The God of the Bestseller List

I take as my text the words of a little girl to Melvin Morse, author of the bestselling Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near Death Experience of Children. As Dr. Morse explains it, the girl had died and gone to Heaven, only to be resuscitated and brought back to this world. And when he asked her what she had learned from her Visit to the Beyond, she considered the question carefully before answering, “It’s nice to be nice.”

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, magazines carried ads for posters, and the most popular of those posters offered a meditation, in what I suspect was intended to be poetic prose, called “Desiderata.” Many people have come across it at some time or another, at least its more famous lines:
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars.
You have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding
as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery,
and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.

What’s particularly noteworthy about this little document is the popular conviction that it is a piece of antique wisdom, produced many centuries ago. Some of the posters identified it as “medieval” and claimed that it had been written by a monk; others dated its composition quite specifically to 1692; still others combined the two, apparently in the belief that 1692 was in the Middle Ages. (The date seems to derive from the rector of an Episcopal church in Baltimore, who typed out “Desiderata” some forty years ago on stationery that prominently featured the 1692 founding date of his church. Photocopying and careless reading did the rest).

In fact, “Desiderata” was written by a man from Terre Haute, Indiana, named Max Ehrmann in 1927. Ehrmann was a lawyer who worked at various times as a deputy state’s attorney and a credit manager for his brother’s manufacturing company — and these items from his vita may be significant. His attempt to articulate a peaceable, serene prospectus for daily life suggests that his primary concern was to maintain a sanguine and mystical temperament in a corporate and bureaucratic environment:
Enjoy your achievements
as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career,
however humble;
it is a real possession
in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.

“Desiderata” is a masterpiece, of sorts, because it so perfectly completes the translation of nineteenth-century American Romanticism into the terms of modern middle-class life. You can see the process beginning to unfold back in 1836, when the Boston Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott asked a student at his Temple School about the mission of his soul — and the student replied, “I think the mission of my soul is to sell oil.” Max Ehrmann is the perfect apostle of that prescient boy’s gospel.

But “Desiderata” is scarcely the final word on the subject. Ehrmann’s descendants now populate American bestseller lists as the stars fill the sky. The current bumper crop of books celebrating the joys of amorphous and sanguine spirituality seems to find an especially appreciative audience among people whose daily lives are spent in bureaucratized environments which, they feel, oppress their spirits. There are so many of these books that even listing them is a challenge, especially since they tend to proliferate like some uncontrollable malignancy. Clearly it wasn’t enough to have the 1993 bestseller Chicken Soup for the Soul, for we now have reached A Sixth Bowl of Chicken Soup for the Soul — to say nothing of Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul (the most popular of them all, with over three million copies in print), Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work, Chicken Soup for the Golfer’s Soul, and many others.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there with no desire to vary their menu, but if they ever do drain the soup bowl of life to the dregs, they may join the millions who have thrilled to Betty Eadie’s account of her “journey through death and beyond,” Embraced by the Light. She and Melvin Morse and Raymond A. Moody Jr. (whose 1975 Life After Life has sold over fourteen million copies) dominate the enormous market for books that promise a sweet pastoral Beulah Land lies in store for us: No waiting, these authors all seem to say, no Day of Judgment, just immediate admission to the Place Where Everyone Is Nice. (If you wish to know more, please consult Moody’s afterlife Web site, www.lifeafterlife.com.)

Anyone who reads these books, and the multitudes like them, will soon realize that their counsels and messages are somewhat less than earth-shakingly original and profound. But that is precisely the point. The popularity of “Desiderata” arose in large part from its power to give expression to the hopeful desires of many people: that “the world is unfolding as it should,” that I am “a child of the universe,” that, in short, “it’s nice to be nice.”

But this cannot be the whole story of the success of these books offering this vaguely spiritual message of consolation. And there is, in fact, a deeper reason for the American fascination with this kind of spirituality: It plays to the passion for having the validity of our desires confirmed by witnesses from the distant past or beyond the grave.

This phenomenon can be seen most clearly in two of the most immensely popular American spirituality books in recent years: Marianne Williamson’s 1992 A Return to Love and Neale Donald Walsch’s 1995 Conversations with God. Each has sold millions of copies and produced its innumerable sequels and spinoffs (Gutenberg’s carcinoma striking again); Walsch’s new Friendship With God: An Uncommon Dialogue was published on October 25, and immediately leapt into the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list. But what the originals mostly reveal is how deeply we Americans crave the echoing testimony of other times and places — as long as it remains merely an echo, and doesn’t threaten to tell us anything unfamiliar or otherwise disagreeable. “Desiderata,” in its guise as a medieval monkish meditation, brings us a confirmation of the present from the past; its recent descendants, the books of Williamson and Walsch, offer us a still louder echo: God’s resounding endorsement of our every craving.

