Page 3130 – Christianity Today (2025)

A high school friend whom I hadn’t seen since her cancer diagnosis two years earlier, a passionate writer and literary scholar, was telling me over lunch about the renewed place that spirituality had taken in her life since treatment had left her cancer-free. In the course of our conversation, she told me, “Most of the time I am so sure that there is a God who has been amazingly good to me. But sometimes, especially after talking with some of my more secular colleagues, I wonder whether all these feelings can be explained in terms of brain biology—whether I’m just fooling myself.” She was eager to know how I could be thoroughly, wholeheartedly both a scientist and a Christian. As I listened to her, I realized I’d found one answer to the question I asked when I read Francis Collins’ The Language of God: “This is a good book, but who is it for?”

Francis Collins, a leader in the field of medical genetics, served as the director of the recently completed Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. He explains his purpose in writing The Language of God as follows: “Many … [assume] that a rigorous scientist could not also be a serious believer in a transcendent God. This book aims to dispel that notion, by arguing that belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and that the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science.” (Collins points out that a recent poll indicates that about 40 percent of professional biologists, physicists, and mathematicians believe in a God who actively communicates with humankind and answers prayers.)

The Language of God begins with a brief description of the author’s journey “from atheism to belief” (the title of Chapter 1). Collins grew up in a family in which faith was dismissed as “not very important,” moving from agnosticism to atheism during college. Subsequently, while completing the clinical part of his medical training, Collins’ convictions were shaken by observing the deep religious faith of many of his patients. His concerns that religious faith might not be intellectually tenable were addressed by reading C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and before long, he became a Christian.

After telling his story, Collins addresses a series of potential intellectual objections to religious faith. (“Isn’t the idea of God just wish fulfillment? What about all the harm done in the name of religion? Why would a loving God allow suffering? How can a rational person believe in miracles?”) He then describes current scientific knowledge about the origins of the physical universe, of life, and of humanity. Next he enumerates four possibilities for the intellectual relationship between science and faith, particularly as related to evolutionary biology: materialist atheism, in which science is considered to have shown that religious faith is wrong; Young Earth creationism, in which a literal reading of Genesis is considered to show that science is wrong, at least regarding origins; intelligent design, which contends that the complexity of life found on our planet could not have developed without the explicit direction of an intelligent agent, although evolutionary mechanisms may have contributed somewhat; and theistic evolution, which contends that scientific evidence for evolution is completely compatible with religious faith in general, as well as Christianity. Collins argues vigorously against the first three and for theistic evolution. The final chapter begins with Collins’ explanation of why he found Christian faith in particular (rather than another religion) compelling, and then ends with a call for all to see religious faith and science as two complementary ways of seeking truth.

The Language of God is an excellent resource for someone like my friend, who finds religious faith attractive but is concerned that it may not be intellectually defensible. Collins’ writing displays the meticulous patience with which a scientist examines evidence, and is persuasive without being belligerent or defensive. For someone seeking reassurance that religion has not been disproved by science, this book will be welcome.

Collins’ work will be equally valuable for serious Christians who want to delve deeper into either the science or the epistemology of the creation–intelligent design-evolution debates. On the science front, The Language of God offers clear explanations of contemporary biology suffused with Collins’ sense of wonder at the beauty and elegance of what science has discovered. In discussing atheism, Young Earth creationism, and intelligent design, Collins critiques these positions from both a scientific and theological perspective. Christians may find his discussion of the shortcomings of intelligent design particularly valuable. He also offers a solid, although elementary, discussion of how Christians who consider Scripture to be authoritative can combine the findings of biology and the scriptural account of creation into a single coherent understanding of our physical universe. As Collins explains, theistic evolution is “the dominant position of serious biologists who are also serious believers,” but few non-scientists know about it. If The Language of God makes this position more widely known, that alone will be a worthwhile accomplishment.

The primary shortcoming of The Language of God is that it is less theologically sophisticated than one might hope. Consequently, it offers a somewhat simplistic picture of how science and theology are “complementary.” Collins’ strategy is to begin with the evidence provided by science and human experience, and show that religious belief is reasonable in the light of this evidence. This approach is important for readers who trust science and are unsure whether to trust other forms of evidence. Yet certain Christian theological issues related to evolution are most effectively addressed when both biology and theology are considered, and here the limitations of either Collins’ approach, or his theological sophistication, appear most clearly.

Most important, in arguing for theistic evolution, Collins must explain how evolution, which biologists understand to be driven by probabilistic events, is compatible with the Christian understanding of God’s sovereignty. (This problem is not unique to evolution: quantum mechanics, which appears to govern all physical processes, including the biochemical reactions that are thought to drive evolution, is fundamentally probabilistic as well.) Collins takes the classical position that as God the Father is outside space and time, events which appear random and unpredictable to humans can actually be foreknown and specified by the Father. Although it is certainly possible that the Creator controls the creation in this fashion, it is not the only way to understand the sovereignty of God in the presence of chance.

Scientist-theologians such as John Polkinghorne, for example, have explained the role of chance in quantum mechanics and evolution as giving freedom to the Creation. Such freedom can be understood as a loving gift, made possible by the Creator’s voluntary self-limitation, in a manner analogous to the kenosis of the eternal Son in the Incarnation. The parallels between such an understanding of chance in the natural world and the Incarnation provide a more uniquely Christian as well as—to this scientist at least— more fruitful understanding of the Creation. The critical role played by chance in the natural world is not just a colossal misunderstanding due to our finite human perspective, but actually a sign of the Father’s love for the Creation!

Another limitation of Collins’s book, which likely reflects his assumptions about his audience as well as the influence of Mere Christianity in his journey to faith, is his choice of evidence to examine, which is a rather narrow slice of all the evidence that might be considered. Collins essentially gives the same argument for belief that Lewis presents in Mere Christianity: the Moral Law—the human instinct that right and wrong come from outside the individual, rather than simply being defined by each individual with reference to him or herself—points to the existence of One who is the source of right and wrong. In addition, the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe indicates that there was a beginning to the creation, which “cries out for a divine explanation.” Although these two ideas are sound as far as they go, they present a rather one-dimensional picture of both the evidence for and the nature of religion in general and Christianity in particular. The same can be said of Mere Christianity; although Lewis’ winsome and peerlessly clear prose makes his argument sparkle, remarkably, there is almost no mention of joy, in spite of the importance of joy in Lewis’ other works.

Collins’ occasional personal stories reveal the depths of his experience of life in Jesus Christ and show that faith is more than agreement with a series of logical propositions. Unfortunately, these stories do not cohere well with the rest of the book, and thus do not contribute as fully as they might. His story (in the last chapter) of a summer vacation spent as a substitute for medical missionaries in Nigeria should be required reading for short-term missionaries, and has brought tears to my eyes every time I’ve read it—but it is only tenuously connected to the point he then goes on to make.

Had my friend asked, “Why should I be interested in Christianity?” instead of “Can science explain away all of my spiritual experiences?” I would have recommended Tom Wright’s Simply Christian—but I would probably tell her, “Just read the first four chapters.” From the title, one might expect Wright’s book to be very similar to Mere Christianity. Indeed, Wright states at the outset, “My aim has been to describe what Christianity is all about, both to commend it to those outside the faith and to explain it to those inside.” The first part of that objective sounds very similar to Lewis’ purpose: “Ever since I became a Christian, I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” However, as soon as one begins to read, it is clear that Collins, far more than Wright, is Lewis’ successor.

Part 1 (the first four chapters) of Simply Christian is Wright’s equivalent of “examining the evidence for belief,” but his choice of evidence is quite different from Collins’. Each chapter describes one of four “echoes of a voice”: human beings’ longing for justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty, which Wright argues are longings because they reflect the character of God. Out of these longings, even before Christian theology is introduced, Wright paints a rich picture of what we might expect God to be like, one that dovetails far more closely with historical Christianity than the Moral Law alone.

Why this profound difference between Collins (and Lewis) and the opening chapters of Wright’s book? As a biblical theologian in the early years of the 21st century, Wright has had to wrestle with the nature of truth and knowledge far more than either Collins or Lewis. As he writes at the end of the fourth chapter:

The sort of thing we could and should mean by “truth” will vary according to what we’re talking about…. To “know” the deeper kinds of truth we have been hinting at is much more like “knowing” a person…. It’s a kind of knowing in which the subject and the object are intertwined, so that you could never say that it was either purely subjective or purely objective. One good word for this deeper and richer kind of knowing … is “love.”

This observation allows Wright to describe the complementary nature of scientific and other forms of knowledge with much more sophistication than Collins: while science concerns itself with quantifiable and reproducible natural phenomena, Christian faith concerns itself with the story of God’s relationship with his Creation, so that history and human experiences are among the most important evidence. In later chapters, Wright thus gives a great deal of attention to the nature and soundness of the historical evidence for the Christian story, and the reliability of scriptural texts, but he takes it for granted that a proper reading of Scripture and history is in harmony with science’s understanding of the world. Other than his explanation of the nature of truth, the only occasion where Wright confronts scientific materialism directly is in discussing the resurrection of Jesus, and there he gives it far less attention.1

Wright’s lack of concern with atheistic interpretations of contemporary science appears deliberate, and most likely reflects a sense that these have received far more attention than they deserve because of what Wright sees as a distracting and unproductive response from parts of the Christian community. Although he discusses scriptural interpretation extensively near the end of the book, the issues swirling around Genesis merit only an exasperated remark that the creation-evolution debate has “provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.” He then pointedly avoids Genesis in his subsequent explanations of how to properly balance various hermeneutical approaches to Scripture.

