Since its “opening” in 1854 by U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan often has been defined in the West by a single, simple image.

Sometimes that image has been one of exotic, romantic tradition (a samurai or a geisha); sometimes it has been the image of technophilic hypermodernity (a bullet train or a robot). Over the past week, Japan has been visually defined in television and online news accounts by the imagery of disaster: flooded fields and streets, bodies and vehicles washed ashore, nuclear power plants exploding, and houses afire.

Disaster looms large in the Japanese cultural imagination. Even casual consumers of Japanese media are aware of the nation’s appetite for apocalypse, as seen in films from 1954’s Gojira (Godzilla) to 2006’s Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks), not to mention anime (cartoon) and manga (comic book) series such as Akira and Sunabōzu (Desert Punk). What the average Godzilla or anime fan may not realize, however, is how deeply rooted Japanese perceptions of disaster are in traditional Japanese religious culture.

In traditional Japanese religion (not only Shintō but also forms of Buddhism as well as hybrid and new religious movements), kami (deities) are entities of great power and unpredictable, even nonexistent morality. As the influential religious thinker Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) wrote:

The changing of spring and fall, the falling of rain and tempest of wind, all things good and evil which may befall men and lands, one and all are the doings of the kami…. Among the kami are good and evil, and their doings are likewise in accord with that nature…. When provoked, a good kami may erupt in rage, while evil kami may soften their hearts when happy, and it is not entirely inconceivable that they might even bestow blessings on humans. And although people may not realize it, the actions [of a kami] which may at first be thought evil, in fact turn out good, while those first thought to be good, may in fact turn out evil.

Many a Japanese apocalyptic drama or disaster movie has perpetuated this ambiguous concept of the sacred. Much like kami, Godzilla has been depicted as both an agent of destruction and a powerful protector who both menaces and saves Japan, depending on the film in question. Interestingly, in the original Godzilla film, nuclear radiation is said to have been responsible for creating the mutated prehistoric menace that is Godzilla, while in Japan Sinks, nuclear warheads are used to detonate portions of sea floor, thrusting the flooded Japanese islands back up above sea level. Thus, whether one speaks of supernatural figures, fictional monsters, or contemporary technology, power in Japan is cloaked in moral ambiguity, and it ultimately teaches human beings important lessons about the limits of their own power as well as their own hidden resources.

Unlike practitioners of Western religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, who may struggle with why a good God would permit evil to exist, traditional Japanese religious communities have tended to turn such moral reflection inward. Instead of asking why disaster occurs or whether it confirms divine justice, one often hears those influenced by Japanese religious traditions asking how they should respond to disaster and how that disaster might lead to self-cultivation and self-transformation. Phrases customarily uttered by Japanese during moments of crisis, such as gaman (“putting up with it”) and ganbatte (“do your best!”), reveal the faith that they often place in the healing and redemptive power of suffering as an occasion for both the strengthening of collective bonds and the development of personal character.

The ideas, institutions, and practices associated with Confucianism and Buddhism, in particular, reinforce the notions that individuals exist interdependently with others as members of a group and that people carry within themselves deep wellsprings of spiritual potential that can be actualized through self-effacing behavior and collective discipline. In medieval Japan, the experience of disaster both confirmed people’s sense that they were living in the era of mappō (“decline of the Buddhist teaching,” a degenerate period in which salvation was increasingly difficult to attain) and encouraged them to seek relief in either the tariki (“other-power” of merciful beings such as Amida Buddha) or the jiriki (“self-power”) of their own latent Buddha-nature. Either way, disaster could be transformed into an opportunity for cultivating one’s gratitude and fortitude in service to others.

In many ways, Japan is one of the world’s most secular societies. By Western standards of religiosity (personal belief, individual membership, embrace of doctrines and scriptures), most Japanese do not appear to be very “religious.” But when monstrosity strikes, the character of a culture is revealed. In the case of Japan, the imagery of disaster also includes the visage of a Buddha, reflected in the faces of millions of ordinary Japanese standing in line for aid, searching ruins for loved ones, and lending a helping hand to others: calm, compassionate, and concentrated. Such an image still inspires Japanese and others who cope with the inevitable loss and suffering that living and dying as impermanent, interdependent beings entails.

Jeffrey L. Richey is director of the Asian studies program and associate professor of religion at Berea College in Kentucky.

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Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter (Princeton University Press, 2010)

Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America edited by Roger Lundin (Baylor University Press, 2009)

These two very different but not unrelated books look at the changing influence of Christianity and the King James Version of the Bible on American literature.

Robert Alter’s “Pen of Iron” appears as the English-speaking world is about to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the 1611 translation of the Bible that is a landmark of Jacobean prose and, on a popular level, the most loved of the Bible’s many translations and paraphrases. Alter’s book is tightly focused and sweeping in the specificity of its claims. He takes a commonplace of conventional wisdom—the ubiquity the Bible once had in American elite culture—to argue that the King James translation created “the foundational language and symbolic imagery” of the whole of American culture, especially its prose fiction.

Alter is a literary critic and an important scholar of the Hebrew Bible, or what in the King James Version would be called the Old Testament. In “Pen of Iron” he combines both disciplines to show how stylistic techniques associated with the poetry of the Hebrew Bible—especially parallelism (using the same pattern of words and phrases) and parataxis (short sentences side by side)—were appropriated by the translators of the King James Bible and from there went on to shape the color and tone of American fiction.

“I should like to try to see how the language of the King James Version is worked into the texture of the writing, making possible a kind of strong prose that would not have existed otherwise, and I shall seek to understand how this prose serves as the vehicle for certain distinctively American constructions of reality,” he writes.

King James I

It is an intriguing notion, but ultimately Alter raises more questions than he answers. He rests his argument on a close and detailed reading of single works by two major American writers—Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom”—as well as a comprehensive examination of Saul Bellow’s “Seize the Day” and more glancing looks at Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” and Marilynne Robinson’s important novel “Gilead.” While they do not fit his category of prose fiction, he also discusses Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address.

Alter’s argument is at times reductive, while at other points he seems to conflate style and substance, employing a theological theme or deploying a biblical concept he finds prominent in the Hebrew Bible (“family,” “nationhood,” “land,” for example) to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the King James Version’s prose style.

But is there a unique “biblical style”? The Bible, even the Hebrew Bible, is the creation of many writers, many voices. It is a collection of genres, but even within genres, even within single books such as Genesis or the Psalms scholars identify differing writers, employing differing styles and languages, who may address similar concerns differently.

More importantly, Alter disregards the New Testament, its genres and styles, gospels and epistles, except to mistakenly read the Puritan colonists’ covenant theology as a rejection of the New Testament, thereby making them some kind of quasi-Israelites. But both the gospels and the epistles of the New Testament bring their own distinct linguistic techniques and methods to the Bible’s polyphony of voices. It is myopic to suggest that American prose writers, if they were as steeped in the King James Bible as Alter insists, closed the book at Malachi 4:6.

Alter does not seem to understand the colonization process or the religious diversity that was a part of the first hundred year or so of American settlement. The first New England settlers were Puritan Separatists, and the Bible they brought with them was the Geneva Bible, not the King James Version. Nor is it likely the first settlers in Pennsylvania, Quakers with strong separatist tendencies—and a vernacular that included “thee” and “thou” not grounded in the KJV—were as steeped in King James as Alter seems to assume for all colonists. Quakers certainly had Bibles, but the book was less important to their religious and spiritual life and expressiveness than making sure they were attuned to the working of God’s Spirit, the Inner Light. In Maryland, Catholic settlers would have carried the Douay-Rheims Bible, a revised version of which, as religious studies professor Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J. has pointed out, “was the standard English Bible in use among Catholics on the eve of the Revolution and during the nineteenth century.”

William Tyndale

Alter writes as if there was a direct, unmediated line from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts to the KJV translators. But they did not work in such a vacuum. Rather, they relied on old, often flawed and error-prone manuscripts as well as a gaggle of previous translations, including the great Tyndale and Geneva versions and the Bishops’ Bible that the new version aimed to supplant. Indeed, much of what many today assume to be the catch phrases from the King James Version that have made their way into the common language made their way into the KJV first from Tyndale’s translations: “eat, drink and be merry,” “salt of the earth,” “give us this day our daily bread.” As Adam Nicolson notes in “God’s Secretaries,” his popular history of the making of the King James Bible, “Tyndale enthusiasts have calculated that 94 percent of the New Testament in the King James Bible is exactly as Tyndale left it.”

