Page 2718 – Christianity Today (2024)

In a season that has seen the price of gas reach so high that Americans have begun actually taking the bus, and the price of food soar enough that Burpee’s sales of garden seeds have doubled, David Kynaston’s new account of postwar Britain is equal parts timely, fascinating, and a little eerie.

It is also—and we might as well get this out of the way at the start—almost endless. Kynaston’s technique is collage—he mixes high and low, housewife diary and parliamentary debate—and he leaves very little out. For the older Briton, for whom the names of comedians and TV presenters and cricket heroes will be familiar, there is probably much digressive pleasure here. For those of us who dimly recognize the occasional name (Benny Hill as a young comedian), the effort is perhaps more to be admired than enjoyed. A hundred pages per year turns out to be a lot, but for those willing to take the time, the effect does yield both insight and a deep confidence in Kynaston’s judgment on important matters. One hopes more American historians will follow his noble lead.

Britain had, of course, won the war—borne the blood, tears, and sweat necessary to rally the free world to its side. But unlike the United States, it had precious little to show for the victory. The war ended not with a rush of prosperity but with a renewed onslaught of rationing, this time without any of the wartime fervor that had made it more palatable in the years of the Blitz. Kynaston begins his account with VE Day, which he describes as fairly sedate in most corners of the country: “Most people were neither depressed nor ecstatic; rather they took the two days in their stride, reflected upon them to a greater or lesser extent, and above all tried to have a good time.” Festivities over, most people returned to the quiet task of making do. Kynaston quotes from the diary of a minor civil servant, Anthony Heap: “housing, food, clothing, fuel, beer, tobacco—all the ordinary comforts of life that we’d taken for granted before the war and naturally expected to become more plentiful again when it ended, became instead more and more scarce and difficult to come by.” Of 1945, Heap said, “I can remember few years I’ve been happier to see the end of.”

In the face of this disruption, which followed not only on the war but on the depression that came before, and in a world where socialism seemed ascendant, the great political questions of the day concerned just how strongly the government would take control of the economy. When present-day Americans reflect that Churchill, triumphant in war, was immediately removed from office by British voters ticking Labour on their ballots, they tend to regard it as incredible ingratitude. But for the hard-pressed working class, and much of the middle-class as well, it made both historic and pragmatic sense. “Oh, wonderful people of Britain,” a young Iris Murdoch wrote in a letter to a friend. “After all the ballyhoo and eyewash, they’ve had the guts to vote against Winston! I can’t help feeling that to be young is very heaven!” And so, in the next few years, the government undertook those projects that seemed so obvious everywhere except the United States: the provision of a national health service, and the building of hundreds of thousands of units of public housing, often in the largeish tracts that the English call “council estates.”

One of the great virtues of Kynaston’s method is that, unlike a traditional political historian, he is able to gauge how much attention ordinary people were actually paying to politics. And the answer is, surprisingly little. Though the radio was on constantly in most houses, with 77 percent of the populace listening at all three meals (and upstart TV was proving equally addictive for those who could afford it), the BBC stayed away from political controversy: discussion was barred of any matter due to be debated in Parliament in the next fortnight. And Kynaston has read enough diaries to know how minor a role politics often played, at least compared to the difficulties of obtaining eggs, or even dried egg powder.

People did know what they wanted, however—and it was often quite different from what the new aristocracy of planners empowered by Labour wanted to give them. The architects and urban designers were all for rebuilding bombed-out cities and worn-out tenements on a grand scale. And with great numbers of people squatting in hulks or homeless altogether, it’s easy to understand their practical as well as ideological preference for housing blocks, new towns, and the like. For many reasons the thinking classes were anti-suburb. But not so the great mass of Brits, who wanted nothing so much as a place, small as it might be, of their own. Preferably with a garden to putter in.

As a women’s page journalist, Mrs. Michael Pleydell-Bouverie, put it: “Speaking generally, the people want to breathe and move, to be rid of the neighbour’s wireless, and the clatter of early-risers and late-bedders … . The community life of which everyone has had experience to some degree or other in this war, has not endeared or recommended itself as a permanent state of affairs.”

This basic political fight continues on down to the present, of course, in both Britain and the United States. Labour and the Tories see-sawed back and forth for a fairly stagnant generation politically, until Margaret Thatcher (seen in these pages as the young conservative campaigner Margaret Rogers) finally scored her historic win over the forces of trade unionism and entropy. She campaigned with the idea that, as she once put, “there is no such thing as society,” only individuals and their families. Ronald Reagan (and after him Bill Clinton) seemed to accept the same idea—the “era of big government” was over, and people should be left alone to create the wealth that would allow them to build the suburban homes they wanted.

But times shift. And in an era of suddenly expensive fuel, the prospects for expansive privacy are not quite what they were even a year or two ago: all those new houses at the outer edge of suburbia are suddenly foreclosure bait, tomorrow’s potential slums, albeit with granite countertops. And unlike the Brits of 1945 emerging from the tube stations where they’d sheltered communally against the bombs, we’re emerging from an epoch of enormous privacy—the average American today eats meals with friends and family half as often as fifty years ago. It’s no wonder that we’re at least a little attracted to some of the communalisms represented by, say, farmer’s markets.

There is so much richness in this book that must be overlooked in any review—digressions about everything from comic books to comic operas, the environmental horror of living in coal-fired Britain (think present-day China), the personalities of game-show presenters. But the picture that emerges most deeply is of the ingrained human desire for normalcy: “a new world was slowly taking shape, but for most of these adults what mattered far more was the creation and maintenance of a safe secure home life—in any home that could be found.” That insight is powerful and likely timeless; it sets a useful boundary on how any of us think about history past or future.

Bill McKibben edited the anthology American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, published this spring by the Library of America. Also recently out: The Bill McKibben Reader (Holt).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

There is an almost universal consensus, right across the Christian theological spectrum, to the effect that the so-called prosperity gospel is an aberration. One should always be suspicious when there is a universal consensus about anything; quite often it is wrong. I will momentarily voice some suspicion about this particular consensus. But first one should give credit where credit is due. In other words, the consensus about the prosperity gospel is not completely wrong.

Is there a theological warrant to propose that God wants us to be poor? Any more than he wants us to be sick? The prosperity gospel contains no sentimentality about the poor.

It is certainly a distortion of the Christian message if it is primarily interpreted as a program for the material improvement of the human condition. Where the prosperity gospel does that, it is an aberration—especially so when its proponents suggest, implicitly and often enough explicitly, that giving money to them guarantees that God will bless the donors with success and wealth. Protestants if no one else should recall in this connection that the Reformation began as a protest against the sale of indulgences. Recall JohannTetzel’s jingle—”as soon as the coin drops into the collection plate, a soul jumps out of purgatory.” Some prosperity-gospel preaching strikes one as an eerie Protestant translation of Tetzel’s message.

A number of critics of the prosperity gospel have couched their criticism in an overall anti-capitalist rhetoric: The prosperity gospel is supposed to be part and parcel of a pro-capitalist ideology, seeking to dupe the poor of the global south into accepting the wicked policies of “neoliberalism.” It is useful to point out that the materialist distortion of the Christian message is fully shared by the liberation theology of the anti-capitalist left. Only here the material improvement is understood in collective rather than individual terms: put your coin in the collection plate of the revolutionary movement, and the soul of the masses will be freed from the purgatory of capitalist exploitation. Theological suggestion: What is good for the rightist goose is good for the leftist gander.

The core of the Christian message is the proclamation of a tectonic shift in cosmic reality inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This proclamation radically relativizes all the empirical givens of this world, including all human institutions. Any reinterpretation of Christianity in terms of a this-worldly agenda, individual or collective, is a distortion. At the same time, one cannot ink out of the New Testament the fact that Jesus in his earthly ministry showed a special concern for the poor, the sick, and the marginalized. Nor should one put aside the age-old pastoral wisdom that adversity can be an occasion of spiritual growth, that God draws closer to us when we suffer from adversity. But this does not mean that adversity should be celebrated as such. Sickness should be fought by the means medicine puts at our disposal, as marginality should be fought politically (think of the civil rights movement here). But if sickness or marginality should not be accepted passively as God-given circumstances, neither should poverty.

This train of thought, at least for me, leads from theology to sociology. In terms of poverty, one must now ask just what is good for the poor. And, as far as the prosperity gospel is concerned, what one can say about it sociologically is quite different from what one can say theologically. Different Christian traditions will have different ways of coping with this (I think, necessary) dichotomy. For Lutherans this is rather easy, due to the sharp distinction between the “two realms” of Law and Gospel. Sociology has nothing to say about the realm of Gospel. It has quite a lot to say about the realm of Law. Let me try.

The research center which I direct at Boston University, in collaboration with the Centre for Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg, has recently concluded a study of the social impact of the remarkable growth of Pentecostalism in South Africa. Not all Pentecostals adhere to the prosperity gospel; many do, especially in the Pentecostal mega-churches. One of these is Rhema Church, located in a suburb of Johannesburg. On a recent visit to South Africa I attended a Sunday morning service at Rhema. It was a memorable occasion. And it led to the reflections expressed here.

An estimated 7,000 people attended the service (one of four every Sunday), in a vast gigantic auditorium that was packed full. The atmosphere was that of a rock concert, with amplified music from a band on the center stage (the music, I was told, derived from American “Christian rock”). After a long warm-up of singing and clapping (certain to give a splitting headache to anyone not immunized against such a trivial ailment by the “baptism of the Spirit”), a collection was taken (very efficiently, given the size of the congregation). Then came the climax of the event, a long, rousing sermon by the founder of the church and its principal preacher, a white South African with a background in professional body-building (I could not help thinking of him as a born-again Schwarzenegger).

The congregation was about 85 percent black, but the whites seemed perfectly at ease. We arrived by car and had difficulty finding a space in the large parking lot on one side of the church. There was a variety of cars, among them quite a few Mercedes, BMWs, and the like. On the other side of the church sat a long line of buses, which had brought people from the townships. The same class difference was evident in the way people were dressed, some in business suits, some in cheap-looking clothes. Thus the divides of both race and class were bridged, fused together in the fire of the Spirit.

Like mega-churches elsewhere, Rhema has a large number of activities serving the multiple needs of its flock. Most of these, of course, were not in evidence on a Sunday morning, but I was particularly struck by a brochure advertising a business school operated by the church. Clearly, this was not intended to give out MBAs for individuals hoping for a career in a multinational corporation. But the courses listed were evidently suitable for grassroots entrepreneurs: how to keep accounts, plan marketing, pay taxes. One could not tell from the brochure how religion was introduced into this curriculum, but it was described as “bringing Christ into the marketplace.”

The message from the preacher had two major themes. One: God does not want you to be poor! And two: You can do it! That is, you can do something about the circumstances of your life. Should one quarrel with this message? I’m inclined to think not.

Is there a theological warrant to propose that God wants us to be poor? Any more than he wants us to be sick? The prosperity gospel contains no sentimentality about the poor. There is no notion here that poverty is somehow ennobling. In that, speaking sociologically, the prosperity gospel is closer to the empirical facts than a romantic idea of the noble poor—a notion reminiscent of another romantic fiction, the noble savage. Such notions, of course, are always held by people who are not poor and who do not consider themselves to be savages. The notions are patronizing. They are implicit in the famous slogan of liberation theology: “a preferential option for the poor.” Mind you, not of the poor, but for the poor—pronounced, as it were, from on high.

