoe is published. Something has allowed the inner life of the hero to appear on the page. And, I want to claim, those somethings involve the Protestant presentation of the spiritual journey of the main character as a unique self—together with the English novel's determination to provide alternate lives for the reader to experience vicariously and the confident sense of modernity as an age defined by more than its rebellion against the medieval past.

However modern Don Quixote seems when compared with the Decameron or Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes' work can also feel unmodern to readers now. Think, for example, of how new characters suddenly appear, chance-met along the hero's journey, and promptly begin telling stories: barely related interpolations that serve mostly to bulk up the text with something interesting. This picaresque device will last until at least Dickens' 1839 Nicholas Nickleby, but the Victorian age quickly thereafter grew too embarrassed to use it much. The rise of magazines allowed such smaller tales to take clearer shape within an author-and-reader agreement about the genre of short stories, and the interpolated tale came to seem something like an admission of failure: an acknowledgement that the author had not succeeded at finding the unified work of art that defined the High Victorian novel, from Jane Eyre to The Wings of the Dove.

Think, too, of the curious metafictional comedy of the second part of Don Quixote (with the characters portrayed as having read the first part of the novel that created them)—from which one could point out a different direction the central current of the art form might have taken. In fact, some novels did flow down that rival streambed, starting with the classic self-referential, Möbius-strip comedy of Laurence Sterne's 1759 Tristram Shandy (by an author who often refers to Rabelais, in confirmation of our sense of an alternate history the novel could have followed).

In other words, the influence of Cervantes was certainly present in the beginning: Interest in the author's work helped begin the 18th-century run of British picaresques and thereby contributed greatly to the establishment of the novel as a ready form of art in the English language. In the 1850 David Copperfield, Dickens' clearest signal that he was leaving the picaresque for the unified art work of the Victorian novel, the eponymous hero pauses to name the books he read when he was young—and they are all the spawn of Cervantes: Gil Blas, Tobias Smollett's stories of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker. Even Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Robinson Crusoe, in the way David describes reading them as imaginary (and sexually innocent) journeys fulfilling the child's desperate desire to escape. Oppressed by his mother's new husband, the young David retreats to reading—"reading as if for life," in Dickens' beautiful phrase—in the picaresque books that are his only inheritance from his father.

And even while Dickens reveals the influence of Don Quixote on the beginnings of the modern novel, Cervantes' metafictional play may actually prove to have had a greater effect on the final years of the modern novel, a key element in the creation of postmodern picaresques from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996). Left aside is much claim of Cervantes' influence between the early formation of the novel and the late rise of postmodernism—much claim of Cervantes' influence during the central period of the modern novel's cultural importance.

To readers trained by the success of the English novel from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, Don Quixote will seem least modern in precisely the feature that leads historians to call it modern: its turn against the failures and oddities of late medieval culture. The book's primary literary device is mockery—and thus a kind of acknowledgment—of its predecessors in the proto-novels of the heroic late-medieval Romances and such Pastorals as Sannazaro's 1480 poetic Arcadia and Montemayor's 1559 prose Diana.

Not all the world was pleased. In the poetry of Don Juan, for example, Byron indulges a digression to bemoan the loss of the Romances in Don Quixote's laughter. But complain as Byron might, the simple fact is that Cervantes won, his work too good not to provide us with permanently comic lenses through which to view that lost time. And as heirs to modernity's early victories, the artists of 18th-century England no longer had to spend much time contemplating their escape from the comic failures of the late Middle Ages. The original gothic novels, from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) through Jane Austen's parody in Northanger Abbey (1818), actually emerge from a sentimental hunger for the supernatural thickness of lost medievalism.

Meanwhile, in the main line of the English novel—in the works of Watt's central figures—the comic and tragic possibilities of the new age proved too interesting in themselves to bother much with attacking a distant and defeated age. Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa, and Tom Jones are modern because they dwell in the modern present, not because they spend much time mocking their culture's premodern past. They don't need to indulge Cervantes' extended disparaging or correcting of the late medieval era.

The smoke of the 18th-century English battles that involved Catholicism, from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to the Gordon Riots of 1780, can hide from us the extent to which much of middle-class Britain (which is to say, England's class of novel readers and writers) heaved a great sigh of relief at the Protestant settlements of William and Mary. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, novels were free to be modern, the old medieval systems unimportant to an English Protestantism that had made its peace with—no, that was creating and sustaining—what they perceived as the modern world.

Perhaps the point could best be phrased this way: Don Quixote is undoubtedly the door by which we came to the modern novel. But doors, one remembers, do not belong entirely to the rooms we enter through them. On the other side, they are part of the rooms we leave behind. And what we enter, after Don Quixote, is the English novel of the 18th and 19th centuries, by which the rest of the world's novelists would be formed. The novel, in other words, as modern. And the novel as Protestant, all the way down.

3.The history of the novel gives us any number of explicitly, deliberately, determinedly Protestant book-length stories—just as it gives us any number of extended prose fictions that promote an explicit, deliberate, and determined Catholicism. Or Marxism. Or feminism, atheism, fascism, libertarianism, and extraterrestrialism, for that matter.

And as far as those vocally Protestant works go, we can probably set aside the ones with such a loud didactic purpose that they seem thereby overwhelmed as novels—although we would have to acknowledge the hypocrisy of disdaining openly religious Protestant teaching while refusing to let didacticism disqualify other novels, from Les Misérables, Middlemarch, and Uncle Tom's Cabin (whose anti-slavery moral is itself almost overpowered by the book's Protestant sermons) to Lady Chatterly's Lover, The Grapes of Wrath, and Catch-22 (its anti-war message once mocked by the poet Philip Larkin as "the American hymn to cowardice").

We can recognize, in other words, a set of moralizing Protestant books that seem to contain little in their plotting, prose, or psychological observations to recommend them beyond their edifying purpose. Charles M. Sheldon's Christian fable In His Steps: "What Would Jesus Do?" (1896), for example: a book that sold 30 million copies in its day. In a perfect world, we would have time to read together the neglected book-length fiction published by the Religious Tract Society, discussing in detail Evelyn E. Green's The Head of the House: A Story of Victory over Passion and Pride (1888) and Mrs. Walton's Little Faith; Or, The Child of the Toy Stall (1880). But not today.

Even on a much higher literary level, authors can seem didactically Protestant when they indulge an explicit anti-Catholicism—as, for example, Charlotte Brontë does in her 1853 novel Villette. Brontë had gone to Belgium to study a decade earlier, paying for her schooling by tutoring students in English. In Villette, she draws on the experience to show her English readers something of what modern European Catholicism looks like in all its rich, thick, and horrifying attraction. "Lucy Snowe," Brontë names her semi-autobiographical heroine, a young Englishwoman teaching on the Continent. And after Lucy may (or may not) have encountered the ghost of an unchaste nun who had been buried alive on the old convent's grounds—eventually, in a highly charged scene, finding the nun's habit in her own chaste bed—she announces, "God is not with Rome." Is it any surprise that Lucy decides against the Catholic conversion to which she had been urged by Paul Emanuel, her love interest and the figure who may (or may not) have drowned in what Brontë herself described as the "little puzzle" of the novel's strange ending?

Of course, Villette has in mind more than just its heroine's decision against godless Rome. The nuanced psychology of the novel—the constricted Lucy, holding together her loves, her hates, and her sufferings—may be the high point of Brontë's art. Certainly it is what led both George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to declare Villette, even with its gothic elements, superior to the earlier Jane Eyre (1847).

But neither can we simply dismiss as merely a Protestant religious tract something like Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe, another novel with anti-Catholic elements from that same year of 1853. The feminist revolution in criticism over recent decades has had the good effect of bringing back into print neglected women writers, even when they do not much support a feminist reading of literature, and Yonge's reputation has risen as critics have newly encountered such surprisingly good work as her 1856 children's book The Daisy Chain. Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe, an enormous bestseller in Britain, may have been started as purely a didactic story by its serious High Church author. But along the way it manages a clever inversion of Romantic literature, with the Byronic loner recast as Christian hero—his secret virtues isolating him from the world just as surely as secret vices might have. In an (admittedly offhand) remark about the dreadful books that passed for "worthy" popular fiction, Henry James confessed, "Occasionally, like The Heir of Redclyffe, they almost legitimate themselves by the force of genius."

Even without much mention of rejected Catholicism, a resolutely Protestant setting can convey a didactic tone. It's true that such settings have been used to attack Protestant sects. You can find it in Dickens' mockery of the evangelical chapels, signaled even in his first fiction, The Pickwick Papers (1837), with the comic Reverend Stiggins. You can find it, for that matter, in books from James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1842) to (the Catholic) Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952), both of which can be read as disturbing satires of certain forms of Protestantism. Still, it's hard not to notice the sectarian lesson in, for example, the all-embracing Protestant atmosphere of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1869), which opens with the March girls acting out Pilgrim's Progress while their clergyman father is off ministering to the Union forces fighting in what Alcott understands as the Civil War's great Protestant crusade for abolition. Even Mansfield Park (1814) uses the assumption of an advancing Wesleyan-tinged Protestantism to resolve the moral collapse of a family made wealthy by the West Indies slave trade—and the novel, together with Emma (1815), marks the broadening of Jane Austen's extraordinary art to reach even the political condition of England and the nation's spiritual character.

In discussions of Protestant stories, Harold Frederic's curious 1896 work, The Damnation of Theron Ware, is sometimes mentioned: a book with a definite religious purpose, for all that it is shaped as a novel. Even after the flood of religious-doubt fiction in the 1880s—The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, Mrs. Humphry Ward's bestselling Robert Elsmere—the novel of "loss (with possible regaining) of faith" continued to be a well-defined category of Victorian literature. For that matter, attacks on the failures and hypocrisies of Christian clergy remain an artistic pastime down to the present day. And thus it's possible to read The Damnation of Theron Ware in the religious-doubt line of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903) or even in the hypocritical-preacher line of Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry (1927), either of which would make more complex the book's message. Nevertheless, Frederic's eccentric book is not quite what we would want for an archetypal Protestant novel—which is why, perhaps, it remains less read even than the other titles that appear with it on lists of neglected American classics.

So, let's think a little about mainline, mainstream works, undeniable instances of the art form. From the pastor Fritz Kruppenbach in Rabbit, Run (1960) through the theologian Roger Lambert in Roger's Version (1986) and the preacher Clarence Wilmot in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)—to say nothing of the philandering Reverend Tom Marshfield in A Month of Sundays (1975), a book thick with references to Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter—John Updike often gives prominent place to Protestant religious figures. Are his novels therefore particularly Protestant? "If there was ever such a species as the Protestant novelist," the self-described "Catholic agnostic" novelist David Lodge has insisted, "Mr. Updike may be its last surviving example."

And what about that ur-American novel itself, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), far more the foundation of a literature of national self-understanding, I am convinced, than the often-cited Moby-Dick (1851) or Huckleberry Finn (1884)? Do we see The Scarlet Letter as a particularly Protestant book, with its setting among Boston's 17th-century Puritans and its figure of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale? Or see The Warden (1855) that way, the book with which Anthony Trollope began his Barsetshire chronicles of Anglican clergy? Or the letters of the fictional Reverend John Ames, with which Marilynne Robinson constructed Gilead (2004)?

For all of them, the answer is obviously yes—and yet, no. These books are Protestant in the sense that they contain explicitly Protestant settings. Protestant, for that matter, in the sense that they were written by practicing Protestants. And Protestant in the sense that they show the psychological, social, and metaphysical effects of Protestant theology.

In his focus on the individual rather than the complete economic restructuring of the modern world, Dickens was very much instantiating a Protestant insight into morality, derived from a Protestant metaphysics.