Perhaps most important, issues of biblical interpretation come late in Wright’s book, whereas Collins addresses potential objections to faith early on. Wright’s approach implies that a solid understanding of the soundness and historicity of Scripture is important for those already seeking a relationship with God, but the “echoes of a voice” with which he begins are the reason people will start seeking God in the first place.

Wright’s approach means that the opening chapters of Simply Christian are far more eloquent and passionate than Lewis or Collins, and, to my mind, far more suitable to give to one of my contemporaries who is asking, “Why should I take the claims of Christianity seriously?” However, as I moved into the second and third sections of Simply Christian, I found myself asking again, this time more emphatically, “This is a great book—but who exactly is it for???”

Part 2 of Simply Christian “lays out the central Christian belief about God.” Although Wright provides a single-sentence overview in the introduction, Part 2 is 85 pages and six chapters long. While I found every page insightful, engaging, and enriching, I have read several of Wright’s books and heard him speak several times, and I understand him better every time. I have also been a Christian for nearly twenty years. I suspect that a reader less immersed in the Christian faith and less familiar with New Testament scholarship would find Part 2 dense and difficult to follow.

Part 3, in which Wright “describe[s] what it looks like in practice to follow Jesus,” seems even more shaped by the desire to “explain [the faith] to those inside,” to the point that I doubt these chapters would successfully “commend it to those outside the faith.” Throughout all but the final chapter, Wright repeatedly addresses disputes about discipleship within the wider church—for example, the relative merits of praying spontaneously and using a liturgy, the different names for and theological interpretations of the Lord’s Supper, and whether a dramatic moment of conversion is experienced by all genuine Christians. As I read Part 2, I felt a little uneasy at the idea of giving Simply Christian to a nonbeliever, fearing that he or she would find it too dense or difficult; as I read Part 3, I felt it would be a distinct mistake to burden anyone outside the faith with so many in-house arguments.

Although I do not think Wright succeeds in making Parts 2 and 3 (except for the last chapter) suitable for outsiders—and perhaps it is simply not realistic for a single book to accomplish both of his goals—for a sufficiently well-read and motivated reader inside the faith, they are captivating and inspiring. Wright describes Christianity first and foremost as participating in a story, the story of “exile and homecoming,” of “rescue and renewal,” that is woven throughout the Bible, and that is enacted by Jesus himself through his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. In Part 2, Wright relates this story from the perspective of his field, the historical study of the New Testament, weaving together insights from Old and New Testaments, along with history and other Jewish writings of those times. He then offers in Part 3 a wonderfully wise synthesis of historical and contemporary practices of Christian discipleship. The result is rich, complex, and engaging.

In the end, I expect that The Language of God and Simply Christian will complement each other, addressing burning questions for different people. These books are a great resource for those of us in the faith, both to offer to friends who have already heard some of Wright’s “echoes” and to deepen our own understanding of the basis of our faith. Both books will draw readers into conversation and into Christian communities so that they see firsthand the richness of life in Christ that Collins and especially Wright portray. That is certainly what I’m hoping for my friend.

Catherine H. Crouch is assistant professor of physics at Swarthmore College.

1. In his discussion of the Resurrection, interestingly enough, Wright’s argument for why science does not render the Resurrection unbelievable is scientifically weak. Wright points out (correctly) that miracles can be documented by history while science studies only things that are reproducible, but then rather than pointing out that science cannot rule out the possibility of rare miracles, he simply remarks that it is understandable that this is difficult to believe, but that the historical evidence of the rise of Christianity is best understood if Jesus really did rise from the dead, so one must be willing to allow for the possibility of miracles.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

At my alma mater we were reading C. S. Lewis before shelves of books were written about him. Though he smoked pipes in pubs, we overlooked such “personal lapses” because we were sure his books, especially Mere Christianity, would bring many into the Kingdom. At my church we affectionately refer to Lewis as “St. Clive” and adjudicate certain doctrinal disputes with a citation from the “Fifth Gospel” (i.e., his complete works). At the community college where I sometimes teach Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas, students occasionally ask questions about their Christian faith. My discussions typically end by handing them a copy Mere Christianity.

But now Tom Wright has written Simply Christian. It obviously trades on the popularity of Lewis; worse yet, it’s marketed as another Mere Christianity! Is there really room for a sixth gospel, or is this a covert plot to replace Lewis? My pastor fears it’s the latter. I believe it’s the former: some students should read Lewis, but others should read Wright.

Lewis’ apologetic works—Mere Christianity, Problem of Pain, Miracles, etc.—are still the best introduction for the philosophically minded student with very little church experience. Lewis is able to write for pagans because he experienced paganism first hand. Wright, because he grew up in the church, is able to write for those in danger of becoming what Christian Smith calls “moralistic, therapeutic deists.” These are students who speak “Christianese” fluently. They have been raised in Sunday School; at church camp they have committed their lives to Christ; most important, they are “spiritual”—they call on God for help with everything from passing a math exam to difficulties in personal relationships. But even so—and this is the crucial point—by the time they get to college, they choke on the name of Jesus.

This is hardly surprising, given the culture in which they have been raised. Lewis’ generation worshiped science. Industrialism was triumphant, and everyone thanked the scientists. Anything that smacked of religion was old fashioned and out-of-date. (Perhaps room could be found for the Bible when teaching children, but it would have to be de-mythologized for adults.) Today, large segments of the population take science for granted or regard it with suspicion; meanwhile, they value “spirituality”—that vague sort of feeling which pictures God (to use one of Lewis’ prescient phrases) as a sort of “tapioca pudding.” This sort of spirituality will never cause offense. But as Wright makes clear, when the earliest Christians proclaimed that “Jesus is Lord” they were implicitly adding “and Caesar is not.” Such exclusivity was offensive then, and it’s offensive now.

Simply Christian, however, is not another lament over the sorry state of the church. Neither its tone nor its content is scolding. Instead, it is a distillation of years of historical research and pastoral care, written for those whose faith is wavering and subjective.

Wright begins by tipping his hat to Lewis’ classic description of children’s innate ability to protest injustice in all its multifarious forms with the cry, “That’s not fair!” What can this be, asks Wright, but an “echo of a voice” from a king and a kingdom where justice is the rule, not the exception? And where do we get our thirst for spirituality, beauty, and meaningful personal relationships if not from the same voice, the same place?

Of course, some students are still enamored of materialistic answers to such questions and will be unmoved by Wright’s metaphor of an “echo.” Those students should first read Lewis. Where Wright shines is with students who are already “spiritual” but are put off by a theology which insists on the centrality of Jesus. And not just the “Jesus of faith,” who lives only in the subjective experiences of individual believers, but the Jesus of history (not the fictional figure of the Jesus Seminar).

We will only learn from the historical record if we are honest about our prior conception of God. Here there are three options. The first is pantheism. Pantheism pictures the universe and God as one and the same—God is in everything and everything is in God. This is the God of both ancient Stoicism and contemporary New Age spirituality. And while Wright insists that God is always at work in his creation, the created order as it now exists is not always working in God. Radical evil is real, and pantheism’s only response is suicide (Stoicism) or denial (New Ageism).

The second option is deism, given a peculiarly modern twist in its “moralistic, therapeutic” form. Deism pictures the supernatural realm and the natural realm as two distinct circles. God is in heaven and we are on earth, and neither has (nor desires) much to do with the other. This option is quite appealing, says Wright, “when you’re sitting in front of the television or hooked up to a portable stereo, one hand glued to the cell phone for text messaging, the other clutching a mug of specialist coffee.” When life is good, why worry about God? Naturally, life is not always good, but the promise of cozy deism is that happiness will quickly be restored to those who confess their mistakes and pray to God in heaven. While the pastor in Wright is pretty gentle with this sort of thing, he is stern enough to add that “quickly” is a relative term. Yes, God wants (and promises) our happiness; but on his schedule, not ours.

The third option is the only fully Christian conception of God. Here, God and his creation are distinct, and heaven (the supernatural) and earth (the natural) are overlapping and interlocking. What’s more, there are thin places where no “random invasion of earth by alien (‘supernatural’?) force” is necessary for God to reveal himself. But looking at God directly is like “staring at the Sun.” God

can’t be defined in terms of anything or anyone else. It isn’t the case that there is such a thing as “divinity” and that he’s simply another example, even the supreme one, of this category. Nor is it the case that all things that exist, including God, share in something we might call “being” or “existence,” so that God would then be the supremely existing being. He is his own category, not part of a larger one.

How, then, is God to be known? And why should we believe that such a God even exists?

Wright is quick to say that the existence of such a God can’t be “proved.” (In fact, he may be a bit too quick. As Ralph McInerny obserbed in his Gifford Lectures, the Catholic Church has made “a dogmatic declaration that dogma is not necessary for one to know that God exists.”1) But, given the “echoes of a voice” mentioned earlier, he argues that those who are intellectually honest can’t help but be impressed by the congruence of the historical data, Christian doctrine, and this third conception of God.

If we want to go beyond congruence, says Wright, we must begin by looking at Jesus. And when we do, we must remember that Jesus was a Jew. This assertion is not trivial, nor does it entail disrespect to our Jewish cousins. Only by seeing Jesus in his historical context, where he experienced from birth the hopes, fears, frustrations, and failures of Jews under Roman rule, can we begin to understand the New Testament. Simply Christian does this, but since it is impossible to summarize its richly detailed account, I will consider a single (and perhaps singularly important) example—the Jews’ hope for a Messiah.

The Jewish hope for a messianic deliverer goes back to at least the Babylonian captivity. By the time of the Maccabees (2nd century BC), the hope for a political and military Messiah was widespread. Around the same period, the hope for a bodily resurrection of faithful Jews was also gaining ground. Connecting the dots, many skeptical scholars have described Jesus as simply one of many failed “Messiahs” of the period. The only difference is that his disciples (not fraudulently, but self-deceptively) connected the hope for a Messiah with the hope for the resurrection and started preaching that Jesus was risen from the grave. This account makes our spirituality safely pantheistic or deistic—of course Jesus was not bodily raised from the grave (what self-respecting modern person could believe a story like that?), but his hopeful optimism lives on in the hearts of individual Christians.