“You can do it!” Research data about Pentecostals bear this out. They are more optimistic, more self-confident than their non-Pentecostal neighbors. David Martin, the dean of Pentecostal studies, has caught this theme in the concept of ” betterment.” The concept refers to what Pentecostals believe to be a fruit of the Spirit—betterment, not only spiritually, but in every aspect of life, including health and material well-being. All over Latin America this belief is expressed in the Pentecostal bumper sticker par excellence: “Cristo salva y sana!—Christ saves and heals!” It is a package: being saved from sin, healed from sickness, and helped to emerge from poverty. This is a big promise. An empirical observer cannot say anything about salvation from sin, and will be inclined to skepticism about healing from sickness. But what about the promise of emerging from poverty? And here is the most important reason for taking a new look at the prosperity gospel: The promise has a good chance of being kept!

The aforementioned package also comes with a moral component—the one that Max Weber long ago called “the Protestant ethic.” It is an ethic of hard work, soberness, frugality, and a generally disciplined lifestyle. If it is observed by poor people over a generation or so, it is very likely to lead to social mobility—that is, to an escape from grinding poverty. To be sure, there will be many people who attend prosperity-gospel churches and think of their transaction with God in quasi-magical terms—they will sing, pray, give money, and without any further effort on their part God will shower material blessings upon them. In other words, Tetzel can indeed reappear in a Protestant guise. But it is also clear from the empirical data that those people who do adhere to the Protestant ethic will indeed be materially rewarded, or at least their children will. “Betterment” follows if people work hard, save from their paycheck rather than spend it on liquor and lavish entertainment, educate their children rather than invest energy in sexual adventures. Individuals who live by the Protestant ethic have a better chance to undergo social mobility, and a society in which this ethic is diffused has a better chance at economic growth. And that is very good indeed for the poor.

Weber believed (correctly, I think) that the socio-economic consequences of Protestantism were unintended. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley did not intend their moral teachings to make their followers rich (though at least the last of the three noticed, with considerable discomfort, that many of his followers did become rich—the “method” of Methodism turned out to have an economic result along with its religious one). The purveyors of the prosperity gospel are, as it were, intentional Weberians: They consciously intend the consequences that earlier Protestants brought about unintentionally. Sociologists will have a hard time quarreling with this program, whatever the qualms of theologians.

One does not have to be a dogmatic “neoliberal” to understand that the major beneficiaries of capitalist growth are, precisely, the poor—in the aggregate if not without exception, later if not sooner, and if the political context is not one in which an élite forcefully hoards the fruits of growth. If one truly cares for the poor, one will hold a “preferential option” for capitalist economics—and ipso facto will be cautious in one’s criticisms of the prosperity gospel.

What about the criticism that prosperity-gospel preachers are cynics who live high on the hog by exploiting their poor followers? Unless one gets jovially drunk with people, it is difficult to know who is a cynic and who is sincere (and, alas, these preachers rarely drink). And exploitation is an ambiguous category: If a salesman convinces me that his product will make me happy and is worth the price, is he exploiting me? (Never mind whether he believes in the product himself.) The maxim of caveat emptor applies. And buyers are often quite careful—especially if they are poor and don’t have money to throw away. But let it be stipulated that some of these preachers are cynical and exploitative. So are other clergy, bishops, archbishops, even professors of social ethics.

People generally know what is good for them, better than the well-meaning outsider. So do buyers in the marketplace, especially if they are poor. Thus the “consumers” of the prosperity gospel generally know what they are “buying.” Specifically, they know that the betterment being promised them is not an illusion, and they know and don’t care that their preacher has a swimming pool and drives a Mercedes. If they put money in the collection plate, they generally believe that they are getting good value in return. Thus it is not only patronizing to see them as dupes and victims; it is empirically misleading.

Pentecostalism is an enormous and growing presence globally. Until recently, it has been under the radar of academic and media attention. It continues to be ignored by many if not most Christian theologians outside its community: it is still the elephant in the living room of respectable Christendom in the global north (and sometimes even in the global south). Given the demographic facts, this will inevitably change. An ecumenical dialogue with Pentecostalism will have to come. To the extent that the prosperity gospel is a sizable component of the Pentecostal phenomenon, a moral reassessment of this component should be part of the dialogue.

Peter L. Berger directs the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The sensible question is why anyone would venture to the sunny Riviera in so lovely a month as May to sit in the dark, hour after hour, day after day, days on end. And all of that sitting in the darkness was to find some kind of light, or at least glimmers thereof. Oddly, though, it worked, and then some, though in a very unexpected way. The 2008 Cannes Film Festival lacked any film that flared incandescently in the usual firmament of many really fine films. Instead, the big surprise was the cumulative efflorescence of the whole lot—not only as cinematic dazzle, of which there was plenty, but as a resounding chorus of wonder and praise for one of the more mystifying portions of the human riddle.

A curious sort of luminousness inheres in all things, in objects to be sure but infinitely more in the mystery of palpable selves. Indeed.

Understand, first, that the entries at Cannes came from all over and went everywhere. A young filmmaker from Kazakh-stan, Sergey Dvortsevoy, brought Tulpan, the plainly told story of a young ex-sailor who wants to herd sheep on the barren steppes. From the Philippines came Serbis, a seamy tale of a dilapidated family-run porn house (still sporting, with ham-fisted irony, the huge marquee from its prosperous days, F-A-M-I-L-Y). From Italy came striking crime stories about guns, the mob, and teenage boys (Gomorrah) and guns, the mob, and aging politicians (El Divo). Brazil and Argentina delivered splendid films about hard lives in hard places. The list goes on, more than one can absorb in the ten days, film after film of fresh story and cinematic elegance. There were bad movies too, very bad, ones to walk out on (once), but, ah, the wonder is that so much was so very good—and that so very many, for all their unsortable profusion, went after the same daunting subject matter. There was with startling regularity a resolute, wondrous sort of meditation on the marvel of being human as soul-in-the-flesh—how much we all are somehow, in an ever-strange brew, consciousness and spirit but also fundamentally of and in flesh. Clearly, that is something we’ve always known, at least in our heads, but we forget easily, or even deny it.

These films grab us by the collar and compel our attention by means of images, or sequences of images, usually wordless. The great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein thought that with the embrace of sound and dialogue, the medium soon came to neglect the power of the visual image. On the evidence at Cannes, he was unduly pessimistic. The festival was a feast of telling, memorable images, the sort one could hang on the wall as icons of the glory (and bane) of what people are.

A very pregnant woman, nude, showering, the camera in close, dwelling on her distended abdomen, nothing at all soft-focus gauzy about it. For one, she’s an inmate, and two, an inmate in the mother’s wing of a ramshackle Argentine prison, and there she will birth her child and rear him till age four.

In 1928 Los Angeles, the look on the face of another young mother, strained and uncomprehending, when police present to her a boy who is not her abducted son. They brook no dissent. Unbelievably, it’s all true, as in actual history.

In a starkly urban Anywhere, a driver at a traffic signal instantly goes sightless, the viewer seeing the sudden white nothing that he sees. And then everyone goes blind, one by one, stone-white blind.

In San Paulo, a jobless, middle-aged, single mother of four, all by different fathers, with still another on the way, mutters sweet love to her sleeping youngest. When he’s awake, she only rails at his very existence.

On a whim, an aging woman, sixty-plus, a part-time seamstress, pretty happily married, beds a customer ten years her elder. The camera watches it all, wrinkles, frailty, and flab, trying to cipher what brings people to this pass and whether this will indeed yield bliss, as the title suggests, or plain old hell-to-pay.

And there were many more such images, prodding us to ponder how much we are our bodies and what, indeed, they make of us. That is, to some extent, the sort of thing we expect film to do—watching and witnessing, variously displaying this world and human experience in and of it. This empirical bent has had its downside, for sure, as in filmdom’s long history of exalting physical appeal, “sexiness,” as it used to be called, particularly in Hollywood’s fixation on glamour and romance, on and off the screen. It is, after all, the dream factory, and how it does love to prettify, objectify, pander, and profit, cashing in on the reductive gaze so often lamented in contemporary critical theory. At Cannes, something quite different was underway, at once searching, exultant, and, for lack of a better term, hallowed, evoking a sense of transcendent mystery, even presence. This we understand well enough when doting on landscapes or babies; it is harder to see in our own mottled creaturehood and the raw, palpable selves of others, at once glorious and ignoble, in-carnate, in flesh, first and last, bound and tangled and headed toward death. But these films push on through tawdriness and misery to the essential goodness of being alive in the flesh.

What did you see at Cannes? Strangely, or maybe not, a cluster of films about mothers and motherhood (where males are either absent or don’t look so good). That really began at last year’s festival, with the Palme d’Or (grand prize) winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a dire Romanian film which beat out, rightly so, the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, as good as that film was. With striking but unpretentious naturalism, writer-director Cristian Mungiu follows one young woman’s harrowing abortion in a country where that was forbidden—not for any moral reason but because its abominable dictator simply wanted more people to tyrannize. What first seems a plea for abortion rights subversively questions the practice itself, suggesting finally that there may be worse desecrations than those perpetrated by a crazed communist state. And this happens, by and large, wordlessly, with Mungiu’s camera simply watching and wondering, bothering to show all, graphically and at length, vivid and urgent, lingering sufficiently to let the human crux of it all seep in.

As it happens, last year’s North American films got around to the same kind of rumination that was so prominent at Cannes in 2008. First there was this issue of the tenacity of motherhood—to birth, nurture, and, yes, venerate flesh born of woman. The mother-impulse came in Juno, a Canadian film starring young phenom Ellen Page as a savvy, restless (and relentlessly cutesy) teenager who on the cusp of an abortion opts instead to birth the child for adoption, though that too is complicated, and religion, frankly, has nothing to do with any part of her choice. Her “why” lingers throughout the film, as does the resolution of the Type-A career-woman adoptive mother (Jennifer Garner). And there was Lars and the Real Girl, a poignant though implausible story of a deeply shy, small-town twentysomething who purchases a human-sized sex doll to be a companion (and not at all for its usual commercial purpose). How his family and the town respond shakes up a lot of notions of what family and community should look like. There were others too, bracing and engaging and yet altogether seeming pretty tame stuff, compared to what showed up in Cannes (pray that all those stunning films find North American distribution).

The young woman standing on a train platform waiting for the police to return her kidnapped son is Christine Collins, a hard-working single mother in 1928 Los Angeles (admirably played by Angelina Jolie). Director Clint Eastwood returns yet again to searching questions about parenthood, family, and guilt, matters that have long preoccupied him, beginning with his masterpiece Unforgiven (1992); this new film, Changeling (tentative title), will be Eastwood’s most popular in a long time. The story, based on a long-forgotten actual case, centers on the disappearance of ten-year-old Walter Collins, who turns out to be one of a number of boys missing and unaccounted for. This is the stuff of melodrama, but much of it is sadly true, and there are no happy endings. Collins’ devotion to her son and her work are complete, and Eastwood gives Collins her due. “Ferocious” best describes her commitment, though at no time through her long ordeal does she go soppy or hysterical, even when the police have her committed to the local psych ward. Hers is a profound travail, and to her aid, if not outright rescue, comes a suave and equally ferocious Presbyterian minister, Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), whose passion, as shown in his sermon radio broadcasts, is the reform of a corrupt and vicious police department (here again the story is all too solidly grounded in history). And Christine never gives up, even long after everything has come to look very grim. That is love and love-beyond-hope, and the question is why exactly. After all, reason has its supply of reasonable nostrums—move on, get over it, life awaits—with which the heart’s fiery love has no truck. Somehow, mysteriously, life proves an implacable gift.