This is not to argue that the King James Bible had no influence on American prose style, but to suggest that Alter fails to engage the complexities and nuances of the Bible and its role in American culture. Symbolically, it might be noted, even that towering touchstone of American religious literature, John Winthrop’s famous 1630 “City on a Hill” sermon delivered aboard the Arbella before disembarking for the New World, drew its scriptural citations from both the Geneva and King James Bibles. But Alter appears to have adopted the conventional wisdom of conflating “the Bible” with the King James Version, and he seems to assert rather than demonstrate his thesis.

Alter is right about the widespread presence of the Bible in American culture, especially through the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its role in public schools through the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. But whether the KJV did the work he suggests in shaping the nation’s prose, and thus its ideological construction of reality, remains contestable. He might have strengthened his case if he could have showed how the “style” of the King James Bible influenced the culture of the second half of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, the seedbed culture for Melville, for example. But Alter chooses generally to ignore the New England preaching tradition, the prose of Jonathan Edwards and the Founders, and the writing of Thomas Paine or Benjamin Franklin, where one would expect to find at least traces of the shaping influence of the KJV. Other than references to biblical place names and covenant theology tropes associated with “the New Israel,” he virtually ignores American writing until the mid-nineteenth century.

Abraham Lincoln

Alter does stop along the way to consider Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the certain stylistic influence the King James Bible had on that classic American speech. Here his analysis is concise and incisive, but he might have pointed out that the address was not really meant as a work of prose to be read, but rather a speech to be heard, and one reason it seems to reach so effortlessly to the KJV for its style is that the KJV was also meant to be read aloud, replacing the Bishops’ Bible in the liturgical life of the Jacobean church. In many respects it could be argued that the power of the King James Bible resides in its oral rather than written nature, and Alter might have done better to look at its influence on Puritan preaching, revival camp meetings, and the sermons of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, not to mention Martin Luther King Jr.

Interestingly, Alter notes that while African-American culture is steeped in the Bible, the only African-American work he considered for inclusion was Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Unfortunately, he writes, “a renewed inspection of its prose revealed only oblique and episodic links with biblical style.” One wonders why he didn’t look at the work of James Baldwin or Toni Morrison or Richard Wright.

Alter’s case would also be strengthened if he could show the pervasiveness of the KJV’s influence—how the language of the Bible made a difference in the texture of American prose, its sound, syntax, and idiomatic usage—in more than one work by his chosen writers. Did the KJV influence not just “Moby-Dick,’’ published in 1851, but also “White Jacket” (1850) and “Pierre” (1852)? Was it part of the cultural air Melville breathed, or was it one voice among many, like the seaman’s jargon he also adopted in his prose? Was it all-permeating for other nineteenth fiction writers—for Nathaniel Hawthorne, for Harriet Beecher Stowe?

William Faulkner

Alter’s reading of “Moby-Dick” is his strongest at finding elements of the KJV style in a work of fiction. In contrast, the chapters on Faulkner and Bellow, in which he has many interesting things to say about each writer and the work he chooses to look at, are not very persuasive for his overall argument. To his credit, Alter picked in Faulkner a writer whose language is a near absolute antithesis to biblical style (unless one thinks of the intricate sentences of Paul) to argue there is “a set of biblical terms” in “Absalom, Absalom!” that “insistently recur” as a counterweight to the nonbiblical language and that are crucial to its meaning. “The King James Version enters into Faulkner’s otherwise anti-biblical prose not as a stylistic strategy but as a thematic lexicon,” writers Alter. He mentions birthright, curse, land or earth, name and lineage, sons or seed, but of course these words even as concepts are not unique to the King James Bible and certainly could be carried by other streams in the culture, including popular preaching, the Book of Common Prayer, or even the writing of pro-slavery southerners at the time of the Civil War. Even as “Absalom, Absalom!’’ reworks a biblical story, Alter’s claim seems a stretch.

Ultimately, what Alter shows in these close and interesting readings is that a handful of American fiction writers used a handful of techniques from a handful of Old Testament sources that also appear in parts of the King James Version to enhance their fiction. That this happened over a century in which the Bible was losing its religious significance for large parts of the elite culture is interesting, even provocative, and worthy of more attention. In fact, Alter begins to address the question in some of his comments on Melville. But his basic case, that the King James Bible determined “the foundational language and symbolic imagery” of the wider American culture, has not been made.

Herman Melville

In many ways, the collected essays in “Invisible Conversations” take up the paradox of the apparent waning of religious and biblical culture in American intellectual life even as the people as a whole continued to assert their religious identity and find meaning in the regular reading of the Bible. There is an academic intramural quality to some of the writing here. Edited by Wheaton College English professor Roger Lundin, the essays were developed out of presentations made in the American Literature and Religion Seminar, a project at the University of Notre Dame. (Another collection of essays by seminar participants, “There Before Us: Religion, Literature, and Culture from Emerson to Wendell Berry,” was published in 2007.) But overall they are a bracing companion to Alter’s book, charting and contesting the wider context of his reading. Alter’s chapter on Melville, for example, would have been a fitting contribution to “Invisible Conversations,” while many of these essays could have deepened his sense of the religious aspects of American culture.

Lundin’s book takes its title and underlying assumption from a belief that there has been in the United States a lack of interest in the religious aspects of American literature among scholars in the academy and a “stubborn refusal to engage religious questions on anything like their own terms.” Whether one agrees with that or not, the essays collected here with the aim of dispelling that ignorance and invisibility are fascinating, instructive and thought-provoking. They trace a wide arc, mostly concentrating on fiction and poetry, but also—as in Alan Wolfe’s essay on the role of religion in postwar nonfiction and Andrew Delbanco’s rejoinder—engaging mid-20th century social-science writing as well as—in Mark Noll’s essay on African Americans, the Bible, and slavery—memoirs, sermons, and other nonfiction genres in African-American literature.

The book structures itself as a dialogue between a chapter and a response—the conversation made visible, as it were. All of the selections have something to offer for further reflection and often pull readers deeper into their subject. As the responses make clear, many also invite argument. For example, is it really, as Stanley Hauerwas and Ralph Wood insist in their essay on theology and American literary tradition, the fault of “the churches” (whatever that might mean) that “a nation with the soul of a church” has “produced so few writers who are Christian in any substantive sense of the word,” and does one want to even argue that America has produced few “substantive” Christian writers?

Phillis Wheatley

The largest section of the book—three essays and a response—considers the oft-neglected area of literature, religion, and the African-American tradition, one of the main currents forming American culture and the area in which Alter said he could find no significant work exemplifying his notion of the stylistic influence of the King James Bible. There are many important insights in these chapters, and Katherine Clay Bassard’s study of the “sign of the cross” in African-American literature is a fascinating reading of the tradition, from eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley through Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel “Paradise.” But a comment by Princeton religion professor Albert J. Raboteau is especially worth pondering: “The astounding flexibility of our culture to include the stories of the invisible or the forgotten disguises the fact that their stories have been included but not fully incorporated.” It is a fitting and pointed reminder that despite the insistence by some that we live in a post-racial society, even in literary studies there is still more tokenism than canonization. Ellison’s invisible man remains as invisible as the religion the writers here seek to make visible.

The two opening essays, literary critic Denis Donoghue’s “Finding a Prose for God” and Harvard professor of American literature Lawrence Buell’s spirited rejoinder, “American Literature and/as Spiritual Inquiry,” lay out the key positions for two opposing views of how to read the American literary canon through a religious lens. But they also point to the larger debate in American culture, including its political culture, between religion and spirituality.

Donoghue takes his cue from a line by the poet Wallace Stevens, “We say God and the imagination are one” (from the poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”). He proposes that in the American canon from Emerson on, “modern American literature is a substitute for religion, but a substitute in which the original has been absorbed.”

Donoghue does not argue that literature is a “valid or effective substitute” for religion, but that for writers in the dominant tradition belief is reduced, replaced, and almost erased. He writes of Hawthorne, for example, that he “replaced God with nature and community.” Emily Dickinson’s poetry, he argues, “had to be eccentric and probably willful, because it did not issue from a living tradition of faith and observance.” It is the “living tradition” that is reduced over time in the American canon.

But to show that traditional, sacramental religion has not been wholly eclipsed, Donoghue examines Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story” and its narrator’s conversation with God. While earlier writers could not find a prose with which to converse with God, Dubus’s narrator can. What enables this, Donoghue writes, “is his membership in the Church, the sacraments, the rituals, the Mass, Confession and Communion.”

In his reply to Donoghue, Buell reads the literary history of the United States differently. He sees the canonical nineteenth-century writers—Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson—as less religiously attenuated. “American literature,” Buell argues, “is and has for centuries been imbued with spiritual striving, even though that striving mostly expresses itself in willfully idiosyncratic forms whose larger public office is to hold up a mirror to the dominant culture’s stolid complacencies.”