Wright argues that historically speaking this skeptical account makes no sense. Yes, many Jews hoped for a resurrection of the dead. But no contemporary of Jesus hoped for the resurrection of a single person—Messiah or not—in the middle of history. For his disciples to “make up” stories about the risen Jesus cannot be explained as a case of wishing that something should be so until one starts believing it really is so. No, it would be a case of someone wishing for something before he or she had even thought of it, much less desired it: a patent absurdity. The only historically satisfying account of the phenomenal growth of Christianity after Jesus’ violent death, says Wright, “is that he really was bodily alive again three days later, in a transformed body.”

The implications of Jesus’s bodily resurrection are huge. It means that “God’s kingdom has indeed arrived; and that means we have a job to do.” Part 3 of Simply Christian describes that job in terms of worship, prayer, and fully living in the new creation. Again, the power of Simply Christian is in the details, but the argument is simple—sin makes it impossible to be completely, genuinely, and gloriously human; but the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus have made the impossible possible; so the Church must make the echo of God’s voice a reality right now (even if its completion awaits the “new heavens and earth”) by restoring justice, establishing faithful relationships and giving birth to beauty in all its forms.

For the hard-nosed, materialistically minded skeptic, there is still no better introduction to Christianity than C. S. Lewis. But for students in danger of losing their uninformed faith or for those who have already lost their faith in everything but a vague sort of “tapioca pudding” spirituality, the best introduction to Christianity is a latterday St. Thomas, N. T. Wright.

Ric Machuga is professor of philosophy at Butte College. He is the author of In Defense of the Soul: What It Means to Be Human (Brazos Press).

1. Ralph McInerney, Characters in Search of Their Author (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 5.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When I reviewed the first two volumes of Lewis’ collected letters for Books & Culture three years ago, I finished with the word, “Encore!” My wish is now granted. Walter Hooper has returned to the stage with this third and final volume of Lewisian correspondence, covering 1950-1963, and his magnum opus is complete.

Editing a lifetime’s letters is no easy undertaking: it is almost a lifetime’s work in itself. First, the collecting of the letters is a Herculean labor. In the 44 years since Hooper served briefly as Lewis’ secretary, he has steadily accumulated from all corners of the globe the material which makes up these volumes, namely 3,228 separate items of correspondence. Completists will be relieved to know that those letters which did not find their way into the earlier volumes, either for reasons of space or because they had not come to Hooper’s attention, have now been included in a supplement to this third book. It is particularly pleasing to see the “Great War” letters to Owen Barfield in print for the first time, and more pleasing still that their dense philosophizing should be leavened by the inclusion of the many amusing illustrations which Lewis provided to clarify his arguments. The supplement even carries a few letters written during the period covered by this third volume; they came to light only after the main body of the book had been typeset. Hooper notes in his preface that “the occasional letter will be popping up for the next 100 years,” a useful reminder that this aspect of the editorial task is akin to catching autumnal leaves in a wood, a game which requires first dizzying energy, then inexhaustible patience. No one could play that game perfectly, but Hooper has come darn close.

After the collecting comes the deciphering. Having studied for my own doctoral research many of the originals of Lewis’ letters in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, I know that his hand, especially in later years when he began to suffer from rheumatism, was not always easily legible; he frequently apologizes to recipients for writing unclearly. The effects of wear-and-tear in the mail and the fading and dirtying which some letters have suffered over the decades mean that Hooper has had to exercise considerable analytical skill in determining what Lewis’ hieroglyphics actually denote. The beautifully crisp presentation of the correspondence in this volume is the result of hours spent puzzling over smudges.

But even after the text has been established, the end of the editorial road is still a long way off. It is not enough, after all, simply to print the letters without explanatory comments. Given that usually we have only Lewis’ half of his various correspondences (he almost never retained letters sent to him), it is sometimes difficult to understand what he is talking about. This is where Hooper shows his real mettle. Lewis’ brother, Warren, once compared Hooper to a ferret—a harsh remark, but one with just a grain of truth inside its harshness, for Hooper demonstrates a voraciousness and fixity of purpose in hunting down explanations which is definitely not unferret-like. Tirelessly he has sought to discover the actual people behind the names of the salutees, many of whom were strangers even to Lewis (such as a certain Father George Restropo, sj, a seminarian in Maryland, to whom Lewis wrote a single letter, but whom Hooper has managed to locate) and many of whom have long since died. Tracking down these people or their descendants has enabled Hooper in large part to reconstruct both sides of the conversation and therefore to illuminate remarks by Lewis that would otherwise have remained mysterious or misleading.

In addition to the detective side of this hermeneutic endeavor, there is the straightforwardly academic side: giving the sources of the quotations with which Lewis liberally sprinkled his sentences; identifying the (sometimes extremely obscure) allusions to Euripides or Mrs. Humphrey Ward or the Second Book of Kings or what you will; translating the frequent phrases in Latin, Greek, French, or Italian. And so on and so forth. The amount of help that Hooper gives to the reader on every page is deeply impressive.

I emphasize the editor’s role here for two reasons. First, because it is more evident in this collection than in the two previous volumes which cover the years when Lewis was less famous and writing to a smaller circle of people. There were 775 letters in Volume 2 and only 457 letters in Volume 1, but Volume 3 contains almost exactly 2,000; inevitably then, Hooper’s function as epistolary circus-master becomes much more important. He has to give due weight to big-name interlocutors such as J.B. Priestley and Mervyn Peake and Austin Farrer, without overlooking the numerous minor figures who have no other literary memorial.

It ought to be admitted at this point that quality has not kept pace with quantity; the letters here feel typically less rich and rewarding than they do in the first two volumes. However, although there are fewer individual plums, there is, all told, a greater sense of the man in the round. We see Lewis negotiating with publishers, correcting proofs, exchanging ideas with scholarly colleagues, advising other writers. (The most interesting letter, to my mind, is the lengthy critique he gives of the manuscript of Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, a model of forceful, detailed, but inoffensive counsel.) That is the “professional” Lewis. Then there is the “pastoral” Lewis, the saintly sage giving encouragement and insight to struggling fellow Christians, amongst whom were more than his fair share of lame ducks and hypochondriacs. It is poignant to see how this Lewis becomes mellower and more reflective as the years go by. There is also the “personal” Lewis, both commonplace and intimate: sending out that tedious thing, the round-robin change-of-address note after his move to Cambridge, but also telling his young Narnia readers how he likes to wallow in his bath with only his nostrils sticking out, and lamenting to his new wife (“well, darling?”) that his tonsils and glands are sore and that he wants to be fussed over. As we switch back and forth between these different Lewises—the busy professor, the conscientious “hot-gospeller,” the anxious paterfamilias, in addition to the belletrist known to us from the earlier volumes—Hooper’s dexterity in meshing the gears shows its worth.

But there is a second reason for emphasizing Hooper’s editorial role, and that relates to his treatment of one Kathryn Lindskoog, a Californian to whom Lewis wrote letters on seven occasions during these years. Readers of Books & Culture are probably aware that the late Mrs. Lindskoog, having employed Hooper to write a preface for her first book on Lewis way back in the 1970s, then turned against him (for reasons which may one day become public knowledge) and started a long, noisy campaign of vilification. She accused him of forging Lewis manuscripts (most notably The Dark Tower) and of committing various other remarkable misdemeanors, such as speaking with an English accent despite being American. Yes, seriously. Needless to say, her allegations are fantastic and Hooper has always declined to dignify the charges with any kind of written public response. Here, however, he comes close to responding, but one needs to be attentive to notice it. In a footnote to page 891, he shows, as a simple matter of fact, that Lindskoog knew Lewis’ works less well than she thought she did. In a sketch of her in the biographical appendix, he politely overlooks all the titles she published in her efforts to ruin him and praises the “wonderful fortitude” with which she bore her multiple sclerosis. And on page 1669 he points out (again, with devastating matter-of-factness) that Alastair Fowler, writing in The Yale Review, disclosed that he had seen the manuscript of The Dark Tower in Lewis’ company before Hooper had met either Lewis or Fowler.

In addition to containing Lewis’ letters to Lindskoog, this volume has Lewis’ nine letters to Hooper himself. These reveal that Hooper and Lewis became genuinely close in the short time they knew each other and that (contrary to Lindskoog’s claims) Lewis did intend Hooper to become his permanent and paid secretary. In 1963, about a month before he died, Lewis wrote: “Now about money. It’s not so much that I can do nothing as that I am ashamed to offer to a scholar and a gentleman what a servant wd. reject as an insult. I could go (forgive me—I can hardly bear to write it down) to £5 a week.”

Although Lewis was a bad judge of his financial situation, he was good judge of character. The expertise with which Hooper has edited these three superb volumes shows that he is indeed a scholar. The graciousness with which he handles the memory of his would-be nemesis confirms—if anyone had been in doubt—that he is also a gentleman.

Michael Ward is Chaplain of Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge, and author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I‘m the right person to review this book. I grew up in the shiny new L.A. suburbs in the early 1960s, and for my fourth birthday, my parents took me to Disneyland—then itself still shiny and new. We rode the Mad Hatter’s Teacups, took the boat ride through the jungle, visited radiant Tomorrowland. And then, on the way out through Main Street, we came across the capering Disney characters. Mickey himself frolicked my way—and proceeded to stomp on my small foot with his big wooden shoe. It hurt, and it scared me too—this big-headed rodent, a confusing blend of real and pretend. In our newer, more litigious age I’d probably have been able to collect a million or two for psychic damage, but at the time I just limped away as fast as ever I could. It’s possible that a seed of ambivalence toward mass entertainment culture was planted then and there, though in fact I remember many subsequent Sunday evenings watching quite happily many years of The Wonderful World of Disney. All I know is, it made a big impact on me.

