THE GOOD VERSUS THE CHRISTIAN

~ Posted by Simon Willis, December 2nd 2013

American Christianity, the media and the politics of austerity: all three got a tough ride on Thursday night from the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, herself a Christian whose novels are steeped in religion. She told an audience in London that she had been "schooled in generosity and optimism" by the civil-rights movement, but lamented that in the decades since, Christianity has been stigmatised "as a redoubt of ignorance", as has the word "liberal…as if generosity were culpable". And she identified a cause: "the word 'Christian' now is seen less as identifying an ethic and more as identifying a demographic". The result has been a polarisation of the good versus the Christian, and a tribe whose members, she said, "can be outrageously forgiving of themselves, and very cruel in their denunciation of anyone else". It is not an attractive sight: "There are worse things than uncertainty—presumption being one of them."

Robinson was delivering the Theos lecture in the wood-panelled and red-plush splendour of One Birdcage Walk in Westminster. But not all her rebukes were as gentle as that last one. At one point she said that "the media do not find reasonable people interesting". Later, during an on-stage interview with the BBC's Mark Lawson, she accused certain radio and TV channels in the United States of profoundly corrupting the national conversation. "It's manipulative and at its root it's anti-democratic, because it wants to intrude artificial considerations into public life."

But she made her most impassioned remark when an audience member asked her about the politics of austerity: "I hear things like, 'You starve them now and they'll be prosperous later.' I don't believe it for a minute. I mean, having seen life on earth, seen how things go, I think that is just appalling, and we are doing nothing but destroying the future when we deprive the vulnerable. It's just odious to me."

When my colleague Emily Bobrow interviewed Robinson five years ago, she was struck by her forbidding reputation, her serious persona, and her disarming warmth. All three traits were on show at the lectern—along with her puckish humour. Her novel "Gilead" was named by President Obama as one of his favourite books. When he presented Robinson with a National Humanities Medal in 2012, he asked her about her new novel, which she hadn't yet finished. "Finish it, I want it," he told her. "So I went home and finished it. I know an executive order when I hear one."

There's more good news, then, for Obama: Robinson will publish "Lila", the third novel in a series about the fictional town of Gilead, in autumn 2014.

Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life. His recent posts for the Editors' Blog include An uneasy eye for the English and Seventy-five months of Maigret

Picture Getty