The effort by Donoghue—and by Hauerwas and Wood in their essay—to tie the category of the religious to particular institutionalized faiths needs to be challenged. “Why should not the religious be identified mainly, if not exclusively, with the arenas of moral or spiritual inquiry and practice rather than with theologic belief or church affiliation?” Buell asks.

The distinction between religion understood as institutionalized, even sacramentalized faith and religion as individualized spiritual seeking or striving lies at the heart of the American literary tradition as reflected throughout the essays in “Invisible Conversations.” It is also part of the wider debate over what constitutes authentic American culture and values. It is not too much to say that the American canonical tradition, including those streams of it such as African-American, feminist, or gay writing, is a two-way street. How you read the literature influences and is influenced by how you read the culture: religiously weak or spiritually robust? It is an argument central not only to academic literary studies but also to political life and the life of faith.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. He has written recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on nuclear disarmament, as well as on Marilynne Robinson,  John Updike, and Flannery O’Connor.

Read more of Bob Abernethy’s August 31, 2009 interview in Iowa with Marilynne Robinson. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Gilead and Home, and she a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop:

Marilynne Robinson

Q: In your teaching, what are the most important things you want your students to understand?

A: That they have their own testimony to offer, that if they think about what they perceive and what they feel carefully, if they watch other people closely and magnanimously, they will have something new to say, something that’s an actual addition to what has been said. That they have no obligation to be derivative or imitative in any way. That is absolutely not the point. I want them to know that if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently and to enjoy the processes of their own thought, then they will give the world something new, something worth having.

Q: In your essay on Psalm Eight in The Death of Adam you wrote, “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.” I think it’s very central to appreciating what you’ve been doing in your work.

A: Well, yes. I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is intrinsically mysterious as a physical object, say, or as a phenomenon of culture, or as an artifact of the history that lies behind it. I’ve always been almost offended by the idea of mysticism, because it seems as if it diminishes what we know by every means that gives us access to it – it diminishes the simple spectacle of what we are and where we are, the complex spectacle, I should probably have said. I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. I never had the experience of banality, as it were. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me, and I think that probably has done as much to form my mind as anything could have done.

Q: What are some of those things you’ve seen that are plainly before your eyes?

A: When I came here from living in New England for quite a long time I wanted to know what I was seeing, because every landscape has a history. It is the way it is because specific layers of population have lived in it and modified it and so on. Why is it that in the Middle West so many of the oldest structures are colleges virtually, in many cases, as old as the settlement itself? Because it’s a remarkable thing that the first thing people would feel they needed would be a college, and then it turns out that there’s a whole narrative behind that, that they were almost utopian communities that were designed to do all sorts of things. Create a culture that would be immune to the slave economy, for example. Create a culture that would be disseminating education at a high level, but accessible to anybody. All these kinds of very idealistic intentions were established very early on at what looked like little New England colleges that are scattered all over the Middle West and which tend to be, to this day, institutions of very high quality, very culturally important. But you look at a building, and you think why that period? Why that style? Who made that choice? And then you can sort of unfold almost anything that you look at, and so you find out that there’s a human narrative behind it, that there was a social vision behind it. If you just look at anything as if it were just, sort of, furniture – nothing against furniture, but then you are absolutely not seeing it. Everything needs to be queried, as they say.

I think probably the major component of seeing for me is assuming that what I see is something that I can’t see adequately or see exhaustively, and what is most remarkable in it is probably something that I have to watch very carefully in order to see any fragment of. The idea, which is very important in Calvin, that people are images of God – nothing could mystify anyone more than the idea that this is, in fact, what is being encountered, you know? Then what do you do but watch? What do you do but see what you can see? I think that it tends to be enormously partial, just given the human situation. But, nevertheless, I think it also sensitizes you to the profundity of the fact of any other life – that people can’t be thought of dismissively.

Q: Lots of people have called what it is I think you’re talking about as seeing the sacramental. Is that what it is? That in everything you see there is a quality of the holy?

A: Well, yes, in the sense that I certainly think that the holy is at the origins of everything that exists, everything, and so necessarily that’s true. I mean, there’s a sense in which it’s a signature act, you know, the beauty of it, the scale of it, the intricacy of it, all that. It’s not as if holiness were something super-added to things, and that’s why I hesitate a little bit over the word “sacramental,” because there can be an implication that an unsanctified reality exists, as if there is any kind of unholy reality. I think that one of the meanings of Christianity, of the Crucifixion, is that the holy can be unvalued, abused. There’s no question about that. A great deal that you see in the world is the abuse of the sacred. But the intrinsic sacredness is invariable, is a constant.

Q: This ability and interest in seeing everything in a very intense way, what does that add up to and where do you come out, then, in a sense of what I think many people would call a worldview?

A: If I have a worldview, which I suppose I do, I would hope it’s a very open one. You know, I’m always referring to Calvinism, my vocabulary in certain ways, but just the idea that the world is continuously unfolding itself for your further understanding, with the idea, of course, that whatever understanding you bring to this experience is incomplete, is too small. Something will tell you more, you know. I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It’s the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

Q: Is there a theological component? Is what you were just talking about part of a sense of the existence of God?

A: Oh, it’s absolutely central. Since I do use Calvin’s conceptual vocabulary, one of the things that is certainly true of him is that the givens of our situations are that we are given the world to enjoy. The signature of God in creation is beauty, as well as the expansion of understanding or the expansion of awareness, which is never complete precisely because it’s a manifestation of the presence of God. That life in the world is an enormous privilege, which is enhanced as privilege in the degree to which we are attentive to what is being given to us, not just as gift of prosperity or something, but what’s given us to understand, to allow us to reconceive.

Q: You’ve written with great kindness and understanding about mainline Protestants, your tradition. Why do you think they’ve suffered such losses in recent years?

A: Well, oddly enough, sometimes it seems to me as if they take every criticism that is offered of them and make it into a sort of modus operandi. So to the accusation that they are bland they respond by becoming blander. One of the things that is true of the mainline Protestant tradition is it’s a great theological tradition. It is as major a theological tradition as exists on the planet, and it’s as if that’s a responsibility that they really don’t want to live up to, in many cases, and they’ve sort of turned on themselves, I think, in that sense that the virtues that have defined them – moral and intellectual seriousness and so on, which had been their contribution to Christianity – are precisely the things that they have been running away from in too many cases. I don’t want to generalize too broadly.

Q: What do they do well?

A: I don’t know to what extent these things are being as effectively sustained as they ought to be by the institutions, or to what degree their carry-over from other traditions that have, perhaps, not been cultivated as well as they should in the modern period, but I think that they do sustain a sense of responsibility, strong value for what we, as people who work in the world can contribute to the world. I mean, as in many cases, work being the mode in which we can contribute to the world. I identify with them very strongly, in fact, because I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve serious attention. For example, social problems and so on, that they are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments or drawing of lines of the kind that say, “We’re the good people, and they’re the wicked ones.” There’s nothing of that in mainline tradition, and thank God for that.

Q: As one who sometimes has trouble with this himself, and I know a lot of people who do, too, I would be interested in hearing about why you believe in God.

A: I know this might not seem like the best answer in the world, but I do not not believe in God. If I were to say I don’t believe in God, I would feel that I was saying something that was not true.
I don’t think that we have a basis in our experience that allows us to put together a case for the existence of God. I don’t think that’s intended. I think that people who feel that they have to be able to put it together in that way, arrive at it rationally, as it were, simply lack acquaintance with the extreme fallibility and limitedness of human capacities for reason and for gathering relevant information and all the rest of it. I think the feeling of amazement that I think is appropriate to an alerted sense of what being is leads very naturally to deep comfort with the assumption of God.

Q: You’ve written about your childhood and how natural it was in your childhood to just assume that, yes, God exists. Is there a particular argument or a particular couple of arguments that, intellectually, provide you with conviction?

A: I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they’re capable of from thinking in that scale is something that’s really unique to theology. Given the assumptions that theologians proceed from, they are so much more capable of making meaningful articulations about what things are, what it is to exist, the experience of moral life, and so on. I mean that in the largest sense, of course. Nothing else touches it. Major philosophy doesn’t come close. Science — it’s like this wonderful conversation on another subject, you know, which — a theologically minded person is probably happy to read about the expanding universe and so on, but, of course, the whole human narrative is missing out of that. There’s nothing that can integrate reality in the way that theology can, and so I feel as if I’m reading something whole when I read great theology, and I feel as though I’m reading something very partial when I’m reading anything else.

Q: Can you find any words to describe God?