Setting alone, however, is not enough to define a novel, or we would be forced to count Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), Grossman's Life and Fate (1959), and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) as Communist novels simply because of their setting in the Soviet Union. Similarly, the religion of the author does not necessarily determine the book, else innumerable works written in the days of the Protestant establishment in Britain and the United States—everything from Gulliver's Travels (1726) to To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—would automatically be defined as Protestant simply because their authors were practicing Protestants of one degree or another, even though the books offer little explicitly Protestant content and often only cold comfort for Protestant readers. Finally, if we are to take as the defining feature an investigation of the modern world that Protestant ideas helped create, then nearly all novels, the central stream of the art form, would be Protestant—which makes Protestantism the genus of the novel itself, rather than something identifying a particular species of novels.

4.But that point, Protestantism as the genus of the modern novel, is where we have been heading all along. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt claims Fanny Burney as an important figure in the history of the art form, reaching with her satirical 1778 Evelina toward what Jane Austen would perfect: a joining of two arms of the early British novel. While Samuel Richardson showed us the "minute presentation of daily life," Henry Fielding gave us a "detached attitude" in the narrative voice, allowing the narrator to tell the story from "a comic and objective point of view." Burney's insight and Austen's genius, in Watt's interpretation, lie in finding a way to combine the two.

Noting what Watt would call the narrative voice of "some august and impersonal spirit of social and psychological understanding," C. S. Lewis and many others have claimed for Jane Austen the tone of Samuel Johnson, in the calm and classical modes of both Johnson's irony and Johnson's assured morality. But Austen is not a moralizer, however morally assured she is. G. K. Chesterton once joked that Charles Dickens had for his characters the fondness with which a father looks at his children, while H. G. Wells had for his characters the fondness with which a butcher looks at a pig. There's something to that, a nice way to divide all authors—and while Jane Austen is clearly fond of her strong-willed heroines, she does have more than a little of the butcher's eye, which she learned not from Samuel Johnson but from Henry Fielding.

Nonetheless, as Harold Bloom intelligently observes, Austen descends in a far more direct line from Richardson's Clarissa (1748) than from Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), just as she is in turn the direct ancestor of George Eliot and Henry James, rather than of Thackeray and Dickens: "Doubtless, Austen's religious ideas were as profound as Samuel Richardson's were shallow," Bloom notes, but Emma and Clarissa are alike in being deeply "Protestant novels without being in any way religious."

Not that the other early line of the English novel, the one that flows from Fielding, is un- or anti-Protestant. The Thackeray revealed in his letters seems, at best, an ambiguous believer. But he was delighted when he stumbled on the Pilgrim's Progress title for Vanity Fair (1848), and rightly so. The reference to John Bunyan's spiritual classic helped him shape the novel away from being the kind of digression-filled picaresque he always loved and toward being a leading early example of the Victorian unified art. Charlotte Brontë would dedicate Jane Eyre to him during the magazine serialization of Vanity Fair, discerning even in the unfinished story a complete and coherent satire that assumes the truth of Christian virtues in order to expose the hypocrisy of a British Christian society that fails to practice what it mouths in such pious tones.

One of the best ways to see the Protestant definition of the Victorian novel—one of the best ways to see the Victorian novel however one wants to define it—is to abandon the Edwardians' adolescent sneer that their Victorian Christian parents and grandparents were the most hypocritical people who ever lived. Not only is the Western understanding of the vice of hypocrisy shaped by its biblical expression, but the actual writings of the Victorians demonstrate the opposite of what the Edwardians supposed and inscribed in us, their descendants, as the proper scornful picture of those Victorians.

In truth, never was there a people more obsessed with identifying and rooting out hypocrisy in all its ever-more minute forms. They wrote about it so much because it bothered them so much. The early Oliver Twist (1838) is not as highly regarded by critics as Dickens' later work, but toward the end it contains a scene of unexpectedly acute psychological observation as Bill Sikes attempts to lose himself, to forget the guilt of his killing of Nancy, in heroically fighting a house fire. It's an authorial courtesy to a character that suggests Dickens was willing to treat even a murderer with sympathy—a courtesy he refused to pay the hypocrites who ran the poorhouse. The sin of hypocrisy burns like Satan's signal-fire for the Victorian novelists. Not for them the saturnine sophistication of the Continental aphorists or the Catholic cultures' droll shrug at insincerity and pretense, the comedy of the Goliard poets and Rabelais derived ultimately from the ex opere operato principle of sacramental theology.

In other words, the Victorians wanted a clean world, an honest world, and their novelistic social concern aims at little else. Of course, in rejecting hypocrisy, one can either denounce the behavior or reject the ideal that the behavior fails to match. The Edwardians and post-Edwardians often used the fact of hypocrisy as an argument for abolishing the entire ideal frame of the culture. But the robust line of Victorian writers, the heirs of Fielding, typically used their obsession with hypocrisy to demand reformation of the behavior.

Observing such figures as the always-moral Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby and the moral-after-being-visited-by-ghosts Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, both George Orwell and the usually excellent French critic Louis Cazamian (thanked by Ian Watt in the preface to The Rise of the Novel) object that, in documenting personal evil, Dickens closed his eyes to the structural problems of social evil. The benighted novelist seemed to demand only the improbable conversion of individuals—a philosophie de Noël, as Cazamian scoffed.

Part of that 20th-century complaint derives simply from its era, a time in which much experience of art was forced into the categories of socialist dogma, and Victorian work like Dickens' had to be read mostly as failed novelizations of Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. But in fact, in his focus on the individual rather than the complete economic restructuring of the modern world, Dickens was very much instantiating a Protestant insight into morality, derived from a Protestant metaphysics.

However powerfully our society controls us, it is an epiphenomenon created by the metaphysical drama of the soul. However completely our culture shapes us, it is, on the cosmic scale, only the prismatic spray tossed up by individuals acting out their individual salvation plays. Where, except in the reformation of many separate selves, could we find a solid basis for change in their society and culture? The nation remains important, particularly in its role as educator: "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want," the second ghost tells Scrooge. "Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom." But the nation is not the actual object of grace and salvation. Only the individual soul has true metaphysical weight and consequence, and the novel is the story of a soul's journey.

5.If the individual soul's journey increasingly defines the social line of the English novel from Fielding through the 18th-century picaresques of Smollett and on to Thackeray and Dickens—together with writers as diverse as Mrs. Gaskell, Mark Twain, and James Joyce; novels as different as Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, and Herzog—so even more does it define the personal line that runs from Richardson through Jane Austen and Henry James and down to Alice Walker and innumerable others.

I confess there's something in this kind of novel I find tedious. Austen and James, many others in the Richardson line, are beyond carping; to prefer Dickens to them is as individually revealing and critically pointless as preferring the planet Mercury to the planet Mars. Still, I do prefer Wuthering Heights to Jane Eyre, War and Peace to Madame Bovary, Death Comes for the Archbishop to The Awakening (and Rabelais to them all). Reading even much of Virginia Woolf, I find myself tiring of the relentless search inside the psyche, the endless dwelling on internal reality, as though feelings and thoughts about the self were as important and interesting as actions and thoughts about the external universe.

Except that feelings and thoughts about the self actually are important. They were important even in the premodern Aristotelian and Stoic rational accounts of the good life, although they were understood mostly as tools: instruments to be left behind once virtue had been achieved. And feelings and internal consciousness become more than important—they become vital—in the modern turn to the self.

This is what the novel as an art form emerged to address, and what the novel as an art form encouraged into ever-greater growth. The inner life, self-consciousness as self-understanding, becomes the manifestation of virtue and the path for grasping salvation. It's there in 1813 when Jane Austen has Elizabeth Bennett declare, "Till this moment I never knew myself," at the great turning point of Pride and Prejudice, and it's there in 1908 when E. M. Forster has Lucy Honeychurch exclaim that she has at last seen for herself "the whole of everything at once," at the great turning point of A Room with a View—Forster's most Austen-like book, intended (as he described it in his diary) to be "clear, bright, and well constructed."

Plenty of novels, and perhaps the majority of stories told outside the novel tradition, lack thick characters with revealed interior lives. In much of the genre fiction of our time—science fiction, mysteries, and thrillers; romances, westerns, and Napoleonic War sea-stories, for that matter—the thinness of the characters can be a benefit, keeping clear the fact that those characters are acting in a kind of chanson de geste: They instantiate recognizable types, and they perform iconic actions. In the roman tradition (which is to say, in the central stream of the modern novel), the characters are generally required to be fuller: to have unique and individual interior lives. They are required to be realistic, the novelists say, although the range of novelistic interior lives contains its own share of well-defined types.

More to the point, such books seek to explain (and by explaining, validate and make ever more central) the kind of distinct and self-conscious self whose invention in modernity is suggested by its absence in previous literature. This is why we hesitate, backing and filling a little, before naming as novels such ironic 18th-century chanson fiction as Voltaire's Candide and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, but do not hesitate at all to give the name to Sarah Fielding's relatively minor book of roman fiction, The Countess of Dellwyn—although all three were published in the same year, 1759, 40 years after Robinson Crusoe and 150 years after Don Quixote.

The self-investigation of the self, the attempt to discern the truth amidst the clash of feelings with perceptions of social and physical reality, emerges as the proper spiritual journey of individuals and the true rightwising of their souls: Pilgrim's Progress, rewritten in self-consciousness. This is the purest stream of the modern novel, however much we like Dickens—however much we understand the outward peregrinations of Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, and Pip Pirrip as reflecting an inward journey toward mature self-understanding. And this stream has its wellspring in Clarissa Harlowe.

When Samuel Richardson began publishing Clarissa in 1748, he was determined to compose a story that responded to the charges of licentiousness against his 1740 novel Pamela (and to Fielding's mockery in his 1741 parody Shamela). Subtitled Virtue Rewarded, Pamela ends with the heroine's successful marriage as she reforms her former jailer and converts him into a true husband. And yet, Clarissa is the more triumphant book, even though it culminates in its heroine's death. Clarissa Harlowe's virtues are the stronger for their not being rewarded, the more edifying for belonging to her alone.

We tend to remember only Clarissa's long struggle to keep her integrity despite the selfish machinations of her family, and her long struggle to keep her chastity while held prisoner by a man willing to use even drugs and rape to bring her body, her mind, and her will into his possession. But Richardson devotes most of the final third of the enormously long epistolary book to Clarissa after her final escape from Lovelace: 300,000 words given over to her damaged health and consequent death. And why not? It's here that Clarissa reaches her clearest expressions of her strength and her will to be true to her ideal self.

The heroine of Pamela wants to keep her sexual integrity, yes, but she also wants to change others and modify the world to match her own virtue, returning to marry the contrite Mr. B in the second half of the book. The heroine of Clarissa is a far more passive character, externally, just as she is a far more active character, internally—which makes her the original behind Jane Austen's Fanny Price, Charlotte Brontë's Lucy Snowe, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (whose first name is also Clarissa). Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe demands no real change of heart in anyone else, and she seeks to modify the world only insofar as she needs that world to leave her alone.

Of course, the consequence is that she would burn to the ground everything around her, if that's what it takes to be left to herself—and she nearly does: No one who tries to manipulate or use her escapes the encounter with Clarissa unscathed. But that is as must be. The "divine Clarissa" has serious internal business to do: the willing of herself into self-integrity, a matching of her self-understanding and self-possession to the virtuous pattern of the salvation to which she has been elected. For most of the novel, she either does not understand or does not care that her breathtaking loveliness is itself a force in the world, sexually active in ways she does not wish to be. In the long time of her dying, however—as the conversion of the rake John Belford into her defender proves—Clarissa's pale beauty is clarified beyond sexual attractiveness into a pure expression of her sanctification. No wonder Lovelace, shot in a duel with another of Clarissa's defenders, dies with the prayer "let this expiate" on his lips.

I don't know what more a reader could want for a Protestant art form. And there Clarissa sits, a million words near the beginning of the literature: the defining wellspring, the inescapable origin, of one of the few streams down which the entire modern project of the novel will run.

6.It's curious that while we can speak, at least in a loose way, of the Richardson line and the Fielding line in the English novel, it is almost impossible to draw from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe any direct influence on the serious works of the art form. But still, somehow, everyone agrees that the novel occupies an enormous place in the foundation of the new literature.