The same jolting current roars through Leonera (Lion’s Den) by the youngish Argentine director Pablo Trapero. Martina Gusman plays Julia, a disaffected student rather randomly living with her boyfriend and his friend in the apartment her mother left when she long ago went back to Spain. Julia ends up arrested for the gruesome murder of the boyfriend, and only then does she find out that she is pregnant by the same, though there is a suggestion it might be the roommate. Well, prison and pregnancy have a way of clearing the head, and Julia’s dissolute fog fades as she gives all to birthing and rearing the boy within the prison (the mothers in her cell block are allowed to have their children with them till age four, when they give them up to family members or the state takes custody). Her task is not easy, just as it is not for any of the other mothers, who are generally a pretty rough crew. The plot-line sounds tear-soaked pablum, and so it would be if Trapero did not sustain throughout a sober, brooding realism. Like Julia, we find out a lot about wherein lies the value of living, and again that resides in the peculiar bondedness that emerges between mother and child and also among mothers, a fierce sisterhood made so by their common troth to children. In the bowels of that rusty, falling-down prison, of all places, love has no limits, for better and for worse. Much of the time, or at least more than was necessary to tell the story, the camera simply watches women striving hour-by-hour in a hard place.

Versailles has more than a little irony in its title, for it has little to do with opulence. Writer-director Pierre Schoeller’s story follows the fate of yet another single mother and son. Judith Chemla plays the homeless twentysomething mother of a five-year-old (Max Baissette de Malglaive), who fears that France’s super-nanny state will take her boy. The pair escapes to the woods surrounding the famous estate, and there they find an angry, solitary squatter, Damien (Guillaume Depardieu, son of the famous Gerard), in whose care she leaves the boy while she decamps to find work. Finding a job that’s half rehab for herself, caring for the aged infirm, she returns months later to retrieve the lad, only to find the pair long gone to who-knows-where. She has lived in a world outside the “safety net,” an alien sphere without last names and numbers, so there is no way to trace either the squatter or her son, and that is the cost of eluding the bureaucracy. All are stricken: mother, reluctant squatter-father, his own parents to whom he hands off the boy, and, lastingly, the boy himself, shuffled from her to anywhere, himself a seeming squatter bereft of “real” family. Like these others the picture is striking in its lack of comfort, and all its characters are plainly more than flawed.

In Linha de Passe (The Passing Line, tentative English title), the Brazilian writer and director Walter Salles (Central Station, 1998) and co-director Daniela Thomas tell the story of a deeply troubled poor family. An aging and pregnant-again single mother tries to raise her passel of four sons, aged ten to eighteen, all of different fathers, on her cleaning lady wages (her employer cuts her when she discovers she’s pregnant—so she can “rest”). She fumes and rants at her motley bunch: the eldest could make it as a soccer pro if only he had the “fee” to pay to the scout; the next, already a father, works as messenger fast on his way to crime; the third, dutiful and hard-working, is a charismatic Christian, though his church and faith wane; and the biracial youngest yearns to find his father and drive a bus. She loves them, a lot, though they feel it not at all, for in either frustration or duty she does nothing but rant when they’re about. Bodies bring us to strange places indeed, and we use them to get by some means or another somewhere else, wisely or otherwise. And in the end, all four boys do move on, to God knows where, unforeseeably, eerily, recalling the rapturous bittersweet ending to Central Station.

The splendid Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre (L’Promessse, L’Enfant), brought The Silence of Lorna, the story of a young Romanian woman (luminous Arta Dobroshi) who’s in the citizenship business, so to speak, part of a gang running various scams to get Belgian papers for assorted undesirables. It’s not her calling, to be sure, for she actually sympathizes with her clients, mostly addicts and mobsters, her compassion leading her to pregnancy, or so she thinks. The film is not as bold, either stylistically or thematically, as the Dardennes’ earlier work (twice winning the Palme d’Or), its ending ambiguous and grim, but still it haunts and jostles long after, suggesting a kind of miracle that science itself cannot detect. And along with all the mother-and-son vehicles came My Magic, a Cannes favorite, Singapore writer-director Erich Khoo’s story of an alcoholic father, an enormous man, looking much like a sumo wrestler, who shakes off the booze long enough to aid his bereft son. It’s an intriguing film, though in the end its slightly cloying sentiment and its gestures at magical realism tend to subvert its power.

With resolute visual patience, these filmmakers give painstaking meditative heed to the material, bothering to look and look and look yet again. The gist of the perspective seems to be something like this: psycho-chemical we are, but that does not seem the half of it. There is still, surprise, that irreducible datum of being alive and conscious in flesh, and revering the flesh, not to mention the wonder and puzzle of being at all. And this shows up nowhere more persuasively than in those tales where mothers know this, well, in their bones and soul.

That’s not the half of it, though, so born and constrained are we of flesh. No one catches this better than Woody Allen, who is again, happily, in top form with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, and Penelope Cruz, in the best romantic comedy Allen has made in a couple of decades. Its breezy voiceover narration and swirling network plot belie its rueful meditation on the strangeness of human longing, and especially so when it comes to romance—meaning what we really want relationally. Tellingly, the best and brightest do no better at this, and probably a good deal worse, than the ordinary bloke. All the education and the glamour money can buy seem only to muddle the appetites further still. Recent Ivy grads Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Johansson), once roommates, are larking on family money and friends in Barcelona when approached one evening by a local artist-lothario (Bardem), who smoothly invites them to fly off to his island for a cordial erotic weekend. Vicky objects—she’s a strait-laced career girl, duly engaged to a frothy go-getter—but Christina, exotic, vaguely artistic, and very thirsty, likes the idea. Complications ensue, and when the seducer’s daft artist-ex, Maria Elena (Cruz), shows up, things get stickier, funnier, and dumber still. Christina thinks she has found her true love(s), and Vicky rethinks everything, and in the end nothing changes, despite all the exhausting sturm und drang. Somewhere behind his jaunty narrator, Allen stands bemused, grieving, and mildly alarmed at the human proclivity, at once flighty and profound, to yearn and ache for some other or more, if we could only figure out who or what that is. The film is an old man’s rueful meditation (Allen is 72) on the vagaries of the human comedy among those who should know better, at least by now—and Allen, the implication is clear, pointedly does not exclude himself from that indictment.

German writer-director Andreas Dresen’s Cloud Nine echoes Allen but without the humor and the youth, making for an arduous journey through old-age love or lust or whatever it is that fuels these folks. For no apparent reason, elderly seamstress Inge (Ursala Werner) seduces customer Werner, ten years her senior but robust still. Her longtime spouse is a good, kindly fellow, though on the bland side; his favorite pastime is watching videos of trains. Dresen’s choice to film scenes of lovemaking rather clinically—in full light and single takes at middle distance—effectively detaches viewers from most of whatever frisson these characters feel. The age, look, and staging of the participants foils all the usual titillation, emphasizing still more the puzzle of what propels people towards physical intimacy. Viewers understand well enough what’s happening, and then some, but the camera’s neutrality has the effect of mystifying motivation. And the more we see the bodies, the more we wonder, in awe of the conspicuous incursion of both age and desire, at the opacity of knowing inner cause. Clearly, the affair disrupts the monotony of sameness, and it no doubt also recalls, at least momentarily, the rush of passion and romance that fires youth. The further we travel with these folks, though, the more problematic it all gets, especially after Inge tries to explain to her husband why she wants to leave him. Soon enough, cloud nine turns rainy, though the protagonists are, remarkably, loath even to suspect what’s ahead. We’re left with a strong sense of the blithe narcissism, psychological and moral, that no doubt fueled the business in the first place. Body and soul, oh how they twine.

Any suggestion that self or soul somehow float disconnected within the body shatters in Blindness, Mexican director Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, Portugal’s most widely translated contemporary writer. So many of the claims of fundamental human decency and goodness presume normalcy, a notion subject to rapid shifts in unforeseeable ways. How quickly it all goes, personally and socially, the minute threats and peril emerge, something that seems to be getting truer by the day. First just one man falls blind, terrifyingly rendered by Meirelles, who’s a master of nightmarish cinematic effect, as in City of God (2002) and The Constant Gardener (2005). And then everyone, and the world fast goes to hell. There is even the suggestion that God himself has gone blind, and we are the ones who must show him around. So frail is civilization, the film suggests. What hope there is in Blindness depends on one exception to a world gone blind, and then, more than likely, the whole thing starts over. Cheery it is not; neither is it forgettable.

The usual terms for describing what these films seem to acknowledge are, if of a secular bent, embodiment, and, if religious, creatureliness. Here, though, in noting the visceral impact of these films, neither seems to stretch nearly far enough, as if they’d passed a boundary of some mystifying sort. And film can do that. Witness a recent book by prominent film theorist Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. [1] Sobchack on the one hand describes existence as a “radically material” mix of body and consciousness, “an irreducible ensemble,” yet she remains throughout the book, despite a prolix host of sometimes painful neologisms (“inter-objectivity,” “egological,” to name only two), more than a little baffled by the peculiar power of the material world and her reactions to it, for they don’t readily fit, labor though she does in trying to make them, the reductionist categories of postmodernism.

Late in the book she meditates in considerable surprise on what she calls “the charge of the real,” meaning the capacity of the bodily image, animal or human, to shake viewers from the detachment of simple “aesthetic valuation” to a visceral recoil that ends in “response-ability,” a recoil that elicits ethical action. Insofar as the “fictional space [on the screen] becomes charged with the real, the viewer is also charged” by it and, it seems, is subject to some sort of moral demand. Her puzzlement at why this should be so only grows when she turns to what she calls in her concluding chapter “The Passion of the Material.” There she considers religious films, seeking—though deeply moved by them—to evacuate any metaphysical dimension from the moments of ecstasy and communion found in Babette’s Feast, Diary of a Country Priest, and American Beauty. For Sobchack, whatever sacredness anyone sees in those films lies in film style and derives from one’s own egoless apprehension of some other something that is not us. The notion that the stories themselves might have something to do with the “religious” response to them, or that some metaphysical something beyond humankind might actually impinge on human consciousness, waving a flag of sorts in moments of perceptual clarity, never seriously enters as a possibility. Throughout, Sobchack mercilessly overtheorizes to elude any sort of religious category and, finally, to dodge any sort of transcendent anything, no matter its “charge” or “passion.”

A sounder approach comes from novelist-cum-art critic John Updike in a recent essay on the distinctive character of American art. [2] Updike begins by noting early British complaints about over-precision in the work of colonial painter John Singleton Copley, whose penchant for literal exactness (Copley’s pictures were too “liney,” his critics said) was ill-suited to atmospherics preferred by European tastes. And there, as if to say what does one expect, Updike invokes Jonathan Edwards in reverence for the glory of the ordinary, for “the clarity of ‘things.'” As Edwards wrote, “The manifestations God makes of Himself in His works are the principal manifestation of His perfection, and the declaration and teachings of His word are to lead to these.” From Copley to Winslow Homer and beyond, Updike concludes, American artists have displayed a “bias toward the empirical” and, in a wonderful phrase, “toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being.” For Updike himself, that posture is nothing new. In an essay from the 1960s, “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” he attested, in a signal phrase for his whole career, to “a tireless goodness in things at rest.” With slight modification that notion provides a succinct coda for the films talked about here. A curious sort of luminousness inheres in all things, in objects to be sure but infinitely more in the mystery of palpable selves. Indeed.

The same preoccupation lies at the center of the haunting work of American filmmaker Terrence Malick, especially in The Thin Red Line (1998), where he goes so far as to describe what he is after visually and experientially in his films. During the battle for Guadalcanal, infantryman Witt (James Caviezel), one among a host of characters, wrestles long and hard, Melville-like, to grasp the nature of the universe. And where does his strenuous questioning lead him? To pay heed, in grateful adoration, to “all things shining,” and that despite the war all about. So fierce, then, is the divine presence in the radiant, palpable world in which we find ourselves, body and soul, and in all that shines before us in “numinous fullness,” shining, constant, and pressing. Though one surely does not have to go to Cannes to sit in the dark to know that, it was good to be reminded.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies (Eerdmans).

1. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2004).

