Ignoring David Foster Wallace's religion

The forthcoming biography of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max's Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, seems very unlikely to shed any light on Wallace's faith or spirituality.

Though it's known that, at one point, Wallace belonged to a church in Illinois -- maybe a Mennonite church -- and also he reportedly twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, there's not much more information about his religiousness. Beliefs, practices, problems or questions, affiliations -- it's all question marks. A lot is known about his life, but not about this. His life fascinates people, and moves people. His ethical-religious reflections especially.

But no one in the position to find out more about his religious beliefs or practices seems to have been interested in doing so.

Either that or the information just isn't out there.



The question of Wallace's relationship to Christianity came up again in a panel focused on the Wallace archives. Max was on the panel, as well as two other writer's who know more than a little about Wallace's life. But the question wasn't answered:

Douglas Brinkley: "....And also, I always felt it a little odd, but not that odd, but he would always go to church constantly throughout his life. And I was wondering if that came from his childhood and kinda the routine of church? Was he going to church for lightness? Or was he looking for literary material?

Seth Colter Walls: "There's not a great deal of that that I've seen in the archive, but maybe you can speak to that."

D.T. Max: "Well, I was actually think of again of the archive and the things archives don't or can't contain .... What the archive is really really good at (and you probably know this better than me), it has a lot of Infinite Jest gestations .... It's amazing to me, and wonderful and fascinating that there are people, many people who feel close enough to David's work, that they actually want sort of see what made this work. That's -- On one level that's an absolutely normal, typical. You read anyone's novel. But I don't think that that comes up a lot with most writers. I don't think -- I mean, as much interest as there is in, say, Don DeLillo, I don't know, I would be surprised, if there are people who are really, well, I don't know. Let's just say that the scope of people who care about this seems to me unprecedented. And says something. I think, as a biographer I'm always saying, well what does this say. Well it says something really interesting to me, that David touches people not just with his finished work, which he clearly does, but also with the sense of that struggle to create that work."

It is very interesting, from the stand point of biography, that Wallace's writing struggles are so important to so many. I wish, though, that Max found Wallace's struggles with and attempts at religion important too. What does that say? What does it say that Wallace dedicated some time trying to be a part of church communities? How did that work and how did it play out?

Max tacks around the question, as if he either doesn't know the answer or doesn't find it interesting.

Asked directly, in another context, he went with "banal," an assessment he attributes to Wallace.

"Wallace once wrote to his friend Jonathan Franzen that his thoughts on religion were 'banal.' He did go to church, and my assumption is that this practice began after he stopped drinking and smoking pot as part of getting clean and may have continued either because he felt it centered him or merely out of habit, as part of his sense of himself as a middle-class Midwesterner."

Maybe Wallace's thoughts on religion were banal. I doubt it, though. Unfortunately, Max seems to assume that's the case with out investigating any deeper or even being interested. The rest of his answer is just speculation -- and, really, even if his Illinois church attendance was best explained by those things, there's still plenty there to explore. None of those answers specifically would be boring, though Max seems to take them that way.

It's like a terminal disinterest in religion. David Lipsky's extended interview with Wallace was the same way. Wallace talked about religion and God several times, but Lipsky let every statement pass, never following up, always pursuing other questions.

I will read the upcoming bio. I expect it to be good, though for other things and other reasons, but I wish, with all the religious themes and threads in Wallace's work, that those writing about his life would take his religious efforts and endeavors seriously.

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Protecting belief

"Christian theology never expressly identified God and nature; but the point is that natural theology and nature-preaching had implanted within Protestantism an increasingly strong leaning in this direction. Ministers often forgot Calvin's warnings, misunderstood Edwards, ignored Bushnell; natural theologians wanted not just to glorify God in nature but to see Him there ....

In the end, the most influential church leaders tried to protect belief by making peace with modernity, by conceiving God and His purposes in terms as nearly compatible as possible with secular understandings and aims. A minority insisted that a transcendent God must utterly elude human grasp."

-- James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America.

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A perch at the end of the day

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Let me root, root, root for the home team: When sports replaces religion in the rites of death

"It was such a big part of her life, why not be a part of her send off too."

Errol Morris' latest short documentary, on sports funerals:



As a reporter, I covered one of these in Georgia in 2007 or '08. The viewing was set up as a tail gate party, and everyone wore University of Georgia Bulldog gear in accordance with the will of the man who'd died. A large bulldog was inflated in front of the funeral home, bulldog flags were flown from the hearse, and the man was buried with two tickets to the next game in his hand.

Morris doesn't get into the specifically religious aspects of these funerals, though he does ask one Cubs fan if there will be sports in heaven.

