Marilynne Robinson has been, for at least a generation, the most widely read and highly celebrated Christian writer in the United States. In her fiction and essays, she has positioned herself as the leading representative of what she holds to be the central, but increasingly embattled or ignored, tradition within American Christianity: the strain of mainline Calvinism. She argues throughout her work that this form of Christianity, eschewing both the emotionally intense “personal relationship with Jesus” characterizing evangelical piety and the sacramental, incarnational theology of Catholicism and other liturgy-centered denominations, has been itself the foundation of American cultural and political history, and particularly of progressive liberalism. Her message appeals to figures of our largely secular (or at least non-Christian) liberal establishment (notably, to Barack Obama) with its promise that American history and Christian faith, for all their apparently wild, divisive, reactionary contents, are basically “good” according to the canons of goodness uncontroversial among regular listeners of National Public Radio.
Whether in her funny, effusive first novel Housekeeping (1980) or the more somber, ruminative Gilead tetralogy (2004-2020), Robinson organizes her fiction through masterful techniques of uncertainty. Her narrator-protagonists are unreliable, their perspectives contradicted by those of other inhabitants of their small towns and at times belied by their own unfolding narratives. They change their minds, continually reappraising the meaning of past events and speculating about deep matters in displays of thinking that make Robinson one of the most skillful depictors of introspection’s otherwise invisible dramas. Her narrators model how thought—whether the inspired, disorienting flights of Housekeeping’s Ruth or the determined, earnest plodding of Gilead’s John—can transform the thinker. They reveal how crucial is the capacity to hold contending ideas and accept the demands of potentially troubling new ones to the right kind of life, a life that for Robinson should reconcile political liberalism and Christianity.
To some degree, Robinson intends her narrators to be realistic, to have access only to a specific range of cultural references plausible for a person of their background and education. This person is to some extent herself (a point she makes in her 2012 essay “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” which must take first rank in the category of Self-Congratulatory Titles), sharing many of the preoccupations that animate her non-fiction. A mainline Christian of Calvinist theology and liberal politics who has spent long periods of residence in Idaho, New England, and Iowa, Robinson is intensely present in her novels; meditative passages in the Gilead series, especially, sometimes appear to have been lifted straight from her autobiographical essays. But her fictional narrators never merely express a point of view that might be determined by their (or their author’s) social location and ideological commitments. The narrator of Housekeeping, in particular, reaches toward a more-than-human vision, ecstatic and anything but authoritative.
Readers are kept alert that the ideas appearing in Robinson’s novels, coming as they do from the minds of partial, imperfect, protean narrators, are not meant to command our assent or educate us, but rather to incite our own alternately delighted and vexed thinking. If Robinson’s fiction is pedagogical, and indeed theological, it teaches through indirection, not exhortation. It is, in this sense, liberal—as in, a liberal education, one that aims to make those it teaches freer to use their own abilities, to pursue the imperative to know one’s own mind that animates much of both the Protestant and secular liberal intellectual traditions (which teach us to ask, “Do I really believe…?”).
Robinson’s non-fiction, however, although ostensibly aimed at defending a certain sort of liberalism with which Robinson has long identified, is vehemently sure of its author’s possession (and a benighted readership’s lack) of the truth. It summons a wayward nation to return to traditional values with little of the humor, joy, and generative uncertainty that characterizes her fiction. The apparent contradiction between the two aspects of Robinson’s work is an opportunity to re-evaluate how the multiple meanings of “liberalism”—as politics, as belief, as pedagogy, as aesthetics—hang together, or fall apart, and how they complement or contradict a project of public Christianity.
It is no exaggeration that, as one astute reviewer at First Things has put it, Robinson’s essays are often “flippant and uncharitable” towards a host of real and imagined figures linked to what she takes to be the ills of secular modernity (when even First Things worries that a Christian intellectual is too uncharitable toward the modern world, that’s really saying something). When addressing contemporary social and political phenomena, her authorial voice seems to cross Old Testament prophet with the most pessimistic sort of post-war critical theorist, for whom everything the state or market offers is only a cynical, fatal ruse. Her first substantive work in this vein was Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution (1989), a jeremiad that indicted a nuclear waste facility in Britain as a danger equivalent to nuclear war and as a symbol of everything wrong with modernity. Moving with disturbing ease from alleged risks posed by the improper management of pollutants to totalizing condemnation of the past several centuries, Robinson notably argued that the British welfare state (then, of course, being rolled back by Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal government) was nothing but an extension of early modern Poor Laws and aimed, like them, “to make the poorest disappear.”