A: Well, I would use the basic biblical vocabulary. I would hesitate to do that.

Q: How do you answer the prominent atheists who have written so much recently that is critical of religion?

A: Atheism is such a longstanding tradition in Christian culture that I think it’s a necessary part of the conversation, and I have every kind of respect for somebody like Bertrand Russell or any considered atheist. I really think that to explore the question from that point of view and do it scrupulously is valuable. I think that this sort of avalanche of literature that we’ve gotten recently is very second-rate. It simply is not well-informed and not well-considered. I mean, I consider it to be kind of noise, a distraction from the conversation that actually can be fruitful.

Q: Let me turn your attention to the everyday cultural environment that we all live in, all the sounds and messages that are coming to us, what sometimes is called modern popular culture. You have found much to criticize in that.

A: Well, one thing that I find to criticize about it is that it’s not really popular, that it’s an industrial product that is sold by the means that any industrialist product is sold by, and the selling is very intense because the people that are making the product are also in a position to sell the product — the media and so on. I think that their idea, the idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life and so on, I mean, that is one of the major vectors of this phenomenon, and I think for most people, if they were making culture themselves, they’d be kind of sitting on the back porch singing a song that they maybe thought up the words for, and 200 years later people will be singing the same song. There’s a lot of profound work that has been done that’s truly popular. But now I think people are passive in relation to what they take to be popular culture, and they tolerate things that they would not themselves generate. It’s kind of an alienation of a culture from itself, I think.

Q: Do you think there are any ways to correct it?

A: Well, there’s this sort of day-to-day momentum of these things, that if something is supposed to be enormously scandalous people turn it on to see if it’s really scandalous, and then they can talk to each other about how scandalous it really was, and that sort of thing, and it’s a sort of chewing gum. It’s just this sort of continuous distraction that carries people from day to day in no significant way, just taking up time and space that would otherwise, I think, be used more imaginatively, more humanely.

Q: Do you see it as a barrier to a religious life?

A: I think it’s a severe distraction. One of the things — I mean, you’ve asked me to grumble, and so I’m grumbling – but one of the things that bothers me is that there’s a cynicism about it. People, I think, to a certain extent have to be instructed in things like the necessity of respect for other people, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable items. I really think if I had to say that religion depends on one thing, putting religion categorically, you know, we have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning, and then anything that, it seems to me that, really departs from that, that conditions people to part from it in their thinking, I think, is antagonistic to religious life.

Q: You seem, in many ways, a lot of good ways, independent of the everyday world around you. I’ve heard you called an outsider. I wonder whether you would feel comfortable with the term “gentle prophet.” How would you describe yourself in that public role?

A: I’m a very private person, and the fact that this has sort of slipped over into a public role is very surprising to me. You know, it’s certainly nothing that I would have thought about or think about much even in the ordinary course of my life. I’m just somebody who likes to write. I think growing up in the West, in the mountains where, at least when I was a child, being an independent person was very highly valued, and what that meant was, of course, cultivating an interior life that could sustain you, that dignified you. I wrote an essay a long time ago that sort of disappeared, but the word “lonely,” when I was a little kid, had a very strong positive connotation. It was an experience to be sought, and it took me a while to learn that this was not common wisdom. But I just grew up culturally, I think, very prepared to live to myself, in a certain sense, for weal or woe. I think that that does give me a certain distance from things of a more, perhaps, praising posture toward what is taken to be popular than other people might have.

Q: Let me go back to some of these religious matters that we were talking about. The Bible – how do you read it, interpret it? The Bible often is described as God’s literal word. How do you see it?

A: Well, I find that’s really remarkable, you know, considering that surely virtually anybody that makes that claim is in the habit of reading it in translation, and anybody that has any acquaintance of the variety of translations knows that from ancient Hebrew or Greek to modern English is a very, very long and perilous step. I think that is simply not a sustainable idea. I have lots of Bibles. My house is full of Bibles, and the reason for that is that whenever I look anything up, I look it up in eight different translations to try to sort of encircle what the probable meaning is, because every one of them can make the case for the interpretation it has made. I read the Bible as an ancient literature. I read it, to the extent that I can, surrounded by other ancient literature, you know, that you can now read Hittite poetry and Canaanite poetry and all the rest of it in translations also. I think that it has a long history of tendentious interpretation of various kinds, and that for a modern reader one of the most difficult things to do is to read it as if newly, as if you could put aside the fact that certain passages have been selected and underlined over history, and in a way that discourages you from noticing what comes before and what comes afterward. The Bible as a literature of antiquity is incomparably great, I think, and frankly, I hope to write about it in a way that treats it with a different kind of respect from the respect it has tended to receive up to this point. It’s a fascinating, complicated, mysterious, endlessly suggestive literature that I, again, don’t feel that I have to arrive at hard conclusions about, and that makes it, in effect, more like the rest of reality than it would be if I felt it could be encapsulated and summarized or concluded about.

Q: Let me ask you about Calvin. Many of us hear that word and we think of an ultra-strict, judgmental, unforgiving reformer. You have done a lot of thinking and writing about this.

A: One of the first things that has to be done when you’re talking about Calvin is think about the world that Calvin lived in. Was he severe by the standard of his time? And, of course, he was living in the middle of the Inquisition, which was notoriously severe. There was a sort of punitive aspect to social organization then. The question is, was Geneva more severe than any other place in Europe? No, actually. It was the first place where the Qur’an was published in Europe, and so on. All kinds of literature that would not have been tolerated anywhere else in Europe was published for the first time in Geneva in the post-classical period. He created public education for both boys and girls in Geneva. He had institutions for the relief of poverty in Geneva. He did all kinds of things that are certainly very liberal by the standards of the time. He was basically responsible for the survival of that city which was under siege through a great part of his time there, not because of him in the first place, but because it had had a political revolution and driven out its traditional ruling family, but it became the center of the Reformation, and then it came under many kinds of threats and pressure, and not only that, but reformed populations all through Europe. So he was continuously trying to keep the city safe, trying to keep these other populations in Europe safe at the same time that he was writing scores and scores of books that were interpretations of Scripture of a very high quality, from the original. He preached, in fact, from the original Greek and Hebrew. He’s a little bit like Saint Augustine. He wrote so many books that people don’t know which book to read, perhaps. Even people who call themselves Calvinists are oddly unread in what he actually wrote. But if you read his sermons on Micah or his sermons on the Ten Commandments or something like that – extraordinarily compassionate, extraordinarily generous, certainly bears up to anything that you would find in the period, or this period. He was a lightning rod for the enemies of the reform movement who, of course, generated a huge polemic around him and around the city. Most of Calvin came into English almost immediately. He was very closely followed in England. They have begun to translate the notes from the consistories, and it turns out that what they were doing, this meeting of clergy that dealt with people who were some sort of social problem, it would do things like establish the paternity of a child and make the father support the child and the mother. In some small way, of course, it sounds very minor economics by any standard we’re used to, but nevertheless, you read things like they drowned unmarried mothers and things like that. But if you look at what they actually did and what the transcripts actually say, there’s nothing judgmental, there’s nothing cruel about it. It’s just a matter of trying to keep them from bearing the worst consequences of unwed motherhood, basically.

Q: Some of the things that you’ve written, I would imagine, are consistent with what Calvin taught about the importance of forgiveness.

A: There are two things that I think are very important. One of them is the emphasis on original sin. In earlier theology the idea was that baptism removed the effects of original sin from the higher functions, and it was basically the body that continued to bear the consequences of it. But Calvin said no. Original sin is what makes it so that we can never see clearly or understand entirely. And this, of course, undermines the assumption that secure judgments can be made, that we actually know. But how to understand something in a way to draw unforgiving conclusions about it? There’s also the fact that he does not exclude anyone. People say that he doesn’t attach importance to works, as they call it, but what that means in certain contexts is that the value God assigns to a person is not something that’s necessarily evident in how we would value their lives. The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know. So you err on the side of forgiving. Or you don’t, or who knows what God’s ultimate intentions are, in any case. But you assume your fallibility and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God, or is God himself, which is sometimes how [Calvin] describes this when you are encountered by someone, even an enemy, and when Calvin talked about somebody who wanted to kill you, that was most of Europe at that point, from his point of view. But he says this is the image of God that has approached you. And the question is what does God want from this moment? And so there’s this absolute valuing of the other that comes under all circumstances and just leaves the idea of judgment as a meaningless idea.

Q: Reading Gilead and Home and reading about those two old preachers that you described and drew so beautifully certainly took me back to my childhood in a preacher’s family. You had to have great respect for those people. You couldn’t have written about them unless you loved them and respected them. What they lived for and the way they saw the world, the way they saw each other, the way they saw their people must be something that you think is very, very important – and not just in the mid-’50s, but right now.