The set of books known as "Robinsonades" obviously does owe its existence to Robinson Crusoe. Often appearing as children's books, the genre runs from The Female American (1767) through The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) to—oh, I don't know, R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), I suppose, or Jules Verne's Castaways of the Flag (1900) or wherever one arbitrarily stops counting. But these books typically manage to be descendants of Defoe only in the gross sense of imitating the deserted-island setting and the plot of systematic organization of the means of survival, using modern knowledge in a primitive place. The Swiss Family Robinson, for example, is Protestant work of a kind, in that it was written by a Swiss pastor and contains regular notice that the shipwrecked family is pious and often prays. But only incidentally does the story contain the Protestant view of the self that Robinson Crusoe gave the genre of the novel, and never does it reach toward the deeper interior journey with which Defoe infused his own work. Not even the Robinsonades, the self-declared imitators, follow the moral aim (or the imprecise prose and awkward structure, for that matter) that Defoe gave his novel. In many ways, Robinson Crusoe is an isolated oddity in the history of the English novel.

And yet, it is also, by universal critical agreement, one of the most consequential English novels ever written. Perhaps we can resolve the contradiction by suggesting that the 1719 Robinson Crusoe comes to us as something like the ground on which Clarissa could begin to flow in 1748 and Tom Jones in 1749: not a stream itself, but the necessary condition for the possibility of those streams. And the ground is defined in the novel's earliest moments, when Crusoe admits, "I was to be the willful Agent of all my own Miseries"—rejecting his father's advice to enter business and going instead to sea in what he calls his "Original Sin."

If Clarissa is a tale of sanctification, then Robinson Crusoe is the necessary prior story: a tale of salvation and awareness of being born again. The isolated hero learns to see as "the Work of Providence" all that has happened to him—and thereby becomes master of the island on which he is stranded. Nearly dying of fever in the summer of 1660, he offers "the first Prayer, if I may call it so, that I had made for many Years." And as he recovers, we reach the central moment of the novel. Robinson Crusoe finally reads the Bible he has brought from the wrecked ship, and—without a church community or a teacher to aid him, sheerly from the power of the divine text itself on an individual conscience—he writes, "I threw down the Book, and with my Heart as well as my Hands lifted up to Heaven, in a kind of Extasy of Joy, I cry'd out aloud, Jesus, thou Son of David, Jesus, thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me Repentance!" (It would be interesting, if beyond our scope here, to think about Protestant art's use of the spiritual memories of childhood, that old-time religion, to provide what Catholics would understand as the interpretive guides of ecclesial tradition and the deposit of faith.)

As the critic Philip Zaleski observes, it was once common to read Robinson Crusoe this way—to take the novel as it takes itself: a Presbyterian tale of redemption revealed to its hero by adversity, in God's great plan and care for the individual sinner. Perhaps Defoe's religious sense suggested writing a story of isolation, or perhaps the author merely began a story of isolation (inspired by the nonfiction 1712 accounts of Alexander Selkirk's adventures) and found thereby a way to express his religious sense. Regardless, he created with Crusoe's island something like the ideal novelistic setting for a tale of a Protestant worldview: The journey of the self is the deepest, truest thing in the universe, and the individual soul's salvation is the great metaphysical drama played out on the world's stage. Could Clarissa Harlowe have been as isolated in herself, if Robinson Crusoe had not first been shipwrecked alone on his island?

Unfortunately, Karl Marx, not otherwise known for his literary criticism, used Robinson Crusoe as a model text of modernity in his 1867 Das Kapital—writing, "Of his prayers and the like we take no account." And thereby Marx established a new standard way to read the novel. Robinson Crusoe, we were all to understand, was an account of the economics of modernity's rising middle class and its effect on the West's imperial expansion.

The genius and impishness of Max Weber's 1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was that it turned Marx on his head: The economic condition of the rising middle class didn't create Protestantism, the book argued; Protestantism created the conditions necessary for capitalism, and culture is driven, even in its economic forms, by religion and spiritual anxiety. But Weber's work did not provide a rescue for Robinson Crusoe. By the time we reach R. H. Tawney's much more British-centered 1926 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Defoe's novel has become completely intertwined with economic questions—until (as the critic Irvin Ehrenpreis pointed out) in mid-century the influential New Marxist critic György Lukács could systematically analyze the history of the novel as the history of bourgeois consciousness, with Defoe's central role "casually taken for granted."

We shouldn't downplay Defoe's monetary fascinations; surpassing even Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, the man is rivaled in this respect only by Benjamin Franklin and perhaps James Joyce in Ulysses. From Robinson Crusoe to Roxanna, Defoe was always convinced that he was revealing something important about his characters by recounting down to the farthing the money in their pockets. But that kind of bookkeeping is neither the center of the novel nor, really, the gift Defoe gave the subsequent history of the art form. It is, in a sense, only the dross of a setting at a particular time, like the rest of the social, political, and cultural facts circ*mstantially known to the author because he happens to be writing in a certain era.

What Robinson Crusoe provides the form of the novel comes rather from its sense of purpose. The individual figures in novels undergo travails and adventures—whether comic, bawdy, and ironic (as in Fielding's 1749 Tom Jones) or more tragicomically serious (as in his 1751 Amelia)—all aiming toward resolving their external situation by revealing its parallels with the characters' internal situation. Before Robinson Crusoe, we could have something like the 1715 French Gil Blas, the picaresque of one thing after another, but afterward we get the English revision that gradually remakes the European novel of action, from Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766 to Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon in 1844.

With all its awkward proto-novel carelessness, wordiness, and clunky digression, Robinson Crusoe is far from possessing the great ambition of a unified art form at which the High Victorian novels aimed. Nonetheless, with Defoe, we arrive at the modern novel in its essence: a deeply Protestant book about the great journey, the only story that is metaphysically true, of the individual soul struggling with itself in this world that God, in his Providence, has made.

7.In a 2013 essay about Catholicism and the arts, the poet Dana Gioia wrote, "Catholic literature is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent." And in a brief online reply, the Protestant theologian D. G. Hart suggested that "perhaps the problem is that Protestants are too devout and guard what qualifies as genuinely Christian while non-Protestant Christians are more used to the big tent of mixing and matching." Admitting "the paucity of Protestant novelists"—by which he seems to mean something like the difficulty he would have assembling a Protestant parallel to Gioia's list of Catholic writers—Hart concluded with a dismissal of both Gioia and the project of identifying religious fiction: "Protestants intuitively know (but often refuse to admit) that novels don't need to be Christian, that the question of whether a novel is Christian is actually silly."

Silly is a curious word to use for either Gioia's particular study or the more general search for the truths of Christianity in a major art form of Western Christendom for nearly three centuries—especially when the complaint is made by someone writing in English. The greatest contributions of Great Britain and the United States to the arts have come in literature, after all. We could lose the paintings of all Anglophones, just as we could lose their classical-music compositions, without absolutely terminal damage to the history of those arts. But the novel would be destroyed beyond repair. Still, D. G. Hart is not exactly wrong. Novels don't need to seem especially Christian to Protestant readers and writers, because the novel itself is a Protestant-inflected art form—always influenced by the definitions it obtained from its birth in English literature as a central art of Western culture: the device by which, more than any other, modernity tried to understand itself.

To write a Catholic novel is thus to attempt something a little tricky, a little verging on the self-contradictory. And when a Catholic-aiming novel fails, it typically fails because it is at war with its own form. So, for instance, G. K. Chesterton's small disaster The Man Who Was Thursday (1908): a piece of allegorical fiction possessing many wonderful characteristics, without "being coherent as a novel" among them. John Kennedy Toole's 1980 Catholic comedy A Confederacy of Dunces is often described as Rabelaisian, but the term is accurate only relative to other modern fiction. In hard truth, we cannot simply go back to Rabelais and start over, pretending the march of modernity and the parallel histories of the novel and the self hadn't happened (much as I, as a Catholic reader, wish that we could; much as it's possible to interpret several late-20th-century literary movements, especially magic realism, as attempts at that return).

To write a Protestant novel is, instead, to do something a little unnecessary, a little verging on the redundant. And when a deliberately Protestant novel fails, it often fails because it seems didactic and preachy, engaged in what the art form itself promises that readers can take for granted. Hesba Stretton's Little Meg's Children (1868) is unbearable now, however worthy the lessons of the book may be: its tale of the abuse of poor children overrun by its sermons on Evangelical religion. Oliver Twist does the greater Protestant work with less concern for Protestant catechetics.

Many different campgrounds and overlooks, enclaves and inns, are available for writers as they walk the paths of the novel, and Gioia is surely right that the Catholic one remains interestingly large and robust. But the land itself is Protestant territory. Modernity's sense of the self owes a great deal to the philosophers, from Descartes to Kant, who theorized about it. But that sense of self owes even more to the novel as an art form—a form created, defined, and sent on its way, everywhere in the world, by English-language authors confidently breathing a Protestant air.

And as the atmosphere grows thinner and thinner in the West, as confidence fails, where shall we seek our future arts, our future selves?

Joseph Bottum is a bestselling essayist in the Black Hills of South Dakota and author of An Anxious Age (Image).

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

One Sunday in the late 1990s, my wife and I drove into the countryside beyond Louisville, Kentucky, to attend a Reformed Baptist church. The preacher sharply criticized President Bill Clinton, both for his moral lapses and for being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." Eventually, the preacher sensed a word of caution was in order. Clinton, he clarified with helpful nuance, was "not the Antichrist" himself, but only "a pawn of the Evil One." I found the discussion an amusing change from the typical politics of our Presbyterian congregation. We left in haste, however, when the minister later prayed that a congregant would discern which of her sins had caused a recent miscarriage.

Saving sinners from hell and keeping the United States on the right side of a future Armageddon have long been twin goals for American evangelicals. Nowadays, however, one hears nary a word about hell and far fewer apocalyptic references in most evangelical settings. Mainline Protestants, who consider the word "hell" nearly as uncouth as the phrase "born again," often make an obligatory reference to the Second Coming on the first Sunday of Advent but eschew any discussion of seals, trumpets, and apocalyptic armies. Not all American Christians, however, gave up on hell or the Antichrist.

Two recent books make sense of these theological trends. Kathryn Gin Lum's Damned Nation explains that vibrant and colorful debates about hell in the decades following the American Revolution faded into sentimental visions of familial heavens in the wake of the Civil War's carnage. She begins with the humorous juxtaposition of two John Murrays, a Universalist minister known as "Salvation Murray" and a Calvinist Presbyterian dubbed "Damnation Murray." Questions of hell were no laughing matter to either Murray, nor to the many evangelical Americans in particular who worried about the eternal destinations of themselves and their loved ones. Already, though, Americans were abandoning more severe forms of Calvinism in droves. Even before the Revolution, Joseph Bellamy, a theological disciple of Jonathan Edwards, had speculated (with curious precision) that "above 17,000 would be saved, to one lost" by the end of Jesus Christ's millennial reign. Edwards himself had never been quite so sanguine, but his descendants, not to mention Christians of other theological traditions, found it increasingly difficult to reconcile a populous hell with their sense of God's fairness and goodness.

Still, even Deists like Benjamin Franklin believed that only a fear of postmortal punishment could uphold mortal morality. As Gin Lum suggests, hell was a very useful concept, not least as a ballast for republican virtue. "If evangelicals had dropped hell from their worldviews," she writes, "revivals would not have had life-or-death intensity, missions movements would likely not have taken off, and social reform crusades may not have seemed as immediately pressing." Americans needed hell.

Fundamentalists, Sutton drily observes, "had a knack for picking losing battles."

As Victorian sentimentality took hold, though, Americans found it harder to imagine that God would consign the ones they loved to eternal damnation. Families were told to make their homes a foretaste of heaven, which became a continuation and expansion of the greatest of earthly joys. Distant heathens might suffer in the afterlife, a concern that encouraged the burgeoning American missionary enterprise, but one's own parents, spouse, and children—surely God would spare them. That is not to say that all Christians took their eternal fate for granted. Indeed, during the early years of the Civil War, chaplains worked hard to bring about death-bed conversions. The sheer number of deaths effected a change in attitudes. By the end of the war, many ministers and chaplains on both sides of the conflict presumed that wartime patriotism alone made the fallen into martyrs, ensured of eternal bliss as a compensation for their passage through hell on earth.