2. John Updike, “‘The Clarity of Things,'” The New York Review of Books, June 26, 2008, pp. 12-16.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Didn’t any of you guys ever go to Sunday school?” So said Indiana Jones to a couple of bemused military intelligence agents in Raiders of the Lost Ark, easily the top-grossing film of 1981 and one of the greatest action movies ever made. And thus producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg seemed to make explicit what had only been implicit in the handful of films that they had made over the previous few years—films that had captured an entire generation’s spiritual imagination.

Lucas, of course, had helped to revive interest in the power of myth with his space-opera throwback, Star Wars (1977), and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980); the latter was particularly heavy on the spiritual development of its hero, Luke Skywalker. Some Christians, keen to capitalize on the franchise’s popularity, even went so far as to draw extensive analogies between the first movie and the biblical narrative; the fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi was betrayed by his disciple, and died, and continued beyond death as a counsellor to Luke was, of course, key to their interpretations. [1] Spielberg, for his part, had directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, re-edited and re-released in 1980), a film about aliens that spoke very strongly to the longing for enlightenment from above; in both images and dialogue, the film even made indirect references to the story of Moses and his encounter with God on Mount Sinai. [2]

Now here they were, collaborating on their first movie together, a tongue-in-cheek ode to the Saturday matinee serials of their youth—and it was all about the Ark of the Covenant, the gold-plated chest within which the Israelites had stored the tablets of the Law, and above which the spirit of God himself was said to reside. There was no need for allegory here; this movie really was bringing a piece of the Bible to life. Even better for an 11-year-old Bible geek like me (I would begin my first subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review just a couple years later), the hero of the film was an archaeologist who spoke knowledgeably about obscure biblical characters like the Pharaoh Shishaq. No one really knows what became of the Ark in the end—outside the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, at any rate, which claims to have the Ark—but the film floated a theory that was, at least, plausible: that the first foreign power to attack Jerusalem after Solomon’s death had taken the Ark away, along with all of the Temple’s other gold-plated treasures. [3]

Everything after that—the Egyptian city buried by an ancient sandstorm, the Staff of Ra containing the jewel that points the way to the building that houses the Ark, and all the various fights and chases that ensue between Indy and the Nazis—was just plain, old-fashioned Hollywood nonsense, of course. And the sequels which followed turned increasingly silly and cartoonish—none more so than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which brought the character back to the big screen this past summer for the first time in almost 20 years. But the original movie was animated by a biblical idea—even to the point where the Ark itself steals the show from the film’s ostensible hero—and if you look at the franchise as a whole, it is possible to isolate some striking developments in their approach to faith, family, and the seemingly divine.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this series is that, if you watch the films in sequential order—the second film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), is actually a prequel that takes place one year before Raiders—you can chart a spiritual journey of sorts from paganism to Judaism to Christianity and, now, alas, to some sort of post-religious, pseudo-scientific, New Age sensibility. In a strangely microcosmic and presumably unintentional form, the spiritual journey of Indiana Jones happens to match that of the civilization which produced him. [4]

Temple of Doom captures Indy at both his most and least heroic. Set in 1935, the film begins in a Shanghai nightclub, where Indy is about to close a deal with a local ganglord, exchanging the ashes of the Manchu emperor Nurhaci for a valuable diamond. When the deal goes sour, Indy grabs the nightclub’s singer, Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), and sticks a fork in her side, threatening to harm her if her boss doesn’t give in to his demands—not exactly the sort of behavior one expects from a good guy. But then a fight breaks out, mayhem ensues, one thing leads to another, and before they know it, Indy and Willie and a kid named Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) find themselves stuck on a pilotless plane somewhere over India.

Indy and the others jump from the plane in an inflatable life raft and, improbably, survive, their raft eventually settling near a village that has been wasting away ever since its children were abducted by a local cult of Thuggees, followers of the Hindu god Kali. A village elder tells Indy that the cult also took the village’s Sankara Stone, an object without which the village cannot prosper—and he adds that the Hindu god Shiva brought Indy there to retrieve the stone and save the village.

Indy doesn’t buy the supernatural stuff, and he tells Short Round not to worry because what the elder told them was nothing more than “a ghost story.” But he is interested in the Sankara Stone—which, if genuine, would mean “fortune and glory” for him when he took it to America. So he goes to nearby Pankot Palace, with Willie and Short Round at his side, and there he witnesses horrifying displays of human sacrifice and child slavery at the hand of the Thuggees and their leader, Mola Ram (Amrish Puri). By the end of the film, Indy has had a change of heart, liberated the children, defeated the bad guys, and returned the Stone to its village, which now prospers. A final exchange between Indy and the village elder establishes that Indy now “understands” the Stone’s power.

Raiders takes place one year later. A couple of federal agents tell Indy that the Nazis are on the verge of discovering the Ark of the Covenant in an ancient, ruined Egyptian city, and they want him to claim it for the United States before the Germans get it. Despite his experiences the previous year—which, of course, had not been written or filmed yet—Indy is a skeptic once again, scoffing when his colleague Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) cautions him not to take the job too lightly. “I don’t believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus,” says Indy. “I’m going after a find of incredible historical significance, you’re talking about the bogeyman.”

By the end of the film, however, Indy has become a believer all over again. With the help of a former girlfriend, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy does indeed find the Ark, but all three of them are captured by the Nazis, who bind Indy and Marion to a pole and allow them to watch from a distance as René Belloq (Paul Freeman), a mercenary French archaeologist, opens the Ark and peers inside—which, as anyone who has read their Bible could have told them, is a definite no-no. [5] Spirits emerge, bodies melt, and in a matter of minutes everyone is dead except for the two lovers—both of whom are alive, it is suggested, because Indy remembered at the last minute that they should shut their eyes and avoid making eye contact with the divine. [6] The film ends with the American government locking the Ark away in a warehouse, as Indy grumbles that those “bureaucratic fools … don’t know what they’ve got there.”

Indy tussles with the Nazis again in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), but this time they are fighting for possession of the Holy Grail. If the Ark of the Covenant is situated right at the heart of the Old Testament, providing the crucial link between Sinai and Zion, the Holy Grail exists somewhere on the cusp between the New Testament and post-biblical legend—but ultimately it points to Christ, who used the cup at the original Last Supper and who, according to the legends, shed some of his blood into that cup from the cross. Once again, Indy starts off as a skeptic, trading “bedtime stories” with Walter Donovan (Julian Glover), a wealthy American businessman who hires Indy to help him look for the Grail before revealing himself to be a villain collaborating with the Nazis; but by the end of the film, Indy has met a legendary, centuries-old knight, drunk from the Cup of Christ himself, and shared it with his once-estranged father, Henry Jones, Sr. (Sean Connery). Once again, Indy has gone from being a doubter to being a believer.

The pattern repeats itself in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but in this episode the question of doubt and belief is tied to a decidedly more secular subject. The new film takes place in 1957, nearly two decades after Indy’s last big-screen adventure, [7] and the villains are Soviets: atheists with an interest in psychic research, rather than the occult-obsessed Thuggees and Nazis of the previous films. Led by the Ukrainian Colonel Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), they are particularly interested in finding the remains of extraterrestrials whose ships have crashed in various parts of the world, including the legendary UFO wreckage supposedly found in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The film begins with the Soviets taking Indy as a prisoner to Area 51 and compelling him to find the crate that contains the alien; not coincidentally, this turns out to be the same warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant was stored many years before, though this fact is revealed only to the audience, and not to Indy.

Thanks in part to a scheduled nuclear test, Indy escapes the Russians, but the fact that he helped them in any capacity puts him under a cloud of suspicion. Indy is ready to leave America and pursue a job at the University of Leipzig in East Germany—not the best way, perhaps, to assure the authorities that he isn’t a Red—but his plans are interrupted when a young greaser named Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) enters his life and asks for his help in finding an old friend, Harold Oxley (John Hurt). Oxley, we are told, was obsessed with crystal skulls, artifacts that supposedly go back to ancient Latin America, and which some say have magical powers. Before long, it turns out that Oxley has been captured by Spalko, too, and that the particular skull he has discovered is not only the work of extra-terrestrials, as some have speculated, but is part of an actual extraterrestrial skeleton.

Indy, as always, mocks the idea when it is first presented to him, but Spalko forces him to make a psychic connection with the skull, and from that point on, all of the various characters are determined to bring the skull back to the legendary temple, hidden somewhere in the South American jungle, from which it was stolen a few hundred years before. Indy does it to help Oxley, and also, he says, because the skull told him to. Spalko does it because she hopes to find the power that will enable her and her comrades to rule the world by controlling the minds of their enemies. But what they find is a throne room filled with 13 alien skeletons, one of which is missing its head—and when they put the crystal skull back in its place, the aliens all come to life and demonstrate that they have a hive mind of their own. Spalko asks them to give her all the “knowledge” in the world, and they oblige, overwhelming her brain with so much data that her body basically evaporates. For their part, Indy and his friends manage to escape before the temple collapses and the aliens depart in a flying saucer.

In some ways, the new film marks a significant departure from the others, inasmuch as it ignores the myths, legends, and relics of ancient religions, instead taking as its starting point a phenomenon that cannot be traced back with any certainty to any point earlier than the 19th century, which is when crystal skulls first began to show up on the antiquities market. What’s more, the film fuses this phenomenon to a decidedly cheesy sci-fi premise, typical of the decade in which the film is set but lacking any remotely resonant connection to the beliefs and practices of any significant number of people in the real world. In at least one way, however, the new film does bring the franchise full circle, since Raiders itself began with Indy going to South America in search of an idol based on a fertility symbol that some scholars consider to be a 19th-century forgery with no basis in actual cultic practices. [8]

Some elements have remained relatively constant over the course of the series, such as Indy’s frustrated relationship with the government. The British army may ride to the rescue at the end of Temple of Doom, but from the sheriff who confiscates the Cross of Coronado in Last Crusade to the federal agents who spread the notion that Indy is a Communist spy in Crystal Skull, the American authorities always seem to come off as unreliable or untrustworthy, at best.

Other themes have developed in interesting ways over the course of the franchise, though, such as its portrayal of sexuality and the family. Indy was originally conceived as a James Bond-like character—hence the casting of Connery, the original Bond, as his father—and each of the first three films presented him with a different leading lady. But each film also introduced other characters, seen or unseen, who either eclipsed or extended these relationships, as if to suggest that Indy wanted or needed something more than the isolated couplings that Bond usually settles for. Indy’s boldly promiscuous flirtations in Temple of Doom and Last Crusade pale next to his fraternal love for Short Round and his filial love for his father, respectively. In Raiders, the romance runs deeper, partly because Marion is a figure from Indy’s past whose father, now dead, was a mentor of sorts to Indy until they had a falling out over Indy’s relationship with his daughter. The reunion of Indy and Marion thus raises the possibility that old wounds can still be healed, though it isn’t until the second half of Crystal Skull—when Indy meets Marion again for the first time in 20 years, discovers that Mutt is their son, and marries her—that the reconciliation becomes permanent.

But if the series has gotten increasingly pro-family, it has also moved further and further away from anything resembling a religious or explicitly theological sensibility. At the climax of Temple of Doom, Indy seems to align himself with the Hindu gods when he recites a spell in Sanskrit and tells Mola Ram, repeatedly, “You betrayed Shiva.” In Raiders, Indy is surprisingly less inclined to invest the Ark with religious significance. In the early scenes, where he is still skeptical of the Ark’s power, he does throw away a line to the effect that the Ark is said to have exuded the “power of God or something.” But in the final scenes, after he has witnessed the power for himself, he does not connect it to anything explicitly theological. Even Brody, who had earlier expressed concern about going after such a supernatural object, insists that “the Ark is a source of unspeakable power and it has to be researched,” as though the power of God were something that could be subjected to scientific analysis. In Last Crusade, the Holy Grail takes a back seat to the father-son relationship just like everything else, and the Grail’s significance is reduced to a pop-spirituality cliché worthy of Dan Brown. “The search for the Cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us,” Brody declares.