Walsch acquired what he calls “God’s latest word on things” through a highly traditional method: a kind of automatic writing, in which Walsch claims to have become the Deity’s amanuensis (though one with the power to scribble his own questions and responses). And what does God reveal to Neale Donald Walsch? Well, for one thing, that religious institutions, persons of religious authority, and the Bible “are not authoritative sources” for “truth about God.” Instead, God says, here’s what we do if we want to know about Him: “Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your book, forget the words.”

This is certainly encouraging (not that you haven’t heard it before from Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and the guy who makes those “Question Authority” bumper stickers). But a reader with even the dimmest spark of critical reflection might be tempted to ask, “How can I tell my Highest Thoughts from my lower and presumably unworthy thoughts?”

This is a problem Walsch’s God doesn’t know quite how to address. He likes the sound of capitalized phrases: “Highest Thoughts” and “Who You Are” and things like that. But he is also at pains, repeatedly, to say that there is “no such thing” as right or wrong, good or bad, better or worse. “There is only what serves you, and what does not.” And perhaps this is the key to identifying our Highest Thoughts: They are the ones most perfectly self-serving.

Take our thoughts about money, for instance. At one point, Walsch’s God suggests that we need to “outgrow” a love of money, but when Walsch complains that he is financially strapped — “What is blocking me from realizing my full potential regarding money?” — God responds with almost gushing sympathy: “You carry around a feeling that money is bad.” If only Walsch would stop feeling guilty, then he could liberate himself to make and enjoy lots of money. Here’s a counsel Walsch is quick to warm to. “I see I have a lot of work to do,” he says with evident relish. Presumably, now that Conversations with God has been on bestseller lists for almost four years — it’s still number twenty on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list — he has had ample opportunity to cultivate the requisite virtue.

The God of Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love bears striking similarities to the one with whom Neale Donald Walsch hangs out — which seems a confirmation of sorts. In any case, Williamson’s book is also based on a revelation given through automatic writing, though in this case she was not the recipient. She draws on a hefty volume called A Course in Miracles, which came about in 1965 when Helen Schucman, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University, heard a voice speaking to her that she came to believe was the voice of Jesus. Her colleague William Thetford served as amanuensis as the revelations poured forth; eventually the transcriptions made their way into print. (In the copy I saw, Jesus begins by speaking these words to Dr. Schucman: “This is A Course In Miracles (R). Please take notes.” One wonders who registered the trademark and where the royalties go.) But if Schucman and Thetford were the evangelists, writing this new Gospel, Marianne Williamson has turned out to be their Apostle Paul, spreading the good news far beyond its original source.

Aside from the dependence on automatic writing or “scribing,” another feature shared by Walsch and Williamson is their retaining of much of the language of traditional Christianity, even down to the identification of God as a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (It’s Walsch who occasionally inserts references to God as “Mother,” while Williamson uses “He” and “Him” throughout.) A cynical reader might see this as an attempt to borrow some external authority — especially since the resemblance to Christian doctrine is merely verbal. Walsch, for instance, reinterprets the Father as “knowing,” the Son as “experiencing,” and the Holy Spirit as “being.” Likewise, Williamson says that the Holy Spirit “has been given by God the job of . . . outsmarting our self-hatred. The Christ does not attack our ego; He transcends it.” In A Course in Miracles — and remember, this is Jesus Christ speaking — she quotes, “Do not make the pathetic error of ‘clinging to the old rugged cross.’ The only message of the crucifixion is that you can overcome the cross. Until then you are free to crucify yourself as often as you choose. This is not the Gospel I intended to offer you.” (In other words, “Forget that ‘Take up your cross and follow me’ stuff — I was misquoted.”)

“In the eyes of God,” Williamson explains, “we’re all perfect,” and our job is merely to recognize that. Evil is an illusion. Moreover, “the word Christ is a psychological term. . . . Christ refers to the common thread of divine love that is the core and essence of any human mind.” A century and a half ago, Ludwig Feuerbach brought as his gravest charge against Christianity that it is the projection of our own desires — a notion cheerfully accepted by both Walsch and Williamson, who are, when it suits them, pantheists, seeing God in all things and therefore God in us and as us. We like having a God who is a projection of our desires, because that God won’t say anything we don’t want to hear.

It never seems to have occurred to any of these authors to question the validity of what they were hearing, or to notice that when other people in the past, or in other cultures, have claimed to hear God speaking, He seems to have said very different things and to have exhibited a very different character. (The vision granted to the fourteenth-century mystic Juliana of Norwich, for example, began with an image of a crown of thorns from which blood flowed copiously; only after encountering such an image did she arrive at her famous conclusion that “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”)

I believe that I, in any case, would have been not only surprised but disappointed if I heard God speaking and He told me nothing that I couldn’t have found expressed more eloquently by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, or for that matter by Dale Carnegie and Gail Sheehy. Imagine coming down from Mount Sinai with glowing countenance, only to have to tell the assembled masses, “I have heard God, and He is Norman Vincent Peale.”