A: Yes, granting fallibilities, granting the fact that they’re sort of culturally blinded by the conventions that surround them. Why can’t Jack talk to his father, you know? He can’t. He can’t tell him.

Q: But I would assume that in your church and in neighborhood you find much of the same thing today, don’t you?

A: I do. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that tends not to be visible in the way that popular culture tends to represent people. I know so many people whom I admire so deeply who seem to me to be enormously sensitive and really respectful of people in general, and so on. But somehow or other, it’s as if that didn’t matter, as if that’s some sort of assumed background that doesn’t have interest or value. It’s very odd. I love and feel very much at home in my culture, whether it’s Iowa or Astoria or wherever I am. I just feel that it’s not being valued. The things that are precious in it are not being acknowledged, and I think that that’s something that depletes people’s lives of a great deal of the satisfactions that are essential.

Q: Why is that? Why are these things that are so valuable being ignored?

A: I think that perhaps, well, it requires a certain subtlety. It requires attention. It’s easy to be sensationalistic. There’s nothing easier than that, and making a narrative out of thoughtfulness, you know, to make a life of it as a considered life rather than one that’s just a slash-and-burn version of human experience is hard. I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of this stuff, and then it becomes the norm. It becomes what people expect or think other people want, whether they want it themselves or not.

Q: You’re talking about writers now, what writers are doing, or just what the general public seems to believe is important?

A: Well, not really talking about writers. I have these impulsive, tribal loyalties, and when I’m speaking this way I’m never speaking about writers. But I mean just in terms of the general cultural ambience, you know, what you see when you are in a hotel room and do turn on the television set, and so on. I don’t want to be categorical, but I think that that’s a very important element, and it has a way of distracting people from what is substantial in their own lives and making people think that if they’ve never been involved in something dramatic in some painful way they somehow or other haven’t lived or something.

Q: There’s a wonderful quote from you. It had to do with looking back on one’s life, and you were saying we should get great comfort out of having comforted a child.

A: Well, I do think when you look back at your own life, and you realize that among the things that you remember might be some gesture of comfort that another person made or some small compliment that you received that for some reason redirected your life, and so I mean I think most people can tell those kinds of stories, and the other side of it is, of course, that those are the moments in which you have the opportunity to do something that actually changes life, you know, that someone could look back on and say “and after that things were different,” which is an extraordinary privilege That is the kind of thing that tends to be overlooked.

Q: You told us some years ago how much you missed hearing people say that they thought it was important to leave the world better than they found it.

A: Well, I think that was a major, dominant cliché of my childhood – that you were supposed to leave the world better than you found it. It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing that we’re going through now, “What’s in it for me?” That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it, but now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me, just – what a lovely thought, do you know? People talk about soldiers as being the standard against which things should be measured. But they, by definition, are doing things that there’s a very strong chance they will not live to enjoy. I mean, all those lovely, young people that go off and are said to be dying for freedom by definition are giving other people something that they cannot enjoy. This is a great value, so how can people have possibly got around to this “what’s in it for me?” approach to political and social life? It’s extraordinary.

Marilynne Robinson

Q: In your teaching, what are the most important things you want your students to understand?

A: That they have their own testimony to offer, that if they think about what they perceive and what they feel carefully, if they watch other people closely and magnanimously, they will have something new to say, something that’s an actual addition to what has been said. That they have no obligation to be derivative or imitative in any way. That is absolutely not the point. I want them to know that if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently and to enjoy the processes of their own thought, then they will give the world something new, something worth having.

Q: In your essay on Psalm Eight in The Death of Adam you wrote, “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.” I think it’s very central to appreciating what you’ve been doing in your work.

A: Well, yes. I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is intrinsically mysterious as a physical object, say, or as a phenomenon of culture, or as an artifact of the history that lies behind it. I’ve always been almost offended by the idea of mysticism, because it seems as if it diminishes what we know by every means that gives us access to it – it diminishes the simple spectacle of what we are and where we are, the complex spectacle, I should probably have said. I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. I never had the experience of banality, as it were. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me, and I think that probably has done as much to form my mind as anything could have done.

Q: What are some of those things you’ve seen that are plainly before your eyes?

A: When I came here from living in New England for quite a long time I wanted to know what I was seeing, because every landscape has a history. It is the way it is because specific layers of population have lived in it and modified it and so on. Why is it that in the Middle West so many of the oldest structures are colleges virtually, in many cases, as old as the settlement itself? Because it’s a remarkable thing that the first thing people would feel they needed would be a college, and then it turns out that there’s a whole narrative behind that, that they were almost utopian communities that were designed to do all sorts of things. Create a culture that would be immune to the slave economy, for example. Create a culture that would be disseminating education at a high level, but accessible to anybody. All these kinds of very idealistic intentions were established very early on at what looked like little New England colleges that are scattered all over the Middle West and which tend to be, to this day, institutions of very high quality, very culturally important. But you look at a building, and you think why that period? Why that style? Who made that choice? And then you can sort of unfold almost anything that you look at, and so you find out that there’s a human narrative behind it, that there was a social vision behind it. If you just look at anything as if it were just, sort of, furniture – nothing against furniture, but then you are absolutely not seeing it. Everything needs to be queried, as they say.

I think probably the major component of seeing for me is assuming that what I see is something that I can’t see adequately or see exhaustively, and what is most remarkable in it is probably something that I have to watch very carefully in order to see any fragment of. The idea, which is very important in Calvin, that people are images of God – nothing could mystify anyone more than the idea that this is, in fact, what is being encountered, you know? Then what do you do but watch? What do you do but see what you can see? I think that it tends to be enormously partial, just given the human situation. But, nevertheless, I think it also sensitizes you to the profundity of the fact of any other life – that people can’t be thought of dismissively.

Q: Lots of people have called what it is I think you’re talking about as seeing the sacramental. Is that what it is? That in everything you see there is a quality of the holy?

A: Well, yes, in the sense that I certainly think that the holy is at the origins of everything that exists, everything, and so necessarily that’s true. I mean, there’s a sense in which it’s a signature act, you know, the beauty of it, the scale of it, the intricacy of it, all that. It’s not as if holiness were something super-added to things, and that’s why I hesitate a little bit over the word “sacramental,” because there can be an implication that an unsanctified reality exists, as if there is any kind of unholy reality. I think that one of the meanings of Christianity, of the Crucifixion, is that the holy can be unvalued, abused. There’s no question about that. A great deal that you see in the world is the abuse of the sacred. But the intrinsic sacredness is invariable, is a constant.

Q: This ability and interest in seeing everything in a very intense way, what does that add up to and where do you come out, then, in a sense of what I think many people would call a worldview?

A: If I have a worldview, which I suppose I do, I would hope it’s a very open one. You know, I’m always referring to Calvinism, my vocabulary in certain ways, but just the idea that the world is continuously unfolding itself for your further understanding, with the idea, of course, that whatever understanding you bring to this experience is incomplete, is too small. Something will tell you more, you know. I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It’s the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

Q: Is there a theological component? Is what you were just talking about part of a sense of the existence of God?

A: Oh, it’s absolutely central. Since I do use Calvin’s conceptual vocabulary, one of the things that is certainly true of him is that the givens of our situations are that we are given the world to enjoy. The signature of God in creation is beauty, as well as the expansion of understanding or the expansion of awareness, which is never complete precisely because it’s a manifestation of the presence of God. That life in the world is an enormous privilege, which is enhanced as privilege in the degree to which we are attentive to what is being given to us, not just as gift of prosperity or something, but what’s given us to understand, to allow us to reconceive.

Q: You’ve written with great kindness and understanding about mainline Protestants, your tradition. Why do you think they’ve suffered such losses in recent years?

A: Well, oddly enough, sometimes it seems to me as if they take every criticism that is offered of them and make it into a sort of modus operandi. So to the accusation that they are bland they respond by becoming blander. One of the things that is true of the mainline Protestant tradition is it’s a great theological tradition. It is as major a theological tradition as exists on the planet, and it’s as if that’s a responsibility that they really don’t want to live up to, in many cases, and they’ve sort of turned on themselves, I think, in that sense that the virtues that have defined them – moral and intellectual seriousness and so on, which had been their contribution to Christianity – are precisely the things that they have been running away from in too many cases. I don’t want to generalize too broadly.

Q: What do they do well?