Crystal Skull pushes things even further, by substituting extraterrestrials or “inter-dimensional beings” for the gods and supernatural relics of the previous films. But there are other, subtler clues that science has supplanted religion, as well. The nuclear bomb that nearly kills Indy at the beginning of the film also destroys a test village populated by mannequins, and it causes their faces to melt, not unlike the faces that melted when the Nazis opened the Ark in Raiders. And the mushroom cloud that looms over Indy seems a more frightful spectacle, more out of control, than the pillar of fire that poured out of the Ark. Later, the film draws our attention to the fact that Robert Oppenheimer, one of the bomb’s designers, quoted a Hindu scripture while claiming that he had become a “destroyer of worlds”; the destructive power of the gods is now in the hands of men.

Oxley, for his part, often cites a line from John Milton’s Comus about a “Golden Key / That [opens] the Palace of Eternity.” In its original context, the line is spoken by a Greco-Roman spirit and refers to the bliss that awaits the virtuous after death, when they are greeted and rewarded by “the enthron’d gods on Sainted seats.” But here, it refers to the elaborate mechanisms that take heroes and villains alike into the room with the enthroned aliens, and the “reward” they offer is something that people would be better off avoiding.

Oxley also draws Indy’s attention to the Nazca Lines, a series of Peruvian geoglyphs that, in his words, “only the gods can see,” because the patterns they form are said to be visible only from the air; but modern technology has given Indy and his friends the ability to soar above these lines and see them from the gods’ point of view. And when all is said and done, Indy marvels that the ancient people who worshipped these aliens did so because the aliens gave them “knowledge”—that is, the knowledge to develop basic technologies such as agriculture and irrigation, neither of which seems particularly supernatural to anyone today. If these “gods” meant anything deeper to the people who worshipped them, the film never suggests what it might have been.

For fans like myself, it is impossible not to feel disappointment at the note on which the franchise has now concluded. A number of critics have suggested that there is no real difference between the aliens of Crystal Skull and the religious artifacts of the earlier films; they’re all just mystical MacGuffins, and equally silly, or so these critics say. But no matter how pulpy the earlier films were, they at least turned our attention to matters of the spirit and stoked a sense of awe. Crystal Skull has nothing that compares to this; indeed, the characters even perform autopsies on the “gods” of the past. [9] It’s safe to say this is one Saturday matinee that won’t be getting much play in Sunday school.

Peter T. Chattaway lives in British Columbia and writes about movies.

1. A prime example of this is Frank Allnutt’s The Force of Star Wars (Bible Voice, 1977).

2. Note the mountain where the humans and aliens make contact, and note the scene where Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr discuss whether to let the kids watch The Ten Commandments (1956).

3. 1 Kings 14:25-28; 2 Chronicles 12:1-11.

4. I owe this point to Dan’l Danehy Oakes, who charted the progression of the first three movies on Coinherence, an e-mail discussion list devoted to Charles Williams, back in 1996.

5. Witness the fate of the 70 men who peered into the Ark in Beth Shemesh (1 Samuel 6:19). Depending on the circumstances, one could also die by touching the Ark (2 Samuel 6:6-11; 1 Chronicles 13:9-14) or even just by being in its presence (Leviticus 16:2). There is also a biblical precedent for the form of divine judgment whereby the bodies of certain characters rot while they are still standing (Zechariah 14:12).

6. Cf. Exodus 33:20, where God tells Moses that “no one may see me and live.”

7. Harrison Ford had also played the character in the bookends of an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1993) set in 1950. While it is not clear to what degree we should regard that series as canonical, Indy does tell Mutt in Crystal Skull about an incident from that series that happened when he was about Mutt’s age.

8. Jane MacLaren Walsh, “Legend of the Crystal Skulls,” Archaeology (May/June 2008). www.archaeology.org/0805/etc/indy.html

9. For all their enlightenment, these aliens do seem to have a tendency to crash their ships. And just how was the crystal skull stolen from the body of its alien in the first place, anyway?

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Spiritual mentors and pastoral endorsements have brought a few pastors to the forefront in the 2008 election. Sen. Barack Obama broke with his long-term pastor and Sen. John McCain eventually rejected endorsements from pastor John Hagee and pastor Rod Parsley.

Now, Harper’s Magazine reporters have dug up sermons from Sarah Palin’s pastors.

Palin has attended the Juneau Christian Center, where Mike Rose serves as senior pastor. Her previous pastor was David Pepper of the Church on the Rock in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla.

Sebastian Jones found links to some of their sermons.

Rose said during a July 28, 2007 sermon: “Do you believe we’re in the last days? After listening to Newt Gingrich and the prime minister of Israel and a number of others at our gathering, I became convinced, and I have been convinced for some time. We are living in the last days. These are incredible times to live in.”

Pepper said during a November 25, 2007 sermon: “The purpose for the United States is? to glorify God. This nation is a Christian nation.”

Three panelists debated this morning over whether the Democrats’ platform on abortion is a step forward.

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, praised the platform for introducing sentences about the party’s desire to reduce the number of abortions. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, called it even more pro-choice because of it’s “unequivocal” support of Roe v. Wade. Steve Waldman, founder and editor of the spirituality Web site beliefnet.com called it two steps forward and two steps backward.

The debate came during a panel in Minneapolis hosted by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance. Wallis argued that the evangelical agenda is broadening to include issues like poverty and the war in Iraq. “The monologue of the Religious Right is over,” he said.

Waldman said that the evangelical leaders are passing the torch, sometimes willingly, sometimes not. “The voters in the rank and file evangelicals have different interests than their parents. I don’t think the impact [of older evangelical leaders] has waned. There is now more of a counter point to it.” And Land argued that abortion and gay marriage are still important issues for evangelicals. He said, “Younger evangelicals want a broader agenda, but they’re not going to exchange their agenda.”

Moderator of the forum Krista Tippett, who hosts a public radio show called “Speaking of Faith,” had to say “Let’s try not to talk about abortion for the next half hour.”

Ah, to have been a reader two centuries ago, in a golden age of English literature. Or so we think. But the thrust of William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period is quite different. St. Clair has done prodigious research to drive home his thesis that in this “golden age,” books were largely inaccessible to ordinary people. Moreover, the real enemy of the common reader was the book trade. One bitter author from the early 19th century told the story of God endeavoring to find a London publisher for the Bible. The first one the Almighty approached “disliked the mangers and carpenters, wanted the characters to be made aristocratic, and asked for the story of King Herod and Salome to be expanded.” The next one offered to print it on a vanity publishing basis.

In the Romantic period, St. Clair explains, the English book trade was committed to positioning new literary texts on the costliest end of the spectrum, thus restricting sales to a tiny élite. A typical new book would have cost a maid six weeks’ income. This strategy reached its zenith with William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814). For the price of that book (48.5 shillings), a person could buy one hundred fat pigs. One man bought his own printing press and thereby set himself up in business for the same amount as this single volume of contemporary poetry!

Such an arrangement was no gift to authors, who, not surprisingly, generally wanted to reach a large audience. At such a price, Wordsworth’s book did not sell out its first edition for fifteen years, thereby holding back a cheaper version that might have reached the reading nation. Not a single copy of Wordsworth’s book was sold in his own home county of Cumberland. Even an aristocrat such as Lord Dudley felt he could not afford first editions. Publishers often destroyed copies that they could not sell at the list price rather than risk destabilizing the high-price atmosphere by discounting them.

The result of such machinations by the London book trade was that the canonical Romantic authors did not reach nearly as wide a public as we would suppose. And the price of their books wasn’t the only barrier. Publishers were extremely conservative about what they accepted. Both Lord Byron and Jane Austen, for example, suffered rejection by publishers before they achieved fame. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was turned down by all the major firms. Still, she was a success compared to her husband, the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was reduced to vanity publishing.

Authors now enshrined in the Norton Anthology were undervalued by their contemporaries in other ways as well. As a national depository, Cambridge University Library was entitled to a copy of every book published. Nevertheless, it disdained to collect items deemed beneath its dignity, and thereby refused books by Austen, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth. In a lifetime of writing and lecturing on contemporary literature, William Hazlitt never found a reason to mention any of the novels of Jane Austen. In one of numerous delightful asides, St. Clair observes that under British law at that time a man could have been hung for stealing a copy of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, “although there is no record of anyone taking the risk.”

Occasionally the high-minded publishers’ stranglehold on copyrights was broken. The courts declared that a copyright could not be enforced on immoral literature. This act of censure had the ironic effort of releasing these texts to the masses in endless cheap editions from downmarket publishers. While Shelley’s mature work languished in overpriced volumes with minuscule print runs, his youthful indiscretion Queen Mab was by far his most read work. Byron’s Don Juan became a wildfire bestseller in the same manner. This bifurcation was so stark that whole lives of Byron produced by the “respectable” publishers of the day “omit all mention of the fact that he had written the most widely read long poem of the century.” (These risqué offerings prompted the poet laureate, Robert Southey, to pontificate that Byron and Shelley represented the “Satanic School of poetry.” The devil, however, has an urbane wit: Byron prophesied that Southey’s Joan of Arc, An Epic Poem would be read “when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but—not till then.”)

At least in the Romantic period the reading nation had access to out-of-copyright material. In the high monopoly period from 1710 to 1774, everything was under copyright. The first publisher to print a text, however long ago it had been composed, held the copyright in perpetuity. A publisher would suddenly secure exclusive rights to a medieval Christmas carol such as “The Holly and the Ivy.” Shakespeare’s plays were taken away from the people and hoarded for the few who could afford pricey editions. St. Clair combines these two illustrations in order to offer his own intriguing contribution to Shakespearean studies. He suggests that in the original texts of the plays, whole popular songs were often included, but, as these lyrics were now under copyright, the practice developed of giving only a brief fragment of the song in the printed versions of the plays.

Reading therefore actually declined during the so-called Enlightenment. Again and again, St. Clair calls us to see that economic realities were behind trends that we often attempt to analyze as if they merely reflected the intellectual or literary interests of society at that time. So, for example, we might assume that when the vise-grip of the London book cartel was loosed in 1774, the moment had finally come to produce canon-forming edited volumes. Unfortunately, at this historic juncture, the interests and vagaries of the publishers trumped critical assessment. The most important canon-forming collection of the era, Samuel Johnson’s The English Poets (1779), was not the result of the discerning choices of its eminent ostensible editor, but rather a publisher’s ragbag.

So what literature did the reading nation actually have access to during the Romantic age? The evangelical tracts of Hannah More were widely disseminated. With the entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of the movement, More co-opted the chapbook (cheap book) network of traveling booksellers who sold inexpensive publications to the poor. We have on record the testimonies of many who were inspired by these edifying tales. On the other hand, free paper was a useful resource in its own right: “The chapmens’ insistence from the start that the tracts should be printed on soft paper, rather than the smoother book paper favoured by the promoters, suggests that they were all well aware of the ignoble fate to which they would soon be consigned.”

Above all, readers in the Romantic period devoured Sir Walter Scott, as did their Victorian successors. Scott circulated faster than office gossip. Even leaving aside the novels, more of Scott’s poems sold in a normal afternoon than those of Shelley, John Keats, or William Blake during their entire lifetimes. Another quirk caused by market realities was that, as America and Britain did not have a copyright agreement, the common reader in America was a generation ahead of the English public in discovering England’s romantic poets. (Likewise, as Jonathan Rose observes, plebeian readers in Britain were discovering the great American novelists faster than England’s professional literary critics.) But both countries had Sir Walter Scott as the staple of their reading diets. Leslie Stephen, the Victorian intellectual who edited the Dictionary of National Biography and fathered the novelist Virginia Woolf, read aloud to his family all 32 volumes of Scott’s Waverley novels—and then started over again.

