THAT NEW-TIME RELIGION

During a recent interview with the Paris Review, Robert Pinsky — the current poet laureate of the United States — was asked about his “increasing fascination with religion and religious imagery.” In reply the poet declared, “My mother’s mental illness and her scorn, at times, for everything the world believes may have made me especially sensitive to the phenomenon of belief, the discovery of meaning. . . . For a person who practices some particular religion, creation is a major episode in the career of God, whereas for me, God is a major episode in the career of creation.”

Among America’s cultural elite at the tail end of the twentieth century, Robert Pinsky is hardly alone in being fascinated with religion — Scientology, the Eastern religions that have attracted dabblers from the American upper class since the late Victorian days of Madame Blavatsky, but most of all Jewish and Christian religion. There are famous people meeting regularly to discuss the Bible, like the study groups featured on Bill Moyers’s popular 1996 PBS series, Genesis. There is even something of a vogue for the Kabbalah: Sandra Bernhard, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Isaac Mizrahi, Roseanne, and Madonna are among the celebrities said to be studying this form of Jewish mystical theology.

Countless cover stories and special issues have reported on spirituality’s return to hipness. “Religion Makes a Comeback,” read a headline in that most sensitive of weathervanes, the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The major news magazines, the thought journals, and a wild profusion of others ranging from slicks like Mother Jones and the Oxford American to little magazines like the Indiana Review and Witness have all have gotten considerable mileage out of the recent “religious turn” in American culture. To be sure, most of them have felt compelled to preface their religious coverage with a note of editorial reassurance, lest their readers take alarm – – while some have even felt it necessary to indulge in hand-wringing over the decision to cover religion at all in their pages. But, as Mother Jones editor Jeffrey Klein explains, since “the doctrinaire hegemony for which the religious right is fighting assaults the most basic tenets of a pluralistic society, we cannot allow spirituality to be the exclusive preserve of the politically conservative.” What else is a poor progressive editor to do?

Some commentators have taken these conspicuous flirtations with the sacred as signs of an imminent religious revival, and since God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform, it may be so. But if the Great Awakening of our age is approaching, the evidence must lie elsewhere. Religion’s latest crop of fellow travelers may be very interested in the “phenomenon of belief,” but it quickly becomes apparent that they would never do anything so vulgar as actually “believe” anything — that is, believe in the way practicing Jews and Christians believe when they pray to a God who is something more than a product of what Pinsky calls humankind’s fascinating “addiction to creativity. ” Indeed, what is most striking about the much-ballyhooed “religious turn” is the extent to which it is divorced from the experience of millions of believers.

Nowhere is this divorce more evident than in the stack of recent books in which America’s leading literary lights — poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists — explain their fascination with the Bible. The latest entry in the genre is Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, a collection of original essays edited by Rick Moody (whose dark novel of suburbia, The Ice Storm, was recently released as a major Hollywood film) and Darcey Steinke (whose latest dark novel of suburbia is called Jesus Saves), both of whom are the children of pastors.

The introduction to Joyful Noise invokes William James’s 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, but Moody and Steinke ungenerously fail to acknowledge models much closer to hand — for the genre was, if not invented, then at least popularized in the 1980s by a man named David Rosenberg. Rosenberg (a former editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society who is described on the flap copy of his own work as “the leading translator of biblical poetry and poetic prose in our time”) first gained notoriety in 1991 for The Book of J, a biblical study for which he supplied the translation and Harold Bloom the commentary. This preposterous but widely reviewed volume argued that many of the most familiar stories in Genesis and Exodus (that strand of the Pentateuch labeled “J” by proponents of the “documentary hypothesis”) were the work of a single, identifiable author: a woman (in her forties, Rosenberg specified) at the court of King Solomon’s successor, Rehoboam.

Back in 1987, however, Rosenberg had put together a big volume called Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible. For this collection, Rosenberg assembled an impressive cast of contributors — beginning with Isaac Bashevis Singer on Genesis — each of whom was to write on a particular book of the Bible. The quality of the writing was generally high, and many of the essayists offered penetrating encounters with the text, but it was apparent that very few of them were writing from the perspective of Jews for whom the Bible is the word of God.

This was not surprising, given Rosenberg’s introduction, which instructed readers to take the Bible as a work of literature, exclusively a human creation, and to dismiss with that handy epithet “fundamentalist” all those Jews and Christians who think otherwise. But the formula was successful, and Rosenberg edited two similar collections in 1996: Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives and Genesis, As It Is Written: Contemporary Writers on Our First Stories. While he stuck to the basic pattern of Congregation, and even reinvited some of the same contributors, Rosenberg grew increasingly grandiose in his introductions (the introduction to Communion is titled “A New Revelation”), and the essays he commissioned strayed from the biblical text — most of them instead exercises in the familiar type of autobiography that runs: “When I was a child, my parents made me go to church, and fortunately I have now escaped all that, but every once in a while I get nostalgic and misty-eyed for what I no longer believe.”