But then, Mickey and Uncle Walt (and at times they were very nearly the same) made a big impact on everyone in the 20th century. Disney was by no means an insignificant artist—he and his team of animators made major breakthroughs in the visual arts. But his greatest innovations were as an impresario and a businessman, and by the time he was done his combination of image and music and merchandise and theme park had paved the way for the cocooned entertainment culture in which we now exist. Even more than Coke and McDonalds—and perhaps even more than the church—Disney was the great brand artist of his era, carving out a niche in most American brains and hearts. As the consumer society grew more secular, he supplied an easy and alternate creed, complete with icons, pilgrimage sites, and spiritual comforts. In the hymnal of the American religion, most of the happy, whistling tunes were his. He bears pondering.

Neal Gabler, it should be said at the start, has written a superior biography. His previous chronicles of Walter Winchell and of the studio moguls have won many plaudits; he understands the history of the movie business, especially at mid-century. With Disney, though, he had to go deeper, because he’s dealing with a man who made—consciously and unconsciously—the story of his life into the stories of his art, and then into one of the templates for our own understanding of the world.

Perhaps the key source for Disney’s dream world was the half decade, beginning at the age of four, that he spent in Marceline, Missouri. His family moved from Chicago, and would eventually move on to Kansas City, but the heart of his boyhood was spent on a small farm a mile north of the town’s grain elevator. “Despite its modest size, Walt would always recall the farm through the prism of a child’s wonder and always think of it as a paradise. Game abounded; there were foxes, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, and raccoons.” There were hogs, chickens, and cows, too, and five acres of orchards. There were boys to fish with, and sledding and skating; old Civil War veterans to retell battles; a sprawling rail yard:

But it was not just the homey appearance of Marceline or the cultural rites of passage he experienced there that Walt Disney loved and remembered and would burnish for the rest of his life; it was also the spirit of the community. In Marceline people cared for one another and were tolerant of one another. … “Everything was done in a community help,” Walt recalled. “One farmer would help the other, they’d go and help repair fences.” … He especially enjoyed the camaraderie of threshing season, when the wagons would be hitched behind a big steam engine and rumble thorough the fields, and the neighbors would gather to help, sleeping in the Disney’s front yard, and their wives would arrive too, all joining forces to cook for their men in a scene that Walt would always think back on fondly.

I quote at such length because, at some level, this is the America Disney really wanted to re-create.

But it wasn’t what he ended up reproducing, at least not most of the time, and perhaps that’s because he spent only a few years in Marceline. His father wasn’t much of a farmer; eventually he threw in the towel and moved his family to a working-class section of Kansas City, where he earned his living delivering newspapers. He worked his boys, Walt and Roy, long and hard—they were up at 3:30 to get out the morning papers, and the boys had to leave school half an hour early for the afternoon edition. On early winter mornings, sometimes “the cold and his tiredness would conspire, and Walt would fall asleep, curled inside his sack of papers or in the warm foyer of an apartment house to which he had delivered, and he would awaken to discover it was daylight and he had to race to finish the route.” He had to push himself out of poverty, and out of the tough and cheerless world his dominating and dour father created.

For that job, it turned out, he had the necessary skills: relentless enthusiasm and drive, a fair dollop of charm, and a particular talent for drawing. Ten years earlier and he would likely have become a newspaper cartoonist, but the new medium of film opened possibilities for animation, and Disney was quickly enchanted. He started a company drawing shorts for Kansas City theaters; eventually it folded and he moved to L.A., center of the movie business, where he founded another firm. (If there’s one section that drags in Gabler’s massive account, it’s this part of the story—the endless detail about whom he borrowed money from to meet yet another payroll could have been better spent on the last decade of Disney’s life, which gets comparatively short shrift.) Suffice it to say that the early work was crude and unsophisticated: gags mostly, done on short order and a tight budget. But Disney was obsessed with improving the quality of his films, both technically and emotionally, and he plunged every penny he made back into the business (much to the dismay of brother Roy, who spent his life running the financial side of the Disney enterprise). He progressed from a cat named Julius to a rabbit named Oswald to a mouse named Mortimer—no, change that to Mickey. And with that, a change in fortune. Partly because Mickey was appealing, and partly because he was one of the first cartoons that came with sound. Steamboat Willie, the six-minute short that really launched Disney, was essentially a mouse “in the throes of musical passion,” turning a goat into a hurdy-gurdy and a cow’s jaw into a xylophone.

Felix the cat, reigning champion of the cartoons, was knocked flat by noisy Mickey, who soon captured the world. In the early years of the Depression he was regarded as one of the top movie stars across America and Europe—an Austrian critic moaned that he was more popular than Mozart. Soon there were hundreds of Mickey Mouse Clubs in theaters across America—according to one paper, they had more members than the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts combined. And why? The professors weighed in, of course—he was an idealistic altruist, or a counterweight to the rise of totalitarianism, or a “representative of a jittery new machine age.” Gabler argues strenuously, though, that Mickey was mostly a projection of Walt himself—”his intrepid optimism, his pluck, his naïveté that often got him into trouble and his determination that usually got him out of it, even his self-regard, branded him as Walt’s alter ego.” Whatever else we might say about him, Gabler concludes, “Mickey Mouse is in thrall to his abilities of imaginative transformation. Whether he is turning an auto into an airplane or a cow into a xylophone, Mickey … like Walt Disney himself, is always in the process of re-imagining reality… . He makes the world his. In the end, Mickey Mouse was the eternal promise of cheerful solipsism.”

Solipsism, of course, no matter how cheerful, is the opposite of the community spirit that so enchanted Disney in his boyhood idyll. The two themes—Horatio Alger individualist pluck versus open-hearted camaraderie—competed for his soul, but over time the first almost always won out. The heart of Gabler’s book recounts Disney’s achievements in his greatest decade, the 1930s, and especially the story of the relentless, feverish dedication with which his team made Snow White, perhaps his greatest triumph, and Fantasia, perhaps his most unusual success. The movies—from Bambi to Dumbo—are true masterpieces, both of art and spirit. And yet they tend, as Gabler says, toward a pattern: “the Disney theme of embracing maturity and responsibility and taking control of one’s own destiny, even at the risk of being exiled from one’s safe and satisfying childhood oasis.” Autobiography made art.

And art made autobiography yet again. Because Disney never stopped yearning for that lost community he had known in Marceline, and he attempted to build it in his ever-expanding studios. At first the combination of round-the-clock work, initial success, and adventure on the cutting edge of a new (and funny) art made the workshop a kind of paradise, albeit overcrowded and overheated, where people willingly put in endless days and months. “Walt had always loved social organizations, always loved to forge people into a happy unit,” Gabler writes. There were no time clocks, pay was high, a volleyball court waited across the street. One time he told an employee, with a sense of real pride, “this whole place runs on a kind of Jesus Christ communism.”

The fly in the ointment was the need for control, for domination. When he built the huge new Disney studio in Burbank at the end of the 1930s, he designed a worker’s paradise—even disassembling the animator’s chairs to figure out how he could make them more comfortable. There were snackbars everywhere; you could order a sandwich and a cup of beer brought to your table: think Silicon Valley at the height of the dotcom era, with cartoons instead of search engines. But as Disney was becoming famous, he also was increasingly distant, “more distrustful of what people wanted from him.” He could be contemptuous, sarcastic, downright nasty. And he never shared credit with the people who were actually doing the drawing (even the drawing of Mickey Mouse). When one animator, who had worked for years on Pinocchio, went to see a preview and noticed his name never appeared on the screen, it “made me realize I was still just another sketch man, just one of the mob, and I was depressed for weeks afterward.”

In the late 1930s, in left-wing Hollywood, the reaction to Disney’s high-handedness was inevitable: a union. And Disney’s reaction was probably inevitable too: complete revulsion, complete opposition, a scorched-earth decision to fire the organizers. On the first day of the strike, as he came to the gates of the studio, one of the animators shouted, “There he is, the man who believes in brotherhood for everybody but himself.” The strikers won, and Disney was forever embittered. He became convinced that communists were behind the unrest, and he went before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to complain that it was leftists from the Daily Worker and, bizarrely, the League of Women Voters, who had undone him.

The studio continued, of course. Indeed, in the 1950s it flourished as never before, as television proved the ideal and insatiable market for everything Disney could churn out. But he no longer had his heart fully in it, and in any event was no longer spending the money or the effort to make sure the movies and shorts were really great. Animation, which was expensive, became less and less important; cheaper live-action films, from Davy Crockett to The Absent-Minded Professor, became the new bread and butter.

Walt didn’t care, because his need for control had found a new outlet: Disneyland. He began to plan his new park obsessively, drafting and redrafting every inch, and when construction had begun he patrolled the site every hour, ordering trees moved and ponds re-dug. America had seen plenty of amusement parks before, of course, but they were places like Coney Island: “noisy, chaotic, bombastic, subversive.” Disneyland was to be different—”an architecture of reassurance,” its buildings slightly smaller than they should be so one would feel larger standing next to them. No cigarette butt would rest on the pavement for more than a few seconds before a well-trained “cast member” would sweep it up. “When critics would later carp that Disneyland was too serene, too clean, too controlled, too perfect, they were right,” says Gabler. “It was what one might have called the ‘tragedy of perfection,’ with all that was human driven out. … It was a modern variant on the City on a Hill of Puritan dreams. It was the consummate act of wish fulfillment.”