A: I don’t know to what extent these things are being as effectively sustained as they ought to be by the institutions, or to what degree their carry-over from other traditions that have, perhaps, not been cultivated as well as they should in the modern period, but I think that they do sustain a sense of responsibility, strong value for what we, as people who work in the world can contribute to the world. I mean, as in many cases, work being the mode in which we can contribute to the world. I identify with them very strongly, in fact, because I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve serious attention. For example, social problems and so on, that they are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments or drawing of lines of the kind that say, “We’re the good people, and they’re the wicked ones.” There’s nothing of that in mainline tradition, and thank God for that.

Q: As one who sometimes has trouble with this himself, and I know a lot of people who do, too, I would be interested in hearing about why you believe in God.

A: I know this might not seem like the best answer in the world, but I do not not believe in God. If I were to say I don’t believe in God, I would feel that I was saying something that was not true.
I don’t think that we have a basis in our experience that allows us to put together a case for the existence of God. I don’t think that’s intended. I think that people who feel that they have to be able to put it together in that way, arrive at it rationally, as it were, simply lack acquaintance with the extreme fallibility and limitedness of human capacities for reason and for gathering relevant information and all the rest of it. I think the feeling of amazement that I think is appropriate to an alerted sense of what being is leads very naturally to deep comfort with the assumption of God.

Q: You’ve written about your childhood and how natural it was in your childhood to just assume that, yes, God exists. Is there a particular argument or a particular couple of arguments that, intellectually, provide you with conviction?

A: I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they’re capable of from thinking in that scale is something that’s really unique to theology. Given the assumptions that theologians proceed from, they are so much more capable of making meaningful articulations about what things are, what it is to exist, the experience of moral life, and so on. I mean that in the largest sense, of course. Nothing else touches it. Major philosophy doesn’t come close. Science — it’s like this wonderful conversation on another subject, you know, which — a theologically minded person is probably happy to read about the expanding universe and so on, but, of course, the whole human narrative is missing out of that. There’s nothing that can integrate reality in the way that theology can, and so I feel as if I’m reading something whole when I read great theology, and I feel as though I’m reading something very partial when I’m reading anything else.

Q: Can you find any words to describe God?

A: Well, I would use the basic biblical vocabulary. I would hesitate to do that.

Q: How do you answer the prominent atheists who have written so much recently that is critical of religion?

A: Atheism is such a longstanding tradition in Christian culture that I think it’s a necessary part of the conversation, and I have every kind of respect for somebody like Bertrand Russell or any considered atheist. I really think that to explore the question from that point of view and do it scrupulously is valuable. I think that this sort of avalanche of literature that we’ve gotten recently is very second-rate. It simply is not well-informed and not well-considered. I mean, I consider it to be kind of noise, a distraction from the conversation that actually can be fruitful.

Q: Let me turn your attention to the everyday cultural environment that we all live in, all the sounds and messages that are coming to us, what sometimes is called modern popular culture. You have found much to criticize in that.

A: Well, one thing that I find to criticize about it is that it’s not really popular, that it’s an industrial product that is sold by the means that any industrialist product is sold by, and the selling is very intense because the people that are making the product are also in a position to sell the product — the media and so on. I think that their idea, the idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life and so on, I mean, that is one of the major vectors of this phenomenon, and I think for most people, if they were making culture themselves, they’d be kind of sitting on the back porch singing a song that they maybe thought up the words for, and 200 years later people will be singing the same song. There’s a lot of profound work that has been done that’s truly popular. But now I think people are passive in relation to what they take to be popular culture, and they tolerate things that they would not themselves generate. It’s kind of an alienation of a culture from itself, I think.

Q: Do you think there are any ways to correct it?

A: Well, there’s this sort of day-to-day momentum of these things, that if something is supposed to be enormously scandalous people turn it on to see if it’s really scandalous, and then they can talk to each other about how scandalous it really was, and that sort of thing, and it’s a sort of chewing gum. It’s just this sort of continuous distraction that carries people from day to day in no significant way, just taking up time and space that would otherwise, I think, be used more imaginatively, more humanely.

Q: Do you see it as a barrier to a religious life?

A: I think it’s a severe distraction. One of the things — I mean, you’ve asked me to grumble, and so I’m grumbling – but one of the things that bothers me is that there’s a cynicism about it. People, I think, to a certain extent have to be instructed in things like the necessity of respect for other people, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable items. I really think if I had to say that religion depends on one thing, putting religion categorically, you know, we have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning, and then anything that, it seems to me that, really departs from that, that conditions people to part from it in their thinking, I think, is antagonistic to religious life.

Q: You seem, in many ways, a lot of good ways, independent of the everyday world around you. I’ve heard you called an outsider. I wonder whether you would feel comfortable with the term “gentle prophet.” How would you describe yourself in that public role?

A: I’m a very private person, and the fact that this has sort of slipped over into a public role is very surprising to me. You know, it’s certainly nothing that I would have thought about or think about much even in the ordinary course of my life. I’m just somebody who likes to write. I think growing up in the West, in the mountains where, at least when I was a child, being an independent person was very highly valued, and what that meant was, of course, cultivating an interior life that could sustain you, that dignified you. I wrote an essay a long time ago that sort of disappeared, but the word “lonely,” when I was a little kid, had a very strong positive connotation. It was an experience to be sought, and it took me a while to learn that this was not common wisdom. But I just grew up culturally, I think, very prepared to live to myself, in a certain sense, for weal or woe. I think that that does give me a certain distance from things of a more, perhaps, praising posture toward what is taken to be popular than other people might have.

Q: Let me go back to some of these religious matters that we were talking about. The Bible – how do you read it, interpret it? The Bible often is described as God’s literal word. How do you see it?

A: Well, I find that’s really remarkable, you know, considering that surely virtually anybody that makes that claim is in the habit of reading it in translation, and anybody that has any acquaintance of the variety of translations knows that from ancient Hebrew or Greek to modern English is a very, very long and perilous step. I think that is simply not a sustainable idea. I have lots of Bibles. My house is full of Bibles, and the reason for that is that whenever I look anything up, I look it up in eight different translations to try to sort of encircle what the probable meaning is, because every one of them can make the case for the interpretation it has made. I read the Bible as an ancient literature. I read it, to the extent that I can, surrounded by other ancient literature, you know, that you can now read Hittite poetry and Canaanite poetry and all the rest of it in translations also. I think that it has a long history of tendentious interpretation of various kinds, and that for a modern reader one of the most difficult things to do is to read it as if newly, as if you could put aside the fact that certain passages have been selected and underlined over history, and in a way that discourages you from noticing what comes before and what comes afterward. The Bible as a literature of antiquity is incomparably great, I think, and frankly, I hope to write about it in a way that treats it with a different kind of respect from the respect it has tended to receive up to this point. It’s a fascinating, complicated, mysterious, endlessly suggestive literature that I, again, don’t feel that I have to arrive at hard conclusions about, and that makes it, in effect, more like the rest of reality than it would be if I felt it could be encapsulated and summarized or concluded about.

Q: Let me ask you about Calvin. Many of us hear that word and we think of an ultra-strict, judgmental, unforgiving reformer. You have done a lot of thinking and writing about this.

A: One of the first things that has to be done when you’re talking about Calvin is think about the world that Calvin lived in. Was he severe by the standard of his time? And, of course, he was living in the middle of the Inquisition, which was notoriously severe. There was a sort of punitive aspect to social organization then. The question is, was Geneva more severe than any other place in Europe? No, actually. It was the first place where the Qur’an was published in Europe, and so on. All kinds of literature that would not have been tolerated anywhere else in Europe was published for the first time in Geneva in the post-classical period. He created public education for both boys and girls in Geneva. He had institutions for the relief of poverty in Geneva. He did all kinds of things that are certainly very liberal by the standards of the time. He was basically responsible for the survival of that city which was under siege through a great part of his time there, not because of him in the first place, but because it had had a political revolution and driven out its traditional ruling family, but it became the center of the Reformation, and then it came under many kinds of threats and pressure, and not only that, but reformed populations all through Europe. So he was continuously trying to keep the city safe, trying to keep these other populations in Europe safe at the same time that he was writing scores and scores of books that were interpretations of Scripture of a very high quality, from the original. He preached, in fact, from the original Greek and Hebrew. He’s a little bit like Saint Augustine. He wrote so many books that people don’t know which book to read, perhaps. Even people who call themselves Calvinists are oddly unread in what he actually wrote. But if you read his sermons on Micah or his sermons on the Ten Commandments or something like that – extraordinarily compassionate, extraordinarily generous, certainly bears up to anything that you would find in the period, or this period. He was a lightning rod for the enemies of the reform movement who, of course, generated a huge polemic around him and around the city. Most of Calvin came into English almost immediately. He was very closely followed in England. They have begun to translate the notes from the consistories, and it turns out that what they were doing, this meeting of clergy that dealt with people who were some sort of social problem, it would do things like establish the paternity of a child and make the father support the child and the mother. In some small way, of course, it sounds very minor economics by any standard we’re used to, but nevertheless, you read things like they drowned unmarried mothers and things like that. But if you look at what they actually did and what the transcripts actually say, there’s nothing judgmental, there’s nothing cruel about it. It’s just a matter of trying to keep them from bearing the worst consequences of unwed motherhood, basically.