Meanwhile, others were duplicating the formula Rosenberg employed in Congregation. Notably, there was the 1990 Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, edited by the poet Alfred Corn, who wrote in his introduction that the collection was “conceived as a complement” to Rosenberg’s work. And then, in 1994, there was A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints, edited by Paul Elie, a variant on the Rosenberg model. (Kathryn Harrison, in the days before her lubricious, best- selling memoir of incest, The Kiss, contributed the chapter on Catherine of Siena, which she entitled “Catherine Means Pure.”)

Incarnation, however, was distinct from Congregation and most of the books that followed in its wake in including at least some strong voices of belief. The long, brilliant essays by Reynolds Price on the Gospel of John and Larry Woiwode on the Book of Acts, for example, are quite different in the way they approach scripture and the Church, but both reveal a sense of continuity with the common faith that the Bible is no ordinary book, but the self-communicated word of God. “If two thousand years of pious handling had not dimmed both John’s story and its demand,” Price wrote, “his Gospel would still be seen as the burning outrage it continues to be, a work of madness or blinding light. Its homely but supremely daring verbal strategies, the human acts it portrays and the claim it advances — from the first paragraph — demand that we make a hard choice. If we give it the serious witness it wants, we must finally ask the question it thrusts so flagrantly toward us. Does it bring us a life-transforming truth, or is it one gifted lunatic’s tale of another lunatic, wilder than he?”

It is precisely this “hard choice” that is evaded by America’s literary hipsters on the Bible, and the contributors to Moody and Steinke’s Joyful Noise prove no exception. There are some fine pieces in the book, particularly those by the Mississippi mannerist Barry Hannah and John Cheever’s novelist son, Benjamin Cheever. And there are some genuinely creepy contributions, like Ann Powers’s “Teenage Jesus” and bell hooks’s “Love’s Alchemy.” But nearly all the essays are marred by a double-mindedness so deep it amounts to willful dishonesty. On the one hand, these writers refuse to accept scripture at face value: This is a book, the jacket guarantees, free of “dogma or cant.” On the other hand, they are loath to reject the power and haunting promise in the Bible’s stories. And so they mostly end up where, for example, the novelist Lisa Shea ends up: “In my own (lapsed Catholic) home, instead of the New Testament, I read my five-year-old son — and he reads me – – animal stories from the New York Times, from the Macmillan Animal Encyclopedia. . . . I wish I could give my son what my mother tried to give her daughters — awareness of a world that promised life everlasting. But he’s inherited a large measure of my dreaming, doubting, doleful nature. . . . Is doubt a form of belief? For me, the answer is yes. But it is an answer without end whose authority is undermined by my eternal skepticism.”

This evasiveness, which takes various forms in the various essays in Joyful Noise, is characteristic of those who would try to make moral judgments while denying any universally binding basis for morality. Moody at least recognizes the contradiction, criticizing his generation for its abdication of responsibility and praising the Gospels as “great liberal documents in strong support of ethical universals.” But so determined is he to avoid what he calls “a repressive interpretation of Christianity,” he can’t accept the logical conclusion of his own insight. His introductory diatribes against “the hegemony of the religious right” set the tone for the collection, and if most of the writers seem, like Lisa Shea, unsure of what they believe, they are very sure what they don’t believe and what they don’t like: They don’t like “fundamentalists,” by which they mean people like Reynolds Price and Larry Woiwode and anyone else who can affirm traditional religion.

The writers prove a strangely judgmental bunch, considering their antipathy for what they think of as the judgmental types — the Pat Robertsons and the James Dobsons — who too often speak for Christians in the public square. But it is the minimal presence of confession and repentance in these essays that is perhaps the most surprising. Many people over the centuries have found in the scriptures an account of human life that rings true, but that is so primarily because the Bible traces the bentness in the world not simply to some oppressive system (the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal thinking” denounced by bell hooks, for example), but to ourselves — to me, to you. The plain old biblical word for this bentness — studiously avoided by the Moody crowd, except when set off in ironic quotation marks — is sin, and to acknowledge its reality is to acknowledge, in the words of Paul, that “the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

Sin is not a word that comes easily to those represented in Joyful Noise. Frozen in attitudes of adolescent rebellion, these writers seem mostly concerned to congratulate themselves that they are not like others — not mean and judgmental like those hypocrites on the religious right, not credulous or ignorant, like those dutiful churchgoers who actually believe in miracles and think that the Bible was dictated by God. (As Lucy Grealy puts it in her contribution, “I didn’t want to turn into the type of person I’d regarded as stupid my entire life.”) They are so smart, in fact, that they don’t really need the Bible at all. “The ideal collection of writings about the New Testament,” Moody writes, “would not be a series of essays about the canonized text but rather a whole new set of Gospels.“

There is a parable in the eighteenth chapter of Luke that tells of two men going down to the temple. And one of the men stood and prayed, “I thank thee, God, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers,” while the other, standing far off, would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, but smote his breast, saying, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” It is a hard saying, and made harder when Christ explains: “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” One likes to think that when Moody and all the other literary priests of the imagination sit down to construct their new and better Bible, this parable will survive. But it is difficult to see how it can, until they realize that scripture isn’t about cultural realities, or doctrinaire hegemony, or the addiction to creativity. Believe it or not, the Bible is a book about sin, forgiveness, redemption — all that sort of thing.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.