Its fantasy worked both backwards (Main Street) and forwards (Tomorrowland)—only the present was missing. It’s perhaps not surprising that Ronald Reagan was one of the announcers for the TV special that heralded the park’s opening in 1955, a day that marked one of the first (but certainly not the last) fuzzy-lensed new “mornings in America.”

The vision sold, of course, sold like nothing before or since. Within two years, more people were visiting Disneyland than the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone or Yosemite; today, Disneyworld in Orlando pretty much defines mass tourism. The corporate tie-ins were everywhere—Monsanto’s all-plastic House of Tomorrow, for instance, or Arco’s Autopia. It was a perfect corporate world: “Disneyland had no ambiguity, no contradictions, and no dissonance.” The very opposite, that is, of a real town, a real community, but the model for all that was to come, from the fixed smile of the McDonalds cashier to the washed-out pastels of too many megachurches:

At Disneyland the guests were part of the overall atmosphere of happiness, and they reveled in their own manipulation because it was so well executed, because it was so comfortable and reassuring, and perhaps most of all, because it was so empowering to know that someone could actually have achieved this. In the end, it was not the control of wonder that made Disneyland so overwhelming to its visitors; like so much else in Disney’s career, it was the wonder of control.

The theme parks made money, the television shows made money, the merchandise made money—the enterprise coasted through the last decade before Disney died of lung cancer. (And no, he wasn’t frozen, though the control motif makes it easy to understand why people spread the rumor so fast and so far.) He made only one great movie in his waning days, and it was an unusual one: Mary Poppins, which has more than a hint of the subversive—of the child lurking inside the captain of industry, and not the captain of industry lurking inside the child. But it was too late to alter his destiny, and he died, in Gabler’s words, “quite possibly the most famous man in America” but also “among the loneliest.” With neither the consolations of religion or close friendship, he bowed out ten days past his 65th birthday, so terrified of death that he hadn’t even left instructions for his burial. He was cremated, his ashes interred in a remote corner of the vast (and very orderly) Forest Lawn cemetery.

This, ultimately, is a sad story. There’s a chance he might have been better off if he’d lived out his days in Marceline—and for all the pleasure he provided, there’s a chance America might have been better off too.

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author most recently of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, just published by Times Books.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins.—Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation

1.Dawn

All through his body is a joyful pulseThat says his love’s more wide and canyon-deepThan anyone can tell—the morning dewIncreases him, and he wraps round the Earth.

2.Noon & Night

Inside his skull, the innocence of sharksDisperses fins of rainbow, ruby, pearl;Within the heart’s a beat unspeakable,Though peaceful, tethered to a coral branch.

3.At all Times, in all Places

He’s sportive in eternal founts of timeWhere all of past and future surge as one,Where trooping waves dance up a shingle beach,Laughing and tossing bright confetti wealthOf burnished glass and conch and weed to shoreIn tide that’s full yet always coming in.

Marly Youmans’ The Curse of the Raven Mocker was recently issued in paperback (Firebird).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

i.m. (1953-1998)

I’ve had so many good thingshappen to me. So why not me?

And why not there, in that relic-worthy skull, where his good-willedthrust and parry with the local press existed in its jocular fullness?

I think Christwould do it that way. OrSteve Garvey.

Hardly a laureled Hall of Famer, but saintly in the modern sense, still heroenough, emblazoned on my place mat, his submarine curveball thrown.

No man is worth more than another, and none is worth more than $12.95.

He’d be clutch in the ninth, seal the game after afternoon bullpen slumber:those summer double-headers in the grim bubble of the Metrodome:

I don’t think there are any good usesfor nuclear weapons, but this might be one.

I-70 World Series that year, whole state euphoric, that autumn of ’85.Was a Royals victory “God’s will”? Of course! Their winning meant I’d be assertive.

God is concerned with hungry people and justice, not my saves.

New boy in Cardinal Country, I crowed and wagged my mouth and gallopedto class wearing a plastic batter’s helmet. When last bell rang I got my ass whipped.

I’m here! It’s Merry Christmas!

There are toys in my locker. Gloves and bats and balls.

Friend of Dad’s swore Quiz was a neighbor, single men in suburban apartments.He gave me a signed ball (real? maybe? doubtful now) for a birthday present.

I have seenthe future, and it’s much like the present,only longer.

No idea where that ball went. For ten years I’ve been reprobate, estrangedby boredom from the mediocre Royals. The game never changes, but people change.

Brett Foster is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College, where he teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Brilliant. Brave. And a perfect picture of magnanimity.

These are the words I have always used to describe my friend and mentor, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Now I write them in memory, with the mixture of grief and joy that comes with this privilege.

I first met Betsey in 1995, when I was doing graduate work in English at Emory University. I took her “Southern Women Writers,” the first of many seminars I would have with her. She was a historian by training, but in her teaching and scholarship, a humanities guru. Educated primarily at Harvard, her scholarly interests began with her investigations of the origins of physiocracy, and from there naturally expanded to the antebellum South, which was also her husband’s scholarly terrain. Her award-winning book Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South is a testament to the things that mattered most to her: impeccable, morally committed scholarship that endures. It also illustrates her lifelong commitment to the cause of feminism, which for Betsey was always about real justice for real women. Within the Plantation Household is a work of history, with all the usual trappings, but it is also a window into the lives of ordinary southern women, who are given the opportunity to speak for themselves. The book is perfect picture of Betsey’s convictions, for she always spoke for herself with courage, and encouraged countless other women to do so. Including me.

I remember timidly approaching her in the quad during a break, when she was smoking one of those dark cigarettes she loved (and later gave up). I asked her if she would direct my dissertation research; what I got was a broad smile and the beginning of a friendship. What I did not know until later was that it was a serendipitous time for both of us to meet. Make no mistake about it: while I hope I was an encouragement to her at an exciting but tumultuous time in her life, I know I got the much better end of the deal. She was an ideal mentor, the kind most graduate students can only dream about. She read my work carefully, and even line-edited it (she was a lucid and meticulous writer). She took me out to lunch more times than I can remember, which I would have appreciated even had I not been the bean-eating graduate student that I was. I have wonderful memories of dinners with her and her husband, Gene—along with other academic sorts—at their home in Atlanta. If you escaped being knocked over by their large dogs at the door, you were treated to a delicious meal. Betsey was an academic who could also cook, which says a lot about her. We often talked about nfl football. She even tried, at my request, to set me up with young men she respected. What I appreciated most was that under her care, I was neither a pet mind to indoctrinate nor a tool with which to fight other academics. She respected me and wanted me to succeed, to write about things that mattered to me, and to do so shrewdly—but also without fear.

I didn’t know at the time we met that she was nearing the final stage of her full reception into the Catholic church—and about to become the brunt of hostility occasioned by her conversion. I had entered Emory as a bit of a pariah myself: an evangelical studying American literature. But because of Betsey’s faithfulness,

I was able to work with a woman who not only respected my faith commitments—which she would have done even before her conversion—but also now fundamentally shared them. It was a privilege to sit in a graduate seminar on Flannery O’Connor with an accomplished scholar who was seeing these texts with new eyes herself.

Like O’Connor, Betsey thought of her faith as the natural outworking of intellectual honesty and a commitment to the truth. It is thus not surprising that in reflecting upon the arc of her life, a favorite passage of hers from another southern writer, Eudora Welty, came to my mind:

The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.

I know that Betsey’s turn to the Catholic church was this kind of moment for her. In her essay “A Conversion Story,” appearing in First Things, she noted that many of her fellow academics were mystified by her faith journey. But for her there was continuity. Marxist theory—which she and her husband had earlier embraced—is, at its core, an ethical critique. She wrote that “over the years, my concerns about morality deepened, and my reflections invariably pointed to the apparently irrefutable conclusion that morality was, by its very nature, authoritarian. Morality, in other words, drew the dividing line between good and bad.” The academy had come to view morality in increasingly relativistic terms, and Betsey knew better. So she began to take very unpopular stands, such as believing that a woman can be, without contradiction, both pro-life and a feminist. Not only can be, but should be.

Betsey also found in the Catholic church a spiritual articulation of the very best parts of her scholarly vocation, to love and to serve others. She had already done that part well, but, fully committed to God, she began to do it with greater joy, even as she began to struggle more with her health. And against a world that measures value by accomplishment, she recognized that the most important legacy we can have as scholars and teachers is to see others as God sees them:

For if He loves us all, He also loves each of us. And recognition of that love imposes on us the obligation to love one another, asking no other reason than God’s injunction to do so […] knowing how little we merit His love, our best opening to the faith that He does lies not in the hope of being better than others, but in the security that His love encompasses even the least deserving among us.

I have tried to emulate Betsey’s style as a scholar and a teacher. But it is this core humility that I can only pray will characterize my life in the way that it has characterized hers.

Betsey, thank you. You will be missed.

Christina Bieber Lake is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. She is the author of The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor (Mercer Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

We have impatient eyes. In our video age, we expect that one picture will be replaced by another as fast as our brains can take them in. We flatter ourselves that we are the most sophisticated viewers ever, when all the while we demand images so crude, they can be exhausted in the blink of an eye.

We are impatient in a different way with sacred art—impatient with its very right to exist. Secular viewers would prefer to imagine that religious motivation inevitably produces bad art. Urbane Christians are so afraid of being caught endorsing propaganda that they shy away from the very art that expresses their own vision of the world—however good it might be.