Throughout her collections of occasional writings—there are five collections of essays, plus Mother Country and her most recent work of non-fiction, Reading Genesis (2024)—Robinson clangs out vast, hostile, unprovable assertions like “[o]ur collective fiction is full of anxiety, empty of humor and generosity” or “we lost our aesthetic pleasure in the human presence.” These kinds of claims cannot be debated. They point to no facts about which speakers might find their way toward consensus. She engages with potential interlocutors only rarely, usually sparing readers specific examples of the cultural trends she bemoans. When she does name other thinkers with whose work she might initiate a conversation, it is, often, merely to dismiss them. She speaks of her favorite villains—Freud, Weber, and Darwin—with at times unintentionally comic anger, as in this bit of parataxis against the theory of evolution: “[W]hat in the world could have moved us to choose [to believe] anything so graceless and ugly? Darwinians to this day watch for murder in baboon colonies” (as though observing such behavior in animals were tantamount to sadism, and as though beliefs were to be evaluated based on their aesthetic qualities). Yet she insists, again and again, that she is unique among contemporary intellectuals in having actually read such foundational texts as the writings of Marx, or of Calvin, or the Old Testament. Few American writers display such consistent, deliberate refusal to even consider the value of the ongoing conversation about the topics they address.
Robinson’s fiction astonishes in its subtle play among and within changing perspectives, while her essays astonish in their brutal lack of what might be described as the epistemic virtues of a liberal subject. Given their belief in equality, liberals typically have some concern to cultivate, or at least evince, an ethic by which other people’s beliefs deserve respect, even when they could be judged to be incorrect. The liberal subject, although he may know himself to possess some important truth about human nature, the proper paths and ends of life, etc., knows just as well—or even better—that he has to live with others who see things differently, and has to live up to a cultural inheritance composed, in large part, of beliefs, ideals, and norms that seem to be incompatible with liberalism.
To be a liberal is, almost by definition, to live in an illiberal world, and to be the heir to an illiberal past. In regard to religion, for instance, a liberal in a Western society, even if she herself is not religious, cannot but be aware that most of her contemporaries, and nearly all of her literal and metaphorical ancestors, believed in a faith derived from the Bible—a text that, in either Testament, seems to promote genocide, slavery, hatred of unbelievers, and other forms of violence inimical to liberalism.
Liberals have a variety of strategies for containing the tensions that might be generated by the clash of opposing viewpoints—not least the clash in their own minds. These strategies include simply forbidding certain topics from discussion, creating what may appear arbitrary distinctions between mere “opinions” (too subjective to require justification) and respectable “beliefs” (too important to be criticized), and elaborating rules of debate that allow issues to be so intellectualized that they lose their polemical intensity. What may seem to be the fussy arcana of conversational rules, from those operating in polite small talk to those organizing academic conferences, are load-bearing features of liberal life.
Throughout the past two hundred years, critics of liberalism from Karl Marx to Carl Schmitt have condemned these strategies as cowardly evasions that make the most serious matters topics of idle talk and public indifference. Robinson often appears to be among such critics. Insofar as she explicitly rejects both the modern intellectual horizon in which liberalism emerged and frequently eschews the discursive practices that characterize intellectual disagreements among liberal subjects, she would appear to be an opponent of liberalism, drawing from the political rhetorics of the illiberal right and left in order to call her readers back to a Christian worldview that predates, and perhaps will undo, modernity, liberalism, and the styles of public speech associated with the latter.
Robinson insists, however, that she is a liberal, albeit a liberal of her own sort. As she declares in her first essay collection, The Death of Adam (1998), she takes a liberal to be someone who believes that “society exists to nurture and liberate the human spirit, and that large-mindedness and openhandedness are the means by which these things are accomplished.” This is a puzzling statement, since one can easily imagine a whole range of illiberal political visions whose exponents might see themselves as enlarging the human spirit with an open hand and a large mind (and who would ever say that they seek to do the opposite?). Her idiosyncratic definition of liberalism, it is true, usefully points to liberalism having both an end (human emancipation) and a means (an ethics of liberality). This is helpful in resisting tendencies to see liberalism as a merely formal program of abstract equality with little to say about how and why we should live. In its focus on something called “the human spirit” as the object of politics, however, it evinces an odd unconcern with actual people and the way they live and speak together. The “human spirit” seems to take precedence over individuals, communities, traditions, and conversations—which, unlike the vague unity of the human spirit, are inevitably quarrelsome.
Uplifting the human spirit seems a program for an official priest—or a commissar—who takes as her vocation the issuance of vatic demands, not the mission of a liberal intellectual (or a gentle pastor) tasking herself with awakening dialogue among individuals by inviting them, in the first place, to the silent conversation of thought with thought, and silence with the divine. Yet Robinson’s fiction enacts the liberal virtues that her non-fiction, in its strident assertions of liberalism, seems to lack and spurn. This could be explained as a function of the differences between the novel and the essay as forms–their dissimilar affordances and Robinson’s varying engagement with them. There have been, after all, other authors bullyingly tendentious or boringly conventional when speaking in their own voice, and brilliantly empathetic and surprising when speaking through fictional personae (the gap between, for example, the art and the opinions of Joyce Carol Oates or Viet Thanh Nguyen cannot but make readers grateful that fiction offers a means for petulant people’s mediocre ideas to be transmuted into something delightful and wise). Robinson’s case is of particular interest, however, not only because her prose is, at its best, so powerful and beautiful (and at its worst so emptily hectoring), but also because a peculiar, suggestive conjuncture in her biography suggests that among the styles of talk by which liberalism keeps itself aright, through its enduring, uneasy tension with its illiberal interlocutors, one of the most vital is a kind of comedy.