How do we account for the tranquil composure, the utter lack of critical suspicion, with which Walsch and Williamson and all their kind receive their remarkably unimaginative gospels? Sad to say, the answer appears obvious: They share the universal human susceptibility to flattery, and the gods who speak to them offer nothing but flattery. “I have nothing to tell you that you don’t already know,” He says. “You have understood yourself, your neighbors, and your social environment with admirable clarity. Your only problem is that you don’t trust your own discernment. I can neither correct nor admonish you, but merely encourage you to follow your natural inclinations, which are infallible.” Or, as Walsch’s God puts it, “You all think very highly of yourself, as rightly you should.”

That’s pretty much what these books are all about. Thus Iyanla Vanzant concludes the acknowledgments page of her popular In the Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love You Want by writing, “And I would humbly like to acknowledge my Self for being willing to move through the fear, denial, confusion, and anger required to figure out why I had to write this book,” and concludes the book by saying to her reader, “You, my dear, have become the light of the world — the loving light. I beseech you to do everything in your power to let your light shine.” Having looked upon themselves with smitten wonderment, these authors turn and offer us the chance to indulge in the same self-celebratory gaze. (Thanks.)

All our problems, on this account, are problems of perception: We do not see things clearly. Williamson tells the story of how, when she was working as a cocktail waitress, she was unhappy until she had this realization: “This isn’t a bar, and I’m not a waitress. That’s just an illusion. Every business is a front for a church, and I’m here to purify the thought forms, to minister to the children of God.” (But could you bring me my martini first and purify the thought forms when you’re on break?) Therefore it is not moral growth, but visual or perceptual retraining that we need. And, mirabile dictu, what is obscured by our now-clouded sight is our own virtue. Back in the Middle Ages, people who were considered wise and discerning used to think that people are blind to their own moral failings. But now God has appeared to explain that just the opposite is true: It turns out that our moral successes are what we habitually disregard.

What all these books most fundamentally reject is the notion that our wills may be twisted or bent. The God of these authors never for a moment questions, or allows us to question, the validity of our desires: He merely offers superior means for realizing those desires. Thus His willingness to serve as Neale Donald Walsch’s financial adviser. And Williamson’s book, while it may seem at times to be more directive and to require more self-criticism — “God’s plan works” and “Yours doesn’t,” she says at one point — in fact relies just as much as Walsch’s on self-interest and self-congratulation. We should choose God’s plan because it’s the one that will give us what we want. “We must face our own ugliness,” claims Williamson, but only to discover that it’s either superficial or illusory: “The ego isn’t a monster. It’s just the idea of a monster.” When we see more clearly, the bad idea disappears, to be replaced by the image of a “dashing prince.” Looking back at her life, Williamson says, “there’s one thing I’m very sure of: I would have done better if I had known how.” We do no evil, we just make “mistakes.”

Several years ago, when Woody Allen was asked to explain his affair with his wife’s adopted daughter, he offered this verbal shrug: “The heart wants what it wants.” This is a tautology of immense moral significance, because it indicates that there is no power capable of interrogating, much less redirecting, the heart that wants — the heart that does nothing but want. The God of these books congratulates the heart for wanting and stifles the voice of mind or conscience that would offer dissent or even query. He accomplishes this stifling by proclaiming that He merely echoes — as the entire universe merely echoes — the human heart’s howl of appetite.

Am I, after all, a “child of the universe”? It’s worth remembering that the phrase doesn’t originate with Max Ehrmann. In Dickens’s Bleak House, the congenitally feckless Harold Skimpole, upon seeing the orphan Esther Summerson, cries out, “She is the child of the universe,” only to have the more discerning John Jarndyce reply, “The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”

But in one sense an indifferent parent is precisely what we want: a God who neither instructs nor disciplines, who offers neither warning nor chastisement, but who smiles wryly at our peccadilloes and laughs warmly at our charming idiosyncrasies — not a Father in Heaven but a Grandfather, as C. S. Lewis once put it.

This indifference has its dark and terrible side. Without instruction or discipline or warning or counsel, we wander witlessly in a Universe whose child we may be, but which is populated by our siblings, people just like us — which is to say, people who ardently pursue goods that are incompatible with the aspirations of their neighbors, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out way back in those Middle Ages (that is, circa 1650). The numbers of us who want to be the starting quarterback or the homecoming queen or the new executive vice president far exceed the number of desirable roles and places, and they always will. And people whose greed and lust have been certified by a celestial Parent prove — when faced with the inevitable obstacles to their aspirations — to be anything but “nice” and to be anything but concerned with “purifying the thought forms.”

This is the constant threat of what Hobbes called “the war of all against all,” and there’s nothing “illusory” about that war. The irresponsibility of people like Walsch and Williamson lies in their propagating a merely verbal Deity to stroke and console our desiring hearts, reserving His condemnation only for those who would remind us, in the immortal words of the Rolling Stones, that “you can’t always get what you want.” If Mick Jagger can figure it out, may we not expect as much of God?

Alan Jacobs teaches in the English department at Wheaton College.