Hence the Pre-Raphaelites continue to unsettle us, just as they did many of their contemporaries. Critics seem always to be looking for a way to set them aside without having to go so far as actually to claim that their art lacks merit. In Michaela Giebelhausen’s Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, however, the art of the Brotherhood receives a welcome, genuinely sympathetic treatment.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and the other Pre-Raphaelites were rebelling against the high art conventions of their day. They stood for paintings that were infused with meaning, often through symbolism, and executed with realism and meticulous attention to nature. Their self-chosen name was a deliberate provocation: what if medieval art was in some ways better than that of the Renaissance? (Charles Dickens was sufficiently scandalized to write a satire in which he projected the emergence of a Pre-Galileo Brotherhood which would deny that the earth revolves around the sun.) And yet, the glories of the Renaissance notwithstanding, the way its artists flouted realism was assailable. John Ruskin, a seminal intellectual inspiration for the Brotherhood, objected that the apostles in Raphael’s Christ’s Charge to Peter were “a faded concoction of fringes, muscular arms, and curly heads of Greek philosophers.”

The Pre-Raphaelites admired leading medieval religious painters such as Fra Angelico and Giotto for their earnestness and sincerity: they patently believed the Christian truths that their art depicted. Ruskin observed that art used to be a way of communicating faith, but the great themes of faith were now cynically employed simply for the sake of displaying artistic prowess. He grumbled about the typical modern artist who thought of a picture of the Madonna merely as “a pleasant piece of furniture for the corner of a boudoir.” The Pre-Raphaelites wagered their artistic reputations and lives on the premise that it need not be so. In our irony-soaked, “post”-everything age, we need them. Most of all, we need Holman Hunt.

Judith Bronkhurst’s William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné should be gratefully accepted as a gift to our age. A century from now, should the world endure, these volumes from Yale will be on display in some museum. A guide will speak reverently of them in hushed tones, conceding that having all of our images stored electronically is an advance in many ways, but lamenting that such physically beautiful objects as these are no longer being created. Her listeners will dream of owning these books the way that we dream of owning the original paintings they depict.

Mostly, these volumes are a gift to us because they can serve to re-train our impatient eyes, challenge our dismissiveness toward sacred art, and function as a catalogue of hope for those who have reached a cultural dead end. Unfortunately, neither Giebelhausen nor Bronkhurst is quite as sure-footed as Virgil when it comes to guiding us on this journey. Indeed, although Bronkhurst makes a few passing references to the evangelical influence on Hunt’s life and work, she is so unfamiliar with this terrain as to speak dismissively of “a bias toward evangelicanism [sic].”

Giebelhausen explains the need for her book thus: “Despite the centrality of religion to Victorian culture, this is the first study to engage with the theory and practice of religious painting in nineteenth-century Britain.” Lest anyone should make the embarrassing mistake of thinking that she personally believed any of the spiritual messages proclaimed in these works of art, Giebelhausen ends her acknowledgments with a disclaimer of sorts: “And finally, my biggest thanks go to my family and friends for taking my mind off Jesus.” This personal stance noticeably influences her work. She takes it for granted that God, like Prince Albert, did not outlive Queen Victoria. She writes as if the modern discipline of biblical criticism generated the compelling insight that people don’t rise from the dead. Nor is this personal distance redressed by a reasonably adequate factual grasp of the Christian tradition. Presumably projecting her own experience, Giebelhausen imagines that people learned to think of Christ fulfilling the offices of Prophet, Priest, and King by reading Thomas Carlyle.

The fundamental structural flaw in Giebelhausen’s presentation, however, is her inability or unwillingness to observe the influence of evangelicalism. One suspects that she could not envision herself defending evangelical works of art as innovative and compelling. In Painting the Bible, Hunt’s evangelical identity is literally confined to an endnote—and this was forced upon Giebelhausen by an unavoidably apt quotation from Hunt himself. Instead, the religious map is redrawn so that there are only two germane camps: “liberal Protestantism” (a full and final statement of Hunt’s religious identity, in this telling) and “the extreme High Church” (identified as the source of Hunt’s opponents).

As to the latter, the word “extreme” is apparently an attempt to deal with all the support that Hunt actually received from the high church. His main patron, Thomas Combe, after all, was a high churchman. Combe’s widow donated the original The Light of the World to, of all places, Keble College, Oxford, an institution whose high churchmanship can hardly be described as moderate. Hunt even made a wonderfully sympathetic portrait of an Anglican priest that emphasized his Tractarian zeal (New College Cloisters, 1852).

Core themes of evangelical Protestantism—personal conversion and atonement through Christ’s work on the cross—were the inspiration for almost all of Hunt’s great religious works of art. The Light of the World is as evangelistic a painting as one can imagine: a straight appeal for the viewer to open the door of his or her heart and let Jesus come in. Likewise, The Awakening Conscience was a direct call to be converted from a life of sin. The Shadow of Death drove home the point that Christ’s whole life should be viewed through the lens of his crucifixion. The Scapegoat is a piercing affirmation of penal substitution, a doctrine that liberal Protestants—then and now—endeavor to evade.

As to the evangelical emphasis on the Bible, not only was Hunt painting scenes taken from Scripture, but many of his pictures were also sermons. They even came complete with texts. Not content with having the biblical allusion embedded in the title or printed in the exhibition catalogue, Hunt pioneered a new practice of designing the frames for his major works, and he repeatedly had these inscribed with verses. (One of the delights of the second volume of the Yale catalogue is the inclusion of photographs of these ornate frames.)

The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple has Malachi 3:1, “And the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his Temple,” written out in the painting itself in both Hebrew and Latin, while the frame adds the New Testament reading (Luke 2:48-49) in English. The Awakening Conscience has, as its text, Proverbs 25:20. The Scapegoat has Isaiah 53:4 written out on the top of the frame, balanced by Leviticus 16:22 on the bottom. The third version of The Light of the World, designed for St Paul’s Cathedral, has Revelation 3:20 in capital letters at its base: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”

The frame for the first version of The Shadow of Death reads: “He made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant * * * And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross” (Phil. 2:7-8). Queen Victoria was so struck by the expression on Jesus’ face in this picture that she commissioned Hunt to make her a head-and-shoulders portrait of Christ based on The Shadow of Death. Hunt entitled this picture The Beloved, and had Psalm 40:7 inscribed on its frame. (It is still in the Royal Collection.)

So set aside any knowing reaction to The Light of the World which is initial and final all in the same cursory glance, and look at it again more slowly. All its deliberate fairy-tale, mystical qualities notwithstanding, it is in keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite commitment to nature. We can trust Hunt that the plants in the foreground are just right. Indeed, the Pre-Raphaelites’ conception of realism could entail a fantastical literalism. Hunt had a real lantern made out of brass to his exact design for the model to hold. The light had to be real: so, when the moon was full, Hunt worked on this painting from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Indeed, our Savior’s halo is less jarring for us than it might otherwise be because Hunt has made it resemble a full moon.

If this picture does not move us, it is just possible that the fault lies with us rather than it. Perhaps such a jaded reaction betrays that certain doors in our hearts have become overgrown with weeds. It was not so for the Victorians. The Light of the World could jolt and haunt them. Crowds comprised of every kind of person came to see the painting. Eventually, ministers led groups; schools organized outings. It was a sensation when it came to New York. Countless ordinary people bought a cheap, engraved copy to illuminate their homes. It was printed in numerous editions of the Book of Common Prayer.

There is no more poignant tribute to its potency than that the artist himself was spiritually transformed by it. Holman Hunt never paraded his conversion experience, but it was real, profound, and lifelong—and it was prompted by his work on The Light of the World. In addition to all the symbolism that he has left for us to explore in The Light of the World, Hunt literally buried a secret message in it. At the top of the picture, in a portion of the painting that he deliberately hid beneath the frame, Hunt wrote, “Me non praetermisso, Domine!“—a heartfelt plea for his Lord not to pass him by. These private words of devotion were only found when repairs were made on the frame in 1919, by which time Hunt himself had been dead for almost a decade. (They have been left exposed to view.)

Thomas Carlyle was not converted by The Light of the World. Disliking the way that Hunt had symbolized Christ’s priestly and kingly offices, he protested: “Ne’er crown nor pontifical robe did the world e’er give to such as Him.” Carlyle called upon Hunt to present a Jesus that was true to the actual life of the real man, one who was “toiling along in the hot sun,” his “rough and patched clothes bedraggled and covered with dust.” Almost twenty years later, Hunt answered this challenge with The Shadow of Death (first exhibited, 1873).

Once again, we are called upon to look more carefully. This painting is an even more thorough example of Hunt’s attentiveness to nature. It was by then his standard practice to go the Holy Land to paint his biblical pictures. He went to great lengths to paint the light as it is, constructing two sheds on a Jerusalem rooftop that were rotated every hour to follow the sun.

This level of detail, when the Brotherhood had first adopted it, was itself an offense to the academic painters of the Royal Academy. One critic had said in regard to Millais’s widely derided Christ in the House of His Parents, when it was exhibited in 1850, that the artist had wasted his talent “on the representation of wood-shaving.” Given the cluttered floor of Christ’s workshop in The Shadow of Death, Hunt clearly had not been cowed by this point of view. Moreover, he did not present Mary as the ethereal figure she traditionally was in religious art, but rather in strikingly specific Middle Eastern clothes and jewelry. For this painting, Christ’s halo is cleverly gestured at by the way that his head is framed in an arched window.

Hunt proudly observed that the subject matter itself was innovative: “amongst the old masters there is not a single one representing Jesus Christ working as a carpenter.” The working classes recognized that Hunt was giving them a Jesus who was one of their own—a Savior who had done honest, physical labor. They loved this picture. The real money was to be made in reproducing the image for the masses, and Hunt received for The Shadow of Death the highest price that any English artist had ever been paid for a picture and its copyright.