As Gin Lum illustrates from recent surveys, solid majorities of Americans still express belief in hell. In fact, as one could deduce from Matthew Sutton's American Apocalypse, many evangelicals well into the 20th century spoke about eternal punishment as emphatically as "Damnation" Murray once had. While Gin Lim traces broad trends that include not only evangelicals but Universalists, Spiritualists, Adventist annihilationists, and Mormons (Catholics make only a brief appearance in her narrative), Sutton focuses on groups he labels "radical evangelicals," namely Wesleyan (including Pentecostals) and Reformed Protestants known as "fundamentalists" in the early 20th century and "evangelicals" after the mid-1950s. Sutton argues that premillennialism was the theological glue that held these otherwise theologically diverse conservatives together.

Much of Sutton's story is not new. Ernest Sandeen also argued for the centrality of premillennialism to fundamentalism, and Paul Boyer traced many of the same prophetic twists and turns in the ways that evangelicals responded to current events. Nevertheless, Sutton stitches together prophecy and politics in a compelling and original manner, adding a rich layer of original research to many chapters. Very few scholars, I imagine, have read so many of the alternately admiring and disparaging letters received by fundamentalist firebrands like J. Frank Norris and John Roach Straton. The result is a rich, amusing, and often sobering glimpse into the sometimes dark passions of American premillennialism.

Sutton convincingly shows that the alleged post-World War II awakening of evangelical politics was nothing new. Post-WWII evangelicals ignored their own history when they too eagerly claimed "that earlier generations had been indifferent to politics." Rather than simply waiting for Christ's return, fundamentalists were always busy with the task of "occupying" until that moment, and that work of occupying involved serious efforts to direct the course of the nation. Indeed, fundamentalists had organized themselves to defeat liquor, evolution, and Catholicism, and fundamentalist leaders across the country were among the most consistent and bitter opponents of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Premillennialism, moreover, encouraged a "profound sense of besiegement" and "suspicion." Sutton details fundamentalist anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and race-baiting. In 1928, for example, the Fort Worth-based Norris offered to provide the Republican Party with "the addresses of fifty thousand Klansmen" to help defeat Catholic Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith.

Fundamentalists saw their political wishes fulfilled in 1928 and on other rare occasions, but, as Sutton drily observes, they "had a knack for picking losing battles." And a knack for false predictions. Premillennialists largely avoided setting specific dates for the Second Coming, but they lurched from one political crisis to the next, discarding old and apparently incorrect associations of foreign powers and leaders with biblical prophecies. Occasionally, they hurt themselves by their excesses, as when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed the 9/11 attacks on American gays and lesbians. For the most part, however, radical evangelicals benefited from short memories. "If the return of Christ was not around the next corner," Sutton writes, "it was always behind the corner after that." In later printings of The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970), Hal Lindsey did not even bother to revise his speculation that "all these things could take place" by 1988.

Being repeatedly wrong apparently did not matter very much, and it is easy to understand why. From the carnage of World War I, to Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation, to the repeated crises in the Middle East, "[a]pocalypticism has provided millions of Americans with a powerful lens through which to make sense of difficult and challenging eras." Especially to Americans who felt alienated from mainstream politics, premillennialism seemed more convincing than liberal dogmas of human goodness and progress.

A 2006 Pew survey of American Christians documented that 79 percent believed in the Second Coming; one-fifth expected Jesus to return in their lifetimes. An eye-raising 41 percent of all Americans anticipated that Jesus would return by 2050. And yet, as Sutton notes, premillennialism seems to exert less sway over evangelicals than in prior decades. Unlike Billy Graham and Harold J. Ockenga, Rick Warren and Joel Osteen "do not spend time exploring doomsday scenarios."

Together, these books raise difficult questions for contemporary American Christians. Both document a yawning racial divide among theologically conservative Protestants. Most notably, perhaps, white evangelicals (alongside many other Protestants stretching back to the earliest periods of white settlement) have seen America as God's divinely chosen instrument, a "New Israel." African American Protestants, by contrast, have more frequently entertained the idea that the United States is a "damned nation," the object of God's wrath because of the sins of slavery and segregation. For white and black Christians, at times, the United States teetered on the seesaw of divine grace or judgment, with the possibility of national redemption if Americans repented from certain sins. Does God judge nations as well as individuals? Most white and black evangelicals have said yes but have disagreed about exactly which national actions most merited divine judgment. In light of the persistent opposition on the part of white fundamentalists and evangelicals to serious movements for racial justice, it is hardly surprising that theologically like-minded African Americans look on their white counterparts with deep-rooted suspicion.

Second, how is it that most American Christians believe in hell and the Second Coming (with its associated judgments) but rarely discuss them? Hell is still important for evangelicals, but more as a theological boundary than as a source of spiritual trembling or missionary activity. And while a subset of evangelicals take these doctrines seriously, most American Christians—evangelicals and otherwise—do not. Given the rather comical prophetic errors Sutton recounts, this may well be a positive development. After all, it is probably best if American preachers eschew from identifying presidents as even pawns of the Antichrist. Still, the disconnect between formal belief and pulpit/stage/screen silence suggests the need for many evangelicals to revisit these doctrines. Most Americans believe that some human beings go to hell after death, and most believe that Jesus is coming soon. It is, in fact, hard to read the New Testament and not encounter such ideas. Pastors, teachers, and writers should not, through their silence, miss the opportunity to educate their audiences about these doctrines and invest them with new meaning.

John G. Turner teaches religious studies at George Mason University and is the author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Pastors have long admonished their flocks that faith isn't just for Sunday, and many a sermon has played on the theme, "Show me a man's checkbook, and I'll tell you what he truly values." It is an insight that has taken scholars of American religion awhile to recognize, but thankfully some are now examining everyday behaviors and purchasing patterns to better understand trends in spirituality.

Matthew Hedstrom, assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia, contributes to this vein of scholarship with his lively first book, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. Though he attends to liberal Protestantism, he does not trace his narrative through theological debates, denominations, or institutions such as the Federal Council of Churches. Instead, he looks at book cultures, specifically the practices of producing and consuming the middlebrow religious bestsellers that still line the shelves of thrift stores and older church libraries, including books that enjoyed wide dissemination thanks to the paperback revolution. "In material ways that go beyond adherence to broad cultural norms," he argues, "participation in religious and spiritual life happens through commodities bought and sold, and for much of the twentieth century the most significant of these religious commodities was the book."

The selling of books looms larger in this tale than does the buying of them. Hedstrom excavates the massive marketing and distribution campaigns that launched these books into public consciousness, starting with Religious Book Week in the 1920s. Spearheaded by Frederic Melcher, the man who had instituted the Newbery and Caldecott Medals to promote quality children's fare, Religious Book Week aimed to bring the best in spiritual literature to a population hungry for uplift following the disillusionment of World War I. The promotion also, of course, aimed to raise income for the publishers who helped select the titles. And, indeed, the 1920s were a robust decade for religious books. In 1900, Hedstrom reports, religious books ranked sixth among the various types of books sold, but by 1928 they had risen to second, behind only fiction.

Religious Book Week and its successor programs provide Hedstrom a creative new lens through which to study liberal religion. Booksellers' shifting notions of the "best" in spiritual reading show the emphases of liberal religion that influenced American culture in the first half of the 20th century. Book selections in the 1920s advanced anti-sectarianism, optimism, and popularizations of academic research—all hallmarks of liberalism. The books Hedstrom highlights paid special attention to psychology and mysticism. Later, as Americans became aware of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews, liberals' anti-sectarian impulse segued into the newly invented "Judeo-Christian tradition." During and immediately after World War II, owing in part to the extensive psychological testing performed on soldiers and therapy offered to them after their service, psychology emerged as the primary idiom for liberal religion.

Once these ideas gained ascendance in American culture, according to Hedstrom, liberal religious institutions that were temporarily buoyed by postwar suburbanization reverted to the decline that had begun in the 1930s. Here, he builds on the work of Christian Smith, David Hollinger, and other scholars who conclude that liberal Protestants won the culture at the same time—and for much the same reasons—as the appeal of their churches began to wane. Liberal ideals, like floodwaters, overflowed their banks, and the people followed them right on out.

Though it celebrates free spirits, Hedstrom's story takes place within the closed, sometimes claustrophobic world of liberal, mostly Protestant culture-makers. The tight focus he keeps on these men and their books them serves to highlight the élite roots of mass-market, middlebrow culture. Hedstrom helpfully profiles each man—and they are practically all men—behind his chosen bestsellers, but the details of their lives start to blur together: educated, cosmopolitan, East Coast, religious seekers. Perhaps the archetypal figure is Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose many books were regularly selected by the many expert committees on which he also served.

This insularity complicates the already complex connection Hedstrom draws between liberal bestsellers and the American religious temper. He suggests that the bestsellers succeeded because they responded to widely felt spiritual needs, but often his sources hint at a different interpretation. Insofar as featured books appealed to the taste-makers themselves and met what they believed to be, or believed ought to be, the needs of the public, booksellers seemed to be simultaneously creating and satisfying the demand for these particular forms of liberal spirituality.

The case of Eugene Exman and Emmet Fox illustrates this phenomenon. Exman, a University of Chicago Divinity School graduate and parishioner at Fosdick's Riverside Church, ran the religion department at Harper & Brothers from 1928 to 1965. In that span, he also ventured beyond Protestantism to explore Vedantism, other Eastern mysticisms, and LSD. Hedstrom asserts that Exman's life story "closely tracked that of liberal Protestantism, and much of American spirituality, in this same period" while acknowledging that Exman's experiences put him in a line of "elite spiritual adventurers" that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.

Fox, a New Thought leader who drew large crowds to his Divine Science church in New York, became Exman's bestselling author of the 1930s. His book Power Through Constructive Thinking went through multiple printings and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, a feat Hedstrom ascribes to Fox's ability to understand the anxieties resulting from economic and religious Depression. Yet Hedstrom also notes that, despite the Religious Book Club's refusal to endorse this "wildly eclectic mix of New Thought, transcendentalism, Christianity, Hinduism, and a variety of other metaphysical teachings," Exman lavished publicity on Fox's work and made sure Power Through Constructive Thinking was featured in bookstores and department stores across the country.

To what, then, do Fox's sales attest: a pervasive hunger for eclectic spirituality in the '30s or the reach of Exman's marketing machine? It is difficult to say, at least without extensive research into who read Fox's books, what they gleaned from them, and what else they read or listened to around the same time.

The inclusion of reader testimonials and contemporary reviews bolsters Hedstrom's strong final chapter, on religious reading after World War II. The chapter explores the content and reception of Peace of Mind, by Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman; On Being a Real Person, by Fosdick; and The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton. These three late-1940s hits illustrate the willingness of postwar readers to cross confessional lines—a realization of the interfaith ideal—and document a common search for wholeness through psychology (Liebman and Fosdick) or mysticism (Merton).

Future scholars could set Hedstrom's astute analysis of these books and their readers beside examination of other, less obviously liberal bestsellers from the period. The same year Peace of Mind topped the nonfiction bestseller list, the exuberantly Catholic novel The Miracle of the Bells topped the fiction list, followed the next year by The Big Fisherman, a rendering of the life of Peter by the author of The Robe. The Seven Storey Mountain appeared on the 1949 nonfiction list a few spots above Fulton Oursler's The Greatest Story Ever Told, Bishop Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul, and Norman Vincent Peale's A Guide to Confident Living.

Peale fits easily into Hedstrom's liberal trajectory, but the other authors do not. The list of 1950s nonfiction religious bestsellers would appear to drift even farther from liberalism, with authors including Peter and Catherine Marshall, Cardinal Francis Spellman, Billy Graham, and Pat Boone. These books could be evidence of conservative pushback against ascendant liberalism or of a broadening middlebrow culture.