The Georgia funeral director I spoke to saw sports funerals as replacing traditional religious rites. For these people, he said, religion was too dour, too somber. They didn't want organ music and a rented minister. What they wanted was a celebration, and for their friends and families to enjoy at their deaths what they had enjoyed in their lives. Religion wasn't an important part of their lives, wasn't what gave their lives meaning. Sports was. So they designed these non-religious rites of passage around that idea.

The widow at the viewing I attended agreed with that. She said she hadn't known of her husband's plans until he died and she read his will, but that he'd done what he knew would comfort her and everyone who cared about him.

"All this," she told me, "is him saying to me, 'don't cry, now. I don't want no crying.'"

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Ted Cruz & the Texas Ten Commandment Monument case

Ted Cruz -- Texas Republican nominee for US Senate, hailed now as a leader and intellectual force for the Tea Party movement -- made his time as Texas' Solicitor General a foundational piece of his image and campaign. In that role he argued several First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court.

Van Orden v. Perry, also known as the Texas Ten Commandments Monument case, is particularly interesting.



As I read it, Cruz et al defended the monument on three grounds:

1. The monument is primarily not religious (the most standard and yet counter-intuitive argument in these cases)
2. A reasonable observer would correctly understand 1. (this probably being the real crux of the issue)
3. Even if it were religious or were misunderstood as religious, there's nothing coercive about a monument, and thus religion isn't established (a position that's been advanced by Justice Clarence Thomas)

To a large extent, the arguments in the Texas Ten Commandment Monument case as similar to what one sees elsewhere. There were some that struck me as notably different, though.

For example:

"In its museum-setting context, this monument would not convey to the reasonable observer any official endorsement of religion. This is simply not a context in which the State is reasonably understood to be taking sides. The many monuments commemorating veterans do not communicate disapproval of pacifists; the Tribute to Children does not reflect negatively on older Texans; the Hiker and horse-riding Cowboy monuments send no message concerning motorized transport; and the Volunteer Firemen monument reflects no official disapproval of those who pursue firefighting as a paid profession. The monuments, memorials, and commemorative plaques on the Capitol Grounds are not reasonably perceived as creating 'insiders' and 'outsiders' in the Texas political community."

The argument here's pretty clever. Essentially, Cruz et al are saying that a monument can't make an exclusive claim. That monuments are always innately pluralistic, recognition of one thing never meaning or reasonably implying de-recognition for something else.

Presumably, though, the monument to hikers, the monument to children and the other monuments don't say anything like "I AM the LORD thy God / Thou shalt have no other gods before me,"  where the religious one has those words exactly. Which seems like a quintessentially exclusive claim.

The Supreme Court decided otherwise, though, ruling that the law,

"requires that we neither abdicate our responsibility to maintain a division between church and state nor evince a hostility to religion by disabling the government from in some ways recognizing our religious heritage."

And, thus,

"The inclusion of the Commandments monument in this group [of monuments] has a dual significance, partaking of both religion and government, that cannot be said to violate the Establishment Clause."

In a 2011 speech, Cruz gave his own gloss on the court victory, citing it as an example of "how we re-take our country," by "standing on principle" -- "we," in that case, being specifically identified as "conservative Christians."



Some other notes:
-- Van Orden who brought the suit against Texas because of the monument, was, incredibly, a homeless Unitarian with a suspended law license.

-- Cruz' advisor at Princeton was Robert P. George.

-- In a smart analysis of Cruz's triumph, Abby Rapoport argues his win has little to do with ideology, much less the advent of a new era of Tea Party power, and has been widely and wildly mis-read.

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New home

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Al Mohler's confessionalism

Al Mohler, who once effected a purge of "liberals" at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was recently reflecting on that after nearly 10 years. In that reflection he gives a curious account of what he considers liberalism, and how that liberalism happened at the flagship seminary of the famously conservative Southern Baptists.

Mohler:

"The confessional accountability was loosed. And the obligation was ignored. Now it was not done in a blatant way, where someone got up and said 'I deny the Abstract [of Principles],' except in a couple of -- it did happen in a couple of examples. But rather it happened by the claim to private interpretation, which was explicitly ruled out by the founders. Who said the confession must be signed by every faculty member.... It was very clear that if at any point mental reservations should come, it was the faculty member's duty to bring his concerns with his resignation to the president of the school [laughter]. When the conservatives at the SBC -- and this is something very, very important, and I raise this with some fear and trepidation, for I have concerns about my own denomination, which are many -- but, grassroots Southern Baptist, many of whom could not articulate what was wrong, knew something was horribly wrong .... Wonderfully, by God's grace, the issues became clarified. And you had grassroots Baptists who began to understand the issue of the inerrancy of God's word. And, even though they may not know the word 'confesssionalism,' they knew the need for it, even if unarticulated."