Q: Some of the things that you’ve written, I would imagine, are consistent with what Calvin taught about the importance of forgiveness.

A: There are two things that I think are very important. One of them is the emphasis on original sin. In earlier theology the idea was that baptism removed the effects of original sin from the higher functions, and it was basically the body that continued to bear the consequences of it. But Calvin said no. Original sin is what makes it so that we can never see clearly or understand entirely. And this, of course, undermines the assumption that secure judgments can be made, that we actually know. But how to understand something in a way to draw unforgiving conclusions about it? There’s also the fact that he does not exclude anyone. People say that he doesn’t attach importance to works, as they call it, but what that means in certain contexts is that the value God assigns to a person is not something that’s necessarily evident in how we would value their lives. The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know. So you err on the side of forgiving. Or you don’t, or who knows what God’s ultimate intentions are, in any case. But you assume your fallibility and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God, or is God himself, which is sometimes how [Calvin] describes this when you are encountered by someone, even an enemy, and when Calvin talked about somebody who wanted to kill you, that was most of Europe at that point, from his point of view. But he says this is the image of God that has approached you. And the question is what does God want from this moment? And so there’s this absolute valuing of the other that comes under all circumstances and just leaves the idea of judgment as a meaningless idea.

Q: Reading Gilead and Home and reading about those two old preachers that you described and drew so beautifully certainly took me back to my childhood in a preacher’s family. You had to have great respect for those people. You couldn’t have written about them unless you loved them and respected them. What they lived for and the way they saw the world, the way they saw each other, the way they saw their people must be something that you think is very, very important – and not just in the mid-’50s, but right now.

A: Yes, granting fallibilities, granting the fact that they’re sort of culturally blinded by the conventions that surround them. Why can’t Jack talk to his father, you know? He can’t. He can’t tell him.

Q: But I would assume that in your church and in neighborhood you find much of the same thing today, don’t you?

A: I do. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that tends not to be visible in the way that popular culture tends to represent people. I know so many people whom I admire so deeply who seem to me to be enormously sensitive and really respectful of people in general, and so on. But somehow or other, it’s as if that didn’t matter, as if that’s some sort of assumed background that doesn’t have interest or value. It’s very odd. I love and feel very much at home in my culture, whether it’s Iowa or Astoria or wherever I am. I just feel that it’s not being valued. The things that are precious in it are not being acknowledged, and I think that that’s something that depletes people’s lives of a great deal of the satisfactions that are essential.

Q: Why is that? Why are these things that are so valuable being ignored?

A: I think that perhaps, well, it requires a certain subtlety. It requires attention. It’s easy to be sensationalistic. There’s nothing easier than that, and making a narrative out of thoughtfulness, you know, to make a life of it as a considered life rather than one that’s just a slash-and-burn version of human experience is hard. I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of this stuff, and then it becomes the norm. It becomes what people expect or think other people want, whether they want it themselves or not.

Q: You’re talking about writers now, what writers are doing, or just what the general public seems to believe is important?

A: Well, not really talking about writers. I have these impulsive, tribal loyalties, and when I’m speaking this way I’m never speaking about writers. But I mean just in terms of the general cultural ambience, you know, what you see when you are in a hotel room and do turn on the television set, and so on. I don’t want to be categorical, but I think that that’s a very important element, and it has a way of distracting people from what is substantial in their own lives and making people think that if they’ve never been involved in something dramatic in some painful way they somehow or other haven’t lived or something.

Q: There’s a wonderful quote from you. It had to do with looking back on one’s life, and you were saying we should get great comfort out of having comforted a child.

A: Well, I do think when you look back at your own life, and you realize that among the things that you remember might be some gesture of comfort that another person made or some small compliment that you received that for some reason redirected your life, and so I mean I think most people can tell those kinds of stories, and the other side of it is, of course, that those are the moments in which you have the opportunity to do something that actually changes life, you know, that someone could look back on and say “and after that things were different,” which is an extraordinary privilege That is the kind of thing that tends to be overlooked.

Q: You told us some years ago how much you missed hearing people say that they thought it was important to leave the world better than they found it.

A: Well, I think that was a major, dominant cliché of my childhood – that you were supposed to leave the world better than you found it. It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing that we’re going through now, “What’s in it for me?” That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it, but now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me, just – what a lovely thought, do you know? People talk about soldiers as being the standard against which things should be measured. But they, by definition, are doing things that there’s a very strong chance they will not live to enjoy. I mean, all those lovely, young people that go off and are said to be dying for freedom by definition are giving other people something that they cannot enjoy. This is a great value, so how can people have possibly got around to this “what’s in it for me?” approach to political and social life? It’s extraordinary.

Professor Michael Emerson

Q: Fewer than ten percent of churches in America are integrated.

A: Yeah, that comes from our research here, actually.

Q: The number is that low?

A: Yeah, seven percent. That’s what it is.

Q: Were you surprised at that?

A: Yes. Well, yes and no. But yeah, that’s pretty low.

Q: Why? What are the reasons for its being so low?

A: There are three things, and it depends on the group that we’re talking about, but there’s history, there’s culture, and then there’s social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.

Q: They worshipped together before the Civil War?

A: Absolutely. In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: “You’re going to worship with us.” Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they’d even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together. So we didn’t get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What’s happened then, of course, is now that we’ve had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship? We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you’re immigrants, you’re not part of that history. So it’s a little bit different experience. So it may be a language that separates you — again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

Q: Are churches a reflection of our society? We live in different neighborhoods. We work in different jobs.

A: They are. But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there’s something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

Q: What is going on? Is it cultural — that it is difficult to accept an outsider? Is a black church accepting whites, or the other way around?

A: I’ve been in both settings and observed, and I think when non-blacks visit a black church they will feel, they always talk about feeling so welcomed and warmly greeted but being surprised or shocked or whatever by the length of the service, by the different worship style. If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn’t feel that warmly received. But so — and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

Q: Generally white services are more calm and by the book and a lot more emotion in black services. Is that difficult for whites when they go into a black church?

A: Right, right. Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn’t happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they’re quite a bit different.

Q: The congregation saying “Amen”?

A: Call-and-response style, yes, exactly. So whenever different groups get together then there has to be this long period of negotiation. How will we worship? What’s acceptable? What’s not? If I want to say “Amen” can I? It’s one of the things we find in these congregations is that they are much more likely to be sort of up-beat worship styles, more likely that people in these congregations say “Amen,” maybe get up and dance some, tend to be a little bit more lively than a typical white service would be, but not as lively as a typical black service would be.

Q: What is most likely, a black church that’s integrated with whites or vice versa?

A: We rarely see that. Almost never.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, “People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?” I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, “I’m going to do that.” Now there are whites in African-American churches. They’re interracially married. They’re highly committed. Maybe there’s a professor or two, or a student. Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it’s a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they’re overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

Q: If the pastor is black, are whites going to be less likely to go to that church because the pastor is black and in charge?

A: Yup. It’s the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.

Q: But a white church doesn’t feel very welcoming to African Americans, right?

A: That’s right, that’s right. So you can see what is the difficulty. I mean, how do you make these things happen? We’ve done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there’s a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it’s out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race. So they actually put it into their mission statement, and they start changing things as a result. They may change how worship works. They may actively recruit folks and try and get them to come and help them to feel comfortable and get them involved in leadership, and there’s a variety of ways.

Q: Are they glad they did it? Does the church end up being richer for it?

A: I never meet a church that wishes they didn’t do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn’t do it. They will all say, to the person, it’s hard. It’s difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you’re trying to go across cultures, and you don’t understand, you didn’t mean to offend somebody but you’ve offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something. They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

Q: Would our society be a better society if we had more integrated churches?

A: I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don’t have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we’re doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality. I spent a lot of time developing in books why worshipping separately actually impacts inequality, economic, social, on and on. So I really do believe there are huge advantages to being together even though it’s difficult, even though we have a lot to learn.

Q: Is this integration happening more in one part of the country than in another part?