Hedstrom's work is a welcome contribution to a new generation of scholarship on liberal religion in America. By shifting the focus away from theological tomes or denominational ledgers and toward popular nonfiction, Hedstrom shows how much of 20th-century spirituality was created as people encountered new ideas, new voices, and new possible selves in books.

Elesha Coffman, assistant professor of church history at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, is author of The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The evangelical segment of the American citizenry began to interest the nation's political savants in 1976. Although no one—then or now—has ever precisely defined what makes someone an "evangelical," the fact that Jimmy Carter taught a weekly Bible class at his Southern Baptist church in Americus, Georgia, and that he sometimes used the word for himself was enough to kick-start an engine of media scrutiny that has never stopped. The much-publicized rise of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, the contribution by evangelicals (however defined) to the nation's never-ending culture wars, and the alliance between many self-identified evangelicals and the Republican Party have kept the Evangelical Question alive as a matter of urgent public analysis—as well as a steady source of revenue for the nation's leading secular and academic publishers.

The transcendently important dimension of that question is religious: how do evangelicals measure up to the standards of historical, classical Christianity? But for immediate interest to the broader public, political queries have predominated: how and why has this variety of Christian faith affected American public life, as it so obviously has from the late 1960s forward?

Two recent books from Harvard University Press—Matthew Avery Sutton's deeply researched depiction of the evangelical forest and Grant Wacker's equally well researched focus on the tallest tree in that forest—are among the latest in a distinguished lineup to accept the challenge of explaining American evangelicals to Americans who are not part of that religious tribe. The parade began with George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture from Oxford University Press in 1980; it continued in the early 1990s with the first well-rounded study of Billy Graham (by William Martin from Wm. Morrow) and Paul Boyer's Harvard Press book on "Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture." Significant studies followed steadily, including earlier Harvard books by Wacker on Pentecostalism (2001) and Sutton on the flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (2007). Since 2010 the steady stream has become a flood: from Alfred A. Knopf on the spirituality of the Vineyard Fellowship, from W. W. Norton on the migration of southern evangelicals to California, from Harvard on evangelical creation scientists and right-wing nationalists, from the University of Pennsylvania Press on evangelical ambiguity about public funding and on the small band of evangelical political liberals, from Basic Books on Jimmy Carter's religion, and from Oxford University Press on the Jesus People, evangelical anxieties over authority, evangelical cultural influence, preachers of the Prosperity Gospel, and the rise of the Christian Right.

The appearance of such books from major trade and university presses testifies to the salience of evangelical political activity in general public consciousness. Only the Civil Rights Movement has generated as much careful scholarship on religion in the public square. In both cases, however, attention to the political effect of actions propelled by religious motives has too easily ignored, trivialized, dismissed, or read through those motives. Thankfully, the floodtide of recent scholarship includes a number of studies predicated on the assumption that in order to understand the political impact of evangelical religion it is imperative to first understand evangelical religion. The new books by Sutton and Wacker belong among the very best of such efforts.

The conjunction of the two books is also fortuitous, since taken together they allow readers to assess both aspects of the Evangelical Question: concerning the character of the religion, and concerning the political effects of that religion. Although the books resemble each other in their bold claims about evangelical influence on "America," they move in very different directions. Sutton seems convinced that evangelical religion is a Mr. Edward Hyde who, though often restrained by his alter ego, nonetheless acts for destructive, sinister ends. By contrast, Wacker's account of the Billy Graham phenomenon convinces him that, although Mr. Hyde lurks constantly in the background, the evangelical Christianity that Graham represents should be regarded as a benevolent, altruistic Dr. Henry Jekyll.

Matthew Sutton is a younger historian of already considerable renown who teaches at Washington State University. His American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism rests on unprecedently thorough research into an ad hoc but cohesive tradition of influential authors, preachers, and widely read interdenominational periodicals that he describes as "radical evangelical." The chief early proponent of this radicalism was William Blackstone, an Illinois layman who in 1878 published Jesus Is Coming, a book that has sold into the tens of millions, been translated into scores of languages, and remains in print. Blackstone's study drew on widely scattered passages of Scripture to chart the entirety of world history, from the creation to what he saw as the rapidly approaching Second Coming of Christ. Because Blackstone stressed biblical prophecies that he believed predicted the return of Jews to ancestral lands in the Middle East—and because he campaigned hard for that eventuality—he has been recognized as the most influential Zionist who was not a Jew.

Later proponents of Blackstone's understanding of Scripture included the most popular leaders of the fundamentalist movement early in the 20th century, and later the key figures of the "neo-evangelical" revival of the 1940s who shucked off fundamentalist excesses in an effort to re-enter the American mainstream. Closer to the present, the same pattern of biblical interpretation gave Hal Lindsey his plot for The Late, Great Planet Earth, probably the best-selling American book of any kind during the 1970s, and also the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins that from the mid-1990s racked up more sales than any fiction series until surpassed by Harry Potter.

Even as Sutton explains why the radical evangelical stance poses a danger to public life, American Apocalypse patiently unfolds its inner workings. The key for a Bible-fixated American culture was a fresh interpretation of Scripture that has acted like a magnet drawing together an otherwise fissiparous collection of head-strong Protestants. This interpretation hinges on several verses from the 20th chapter of the Apocalypse of St. John, where "an angel come down from heaven … laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years" (i.e., a millennium). Sutton's subjects are "premillennialists": they believe that the Second Coming of Christ will take place before this thousand year-period.

Since the late 19th century, most premillennialists have also followed the lead of John Nelson Darby, an Irish-born teacher of the English Bible who in several visits to America propounded the view that God worked through discernibly different phases or "dispensations" in relating to humankind—from creation, then through the ancient Hebrews, then Christ and the Apostles, then a separate "church age," and finally to the End of All Things predicted by biblical prophecy. Sutton's radicals embraced this "dispensational premillennialism."

They filled out their program by contending for the strategic importance of biblical passages that others find simply obscure. These passages include the prophet Ezekiel's reference to the nations Gog and Magog, who threaten God's people; the prophet Jeremiah's prediction, chapter one, verse 14, that "Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land"; the prophet Daniel's description of a future period of "seventy weeks" into which all history falls; the Olivet Discourse of Jesus from the synoptic gospels (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21) with its fearsome account that "after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened … and the stars fall from heaven"; and the visions of the Book of Revelation understood as a detailed prediction of world events at the End of Time. Great energy and more ingenuity wove these verses together into a vision of the present and the future that has exerted a compelling attraction for great numbers of American Protestants.

Sutton's chief concern is to demonstrate that this interpretation of Scripture has strongly influenced the way these Bible believers live in the world. Several earlier scholars had charted the rise and dissemination of dispensational theology, but no one has argued so forcefully for its deep and wide influence. In Sutton's view, prophetic apocalypticism has provided an epistemological key for evangelicals to decipher the real meaning of great world events as "Signs of the Times" anticipating the Return of Christ. Thus, the devastation of World War I combined with the British liberation of Palestine gave instant credibility to predictions that had earlier been embraced by only a few. Had not their interpretation of Scripture recognized that the Time was at hand when, as Jesus said in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24:7) "nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places"?

The same prophetic scheme encouraged many evangelicals to view Mussolini as the Antichrist. Not only did il Duce hammer out a concordat with the Pope (Protestants' traditional candidate as Antichrist); he also rejuvenated a great world power situated on the seven hills of Rome (see Rev. 17:9). The cataclysms of World War II enhanced the credibility of the prophetic scenario, especially the explosion of atomic bombs over Japan (see 2 Peter 3:10: "the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up"). An even greater confirmation came in May 1948 with the creation of a modern Jewish state. Now for all to see, "the outcasts of Israel" (Isaiah 11:12) were being regathered into "the land of Israel" (Ezek. 37:12). Ever since—Soviet explosion of an A-bomb, the Oil Embargo of 1973, the first and second Iraq wars, the terrorist attacks of 9/11—event after event seemed to reconfirm the accuracy of biblical prophecies recorded in Scripture centuries ago.

Of course there have also been embarrassments. Mussolini turned out not to be the Antichrist. Probable dates for the "rapture," when believers will be taken to "meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thess. 4:17) before the seven-year "tribulation" preceding the Millennium, have been predicted, re-predicted, and predicted again. But such miscalculations amount to quibbles for those who believe that world events are manifestly hastening to the climactic Battle of Armageddon (Rev. 16:16) that will bring human history to a close.

Most important for Sutton are the marching orders that these repeated confirmations of end-times prophecy have supplied for an ever-growing cohort of the nation's Protestants. Rather than promoting passivity, a lively sense of the apocalyptic future has inspired believers to "occupy until I come," as Jesus instructed in Luke 19:13. That occupation at first involved personal moral reform; most evangelicals enthusiastically supported Prohibition and joined in the great national worry of the 1920s and 1930s about slipping standards for marriage and family. But then with the coming of the Cold War—and the Soviet Union identified as Ezekiel's Magog as well as Jeremiah's great power from the North—evangelicals added to their apocalyptic vision a re-kindled sense of America as a chosen nation. Evangelicals had no particular love for Harry Truman as a Big Government Democrat, but they applauded heartily when he pushed the U.S. to speedy recognition of the new state of Israel ("I will bless them that bless thee," Gen. 12:3).

The activism that Sutton documents has never extended to race relations or gender inequities, since in his view the evangelicals' conformity to white middle-class values has been almost as strong as their biblical interpretations were exceptional. But as he construes the recent past, this apocalyptic vision energized evangelicals as a significant political force, beginning with World War I and expanding ever since. Sutton concludes that other students of evangelicalism have missed "how thoroughly evangelical premillennialism has saturated American culture over the last 150 years."

Crucially, he argues, by missing that significant reality, scholars have also failed to understand the link between the enduring apocalyptic tradition and the recent flourishing of American political conservatism. According to Sutton, without the former, the latter is unimaginable: "The urgency, the absolute morals, the passion to right the world's wrongs, and the refusal to compromise, negotiate, or mediate, now defines much of American evangelicalism and a significant part of right-wing politics. We now live in a world shaped by evangelicals' apocalyptic hopes, dreams, and nightmares."

Sutton's last full chapter, entitled "Apocalypse Now," features the public ministry of Billy Graham, who burst on to the national scene in 1949 with a much-publicized revival meeting in Los Angeles. To Sutton, Graham exemplifies the way that American evangelicals have charged their understanding of Christianity with cold-war apocalypticism. Sutton documents carefully the continued presence of such themes for Graham, including his widely read books World Aflame (1965) and Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsem*n of the Apocalypse (1983). He concedes that Graham mellowed over the years. Yet he also insists that Graham's view of a cataclysmic End—along with its political concomitants—have keyed his entire public career, and therefore resonated with millions of American evangelicals.

Grant Wacker begs to differ. Wacker, who is wrapping up a distinguished career as scholar and mentor of young historians at the Divinity School of Duke University, sees Graham's evangelical convictions in a more favorable light, and hence also American evangelicals as a whole. His beautifully written America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation is now not only the best general study of the Billy Graham Phenomenon, but also the most charitable possible reading of Graham's career.

Although the book is not a biography, a 25-page introduction succinctly sketches Graham's career: born into a conservative Presbyterian family of dairy farmers in North Carolina, publicly committing himself to Christ as a teenager at a tent-revival meeting, educated at fundamentalist and neo-evangelical institutions, traveling widely as the first full-time preacher for the nascent Youth For Christ movement after World War II, and for over the next fifty years—from his Los Angeles crusade in 1949 (eight weeks, 350,000 in attendance, 3,000 "decisions for Christ") to a three-day preaching campaign in 2005 at Flushing Meadows (200,000 total attendance)—a dominant presence in American public life.

Wacker's capsule biography rehearses Graham's very public association with the nation's presidents, the savvy exploitation by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of modern media, Graham's crucial role in founding Christianity Today magazine while actively promoting other evangelical institutions, and the prodigious numbers attending his rallies at home and abroad. These last deserve special mention, since Graham may have spoken in public meetings to more people than anyone ever in history.