In The Shadow of Death, Jesus, after a hard day’s work as a carpenter, has paused to lift up holy hands in prayer to his Father in heaven. In so doing, his body happens to take on a cruciform shape. This prefiguring is deepened by his shadow on the wall. There, a wooden tool-rack serves in our imaginations as the horizontal plank of the cross. Mary has been rummaging in the chest where the gifts from the Magi are kept but, for an evangelical, the incarnation and epiphany always point to the crucifixion. Her pondering heart is arrested by the shadow of death on the wall.

What are we to make of the efforts of the Brotherhood? Ruskin’s reaction to the initially unfavorable reviews of The Light of the World is more forceful than ever: “We have been so long accustomed to see pictures painted without any purpose or intention whatsoever, that the unexpected existence of meaning in a work of art may very naturally at first appear to us as an unkind demand on the spectator’s understanding.”

The comments of a teenage Beatrix Potter when she viewed Hunt’s The Triumph of the Innocents ought to serve as a retort to everyone who complains about Hunt’s willingness to insert abstruse symbolism: “My father objects to it that he can’t understand it, but I had rather a picture I can’t understand than one with nothing to be understood.”

Ford Madox Brown, himself an honorary Pre-Raphaelite, conceded that “stepping backwards is stumbling work.” Despite all the faux bravery of our endlessly proliferating “post”- movements, it strikes me that it would take far greater courage in our day for a few hearty souls of real intellectual mettle to pursue some daring “pre”- experiment. The Pre-Raphaelites knew that it is harder to recover what was good in the past than to deride what was bad. What they were searching for—and what I believe they found—was not a nostalgic retreat but rather a faithful manifestation of what Paul Ricoeur alluringly spoke of as a “second naiveté.” Evangelicals call it being born again.

Timothy Larsen is currently a Visiting Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge University. In July he begins as 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).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“I don’t want to die.”

“Neither do I, baby, but if I have to, I’m gonna die last.”

That’s a bit of romantic dialogue between two characters from Out of the Past, one of the films featured in the Film Noir Classics Collection. The fifteen films in these three box sets were originally released between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s. (A fourth volume, featuring ten films, is promised later this year.) They thus bypass the early period of noir, defined by such classics as Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, films whose viewing by French critics in the middle of the decade gave rise to the noir tag in the first place, but they include such gems as The Asphalt Jungle, The Set-Up, Murder My Sweet, Dillinger, On Dangerous Ground, and Narrow Margin. Clearly there’s a growing contemporary interest, both popular and critical, in film noir. Book-length analyses of the historical, cultural, and philosophical roots and implications of film noir continue to multiply—including two noteworthy recent examples, Mark Conard’s edited volume, The Philosophy of Film Noir, and John Irwin’s Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them. Even this limited sample of films and books gives evidence of the rich philosophical resources in noir; its penchant for subversive, anti-Enlightenment themes; and its revival of a peculiar kind of quest.

As the discussion of the essence or nature of film noir in the books from Conard and Irwin indicates, critics seeking a unifying definition of noir as a genre have failed to achieve consensus. Still, the films grouped under the noir label exhibit what philosophers call family resemblances, including recurring themes (criminality, infidelity, get-rich-quick schemes, and seemingly doomed quests), dominant moods (anxiety, dread, and oppressive entrapment), typical settings (cities at night and in the rain), and peculiar styles of filming (sharp contrasts between light and dark and tight, off-center camera angles). Noir is certainly a counter to the optimistic, progressive vision of postwar America; subverting the rationality of the pursuit of happiness, noir turns the American dream into a nightmare. Noir also counters the Enlightenment vision of the city as the locus of human bliss, wherein human autonomy and rational economics could combine to bring about the satisfaction of human desire. Instead of Enlightenment progress, with its lucid sense of where we are and where we are going, noir gives us disconcerting shadows and a present tense that is incapable of moving forward because it is overwhelmed by the past. In the noir universe, progress and autonomy are debilitating illusions. The title Out of the Past is a synecdoche for much of the noir genre.

Noir films regularly focus on characters who manage, at least for a period of time, to lead decent, peaceful, domestic lives—until some chance event pulls them back into their past, and the history of violence repeats itself and engulfs the protagonist. One of the original models for this motif is Out of the Past, which scholar James Ursini in his commentary track calls a “perfect noir.” The film opens with Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) living near an idyllic lake in the Sierras with Ann, his devoted girlfriend. Soon a stranger arrives and demands that Jeff come with him to see a gangster for whom Bailey had once worked in New York. On his way to the meeting, a long drive from the country to the city, Jeff confesses to Ann the details of his past. His current plan, it seems, is to return to the world of his past in the hope of re-emerging unscathed to continue his peaceful life with Ann. But when he visits his former employer, he also runs into Kathie (Jane Greer), an archetypal noir femme fatale, with whom Jeff has also had dealings. The plot is deliberately baroque in structure and requires multiple viewings to figure out its implications. What is clear up front is how acutely aware Jeff is of his own entrapment. “I think I’m a frame,” he admits at one point, but he continues to submit himself to the manipulations of others, particularly the magnetic and deadly Kathie. The question hinted at in the lines quoted at the outset of this essay—who dies last?—is subordinate in the viewer’s mind to a more fundamental question: can Jeff make it out of the past? Yet, since Jeff’s quest never fully transcends self-interested curiosity, the film thwarts viewers’ desire for intelligibility even as it manages to provide some negative satisfaction of the desire for justice—no one wins.

Yet other sorts of quests, less self-interested, populate the world of noir as well. As Irwin notes in his fine comparison of noir criminality with the “fair-play method” of traditional “analytic detective fiction,” the clear sense of justice publicly affirmed or even a neat solution of the plot is absent from noir. Instead, what noir presents is a “puzzle of character” in a world where it is unclear even what the most important mystery is. Not the one-dimensional struggle between the detective and the criminal but that struggle intertwined with another and often more significant struggle, between the detective and himself: this is the focus of the labyrinthine plot structure of noir.

A number of these themes are on display in the most influential film from the first volume of the Noir Classics collection, The Asphalt Jungle, whose very title nicely encapsulates the world in which noir is most at home: the dark city with its tall buildings blocking out natural light and entrapping human beings in a labyrinth. That is precisely the setting for Asphalt Jungle, where the city is never directly lit by sunlight and the interiors are typically windowless. Although the plot itself is not all that complex or compelling, the film provides rich background stories on a number of individuals conspiring in a theft. The two most interesting characters are at opposite poles of the criminal world. An elderly and well-educated mastermind named Doc (Sam Jaffe), who has just been released from prison, orchestrates the plan for a heist. Doc, the brains, enlists the services of Dix (Sterling Hayden), the brawn, a man with a gambling addiction.

There is a sense of fatalism about the entire scheme; its failure seems inevitable. But this does not mean that justice is clearly or optimistically affirmed. In the world of The Asphalt Jungle, criminals abound partly because of the corruption of official law enforcement. Toward the end of this film, a bad cop is arrested and the DA proclaims, “without cops, the jungle wins.” He goes on to describe the bad guys as men without feeling or mercy, whom the police will hunt down and bring to justice. That may be true of the cold calculations of Doc, but it is not an apt description of Dix. In an ironic and fitting twist on John Huston’s observation (in an introductory bonus track) about each character having a dominant vice, Doc’s petty lust proves his undoing. He nearly escapes at the end, but when he lingers to admire a young beauty dancing in a diner, the delay enables the cops to catch up with him. Meanwhile, an injured and bleeding Dix escapes with his girlfriend, Doll, from the city and into the light of country, to his childhood farm. In a genuinely moving scene, a rapidly fading Dix talks of his childhood and then dies with his weeping girlfriend by his side. The ending indicates that the official account of these individual lives would be wrong to see them as lacking every vestige of humanity. Dix may not be virtuous, but he is not unsympathetic either.

Because most noir films do not offer any clear way out of the trap, noir has with some regularity been decried as nihilistic, as a degenerate art form. Such pejorative evaluations can be traced as far back as the mid-1940s, when the French invented the phrase “film noir.” In a seminal essay, Jean-Pierre Chartier expressed distaste for the new wave of dark American films because of their “pessimism and disgust for humanity,” with characters who are “monsters, criminals” and who fail to “rouse our pity or sympathy.” But that judgment is misguided even for a film as saturated with criminality as The Asphalt Jungle. Moreover, Chartier’s pejorative appraisal fails to explain why noir has proven so popular and so enduring—indeed, many of Chartier’s compatriots adored the genre.

What exactly Europeans were seeing when they admired American film noir is another question. In an essay in the Conard volume, “Film Noir and the Frankfurt School,” Paul Cantor goes so far as to assert that noir as we have come to understand it is not really American but rather a “European projection.” Cantor’s thesis makes for provocative reading, but it doesn’t stand up very well next to Irwin’s account, which persuasively locates the development of noir out of the quintessentially American genre of hard-boiled detective fiction.

Of course it matters what films are included in the canon and what films are excluded. The loosening up of the categories defining film noir has led some, such as R. Barton Palmer (“Moral Man in the Dark City” in The Philosophy of Film Noir), to draw attention to unduly neglected films that deserve to be called redemptive—not in the sense that they advocate “cheap grace” or easy salvation but in that they depict an “authentically penitential” path of “difficult spiritual growth.”

Only one film in the Noir Classics collection, Narrow Margin—a twisting train thriller—has an unabashedly light and decidedly happy ending. This does not mean, however, that more or less overt ethical endings are alien to noir. Unusually direct in its moral lesson, Crossfire is the story of an investigation into an apparently motiveless murder. The film makes ample use of the stock noir technique of flashback as the events surrounding the murder are retold from multiple points of view. Its ending lays bare the ugly anti-Semitism at the root of the culprit’s action.