A: It happens a little bit more in the West, where there’s more fluid — where everybody’s originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it’s a bigger social cost. One of the things we find when we talk to people that attend these congregations, they all have social cost to it. People want to know why they’re doing that. Sometimes they’re questions about selling out on their race or “Are we not good enough that you have to go to this kind of congregation and not ours?” So there are costs to it, and I think they’re a little bit higher in the South because of its history.

Q: I guess a pastor really sometimes has to walk a tightrope as well as really be an amazing politician, too.

A: Absolutely. Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they’re African American they’ll say, “I’m not black enough for African Americans. I’m not white enough for the whites. I’m not Hispanic enough.” There’s always that sense of because we’re so racially defined, if you’re trying to cross the boundaries you don’t fit into any particular space. We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There’s something different. They are somebody who — they don’t exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other. So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

Q: There is an impression that in many ways church has meant more to the black community over the years than any other particular section of America.

A: Absolutely. It may be changing, but still it’s the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you’ll hear the statement of African Americans saying, “I have to work with whites. I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don’t want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down.” It’s also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.

Q: And hearing liberation theology. Is that fairly common, as in Jeremiah Wright’s church?

A: Yeah, there are variations of it. He says that very strongly, and you’ll find congregations that do that and others that would not say it as strongly. But it is a very common strain. Yeah, absolutely.

Q: Do African Americans worry that if whites come to my church, they’re going to take over?

A: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate then. There are so many more of them, and they’re used to being in the position of power. So they’ll just take over, and we’ll lose the one thing we do have.

Q: I imagine there are phrases in the Bible they have to be very careful how they use.

A: Absolutely. There’s a lot of terminology, like “washes whiter than snow,” and these things which when they’re said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they’re said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, “Why are you saying that? What are you saying?” And sometimes the clergy are blindsided by that. Other times they realize that ahead of time and say they’re not going to use those terms. So it gets complicated for sure.

Q: Is there a trend? Even though it may be slow, are we seeing more integrated churches?

A: We’re going to see more, and we are seeing more, and I’ll tell you exactly why. Not because white and black are more likely to get together. Only a third of the seven percent of congregations that are interracial are black and white. What’s happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures. We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it’s] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture. If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I’ll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I’m in somebody else’s homeland. So I’m going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean. But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, “I have the right to hold onto my culture,” and that’s what makes it difficult.

Q: If you have a white church and Asians move in and Hispanics move in, is it less of a problem than if African Americans –

A: Yeah, I think it’s still a problem, but I think it’s easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that’s why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

Q: But if you have a white church, and you have a mix of Asians and Hispanics, it makes it easier for African Americans to come?

A: Yes and no, because what happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they’re mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it’s still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

Q: Music is very, very important in a black church.

A: Absolutely, although every congregation will say, you know, every worship leader will say it’s vital. It’s very important, but again these are, you know, these are different cultural styles. So the tradition from Europe is that you’re supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don’t sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Q: I was recently in South Philly in a neighborhood that has a lot of violence. If the churches there were more integrated, do you think that would work more toward healing the wounds that are there?

A: It would because, you know, think about it. I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you’re an integrated congregation? It doesn’t happen. But I see it happen in uniracial congregations all the time. But people — when they’re in mixed company, we speak differently. So one of the profound things we found when studying these congregations, the mixed ones, is just how much overlap and interracial ties that develop not only with the people in the congregation, but they start meeting each other’s families, and their friends, and they go to each other’s neighborhoods if they live in different neighborhoods, and at work they meet people they wouldn’t otherwise met, and so it creates a whole new definition of what the group is. So I think it’s a lot harder then to have racial violence against each other.

Q: Are you familiar with the City of Refuge Church and Reverend Rufus Smith?

A: I think they’re doing an amazing thing in that they have all groups. But they have large segments of white and black, and so I think it’s the most difficult of these kinds of congregations to have, and it takes a very deft leader, and him being African American, I mean I’m sure it’ll be interesting when you talk with him. He’ll have to be very knowledgeable of white culture, black culture, and walk these fine lines.

Q: His is more multiracial than, say, Pastor Woo’s –

A: Oh, Pastor [Rodney] Woo would be more multiracial and more groups, right. I think they have people from 40-some different countries. International church is what I would call it. They’re immigrants from all over the world, be they black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern.

Q: I assume that Pastor Woo’s church is the way it is either because the congregation wanted it, or because he wanted it. How did it end up being that way?

A: It was an all-white church. It was starting to decline. They had to hire a new pastor, and they hired him. But he came under the condition that “I want and I’m called to make this a multiethnic church.” So they knew. He’s interesting because he’s part-Asian, part-white. He’s married to a Hispanic woman, so that’s their family and that’s their vision.

Q: What’s it feel like in one of his services? I’m sure you’ve been there.

A: I think it’s pretty dynamic. There’s a lot of energy there and life, and you’ll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they’re listening in Spanish.

Q: So it’s a rich cultural experience.

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: And Pastor Rufus Smith and the City of Refuge. Tell me a little bit about that.

A: Same thing. There’s a lot of life there, but it’s a different sort, because there’s a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I’ve actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can’t comment wisely on it. I can say that I’ve talked to people in both congregations, and there are both positives and negatives. I mean, so if I’ve talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they’ll wonder, “Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?” And what’s happening is they’re falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It’s not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That’s certainly common in mixed churches.

Q: So there are downsides, but the downsides are outweighed by the upsides?

A: Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start — they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there’s often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave. Maybe there’s even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just — a lot of times they’ll say, “I couldn’t live without it. I just have to be there.”

Q: You see it manifest in any other ways, for instance, in the neighborhood? Do they socialize together if they go to church together?

A: They do, and that’s what really surprised us, because it was such strong effects. They’re more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods after they start being in these kinds of congregations. They are much more likely to say that their two very best friends are of a different race, that their circle of friends, their friends in the church, but also in their whole social network, absolutely. We’ve had people say, “Now when I go to work, I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn’t have done otherwise.” And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe’s connected to a whole network of people I don’t know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son’s birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

Q: Will the election of Barack Obama have an impact on interracial churches? Will we see more of them?

A: Oh, yeah. I think with President Obama there’s going to be a discussion, because he himself is multiracial, because we have for the first time a non-white president. There’s going to be talk about what does this mean? What is it? Are we in a new era? And I think it’s going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it’ll be more acceptable to talk about it. We’ll see what happens. It’ll take some time. But I think it will.

Q: But generally you think it will be positive.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you talk a little bit more about why it is difficult to integrate churches?

A: What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let’s tell jokes with each other. Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they’ll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn’t mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time. Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don’t. So I ask the clergy why don’t I see myself represented in leadership? And I’m told, and this happens quite a bit, “We don’t think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job.” So then I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that’s difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who’s there to give me an afterlife? And different traditions stress different — so then there’s that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don’t do gospel music, and she’s ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there’s that. There’s always the question of time. Does time at 10:00 mean 10:00 sharp? Or does it mean give or take a few minutes? And a few minutes, is that plus or minus two minutes? Or plus or minus ten, or maybe a half an hour each way? So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we’re going to work through these.

Q: Are you looking at Protestant churches, Catholic churches?

A: Protestant, Catholic, even Muslim. We studied a mosque, and this is when we were at Notre Dame, and in this mosque they had people from a variety of countries, most of them immigrants. In some of the countries, when you go into a mosque you remove your shoes. To not do so could be punishable even by death in that nation. In other countries, it would be a great offense to remove their shoes when they come into the mosque, a sign of disrespect. So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn’t remove your shoes and someone’s taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship. And then they would have the shoe removers on one side, and the non-shoe removers on the other side until they could work through coming to understand why we might both be trying to worship authentically, and because of our cultural background we have these different ideas. But it took a while.

Q: Any particular denominations that you’ve seen the most progress?

A: You find the most in not any particular denomination specifically. It’s the style of worship. So if we have what we call a charismatic worship style, that means upbeat music and a more lively style of preaching usually, people are allowed to clap, say “Amen,” whether they’re mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, and Catholics, whatever, they’re much more likely to be integrated. There’s one denomination in particular, though, that has pushed very hard to be multiracial in its denomination — not only its denomination but, I mean, in its congregations, and it’s called the Evangelical Covenant Church, http://www.covchurch.org/ which is headquartered in Chicago. Their whole goal is that’s the kind of churches they start, multiracial, and I think they say now 20 percent of their churches are that.

Q: Is there particular Christian scripture that points to interracial acceptance?

A: Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we’ve broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That’s when they were called Christians. So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they’re stressing. They’re talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together. But you know, interestingly enough, those things were not talked about much at all for a few hundred years at least.

Q: But it’s there. It’s a fundamental part of Christianity that you should welcome people of all races.

A: That’s right.