Wacker takes special care here to record the major flash-points of criticism: Graham's naïve faith in Richard Nixon, a theology that some critics called dangerously simplistic, Graham's contention after returning from the Soviet Union in 1982 that its citizens enjoyed religious freedom, and the revelation in 2002 of a 1972 conversation with Nixon that contained Graham's graphically disparaging comments about Jews and their perverse influence in America.

By also recording the many encomia and almost as many disparagements that Graham has received, Wacker sets up the argument of his book. He will, in the end, interpret Graham's public career positively, but only after a full account of evidence pointing in the other direction. Thus, we read of Graham's repeated position at the top of the nation's "most admired" rankings, his place as one of Time's "100 Heroes and Icons of the Twentieth Century," his countless awards (the U.S. Congress, B'nai Brith, Tournament of Roses, etc.), and the accolades from many admirers, including George H. W. Bush, who in 2007 hailed him as "America's Pastor." Readers, however, also hear from Murray Kempton, who derided Graham as "the Pope of lower Protestants"; I. F. Stone, who called him Richard Nixon's "smoother Rasputin"; Reinhold Niebuhr, who pooh-poohed his theology as so much homespun; and quite a few others whom Graham did not impress.

The book proper proceeds thematically, with chapters on Graham as a southerner, the architect of a coordinated neo-evangelical movement, and a patriarch active into his very old age. Wacker's most creative research underlies a chapter on Graham as pastor: extensive reading of the evangelist's syndicated newspaper column, "My Answer," which appeared in daily papers for over 60 years, and then scores of letters addressed to Graham with requests for personal advice. The conclusion that Wacker draws in this chapter anticipates what he also writes about Graham as "Preacher" and as a "Pilgrim" who has undertaken a lifelong journey of social awareness. They showcase a Billy Graham who, apocalyptic warts and all, became an increasingly moderate, increasingly social-minded spokesman for a traditional but also open and inviting version of the Christian faith.

Wacker insists that any serious account of Graham's message must begin with its basic Christian content, "the inner scaffolding" that prevailed from first to last: "God, humans, sin, Christ, salvation, judgment, heaven, and hell." Yet, as if to counter Sutton's assertion about the central place of apocalypticism among American evangelicals, Wacker also documents a significant evolution in what the preacher stressed. At Los Angeles in 1949 and other early rallies, Graham's machine-gun delivery channeled a dispensational premillennial message into an emotional appeal for conversion. At the start he preached what he thought "the Bible says," but relied just as heavily on reading "The Signs of the Times." For the early Graham, it wasn't always clear whether he felt more strongly about the attraction of Christianity or the perils of the Soviet threat, nuclear warfare, and the moral degeneration of contemporary America.

Yet by 1957 and Graham's weeks-long crusade at New York's Madison Square Garden the tone had shifted. As many have noted, those meetings marked Graham's break with his fundamentalist past. Unlike the separatism that fundamentalists required from modernist churches and also demanded from conservative churches that did not separate from the liberals, Graham announced that he would work with anyone willing to work with him. Fundamentalists recoiled in alarm, while Graham's reach expanded exponentially. In New York City, his signature sermons now focused on biblical texts of divine mercy (like John 3:16, "For God so loved the world …"). Moreover, while not abandoning imperatives spurred by considering the End of Time, Graham stepped back a little; now he spoke more cautiously, as from Matthew 24:36: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man … but my Father only." From that point forward, Wacker portrays a preacher who balanced judgment and love: "For every dire statement about the certainty of apocalypse one finds many more about the certainty of redemption."

America's Pastor charts a parallel evolution in Graham's social and political career, and with a parallel ideological structure. Graham's approach to public life always rested on a belief that individual conversion delivered the only certain remedy for social dysfunction. Yet his social vision likewise evolved. Graham grew up as a conventional white evangelical much more worried about Big Government overreach than racial inequality, more eager to explore conspiracy theories than to strategize for social reform. Yet from these beginnings he moved a very long way in his very long career. While never out front in campaigns for minority rights, he did integrate seating at his southern preaching tours, and did so before Brown vs. Board of Education. From his early stance as a militant Cold Warrior, he eventually became a strong advocate for nuclear disarmament. In 1979, one year before the election of Ronald Reagan, he announced a judgment that soon became a mantra: the arms race was "insanity, madness."

Graham's propensity to shoot from the hip gave him many opportunities to apologize for misstatements. Wacker thinks it is significant that he made those apologies. So it was that after words possibly construed as calling aids a specific judgment of God, he offered an apology with an extended explanation. Even more profuse apologies came after the revelation of his 1972 comments about American Jews, apologies that many Jewish groups, though not all of the nation's political pundits, seemed to accept. If Graham also repeatedly sought to explain away his incautious comments from 1982 about religious freedom in the Soviet Union, thereafter he made several trips back to Russia, and then also to communist Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, where his emphasis on universal human aspirations drew less press coverage than his earlier comments as Cold Warrior and bamboozled tourist.

Graham's political friendships were a consistent source of admiration for the constituency that Wacker calls "the Heartland"; it was as if the attention showered on one of their own extended vicariously to them. Others came up with words like toady and sycophant. The least persuasive of Wacker's efforts to adjudicate Graham's career is his conclusion that after the Nixon debacle, Graham permanently altered his approach to Washington. To be sure, Graham never endorsed Falwell's Moral Majority, yet his fascination with power, his naïveté about how presidents and candidates (not just Nixon) exploited photo ops, and the instances where political or diplomatic commentary showed him to be out of his depth—these persistent traits reveal not a prophet keen about speaking truth to power, but a priest simply hoping to join the conversation.

Wacker's generally positive assessment is in fact more convincing for the pains he takes to present criticisms from others along with several sharp sallies of his own. If readers follow his examination of an extraordinary range of evidence pro and con, most should agree that over time Graham matured in his understanding of the Christian faith and the uses to which he put that faith. In Wacker's judgment, "If the fiery young Graham had worried about lawlessness at home and communism abroad, the reflective older Graham worried more about loneliness at home and AIDS abroad."

Coverage in both books of Graham's activities in January 1991 and during the political season of 2102 focuses the question whether evangelical Christianity exists as a malevolent Mr. Hyde or a benevolent Dr. Jekyll. For those who have no use for supernatural religion, the choice is simple: in whatever form it appears, its delusions can mean only confused minds and poisoned behavior. But others who are not so disposed should find these incidents an interpretive challenge.

The first concerns Graham's relationship with George H. W. Bush and the First Iraq War. In his account, Sutton relays a report that Graham told the president that Saddam Hussein was the Antichrist—though Sutton also concedes that "Graham probably did not make such a claim, since Saddam was not the right fit for the evangelist's premillennial theology." Details aside, Sutton finds the evangelist's continued recourse to prophecy the key to his long career. Thus, "Graham's work illustrates how premillennialists-turned-fundamentalists-turned-evangelicals since William Blackstone's Jesus Is Coming have masterfully linked the major issues of every generation to their reading of the coming apocalypse with the goal of transforming their culture." Alongside his fellow evangelicals, Graham always based his preaching on prophetic interpretation with a goal of accumulating authority. His grasp of the prophetic word has given Graham and "the faithful a powerful sense of urgency, a confidence that they alone understand the world in which they are living, and a hope for a future in which they will reign supreme."

Wacker treats the same incidents, but with a very different conclusion. He also describes the well-publicized prayers that Graham shared with Bush on January 16, 1991, the day the president ordered the bombing of Baghdad to begin. But then Wacker records Graham's little-noticed comments on January 17 when he spoke to military personnel at Fort Meyers. On that occasion, Graham's prayer for a short war and an enduring peace used words taken from Abraham Lincoln's hope that the United States would find itself on God's side, rather than worrying about the reverse. The picture here is not so much of an activist inspired by premillennial fervor as of a public figure trying hard to function constructively as "America's pastor."

Then in 2012 Graham's name appeared in a series of newspaper ads promoting right-wing causes and candidates in the Carolinas and nationwide. To Sutton, the ads represented the natural culmination, not just for a single life, but for American evangeli-calism as a whole. To Wacker, by contrast, the ads reflected the influence of Graham's son Franklin, an eager culture warrior who exploited his father's name as "a departure from the position Graham had maintained since the mid-1970s that high-profile preachers in general, and he in particular, should stay out of partisan politics."

The contrasting portraits of Graham that emerge from these two well-researched books point to sharply contrasting conclusions about American evangelical Christianity—as both a religion and a political force. For religion, if Sutton is correct that premillennial dispensationalism is the driving ideology, it is hard to see how American evangelicals could ever offer what the Christian tradition at its best has provided to its adherents and the societies where they are found. But if, as Wacker sees it, that particular theology is less central—in one place he calls it "boilerplate" trotted out as merely in-house, conventional rhetoric—then American evangelicals might be closer to classical Christian norms and also capable of a more accommodating public presence.

Observers in general, and not only Christian believers, should realize that dispensational premillennialism represents a peculiarly American version of classical Christian faith. Classical Christianity too depends comprehensively on Scripture, but the biblical literalism of dispensational premillennialism arises from a strongly populist and militantly anti-academic understanding of the Bible. A prophetic scheme worked up by individuals with little sense for ancient Near Eastern history and often scant training in biblical Hebrew and Greek took shape when popular preachers and writers snatched individual Bible verses out of their original settings to assemble doctrine as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. Premillennial Christians do affirm the classical belief in a transcendent deity who creates, sustains, and guides human history. But they regularly express that belief with a Manichaean understanding of good and evil and a gnostic reliance on in-group scriptural interpretations to explain how God directs human history.

Traditionally, and with fresh initiatives in recent decades, leading Christian thinkers have insisted that their faith rests on a Jewish foundation and that Jews today retain some kind of mysterious relationship to their ancient status as God's elect people. With great determination dispensationalists also hold to a particular version of this belief, but they act upon it with mechanical biblical interpretation and formulaic insistence on all-or-nothing support for the state of Israel.

Classical Christianity, finally, holds that God will indeed drew human history to a close as decisively as divine creation brought the world into existence and as a divine plan of salvation ordained the saving work of Christ. Yet premillennialists go further by affirming not only an apocalyptic end of time, but with fervent self -confidence that their scheme of prophetic interpretation has figured out when, where and how it will unfold.

From one angle, therefore, dispensational premillennialism may be viewed as simply an extension of classical Christianity. From another angle it looks like a perversion. According to Wacker, Billy Graham's lifelong maturation has moved him ever farther away from the procrustean grip of the millennialism he inherited and ever closer to the classical Christian practices of longsuffering, grace, and empathy. Harder versions of dispensational premillennialism certainly do push evangelicals away from conceptual engagement with the world while fueling a sometimes frantic mobilization for authority. It remains an open question, however, whether this theology prevails as pervasively among evangelicals as Sutton asserts, or—stated more precisely—whether its widespread presence among evangelicals always leads so inevitably to apocalyptic fever.

For politics, the interpretive question is simpler. On the one hand, if Sutton is right about American evangelicals, including Graham, then political involvement by this large segment of the American populace will only firm up right-wing self-righteousness and strengthen the Tea Party for the near and long term.

On the other hand, if Wacker is correct about Graham and, by extension, American evangelicals, then the prospect exists for a different sort of evangelical political presence. Evangelicals will doubtless remain conservative in debates over moral questions and individualistic in their approach to social reconstruction. But it is also conceivable that they might reprise some of the genius for compromise that propelled William Wilberforce's parliamentary attack on slavery, some of the concern for the marginalized that inspired the early labors of William Jennings Bryan, and some of the commitment to world peace that factored so large in the activities of Oregon's Senator Mark Hatfield. For future political considerations it is important to remember that Wilberforce, Bryan, and Hatfield were every bit as evangelical as their fellow-religionists who now join in vociferous campaigns against Big Government and enlist so eagerly in the NRA.