St. Clair argues that such a diet was bad for a nation’s health. He wishes that the book trade would have allowed a more varied fare to be on offer. When the Romantic poets came out of copyright in the late Victorian period and became ubiquitous, it still meant that the populace-at-large was being sustained on stale bread rather than manna for their day. Scott’s works and the popular narratives of writers such as Byron, St. Clair avers, were perfectly suited to foster a culture that glorified war, admired conquest, and aspired to chivalric militarism and honor. Following Mark Twain, St. Clair posits that such reading nurtured the mentality that led to the American Civil War. In Britain, the result was World War I. His case is vigorously asserted but persuasive only with so many qualifications as to render it nugatory. Still, the historical detective work St. Clair has done stands on its own as a magnificent achievement.

Jonathan Rose extols the virtues of the old canon. It is my earnest wish that everyone would find some book somewhere out of which they would derive as much pleasure as I have done in reading The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. While St. Clair skillfully exposes how powerful forces have conspired against the common reader, Rose celebrates those working-class autodidacts who found their way to knowledge and culture despite substantial obstacles.

It is easy to forget what a struggle mere access once was. There were no state schools in Britain until 1870. Thirty years on, in 1900, the majority of state schools still did not have a library. No, manual laborers and their families could not look to the government to educate them; they needed to gather resources on their own. Many of them did just that. Rose brilliantly evokes a rich working-class culture of self-education. One needs to read every detail presented in this example-filled study to appreciate the depth and breadth of this achievement.

Welsh coalminers, for example, created a formidable intellectual culture among themselves. The Tredegar Workmen’s Institute built up a circulating library of 100,000 volumes. When an economic downturn led to massive layoffs during the 1920s, out-of-work miners in Ynyshir were reading, on average, 86 books annually. Likewise, during the labor shortage created by World War I, companies would entice and retain workers by providing educational and cultural lectures for their employees. John Edwards found that his real education began down in the pit, where he learned from other miners about the ideas of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. When he first heard of some poetry by George Meredith, he went to the miner’s library to check out the volume, only to discover that there were already twelve people on a waiting list for it.

A middle-class visitor was stunned to overhear two miners discussing Einstein’s theory of relativity. Another recalled a worker who would cheer himself up after losing a game of billiards by rehearsing the philosophical theories of George Berkeley. The man who spent a portion of his weekend year after year systematically collecting fossils from the mine’s rubble heaps exemplifies a multitude of ordinary people thirsty for knowledge. Ironworkers would sing opera choruses together while on the job. Striking miners would give vent to their feelings by declaiming lyrics from Handel. Laborers would name their children after their favorite classical composers: “in one family there was a Handel, Haydn, Elgar, Verdi, Joseph Parry, Caradog, Mendy (short for Mendelssohn) and an unforgettable Billy Bach, together with an only daughter Rossini (called Rosie for short).”

Certainly there were limits to their reading. Typically the only time they read about sex was in the performance of their religious duties. One man finally got his hands on an illicit volume famed for its raciness when he served as a soldier abroad, only to discover that “it did not come within shouting distance of certain passages in the Old Testament, once you got the hang of Biblical language.” For family devotions, specially expunged Bibles were devised: “if Mrs. Potiphar did not disappear entirely, her agenda was left unclear.”

But Rose has no patience for the charge—exemplified by Matthew Arnold’s patronizing remarks during the Victorian age and echoed by many commentators up to the present day—that the culture of Welsh chapelgoers was narrow and stifling. The Scriptures opened up lush and beautiful terrains; the Bible was great literature that inculcated habits of appreciation for great literature. As one working-class man eloquently recalled: “It is true that our fathers, in Wales, taught us religion of cast-iron dogma, which, according to all the theories, should have made us obscurantists, inhabiting a very small world.But it did not. In some mysterious way we became freemen of a spacious world … . I defy any child of ordinary intelligence to read the Bible constantly (in the Authorized Version) without acquiring a genuine literary taste.”

If the book trade is the common person’s foe in St. Clair’s telling, Rose excoriates modernists such as the Bloomsbury Group, who flattered themselves by sneering at plebeian efforts to gain knowledge and culture. In a memorable image, T. S. Eliot depicted the clerks who commuted across London Bridge as the living dead, perhaps projecting his own state of mind on “the masses.” By contrast, Rose gives us a glimpse of Edwardian clerks who were profoundly alive intellectually. Neville Cardus, a junior clerk for a marine insurance agent, recalled how he and his workmates would stay up afterwards eagerly discussing their frequent forays into London’s cultural scene: “We never went straight home after a new play by Shaw, after Gerontius, after the A flat symphony, after Kreisler had played the Elgar violin concerto for the first time, after Tristan, after Strauss’s Salome with Aino Akté in it.” One office boy raised in poverty poetically expressed his own delight in learning:

For me has Homer sung of wars,
Aeschylus wrote and Plato thought
Has Dante loved and Darwin wrought,
And Galileo watched the stars.

The pretensions of modernists led them to make obsolete the learning of working-class autodidacts. So you are familiar with all the novels of Dickens? Well then, his works must not matter. What working-class people had tenaciously learned on the margins of their days was dismissed as the wrong kind of learning. Working-class readers were knocked to the floor by Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, novels which brutally asserted that their efforts to better themselves were not only futile but also self-destructive. The fate of Forster’s character, Leonard Bast, was a kind of grotesque wish-fulfillment for Bloomsbury snobs, who wanted to put plebeian autodidacts in their place. In Forster’s none-too-subtle scenario, Bast is literally crushed to death by books.

So too the modernists’ self-consciously “difficult” art kept the masses at bay: stream-of-consciousness novels, experimental music, and the like. Rose’s work crescendos toward a passionate indictment and lament: now there is always a self-anointed intellectual élite (made up largely of climbing academics) determined to replace the old canon with a new one of their own devising, while the common people keep doggedly in pursuit. Eliot and Forster mocked the clerks of their day and befuddled them with modernist offerings, but today’s clerk “assumes that a modern painting ought to look like a Jackson Pollock.” Virginia Woolf gets blithely assigned to high school students, and so now a new canon must be conceived—or the old one filtered through some impenetrable theory: “When modernism became mass culture, the avant-garde had to move on to something more modern still—postmodernism, which strove to recapture the opacity and difficulty that once cloaked modernism.”

In a particularly cruel irony, the intelligentsia now asserts its status by reveling in popular culture and championing marginalized groups, all the while excluding the lower classes more thoroughly than ever. Only 3 percent of those who attended the Institute for Contemporary Arts in the 1980s, Rose reports, were from the working classes. Theory-laden academics have spread the disinformation that the classic canon is “bourgeois” and thereby “rendered the common reader illiterate once again.”

The culture that Rose celebrates has largely disappeared. Some individual workers still drink from deep wells, but it is not likely that their workmates will be able to finish a speech from Shakespeare they have begun to declaim or join in when they strike up a refrain from Puccini. To be sure, this state of affairs is not entirely the fault of trendy academics. Still, it is worth lamenting, and workers who remember the old days are captured in this volume doing just that. One of them complains that while people read trash in his youth as well, as least back then they knew it was trash. It is as if they are saying: Eliot, if you only knew what a real wasteland looks like.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford Univ. Press), and he is at work on a book about the Bible in the 19th century.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Shakespeare is the Rorschach test of English literature, a mirror for every critical obsession. Coleridge gazes at Hamlet and finds a partner in procrastination. Freud and Ernest Jones discover in Hamlet confirmation of the universality of the Oedipal complex. For Rene Girard, Shakespeare was a Girardian, and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare embodied Bloom’s ludic ecstasies in Falstaff on the way to inventing the human. Shakespeare knew it would happen. He knew that lovers—including lovers of drama—see not with the eyes but with the mind.

This is in part testimony to the fecundity of Shakespeare’s imagination. But Dostoevsky and Joyce are almost equally fecund, yet interpretations don’t slop over the edges the way they do with Shakespeare. Dostoevsky critics work within the horizons of his letters, his journalism, his Orthodoxy, his gambling, his troubled marriage, and we know what Joyce read and how it came to be fictionalized. The problem of interpreting Shakespeare is structural. On the page and stage, Shakespeare is the undisputed master of English, even world, letters, the “man of the millennium.” Yet we know comparatively little of his life, and what we know suggests he was an uncommonly litigious and grasping man. He left no letters, no diary, no confession to explain himself. It’s the discrepancy between sublime artistic achievement and grubby public record that tantalizes. Shakespeare has to be understood within the horizons of the Elizabethan age and stage, but more definite constraints are missing.

That’s part of what fascinates and complicates. The other part is on the page itself. Even if we had no personal papers, we’d know from their poetry that Milton detested Presbyterians and that Blake hated factories. Not Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a bardus absconditus, known only in the trace of his absence, manifest only behind his masks, glimpsed in his withdrawal behind the curtain. For biographers, this is a frustration, but some turn Shakespeare’s elusiveness into a decoder ring for the plays and the life and the connection between them. In his wide-ranging study of Merchant of Venice, University of Rochester professor Kenneth Gross speculates on the theatricality that he says unites Shakespeare and Shylock. Shakespeare’s rage against his uncomprehending audience, his hiddenness behind the masks of his characters, his status as an alien who, like the Venetian Jew, is forgotten in the final act of cosmic harmony, are dramatized forcibly in Shylock. Shylock is Shakespeare’s commentary on his own work as a dramatist. Shakespeare is Shylock.

Gross’s biographical suggestions are intriguing, but, like most suggestions about Shakespeare the man, unconvincing. Fortunately, the book stands on its own as an interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, and, fortunately again, Gross is a keen reader. He recognizes the religious overtones of the play, and he argues that Shakespeare refuses the easy options of softening Shylock to heroic victim or hardening him into devilish villain. Shylock’s humanity emerges precisely in his refusal to cover his own repugnancy, and Gross sees the play as an experiment in the “aesthetics of repugnancy.” Shylock turns his alien status into a performance, ironically playing the roles assigned to him by anti-Semitic Venice and turning those roles into a mirror held up to his Christian antagonists.

Shakespeare’s hiddenness has recently been combined with a New Historicist fixation on his religious inclinations. Stephen Greenblatt’s best-selling Will in the World and Richard Wilson’s 2004 Secret Shakespeare locate the poet in the subterranean world of recusant Catholicism, which, according to Wilson, Shakespeare transformed into a poetics and dramaturgy of self-concealment. Without taking sides in that debate, the superb essays in Beatrice Batson’s collection examine the echoes of Catholic and Protestant theology in the major tragedies. In Grace Tiffany’s view, Hamlet is a critique of spectacle (= Catholicism) and a Protestant affirmation of the priority of the ear, the gateway either of deadly poison or painful but ultimately healing rebuke. Even the visual Mousetrap play is a dramatized sermon, intended to convict Claudius. For the authors of this collection, Shakespeare exploited the religious possibilities of the theater by consciously exploring contemporary theological concerns in dramatic form.

David Bevington offers some support for Tiffany’s argument. This Wide and Universal Theater is an impressively concise performance history. Bevington describes the physical features of the Elizabethan stage and the techniques employed there, then summarizes the plays and includes a deft history of stage and film performances. Along the way, Bevington traces a general trend in Shakespearean performance from pageantry to meta-theatricality. The mostly Victorian pageantry is spectacular and amusing: A fireball hits a ship’s mast at the beginning of a 19th-century performance of The Tempest, flying witches are very popular in Macbeth, and some performances of Antony and Cleopatra staged the Battle of Actium. Early 20th-century directors reacted against overblown staging, and directors in the mid-century went further, reducing set and scenery to a minimum.