A lesser-known boxing film, The Set-Up, features Bill “Stoker” Thompson (Robert Ryan) as an aging boxer, “just one punch away” from success. Shot in real time, the film focuses on Bill’s last-chance boxing match in (where else?) Paradise City. Viewers know what Bill does not, namely, that he has been set up by his manager to take a fall. Partly because of his victim status and partly because much of the action is communicated through the perspective of Bill’s anxiety-stricken wife, the audience sympathizes with his plight. The ending of the film manages to combine physical brutality with the lingering possibility of love and fidelity; it suggests that, even in the midst of a corrupt world, a certain kind of integrity is still possible and that, in certain circumstances, defeat can be victory.

But the film in these collections that most closely fits Palmer’s thesis is On Dangerous Ground, directed by Nicholas Ray with a score from Bernard Herrmann. The story centers on Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan again, in a superb performance), a cop whose residual commitment to justice isolates him from everyone else and sets him on a potentially self-destructive course of violence. In a seedy, urban setting where no one is trustworthy, Wilson uses force to accomplish his ends. To an informant who is not fully forthcoming, even in the midst of beatings, he says, “Why do you make me do it? You’re gonna talk. I always make you punks talk.” He calls another cop “garbage” and asks, “how do you live with yourself?” When Wilson is sent out of town, up north where the mountains are covered with snow and sunlight, he encounters a blind girl who eventually becomes a means of his moral and psychic regeneration, as he recognizes the possibility of living by a code other than brute force. In his useful commentary track, Glenn Erickson comments that, far from offering a superficially tidy resolution, Ryan’s credible depiction of character transformation requires better acting than the standard fatalism of noir.

One of the emerging themes in noir criticism has to do with noir narration as the attempt to come to terms with a loss of clear moral codes, with a certain kind of absence—in short, with what Conard identifies (“Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir”) as the death of God. Conard’s thesis overlaps in this respect with that of Irwin, who sees the noir detective as attempting to sustain an archetypal American ethos of doing over being, devoting himself to work in a world from which God has vanished, a world void of “hope or fear of an afterlife.” But, as Irwin’s exposition of the career of Raymond Chandler’s detective Marlowe illustrates, this quest ends up “hollow and empty” (the words are Marlowe’s).

This universal sense of defeat strikes a strange, democratic note, not because it reflects the noble Enlightenment mottos of dignity, rights, or autonomy, but because no one wins. Indeed, the anti-reformist bent of noir renders problematic the assumption that noir is a Marxist vehicle, as many critics have argued. Even where there is reform, it is personal, often outside the modern city, and decidedly apolitical. Clearly many of those associated with the Hollywood production of noir films were associated with communism. Not without reason has noir seemed to many critics to offer a Marxist critique of capitalism, of a mechanized humanity dominated by instrumental rationality, wherein the pursuit of happiness is reduced to the futile desire for wealth. The fake bird, the rara avis, that consumes the aspirations of the characters in The Maltese Falcon, for example, can be nicely interpreted as a fetish object, emblematic of capitalism’s creation of false needs.

But noir has also a deeply conservative bent, which accentuates the inherent and ineradicable limits of the human condition. In classic noir, the violation of limits is rarely, if ever, successful, and whatever glimpse of redemption characters may have is always partial rather than revolutionary, personal rather than political. Moreover, noir exhibits an ethical thrust that transcends limited political labels: an ethics of discourse, a quest to discover a lost code, what scholar J. P. Telotte identified as the desire to “speak the truth about the human condition” or at least to narrate the “difficulty” of speaking that truth. Repudiating old-fashioned American optimism but never quite succumbing to despairing nihilism, noir’s most captivating characters are those who, in the words of Pascal, “seek with groans.”

Thomas Hibbs is dean of the Honors College and Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture at Baylor University. He is the author most recently of Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion, forthcoming this summer from Indiana University Press.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1996, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington proposed a paradigm for understanding the world of the 21st century. He argued that the major civilizations would inevitably be the source of most major future conflicts because of their very different worldviews and understandings of personal identity and religious meaning. Since the publication of Huntington’s book, numerous events have lent support to his thesis: terrorist attacks in the United States, Spain, and England; the concern over Muslim immigration in Europe and Hispanic immigration in the United States; the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the war in Iraq. Of course not all scholars agree with Huntington’s perspective; in part, his book was itself a response to Francis Fukuyama’s argument that Western liberal democracy was evolving as the dominant form of human government and that the future would see only minor conflicts over peripheral issues.

The issue of the correct lens through which to see both world history and future events is a controversial one, and the book reviewed here, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails, by Michael L. Tate, is not an attempt to provide a big-picture explanation of the forces that generate either cooperation or conflict. Still, Tate’s work sheds some light on the question of whether civilizations and different worldviews are ultimately and always in conflict.

Tate examines a specific period in U.S. history and a specific set of events, namely the relationship between the Native Americans and the overland travelers in the heyday of wagon train emigration, from 1840 to 1870. During this period, more than 550,000 men, women, and children moved via wagon trains from jumping-off places such as St. Joseph, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska to Oregon and California. In his case-study of this experience, Tate provides counter-evidence with respect to prevailing wisdom about how civilizations interact. He argues that popular images of a “clash of civilizations” on the overland trail are vastly overdrawn; indeed, “this vast region along the trails was more of a ‘cooperative meeting ground’ than a ‘contested meeting ground.’ “

In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that Tate’s work fits well with my research with Terry L. Anderson, where we also argue the West was not nearly as violent or anarchic as usually pictured.1 We find, as Tate does, that Indians and settlers interacted rather peacefully for a long period of time. We also find that effective systems of internal governance evolved for wagon trains; that the several thousand mining camps in the Sierra Nevadas were able to discover and enforce workable rules for establishing and maintaining claims that did not involve large amounts of violence; and that the movement of cattle from Texas to the northern ranges was primarily an exercise in cooperation rather than conflict. We argue that the evolution of water rights and irrigation institutions was remarkably effective, and that home-grown institutions such as the round-up among cattle ranchers solved most collective-action problems in a relatively peaceful way.

Tate takes up in much more detail, however, a very specific issue with respect to popular conceptions of violence and conflict on the frontier: the familiar assumption that wagon trains making their trek from their points of embarkation to the gold fields in California or the farming land in Oregon faced constant depredation from the Indian population. Tate is a careful scholar and presents considerable evidence that both the members of wagon trains and the indigenous population saw enormous potential for gains from trade through repeated interaction. The differences in wealth levels and knowledge of the two populations meant there were numerous ways in which profitable trades could occur. In many cases, Indians settled along the trail and established themselves as middlemen in the exchange system, trading native goods for manufactured items that were both more valuable to themselves and to remote tribes further from the trail. The Indians also provided ferry service across many rivers that were difficult to ford, acted as guides, and also provided fresh draft animals in trade for worn out ones along the trail.

To be sure, misunderstandings oftentimes stood in the way of beneficial interaction—and most of the misunderstanding and distrust came from the westward travelers. Stories of fearsome attacks and the continual hostility of the Indian population were repeated numerous times and were well-embedded in the consciousness of those making the wagon train journey. Many emigrants expected to be attacked by the Indians, and their ongoing suspicion made commerce more difficult. Nevertheless, over time, the lack of frequent attacks did have an impact on the trekkers and most of them came to trust the Indians as honest entrepreneurs and faithful guides. The emigrants were further persuaded by numerous acts of charity and benevolence on the part of the Indians, who returned lost children, helped to search for strayed livestock, and sometimes risked their lives in rescuing settlers from dangerous rivers when crossings did not succeed.

Tate reports the work of other historians finding that from 1840 to 1860 period, only 362 emigrants were killed by Indians, a mere 18 mortalities per year for the period. By contrast, 426 Indians were killed by whites. These deaths mostly occurred in small skirmishes or as a result of misunderstandings about the true intentions of the Indians. There were few major incidents or even organized plans of aggression. Tate finds that from 1840 to 1870 there were only eight “massacres” in which organized Indian attacks were inflicted upon wagon trains. Most of these took place in the latter part of this thirty-year period as the Indians became more aware of the problem of resource depletion by European settlers and as attacks on Indians by the U.S. Army became more frequent.

One of the interesting issues that Tate does not deal with is how the existence of a standing army changed the balance of power and made it more likely that settlers would simply claim land and other resources rather than engage in honest negotiations with the Indians. Once the standing army was in place after the Mexican-American War, and with its subsequent build-up during the Civil War, there were more full-time officers and military bureaucrats, all of whose careers and budgets were advanced by fighting. Thus, is it not always the case that increased force on one side means more peace: rather it can lead to increased potential for conflict.

It is too much to claim that Michael Tate has provided a new way of thinking about interaction and conflict between civilizations, but his work is certainly important in understanding the dynamics of such encounters. Under certain sets of circumstances, people from very different backgrounds and with disparate understandings of the world have been able to interact peacefully, particularly when there are economic advantages from trading with one another.

This is not to say that cultural understandings and religious worldviews are unimportant; some of the major conflicts between the trekkers and the Indians occurred over misunderstandings of the role of gifts and what signing treaties meant. The ongoing conception of gift exchange and reciprocal obligation meant that the Indians often expected wagon train members to accept an obligation of reciprocity that was many times not understood by the travelers. Likewise, the Indians regarded the discussions surrounding treaty negotiations as an important part of a treaty agreement. Rather than seeing themselves as agreeing only to the explicit terms of the treaty they thought that their signatures meant they had heard all of the arguments on both sides of those engaged in negotiation. Despite these misunderstandings and the rising level of conflict toward the end of the period, Tate has nevertheless provided us with an important insight into a relatively peaceful period of interaction between two very different civilizations. We ought not to be too quick to assume that people of very different backgrounds will always find their interactions laden with conflict.

Peter J. Hill is professor of economics at Wheaton College.

1. Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.