Robert Louis Stevenson's novella about the predatory Mr. Hyde and the tormented Dr. Jekyll has remained compelling because of its insights into the contending forces that can rage within a single human being. Transposed to a consideration of religious movements, his story seems to have been written with contemporary American evangelicals in mind. To read America's Pastor and American Apocalypse together revives the poignancy of Stevenson's tale. For those who reject the possibility of anything like the Christian religion, it doesn't make much difference if Sutton or Wacker has come closer to the truth. Those with any interest in any sort in Christianity—not to speak of any concern for the health of American public life—should hope that Wacker is right.

Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (forthcoming).

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 2003, Sufjan Stevens released an album titled Greetings From Michigan, the Great Lake State, a 15-track aural history of the 26th state. Stevens billed it as the first installment of a planned 50 albums, one for each of the 50 states. He followed it up in 2005 with Come On Feel the Illinoise, which included tracks such as "The Seer's Tower," "One Last 'Woo-Hoo!' For the Pullman," and "Let's Hear the String Part Again, Because I Don't Think They Heard It All the Way Out in Bushnell." Since then, though, the ambitious project has stalled. Stevens has produced a number of other albums, including what he calls a "programmatic tone poem" for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but the other 48 states still await their turn as muse.

Such grandiose silliness has little to do with the work of Robert Wuthnow, the Gerhard R. Andlinger '52 Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton University, save in one respect: if anyone writing today could pull off a similarly epic mission—a book for every state—it would be Wuthnow, who at last count had authored some 34 books and 15 edited collections over a nearly four-decade career as one of the leading scholars of religion and society in the United States. In 2012, for example, he published Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America's Heartland, a study of conservative religious culture in his native Kansas. With his latest book, Rough Country: How Texas Became America's Most Powerful Bible-Belt State, Wuthnow has done more than merely pull even with Stevens in the race to 50. When we add to the list yet another of Wuthnow's recent titles, Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future, it's clear that he has completed a trilogy on religious and political conservatism in modern America.

Hardly any development in modern America has been in greater need of scholarly explanation than the resurgence of religious and political conservatism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The rise of the Religious Right bucked much of the conventional wisdom of modern social science. Society was supposed to be growing more and more secularized. Rural peoples were moving to cities and becoming integrated into modern social and economic networks. Education was becoming standardized and extended to greater numbers of people. Science was explaining phenomena which had mystified human beings for eons—and which had inspired much of the hocus pocus of religious and spiritual practices. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. Instead of becoming less religious, citizens in the United States—the most scientifically advanced, industrialized, and democratized nation in the world—actually became more religious. Or at the very least huge numbers of them embraced a religiously influenced social and cultural conservatism that seemed to defy all the modernizing trends.

Social analysts have not been entirely mystified. Conventional wisdom has run in two general directions. One argument contends that religious and political conservatism is merely false consciousness manufactured by economic and political elites. This dismissal of religion as the opiate of the masses has deep roots that stretch back to the origins of modern social theory. Its revitalizers and popularizers have been legion. Thomas Frank's popular 2005 book What's the Matter with Kansas is one of the most recent versions, and one against which Wuthnow writes in his fine-grained study of Kansas. The other conventional explanation is that the turn toward conservative religious life represents a self-interested, narrow-minded reaction by a petit bourgeoisie that is being displaced by broad economic and cultural trends. Barack Obama contributed a version of this analysis to popular culture with offhand remarks he made as a presidential candidate back in 2008. Lower-middle-class whites in the Rustbelt, he explained, were frustrated by the long, slow decline of their local economy, and they turned to God, guns, and resentment of immigrant outsiders in response.

With his exhaustively researched and carefully argued studies, Wuthnow offers a different approach. Avoiding general theories and broad explanations, he looks closely at both the social and institutional structure of the communities in these states and also the history and local contexts that have shaped them. Each book in this informal "trilogy" comes to its own set of conclusions, making a general summary difficult, yet two characteristics of Wuthnow's methodology stand out. First is the seriousness with which he takes the opinions and perspectives of the people he studies. Wuthnow chides his fellow sociologists for "telling almost any population under investigation that it did not understand itself as well as sociologists did." In his study of small towns, Wuthnow and his team of researchers interviewed hundreds of small town residents, and their perspectives come through continually. Surprisingly for a social scientist, he writes about the need to "move beyond the search for broad generalizations." Sociologists, he writes, maintain a "tool kit" of useful analytical categories—closed versus open networks; symbolic boundaries; collective representations; a preoccupation with patterns of deference, demeanor, and norms—yet "these elements combine in manifestly different ways in different places."

This interest in context and difference leads to a second characteristic. It is striking how heavily Wuthnow relies on history to explain conservative religious culture. For books that largely are interested in explaining the contemporary scene, they take a decidedly long view. The studies of Kansas and Texas, more than anything, are social histories of the intersection of religion and politics, from the origins of white settlement through to recent Tea Party activism.

Kansas' image as the quintessential conservative red state hides a contentious and bloody history, Wuthnow reminds us, all of which was connected to religious life in the state. The muralist John Steuart Curry recalled this history in the apocalyptic scene he painted in the Kansas state capitol, depicting a wild-eyed John Brown towering over armed antagonists, an open Bible in his left hand and a rifle in his right. Wuthnow begins with that bloody history, and he ends with an examination of religiously motivated violence that led to the 2009 murder of George Tiller, a doctor who performed late-term abortions. Yet it is not extremism but pragmatism that characterizes the religious life of most Kansans, Wuthnow argues. For much of the state's history, red-state religion "had less to do with contentious moral activism than it did with local communities and relationship among neighbors, friends, and fellow churchgoers," he writes. As citizens of a rural agricultural state isolated from the sources of economic and political power in the East, Kansans developed a skepticism of distant authority and a strong reliance on local democratic government. The religious establishment, particularly the Methodists who predominated numerically, often checked more radical political sentiments. In recent decades, the influence of the Methodists, as well as the Catholic Church, which has been the other major denomination in Kansas, has waned in comparison to that of non-denominational evangelical churches and Southern Baptists, many of whom migrated from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. It is these groups, Wuthnow argues, that have waged the divisive culture wars of recent years. They are often in tension with older established denominations, a fact often missed by outside chroniclers of Kansas's supposed red-state religious unanimity.

Texas, as large and diverse as it is, is less easy to explain. To understand the rough and tumble quality of Texas's religious and political life, Wuthnow begins in the 1820s with the origins of white settlement in the state. The challenges of establishing social order on the frontier, along with the mythologies that developed around white Texans' battles with droughts, plagues, Native Americans, and the Mexican militia, influenced the political and religious culture that emerged. Civil religion and more traditional kinds merged in powerful ways in Texas' cult of political and religious liberty. In white Texans' origins story, the martyrs at the Alamo died at the hands of authoritarian Catholics, and their memory was preserved as the scene of the battle, once a Catholic mission church, was turned into the shrine of Texas civil religion.

Such a place was fertile ground for the seeds of Southern Baptists, now the dominant denomination in the state, a group with its own historical commitment to religion practiced free from the controlling influence of the state. In the 20th century, Texas became renowned as a hotbed of fundamentalist belief. The reputation always belied a more complicated religious scene, yet the state did launch some of the most successful fundamentalist preachers and presses—in part because booming cities like Dallas and Forth Worth, flush with oil and cattle money, had financial backers and denominations to bankroll these religious entrepreneurs. The relationship between business and conservative religion only grew over the course of the 20th century; Wuthnow shows how Texas was home to some of the most important funders of conservative religious causes. It was also ground zero for the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s, a development that would have implications for the broader Religious Right. Wuthnow also includes an afterword in which he puts on his sociologist hat once again and provides a bravura critical assessment of major theories and methods in the study of modern religious life.

While the focus of Rough Country is on white religious culture and politics, Wuthnow pays particular attention to how Texas's racial history shaped the dominant white culture. The racial diversity in Texas communities influenced white conservative Christians "inadvertently, implicitly, or explicitly," he writes. For Wuthnow racial diversity largely means the presence of African Americans; the history of Hispanic-Anglo relations gets far less attention in this book. Even so, Rough Country makes clear that Texas' racial and religious histories cannot be properly understood independent of each other. For example, Wuthnow shows the enduring impact that racially segregated churches had on the broader society. Church ministries that developed in the Jim Crow era served to rationalize separation between the races. Once those separate institutions were founded, Wuthnow writes, "subsequent efforts to organize ministries that crossed racial lines faced structural barriers that destined most of these efforts to fail or to succeed only in limited ways despite the good intentions of those involved."

Religion is not a particular focus of Wuthnow's Small-Town America, at least not in the same way as in the other two books. He is interested in how communities respond to social and cultural change. Churches and religious belief are among the traditional institutions and cultural practices that are in flux. Wuthnow concludes that, despite the mythology surrounding them, small towns really aren't that different from urban and suburban areas. All are governed by the same laws and institutions. All are drenched in the same media-driven culture that we receive through television and the Internet. Small towns are different, Wuthnow argues, primarily in that they are small. It seems like an obvious point, but it's not. Small towns, he writes, have distinctive social relationships and meanings of community that can only be formed in places where the racial, ethnic, class, or ideological differences are narrowed, or at least, where those differences are mitigated by personal interactions, interfamily relationships, and a tighter web of connectivity. The mistake people make, he says—and they've been making it ever since the 19th century, when modern American metropolises were born—is the belief that "America could save itself from impending doom by somehow reinstituting the values and lifestyles of the small town." This is the sentiment that Sarah Palin invoked on the campaign trail in 2008 when she lauded the values of "real America." Palin really meant Republican-leaning areas, but she invoked a long tradition in American life of valorizing small-town life and small-town values. Wuthnow's study suggests that there's no such thing as "real America":

Efforts to strengthen civic values in larger places have to be different. They have to take into account the wider scale in which social interactions take place, greater diversity of needs and interests, and more open-ended meanings of community.

Strengthening civic values is no easy thing to do. Neither is finding a middle ground in the religious culture wars that continue to be waged in America today. Wuthnow laments the "penchant for generalizations" in today's culture, the desire for "quick answers that can be gleaned from books turned into sound bites." Undoubtedly this is true. Yet as I was working my way through the nearly 1,500 pages of these three studies, I couldn't help but think that perhaps a sound bite or two wouldn't be so bad. Wuthnow relies on the old-school Protestant work ethic: if you want to know about conservative religious and political culture today, he seems to be saying, then you've got to roll up your sleeves and read about it in all of its particularity in the many varied situations in which it arises. Unfortunately, I think few people other than scholarly specialists are going to be up for the task.

For those who are, however, there are rewards to be had, particularly when Wuthnow's studies of Kansas and Texas are read alongside a number of important recent works in religious history—books such as Darren Dochuk's study of the southern California Bible-Belt, Bethany Moreton's investigation of Christian capitalism in Wal-Mart Country, or Carolyn DuPont's book on Christianity and the color line in Mississippi. We may not end up with 50 books for 50 states, but all of these works make for important reading for anyone interested in the sources of religious and political conservatism in modern America.

Joseph Crespino is professor of history at Emory University. He is the author of Strom Thurmond's America (Hill & Wang) and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton Univ. Press).

Books by Robert Wuthnow discussed in this essay:

Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America's Heartland (Princeton Univ. Press, 2012)

Rough Country: How Texas Became America's Most Powerful Bible-Belt State (Princeton Univ. Press, 2014

Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013)

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Some books provide an arsenal of disparate facts that make for sitcom fodder. I can imagine a scene in Cheers with Cliff asking Lilith and Frazier, "Did you know that in ancient Macedonia nobody could wash in warm water except a woman who had just given birth?" Or, "Few people can name Plato's successor. Yeah, it was ol' Speusippus." And, "Did you know that the 'Sacred Band' of the Thebans was an élite fighting group? Apparently, these 150 pairs of lovers fought valiantly to save their partners." And then, "All true—read it in By the Spear, a fascinating book about Alexander the Great. Guess where they got the book's title?"

Perhaps Lilith would respond, "Of course from Alexander's statement about conquering the world after crossing the Hellespont. But did you know that his father, Philip II, must have had a lot of warm water around? He took seven wives and divorced none. That's in the book, too."