This turn to meta-theatricality is a return to Shakespeare’s own drama, Bevington shows. Shakespeare fills the stage with actors playing at being actors, critics, stage managers, directors, playwrights. Prospero is a well-known stand-in for the poet, but Lady Macbeth is a director, as is Iago; Hamlet and Polonius are theater critics; Cleopatra stages her own suicide, and throughout Measure for Measure the Duke, a personification of providence, tests the other characters, in full knowledge they will fail but hoping that they will through the failure grow in wisdom. Shakespeare’s theater is quintessentially meta-theater, insistently calling attention to its own theatricality. Spectacle (Catholicism?) cannot but undermine that key dimension of Shakespeare’s (Protestant?) art.

Eric Mallin will have none of this. If Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens set out to write a book on Shakespeare, it would be Mallin’s Godless Shakespeare. Mallin isn’t just an atheist. He is an aggressive, militant atheist. He’s an angry atheist. Mallin offers readings of selected plays, organized, clumsily, by the tripartite structure of Dante’s Comedy, and occasionally intersperses his interpretations with cynical reflections on contemporary Christianity. Everywhere, Shakespeare gives us godlessness—a godless hell of religious hypocrites (strange, that: doesn’t Jesus consign hypocrites to hell?), a godless purgatory of failed Messiahs, a godless heaven promising pleasure and sex. But who needs evidence from the plays? Mallin knows before he begins that believers are animated by “aggressive certainty,” that orthodoxy is small and mean and religion an inflexible system posing senseless riddles as if they were divine profundities. Religion is rigid; Shakespeare is flexible. Religion is certain; Shakespeare richly doubts. Religion justifies immorality by invoking God; Shakespeare is rigorously moral in a Kantian sort of way. Religion gives answers; Shakespeare poses questions. Religion is small; Shakespeare expansive. We know before we crack the First Folio that he was at best a religious skeptic. QED—that is, “Quite Easily Done.”

Mallin accomplishes less than his title promises. Godless Shakespeare reveals not Godless Shakespeare but Godless Mallin. The back cover copy has it right: The book doesn’t prove Shakespeare an atheist, though Mallin’s may be the “first book to discuss Shakespeare’s plays from an atheist perspective.” That Augustine’s mood is as interrogative as Shakespeare, that Christianity has impressive resources for self-criticism, that his own atheism is as stiff a collar as any orthodoxy—all this is lost on Mallin.

Mallin’s analysis is also anachronistic. He projects the late modern struggle of fundamentalisms back into the 16th century. If Shakespeare is skeptical, he must have been godless. QED again. By contrast, John D. Cox demonstrates that skepticism, reintroduced to European thought by sixteenth-century translations of Sextus Empiricus and Lucian, was put to Christian uses by writers like Erasmus and More. Not every skeptic was a Montaigne. Shakespeare operates with an engaging Renaissance hybrid that Cox calls “skeptical faith,” concocted of equal parts suspicion and hope—suspicion about humanity’s capacity for accurate self-knowledge and moral improvement, hopefulness that limited progress is possible. Shakespeare’s is a specifically Christian skepticism, rooted in the New Testament’s already/not yet eschatology: Humans have some hope for improvement, yet none of this improvement proves to be “the promised end.” By infusing this Christian suspicion into drama, Shakespeare transformed ancient comedy and tragedy, and along the way invented the history play. In comedies, the world is better off at the end than at the beginning, but the joy of the end is tinged with the recognition of its incompleteness. Tragedies foreground suffering, offering no explanations or ultimate consolations, because such explanations are outside the bounds of this world. Through the hundreds of biblical allusions in his history plays, Shakespeare lets salvation history impinge on political history, and judge it.

Cox suggests that Shakespearean drama works within a fundamentally Christian structure, and despite his title and thesis, Mallin’s book rather helps Cox’s case. Mallin uncovers biblical references in the most out of the way places. Pandarus is a perverse figure of Christ the Way; “I cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar,” says Troilus. Titus’ Ovidian feast is a parody of the Last Supper, and the whole play is anti-sacrifice (Mallin doesn’t recognize that this could be as much a Protestant as an atheist polemic). Petruchio speaks his wedding vows so loudly that the priest drops his book and Petruchio cuffs him, attacking “two crucial vehicles of God’s grace.” Paulina’s name puns on the apostle’s. Against his stated purpose, Mallin presents Shakespeare as an “entertainer” who can’t stop quoting Scripture, a poet as God-intoxicated as Spinoza or Flannery O’Connor.

A. D. Nuttall is skeptical about the New Historicist Shakespeare, though not because he thinks Shakespeare an atheist. For Nuttall, who died early in 2007, New Historicism is as reductive as the poststructuralist methods that preceded it, since both critical modes reduce the dramatist to a cog in the cultural machinery and reject the notion that a poet might “artfully manage” the material he receives from his surroundings.

Nuttall pithily sums up plots, identifies key issues and gives close readings of well-selected passages. Shakespeare emerges as a prescient, nearly omniscient, figure. At several points, Nuttall discovers a more bookish Shakespeare than critics since Ben Jonson have been willing to recognize. Everywhere, he discovers a thinking Shakespeare. Before empiricism or idealism existed, Shakespeare already saw that the former would collapse into the latter. Shakespeare is a psychologist who meditates deeply about gender, sex, and love, a political thinker more original than Machiavelli. Nuttall’s Shakespeare resists explanations that begin with “all”: He recognizes that identity can be constructed (Volumnia makes Coriolanus) and manipulated (Iagooperating on Othello), but refuses to relieve the tension by saying that the self is entirely constructed (Coriolanus’s core self is evident in that torturous silence when he questions what his mother has done to him). Beyond the trappings there is always something that passes show. Nuttall suggests a Law of Shakespearean Anticipation: If you have thought of something, Shakespeare thought of it first.

And Nuttall is a witty writer, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Cassius sympathizes with Brutus when he learns of Portia’s death, but he is stymied because “You can’t hug a stoic.” For the cloistered students of Love’s Labour’s Lost, reality seems to slip away, and this prompts an aside: “usually it is only a philosopher who can contrive to lose so large a thing as the real universe.” Nuttall’s brief pastiche of poststructuralist pas-d’hors-textism is deliciously unfair.

Nuttall’s book will survive because he rejects faddishness in pursuit of old-fashioned literary humanism. It will survive too because he resists the projections so common in Shakespearean criticism. He goes to Shakespeare not to discern familiar shapes in the ink but to learn—about politics, identity, sex and love, religion. He goes to Shakespeare because he admires Shakespeare’s intelligence and learning. The result is highly satisfying. Over several decades, Nuttall absorbed Shakespeare’s skepticism and generosity, and something of his faith, and in his last years produced an effortlessly authoritative, effortlessly wise book that should be on everyone’s short-list of Shakespeare introductions.

Most readers and viewers of Hamlet take Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy as a meditation on suicide. John E. Curran, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, thinks there are bigger things at work. Hamlet is opposing two ontologies, religious universes, moralities.

The first Curran labels “the Be.” The Be is the realm of predetermined fixity, without freedom, choice, or contingency. It is an either/or, zero-sum world where every divine initiative must be at the expense of human merit, where signs and things stand in antagonistic opposition rather than seeking reconciliation. The Be is static, atemporal, a world within which human action is meaningless. In the Be, things stay what they are. The Be is cold, logical, technical, empty. The Be is a Protestant world.

On the other side of the great ugly ditch is “the Not to be,” which is everything the Be is not. It is a world of both-and, a world of real contingency and freedom, a world where grace and merit, sign and thing, live together in merry fellowship. Human action makes sense, and makes a difference, in the Not to be, because the Not to be is dynamic and temporal. In the Not to be, anything can happen, even bread becoming flesh. The Not to be is warm, moist, organic, teeming. The Not to be is Catholic.

Hamlet’s dilemma, according to Curran’s interpretation, is that of a man of Catholic sensibilities and aspirations who finds himself stuck in a Protestant world. In his heart, he is a man of the Not to be who wants to breathe free of the stifling, stagnant air of Geneva or Wittenberg; but he learns, with growing frustration, that he lives in the Be. By the beginning of Act 5, he is resigned to the fact that the Not to be is not to be. After that, there is nothing more to say. Submitting to the Be leaves us speechless and dehumanized. The rest is silence.

In this context, Curran suggests, we can see what Hamlet is actually saying about suicide. To endure the slings and arrows is to submit to the Be, a course that Hamlet considers the least noble option. The nobler option is to insist on the dignity of human choice, perhaps through self-slaughter: “To commit suicide would be to alter all the conditions of Hamlet’s life, hateful conditions that have been imposed on him … He wants to be in what is now not in existence; musing on the availability of suicide lets him feel that he can have access to that world of real possibility.” But the dagger falls. Sicklied o’er by thoughts of the Be, we are cowards all. Later, Hamlet wants to enact a unique revenge that does not fall into the typical pattern of bloodshed, but in the Protestant world of determined fixities, he can only be Hamlet. The Be is a world of the Same, where every revenge is like every other.

Curran’s book is filled with footnotes to both secondary literature on Hamlet and an abundance of primary and secondary literature on Elizabethan theology. He has read a lot, but despite the genuine erudition, Curran is no theologian. His portrayals of Catholic and Protestant “ontologies” amount to caricatures. He knows a few things about Protestant and Catholic theology, and extrapolates from those ideas conclusions about what Protestants and Catholics—especially Protestants—must have believed. But the things he knows are not entirely accurate, and his extrapolations even less so. In characterizing Protestantism as steady-state determinism, for instance, he ignores the significant continuities between medieval Catholic and Protestant theologies, the prominent role of sanctification in Calvin’s and Puritan theology, the notion of regeneration. He ignores the cross as an epoch-making event. In fact, a plausible—I think convincing—argument can be made that one of Protestantism’s great contributions to the church was a rediscovery of the historical dimension of Christianity.

Anyone who suggests, as Curran does, that Protestant determinism undermined casuistry has never cracked a volume of Richard Baxter. While Protestants did deny that humans can control God, the central Calvinist doctrine of the covenant was all about God’s voluntary self-binding. When Curran characterizes Hamlet’s “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” as capturing “the hard logic of predestinarian Christianity,” the prejudice is obvious. Hamlet wants to talk about birdies, but Curran takes it as logic, and hard logic at that. For a sect that believed humans “make no contribution to history,” Puritans sure contributed more than their share.

Let me illustrate Curran’s theological simplifications with a couple of specific examples. He rightly notes that Calvin interpreted the est of the words of institution figuratively and that he repudiated “the idea of our physical eating of Christ.” From this, he concludes that “Calvin admitted that the Protestant Eucharist removed the immediacy of our connection to God and made the divine more distant to us.” This is flat wrong. In the very passage where Calvin argues that there is no presence “in the bread,” he insists that believers are joined to Christ by the Supper, through the Spirit “which unites Christ himself to us” (Institutes 4.17.31). The Supper is for Calvin a “vehicle” by which the Spirit overcomes all “distance” between the church and the heavenly Christ. Calvin is only too happy to speak of “feeding on Christ” and being knit “bone to his bone, flesh to his flesh.” Check the liturgy: Who is closer to the bread that is Christ’s body—medieval Catholics who watch from the nave, or Calvinists who take and eat?

Curran also misconstrues Calvinist treatments of free will and predestination. He thinks that the Calvinist emphasis on predestination must preclude meaningful human action and render the warnings of Scripture nugatory. But Calvinists regularly sought to explain how predestination was different from determinism, and how predestination could coexist with genuine, though qualified, human freedom. High supralapsarian Puritan William Perkins explains that the decree of predestination “doth altogether order every event, partly by inclining and gently bending the will in all things that are good, and partly by forsaking it in things that are evil: yet the will of the creature left unto itself, is carried headlong of [its] own accord, not of necessity in itself, but contingently that way which the decree of God determined from eternity” (Golden Chaine, Works 2.621). This may not convince Curran, but it is certainly evidence that Protestants did not “ignore” the difficulties of their theology.