This is curious, I think, for a few reasons:

1) Mohler is suggesting that theological liberals are not liberals because they hold liberal positions, but because of the how they come to those positions. It's the hermeneutic of private interpretation that bothers him. Presumably one could hold that individuals can and should interpret the Bible for themselves and still come to exclusively conservative positions on things,  but Mohler would still object to them (in principle at least).

Mohler's making opponents out of a lot of evangelicals who would agree with him on particular issues that normally get classified as "conservative" or "liberal," on the basis that their interpretive principles are in themselves "liberal," even if that hasn't been the result.


2) The emphasis is on confessions, rather than biblicism more strictly.

Not to say that Mohler goes anywhere near suggesting a confession could be authoritative beyond or separate from the Bible. There's no question Mohler believes confessions are valuable only to the extent they sum up essential Biblical doctrines. Yet there is a matter of emphasis. The problem he's pointing to came not specifically because of disregard for the Christian scriptures, in his account, but because of a weakening of authority and a loosening of "confessional accountability."

I read that as implying that the Bible can be read in a rather open way, as a dialogue, with interpretation ongoing and developing, etc., whereas with these confessions (as per Mohler), there's absolute closure and an end to interpretations. One can either assent or not assent, but it's no longer a matter of reading.

The Baptists have a long tradition of confessions, but it's more common, post-Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies, to hear an emphasis on fidelity to the Bible and also a commitment to certain sort of reading (i.e., "literal"). Where the Abstract of Principles doesn't even mention the Bible, more recent Southern Baptist documents make beliefs about the Bible central. In the Southern Baptist Convention's statement of faith, for example, in 1925, '63 and '00, the Bible is the very first item on the list, above even beliefs about God.

I suspect that this emphasis on confessions and grassroots Baptists turn towards (unarticulated) confessionalism evidences a growing concern that the Bible and the literalist hermeneutic were not enough. That authoritative official interpretation is necessary.

If this is the case, then this development is not unrelated to the evangelicals who've become Catholic and Eastern Orthodox in recent years. 

3) The SBC statement of faith says of the Bible that it is "the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried." It's really not clear to me how or by whom such things should "be tried," according to Baptist polity, if not by individuals.

There may be an answer to that, from Mohler or other confessional Baptists. I don't know what it is, though.

4) It's not always the case that confessions are enforced so authoritatively as set out by Mohler here. It can still be the case that confessions are open to ongoing readings, interpreted by communities, part of a conversation where commitments have been made but applications and explanations and understandings are still being worked out. He rules this out, though, by promoting this idea of a confession where even having "mental reservations" is unacceptable.

This means, in a sense, a confession for Mohler is not something that can be read. It can't be interpreted, because it already has been interpreted. There's supposed to be a finality to the meaning of the thing, I think. There are thought to be only two responses to a confession, accepting and assenting or rejecting and having reservations.

5) D.G. Hart, historian of American religion, has argued that history of Protestantism in the 20th century has been badly misunderstood as a fight between modernists and fundamentalists or liberals and conservatives, where really it's a conflict between those Protestants who maintained confessional orthodoxy and those who didn't. That's proposing a pretty dramatic revision of the historiography as it currently stands. Is Mohler, though, kind of suggesting the same thing?


Some other notes:
-- The purge at Southern inspired some reflection on and defense of Baptist's confessional history. See Steve Weaver's "The Use of Confessions of Faith in Baptist History," which appears to have been written at Southern circa 2002; Gregory A. Wills' "Baptists, the Bible and confessions," written for Southern Seminary Magazine in 2000; and Robert Paul Martin, "The Legitimacy and Use of Confessions of Faith," who argues confessions can prevent heresy where the Bible could not:

"A confession of our loyalty to the Bible is not enough. The most radical denials of biblical truth frequently coexist with a professed regard for the authority and the testimony of the Bible. When men use the very words of the Bible to promote heresy, when the Word of Truth is perverted to serve error, nothing less than a confession of faith will serve to publicly draw the lines between truth and error."

There have been corresponding rejections of confessionalism and counter histories arguing that Southern Baptists are not confessional. Representative is Walter B. Shurden's "The First President of the SBC and Confessions of Faith."

-- It would be worth exploring why history is seen as authoritative in this debate, and to what extent Southern Baptists take their own traditions as authoritative.

-- What I refer to as a purge, above, is more often described as a bold stand for orthodoxy. E.g., Justin Taylor calls it "how the Lord turned the tide at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—from a place of deep theological liberalism to a bastion of orthodox fidelity."

I realize "purge" has negative connotations, but it's the most accurate word I can think of for the situation.

-- I was taught that the Southern Baptists were not a denomination, but a convention. A fine distinction, but significant if you want to make it so. What I was taught was apparently wrong, though. 

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