And so is a steady stream of fascinating stories of brilliant military tactics interspersed with rampant post-Classical gore. From the slaughter of whole villages to unbridled violations of human dignity, By the Spear reminds us of the ugliness of war, especially when military leaders are apparently void of morality filters.

Philip was no stranger to strangers—he had terrorized enough villages and cities that his reputation proceeded him. He executed threats to his throne, including three stepbrothers. When he became irritated with opponents, his wrath could lead to mass slaughter, such as the 10,000 Illyrians and the 9,000 Phocians, including 3,000 captives, killed "on the spot." Though it's not the book's thesis, representing the human carnage in war could be. Throughout the Macedonians' rise we find this on both sides. Darius "the Great King" intercepted the trail of Macedonian sick and wounded shortly before his loss to the Macedonians at Issus. This famed Persian leader "cut off their hands, cauterized the bloody stumps with pitch, and sent some of these men to report his arrival to Alexander."

Alexander himself enslaved the small city of Tyre (pop. 30,000) after slaughtering between 6,000 and 8,000, teaching them a lesson after their long resistance was finally overcome. He also crucified 2,000 Tyrian survivors along the Syrian coast. En route to Egypt, he massacred 10,000 at Gaza and enslaved the men and children. He treated their obstinate commander, the Arab eunuch Batis, much like Hector of Troy. But instead of killing him first, he dragged him naked around the city behind a chariot, with the rope strung through his heels.

By the Spear is loaded with compelling details like this, but they aren't simply piled on helter-skelter; rather, they are embedded in Ian Worthington's coherent narrative about Macedonian ascendancy in the 4th century bc. This celebrated professor at the University of Missouri convincingly gives Philip II his due in Hellenism's spread, and masks not his thesis that Philip "has lived too long in Alexander's shadow …. From a backwater located on the periphery of the Greek world Philip fashioned Macedonia into a military and economic powerhouse in a reign of only 24 years."

Philip's "exploitation of natural resources" allowed him to establish a trade economy, aided by his land reclamation and irrigation project. Auxiliary efforts included coinage, new roads, and mining. He obviously built an intimidating professional military, replacing an "ineffectual conscript force." He added revolutionary siegecraft, 14-to 18-foot spears (sarissas), and the torsion catapult, all contributing in due course to Alexander's success in Asia—an assault built on the groundwork of Philip's successes in Asia Minor. At the same time, as Worthington emphasizes, Philip understood that military might was most effective when combined with shrewd diplomacy—a lesson his son failed to learn. Though brilliant, Alexander should always be measured against his father, "one of the ancient world's greatest leaders." And by the book's end, it's clear that such a tribute is a stretch for the son, one of the world's greatest generals, to be sure, but that was not sufficient to make him a great ruler.

By the Spear reflects Worthington's expansive knowledge not only of Philip's achievements but also of the regional context of rivalries and cultural expectations. One of Worthington's previous books, Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece (2012), accents the strong personality of this relentless orator, a key antagonist here as well. A near-exact contemporary with Philip II, Demosthenes devoted considerable energies to warning the Athenians against the northern threat. Yale University Press published Worthington's Philip II of Macedonia in 2008, and six years before that, Longman released his trade book on Alexander's claims of divinity (Alexander the Great: Man and God). Worthington has also edited Alexander the Great: A Reader, the second edition of which was published by Routledge in 2011. The cumulative scholarship of these earlier works informs By the Spear, which includes—in addition to the main narrative—a very helpful eight-page "Cast of Principal Characters," a five-page timeline, and nearly 50 pages of careful endnotes.

Worthington's meticulous accounts of cunning strategies, shifting alliances, and brutal violence, all driven by ruthless ambition, make a bitter mockery of the "brotherhood of mankind" message of Oliver Stone's Alexander. The mass marriage at Susa between 91 senior Macedonians (and Alexander) and royal women of Persia displaced at Issus nearly a decade earlier wasn't for the "unity of mankind." Against the backdrop of theses trying to prove the Macedonians' multicultural sensitivities, Worthington brusquely and persuasively concludes that "nothing could be further from the truth." There really was no Alexandrian romance.

I set the book aside but couldn't shake the images of the multitude of maimed resisters to Macedonian aggression. Of the throng of Macedonian military families' washed away in a flash flood during a senseless desert hike. Of massacres so numerous that they blur together in one vast scene of slaughter.

The irony is that Alexander rather than Philip became the legend. It's easy to envision Cliff at the Cheers bar asking, "Did you know that Alexander wasn't called 'the Great' until the 1st century BC? Yep, those Romans used it in one of their comedies." And Lilith could plausibly retort, "Well, did you know that the Romans only celebrated military leaders with 'Triumphs' if they had killed at least 5,000 of the enemy? No wonder they were the first to call him 'Great.'"

Jerry Pattengale directs the Green Scholars Initiative, with appointments at Indiana Wesleyan University, Baylor University, Tyndale House, Sagamore Institute, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He serves as associate publisher for Christian Scholar's Review.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000) made his classic argument for viewing human religious history as a single historical story rather than a collection of many different religious stories (Towards a World Theology, 1981), one of his poster-child examples of that all-encompassing narrative was the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. This legendary tale of an Indian prince (Josaphat), his royal father (Avenir), and a Christian ascetic (Barlaam) interweaves themes of spiritual awakening, religious conversion, and theological conquest. The story was born in India, based on the life story of Gautama Buddha, and used Indian Buddhist tropes, yet its two lead characters, Barlaam and Josaphat, were included in many medieval collections of Christian saints. Smith's point: human religious experience necessarily takes many specific forms in as many different contexts, but all draw from the same spiritual well.

Smith's analysis makes for interesting reading. However, anyone who consults two or three of the many versions of the story of Barlaam and Josaphat that have emerged over the centuries will be struck by a major irony. The various editors and redactors of the tale evidently had as their purpose something that appears to be directly at odds with Smith's universalization thesis—that is, their purpose was islamization, christianization, even judaization, rather than trying to collapse human religious history into a single story. The version we are reviewing here, for example, an English translation of Gui de Cambrai's French redaction, is among the most polemical of all, with an evident desire that Indian religious be allowed to convert to Christianity and all lndia become Christian.

The bare bones of the story as de Cambrai tells it are as follows: King Avenir, a vigorous persecutor of Christianity, has a son, Josaphat, born to him. Astrologers predict Josaphat will either become a world political leader or a major religious sage. The king does everything he can to encourage the former, not the latter. He pampers his son, isolating him from suffering. Josaphat instinctively realizes the pervasive existence of suffering, however, and is taught the Christian interpretation of that pain by a Christian ascetic, Barlaam. Josaphat converts to Christianity, resists his father's displeasure, and eventually prevails. That is, he prevails as a Christian convert, and Christianity prevails as a universally successful missionary force in India.

There can be no doubt of the Buddhist origins of this story. All of the variants of the story that emerged as it traveled from India to Arabia to Asia to the Middle East to Europe and the West include three events that became characteristic of most life stories of the Buddha in India: the astrologers' predictions of the extraordinary future that lay in wait for the baby boy; the chariot rides that taught the young man of suffering in the forms of sickness, old age, and death; and the father's/king's attempt to seduce his son back to a life of palace luxury using beautiful women as lures. In addition, throughout the text one recognizes terms more characteristic of Buddhist thinking than Christian thinking: (1) the impermanence of the physical world, especially the human body; (2) karma or human agency when it comes to moral activity; and (3) renunciation as the primary response to suffering. Make no mistake—Barlaam and Josaphat originated as a Buddhist story.

Likewise, there can be no doubt of the ingenious efforts to Christianize the story, to turn Josaphat from a bodhisattva to a saint, and in the process show the superiority of Christianity. These efforts became more and more pronounced as the story moved west. De Chambai's version from 13th-century France is in many ways the culmination of this, adding a full apologetic debate showing the superiority of Christian reason over the other religions of the day and then—the coup de grace—a religious war initiated by King Avenir against his son.

One can respond to the story of Barlaam and Josaphat in many ways—focusing, for example, on the theological and buddhalogical similarities and differences in the story as it moved from India to Arabia to the Middle East and to Europe and the rest of the West. One can emphasize the cultural factors that influenced the changes in the story or the religious ones, whether Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. The philology is fascinating. Tracing the title character's name (Josaphat) in the Christian versions, for example, back to the Buddhist term bodhisattva teaches us much. A whole book could be devoted to the secondary and tertiary literature that has grown up around the story, from the scholarly to the folklorist to the advocacy of ecumenism, humanism, or secularism. A story with this long a history and complicated cross-cultural readings can be read and studied many ways.

There are touches of all these approaches in Donald Lopez and Peggy McCracken's In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint, but their major contribution is their clear delineation of how the story evolved from culture to culture and age to age. They tell a great story about a great story. In places their account is still a bit speculative (especially on the Indian origins), but for the most part scholarship has reached some firm conclusions about the story's transmission. Lopez and McCracken summarize these historical findings reliably and interestingly.

They begin by telling the story of the Buddha. Stories, actually. The search for the historical Buddha makes the search for the historical Jesus seem like child's play in comparison. But since literary heritage rather than historical accuracy is the point here, Lopez and McCracken are able to root the three salient events repeated in all the editions of Barlaam and Josaphat—the astrologers' predictions, the chariot rides, and the seduction scenes—and demonstrate that the more the story changed, the more it stayed the same. That is, the more Christian elements that are added to the story, the more one can see the Buddhist elements at its core.

From its Indian origins, the story evolved to (1) an Arabic/Muslim version; (2) a Georgian Christian version; (3) a classical Greek, then Latin set of versions; and (4) many European-language versions, of which Gui de Cambrai's French version is one of the best preserved. At each stage the story became more Christian. At each stage it became more polemical. And, yes, at each stage it is still a Buddhist story.

After brilliantly relating their story of the story, Lopez and McCracken offer their view of why the story endures, especially in the postmodern West. Their take goes beyond the fact that it is classic literature, "classic" in the sense that it touches on archetypal human themes that can be recognized across cultures and eras. And their take goes beyond Wilfred Cantwell Smith's modernist thesis of human solidarity, unity, and coherence. It is interesting, they say, that a story of an Asian sage becomes the story of a Christian saint, and it is interesting, they say, that different groups of modernists used this fact to argue their points: scholars and folklorists interested in cultural transmission, humanists interested in embarrassing the Christian church and its beatification protocols, Christian apologists (and Muslim and Jewish apologists) interested in showing their religion's superiority over Hinduism and Buddhism.

But the really interesting thing about Barlaam and Josaphat, Lopez and McCracken say, is the way growing numbers of 21st century readers take pleasure in using the story in their creation of a Christian Buddha. Now that the Buddhist origin of Josaphat is common knowledge, more and more readers jump right over scholarly pedantry, humanist pettiness, and Christian-Muslim-Jewish religio-cultural imperialisms, and read the story as a way of understanding Gautama through a Christian lens. The subtitle of their book is incomplete. It might better read, "How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint and Then Became a Christian Asian Sage."

Lopez began this fascinating journey in his Terry Lectures at Yale in 2008 (published as The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life, 2012), a story of how thinkers in the West have understood and, mostly, misunderstood the Buddha, creating the Scientific Buddha in their own image. His conclusion of that very useful examination was that "we honor the Scientific Buddha for all he has done over his short life of 150 years … and that we allow him to pass away, like a flame going out."

But doesn't the story of Barlaam and Josaphat teach us a slightly different lesson? Contrary to popular understanding, legends don't point us back—legends really only point us forward. So isn't the lesson of this legend that there is no getting back to the original Buddha? That there is no help for Christians seeing the Buddha through a Christian lens—that they can see him in no other way? That the "real" Buddha lies somewhere in the intersections of the Indian Buddha, the Muslim Buddha, the Asian Buddha, the Jewish Buddha, and so on? For Christians, specifically, the story of Barlaam and Josaphat is an illustration of God's omnipresence, of God's presence anywhere and everywhere, of God's voracious appetite for self-revelation and God's grace-filled care for all humanity.

Terry C. Muck is executive director of the Louisville Institute.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.