If some Protestants (not Calvin) admittedly broke the bond of sign and thing from one direction, Catholicism arguably did so from another. Hamlet’s musings on the contrast between his inky cloak and the sorrows that pass show display his desire for “genuineness and sincerity,” which in Curran’s terms is a “Catholic” yearning: “No gap should lie between inner and outer; we should instead find an absolute correspondence between them, of the type we get with the Catholic Eucharist.” It’s fairly obvious, though, that transubstantiation creates a chasm between inner and outer, appearance and reality, since transubstantiation is a theory about how the inner reality can be utterly changed while the outer appearances remain. In transubstantiation, the bread-accidents veil rather than display the supernatural miracle taking place behind the curtain. Inky cloaks, on the premises of transubstantiation, might well conceal hearts of pure white, and vice versa. Smiles might be masks of a villain.

Curran doesn’t find it possible to remain consistent with his own paradigm. In the Not to be, anything is possible; contingency is absolute. Yet, Curran is critical of Claudius for trying to combine “an auspicious and a dropping eye,” charging that if so “one eye is lying.” But what happened to both-and? Why, other than the fact that Claudius is the villain and Protestantism is the villain, should Curran conclude that Claudius is expressing a “Protestant” viewpoint? Curran also is ambiguous about whether the play mourns the “loss of contingency”—as if contingency were somehow real prior to the Reformation, but not thereafter—or whether Shakespeare is bemoaning a world that objectively is the Be. Hamlet’s cloak can depict his bottomless grief, he realizes, only in its inability to denote those depths (“called bottom because it has no bottom”): “He wants an extravagant display to register an all-consuming grief, but the display is not extravagant enough and the grief is not all-consuming.” Is the display ever extravagant enough? Is there not always that within which passes show? If so, are we not all Protestants? Is the Be simply what there is?

My point is not to engage in Protestant-Catholic polemics. I am fully aware that Catholicism has its answers to the objections I posed above. My point is only to show that things are far more complex than Curran’s simple binarism allows. But this criticism, substantial as it is, doesn’t get to the heart of Curran’s thesis. After all, Shakespeare might have been as unsubtle a theologian as Curran. Perhaps the Protestantism Shakespeare knew was what theologian James Jordan has called ” Islamo-Calvinism.” The critical question for Curran’s book is not whether he got Protestantism right; he didn’t. The question is what Shakespeare might have believed about Protestantism. Or, better, the question is whether or not Curran provides a coherent reading of Hamlet.

On this score, the book is a more impressive achievement, though not an unmixed one. Curran has a tendency to ignore the drama in favor of a morality play of disembodied ideas. Hamlet becomes an intellectual puzzle. When Curran does keep the text of the play in view, however, his insights are often fruitful. Drawing on Barbara Everett, he points to patterns of circularity and doubling that keep the action and the characters turning back on themselves. The king in the play scene provides the most dramatic example: He dies in the dumb show, lies on his death bed in the play, is killed by Lucianus, and then is “symbolically re-re-re-killed when his queen marries his murderer.” And this of course foreshadows the strange climactic double-death of Claudius, who is both stung by his own venom and made to drink his own poisoned chalice.

Even Curran’s usually clumsy Protestant/Catholic paradigm can work at times. Claudius at prayer is a true Protestant, who knows that shows of piety merit no response from heaven, without a change of heart. Observing him, Hamlet draws a Catholic conclusion—if he went through the motions of penance, he is forgiven, and killing him at that point is poor revenge. The “nunnery” to which Hamlet wants to consign Ophelia is a whorehouse, but it is only so on the Protestant assumption that human beings lack the power for sexual restraint.

Curran is most fruitful in examining the ending of Hamlet, and at this point he throws open some perspectives on the play as a whole. The clever opening to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero got the play right: Hamlet v. the action hero. Hamlet has all the trappings of an action film: “you killed my father—big mistake,” the handsome sensitive intelligent prince, the love interest, the cloak-and-daggerish maneuvering that leads to the final confrontation between the hero and the villain. Shakespeare knew how to write such stuff, keeping Prince Hal and Hotspur, Macbeth and Macduff apart until the final climactic duel. In Hamlet, though, the expected end never comes. Everything is chugging toward the climax, but Hamlet and Claudius never square off. In the last scene, Claudius is still acting through a surrogate. Worse, Hamlet’s hope for “a distinctive and proportional revenge” collapses into a scene that “fails to contain any nobility whatever”: “Everyone dies, along with his father’s ambitions and endeavors, and that is that. Anti-climactic, spur-of-the-moment, clumsy, and cruel without some potentially compensating dash or flair to it, the deed itself has no dignity.” Hamlet speaks of providence while recounting his clever, cruel dispatch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Surely Curran is right that all this casts a dark question mark across Hamlet’s faith in heaven’s providence: “Heaven has ordained this?”

This gives us something to work with, at two levels. Most obviously, Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, and like most plays in this genre it depicts the uncontrollable potency of revenge. Where does the blood stop once we open a wound? Blood flows and flows as long as there is another blood, and bloody, relative to take up the cause—which is as long as forever—or until every relevant person lies in his own personal pool of blood. Shakespeare numbs us with the catastrophe of revenge. He finishes not merely with blood but with an apocalypse of blood. In the end, it’s not “Kill,” but “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.”

But Hamlet is far more than a revenge tragedy, else Schwarzenegger would be as likely to play a parody Hieronimo as a parody Hamlet. The “more” is partly the more of a mysterious universality that hovers about Hamlet’s predicament, a point underscored by the play’s repeated hints of a fallen Eden (unweeded garden, the serpent who kills the king and takes his crown, the primal eldest’s curse). But one does not have to be an overtheorized New Historicist to recognize the strength of Curran’s claim that Hamlet also resonates with cultural and, especially, religious issues of Shakespeare’s time. This too has textual support: Wittenberg, Diet of Worms, providence, and conscience.

Curran’s distribution of roles, however, is easily reversible. Hamlet, after all, has come from Wittenberg, cradle of Protestantism, and encounters a ghost fresh from Purgatory. That suggests Hamlet is a Protestant in a Catholic world, rather than the opposite. Shakespeare invents a Roman name for Claudius (Fengon in the original story), and, as David Kaula has argued, Shakespeare uses ancient Rome as proxy for Papal Rome. Kaula spots apocalyptic allusions throughout the play, from Horatio’s learned discourse on the harbingers of Caesar’s death to the last scene, where Claudius raises, and drinks, a poisoned chalice, like the Whore of Revelation, which English Protestants often interpreted as a symbol of the doomed Catholic Church.

I don’t think this alternative morality play works any better than Curran’s. Rather, the variety of plausible connections shows that the religious interests of the play work at a more abstract level than Curran believes. The play depicts a clash between an old world and a new, a clash that has religious, cultural, and political dimensions. Hamlet pere is a medieval knight, dressed in armor complete with beaver and operating by the standards of chivalric single combat. Claudius, who must be roughly his contemporary, is every inch a Renaissance prince. Ring out the old, ring in the new. Paul Cantor very plausibly interprets the play as a battle between classical heroism, rejuvenated by the Renaissance, and Christian ethical demands, a war carried out not only in Elsinore’s hallways but in the soul of Elsinore’s prince.

Hamlet does not find his Catholic (and prophetic) soul stymied by the Protestant universe around him. Rather, the play suggests that Protestant and Catholic bloodlust can only end with the same stupid slaughter. Hamlet might be a Catholic avenger who wants to restore the traditional world of his father’s Denmark. Claudius might be the usurping Protestant, with blood on his hands that won’t wash clean. The resolution of the play warns that every effort to avenge the father is going to end in blood, and in the shadows waits Norway’s (Machiavellian?) Fortinbras, ready to step in to reverse the results of his father’s defeat in single combat. If there is a “message” in Hamlet keyed to the historical moment of its first performances, it seems to me the same message of Shakespeare’s other plays: It is a Christian humanist’s prescient warning that fanaticism will lead to civil war, the killing of a king, and the triumph of amoral Realpolitik. This is the apocalypse whose outlines Shakespeare could already see at the beginning of a century of revolution, the tragic slather of blood he hoped England might become wise enough to avoid.

Peter J. Leithart is professor of theology and literature at New Saint Andrews College and pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho. Among his recent books are Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature (Canon Press) and a volume on 1 and 2 Kings in the Brazos Theological Commentary series (Brazos Press).

Books discussed in this essay:

Beatrice Batson, ed., Shakespeare’s Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet (Baylor Univ. Press, 2006).

David Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then & Now (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007).

John D. Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Baylor Univ. Press, 2007).

John E. Curran, Jr., “Hamlet,” Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to be (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2006).

Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).

Eric S. Mallin, Godless Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2007).

A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (Yale Univ. Press, 2007).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The government keeps trying to favor one kind of religion over another. A Christianity Today Editorial.

Sounds like … the provocative perspectives of Rich Mullins, Derek Webb, and Andrew Peterson with the earthy touches of frequent collaborators Andrew Osenga, Matt Wertz, Randall Goodgame, and Jeremy Casella

At a glance … the famed session player turns in an extraordinary solo debut laden with colorful poetic phrases, clever organic arrangements, and an all around ingenious eclecticism

When Ben Shive first heard a Rich Mullins record as a high school student in the mid-1990s, the early seeds of his Christian music calling were sewn. After dabbling in jazz prior to graduation, he attended Nashville’s Belmont University with hopes of networking into full-time session work, starting with fellow Mullins enthusiast Andrew Peterson. What began as a simple string arrangement for Peterson’s “Faith to Be Strong” soon morphed into writing string arrangements for the singer/songwriter’s Behold the Lamb of God concert, leading to greater prominence throughout Music City.

From then until now, this relative newcomer has been a regular on the road and in the studio as a producer, arranger, keyboard player and co-writer across several Peterson projects, which quickly led to becoming an in demand session player just as he hoped. In fact, those who study album credits closely have probably seen his name on albums by Amy Grant, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Chris Tomlin, not to mention a slew of talented indie acts like Randall Goodgame, Jeremy Casella and Matt Wertz, to name but a few.

Now Shive finally steps out on his own as the latest artist involved in the Square Peg Alliance (a left-of-center Christian artist collective that features many of the aforementioned indie artists, as well as Peterson, Caedmon’s Call guitarist Andrew Osenga, and Derek Webb). And while he doesn’t specifically tailor his tunes for Christian radio on The Ill-Tempered Klavier, there’s nevertheless a sincere spiritual anchoring amidst an earthy and arty mixture of piano-pop, folk, acoustic rock, and the occasional moment of orchestral grandeur.

The organic piano pop of “Out of Tune” is an early example of Shive’s all-around excellence, boasting brilliantly crafted metaphors like, “I’m just a jagged set of keys that unlock old memories” while addressing several of life’s paradoxes from the perspective of a believer hoping to make sense of life. “Rise Up” again highlights Shive’s piano proficiency while striking a timely chord, taking a page out of Webb’s social commentary playbook by denouncing divisions between political ideologies in favor of finding comfort in Christ’s sovereignty.

Like most Square Peg artists, Shive’s songwriting is also deeply personal. The justifiably melancholy “97” laments the loss of childhood innocence, and the gloriously catchy “New Year” makes resolutions to change several different shortcomings—the latter sounds like Alan Parsons Project’s classic “Eye in the Sky” reinterpreted through the creative lens of a discreet indie rocker. I could heap plenty more praise on other tracks—the melodic bliss of “Do You Remember?,” the quirky pop nugget “Binary Stars” (penned by Peterson), and the classically inspired instrumental—but why settle for reading? The Ill-Tempered Klavier can’t be recommended more highly, a rewarding and introspective listen from start to finish.

For more information on Ben Shive, visit www.benshive.com or www.myspace.com/benshive.

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