In the late 1970s, as Robinson began work on Housekeeping, she finished a Ph.D. dissertation that exemplified the illiberal mode characteristic of her later essayistic writing—a style of aggressive non-dialogue with other thinkers, by which the writer aimed to commune with trans-historical human spirit rather than speak with fellow human beings. Although it took more than a decade to complete, the dissertation, “A New Look at Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure and Meaning,” written at the University of Washington’s English department, is apparently modest in scope. It argues that a minor play is, if not one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, a solid, carefully constructed dramatic unity that expresses some subtle and unstraightforward thoughts about politics and history, and deserves greater respect among critics. “New Look” is remarkable, however, for containing in its central chapters no discussion of the secondary literature.
In an appendix, Robinson explains her “decision not to distract the reader from my own analysis by leaning upon or contending against the view of other critics” in the body of her text. She then evaluates half a dozen of their readings, one by one, measuring each against the standards of her own insights. Rather than framing herself, in conventional academic fashion, as someone who has mastered a large body of literature and hopes in her dissertation to contribute to it, Robinson casts herself as an isolated figure who alone has rightly appreciated a misunderstood text.
Her fault-finding outlines a theory of literature as the transmission of a Sacred Word. One scholar is castigated for having “use[d] the plays [of Shakespeare] to demonstrate a hypothesis that exists outside them.” Taking a given text as a means of thinking about, for example, literature in general, and its possible relationship to extra-literary fields (a mainstay of academic scholarship of the past several decades), is a derogation of readerly piety. It is an intellectual (and even moral) error, in Robinson’s eyes, to interpret a text as a “case” or “example” of something, including of the culture from which it emerged. She warns that to consider Henry VI as an expression of a historically distant world with norms, codes, and references that might resist and perhaps escape forever our understanding denies the validity of “our reactions” in the present, and reduces the play to an “unperformable” “artifact” with no relation to our own lives and feelings, the task of criticism being apparently to explain the relation between these and the enduring message of the text.
But even readers who diligently focus their attention on the text, and nothing but the text, without theorizing about it as symptomatic of trends in early modern English history or emblematic of problems in, say, psychoanalysis (Robinson evinces in her dissertation the contempt for Freud that would later mark such books as the 2010 essay collection Absence of Mind), can fail to give Shakespeare the respect he is due. Those who imagine that he bungled some passage, or that some dramatic effect—perhaps awkward, perhaps interesting—might have been unintended, propound “a notion which defeats criticism.”
Robinson gives the impression of having decided that Shakespeare is a genius and that therefore it is insulting to consider his works as anything other than perfectly formed wholes. Criticism, it seems, should serve to clarify the meaning—understood to be complex but ultimately coherent and timeless—of a transcendent text, not “use” it to reveal insights into politics, economics, psychology, etc.
Although she was not at this point in her career what we might call an explicitly Christian writer, Robinson already shows in her dissertation what could be characterized as an intensely “religious” and strikingly illiberal approach to literary texts and criticism, a kind of Great Books spirituality (one might note in passing that it is possible—and indeed commonplace—to promote “Great Books” and even “liberal arts” in a highly illiberal manner). She summons readers to bring “our reactions” to bear on the text, but only to the extent that these reactions bespeak a longing for the text to appear as a meaningful, relevant unity, and insofar as they show respect for the genius understood to be communicating across the centuries. Reactions sensitive to a text’s lapses, failures, and breaks, to what is baffling, offensive, and idiotic in it—all the feelings from boredom to outrage to mockery that sensitive young people bring to both the literature classes and religious services that we oblige them to attend—appear as violence against criticism, which is founded on a specific mode of seriousness (the expectant pursuit of something significant) towards ourselves and what we read.
Rather than framing herself, in conventional academic fashion, as someone who has mastered a large body of literature and hopes in her dissertation to contribute to it, Robinson casts herself as an isolated figure who alone has rightly appreciated a misunderstood text.
This is the Robinson of the latter essays: belligerent, isolated, condemnatory, fulminating, a warrior for the Good (which she presumes herself to know). But the Robinson of Housekeeping, which she began writing in the same period, is quite different—and suggests that not seriousness, but a certain kind of joyous, loving, comic disrespect, is the means by which we approach higher things and reconcile contending perspectives. Housekeeping is poignantly lyrical. But its passages that strain toward the poetic or vatic are tempered by a comedy that ranges from the subtle to the bonkers. The foundation for the novel’s tonal agility is its unique narrator, who is, ostensibly, Ruth, an eccentric woman of small-town origin who recounts the facts of her early life from the remove of many years. The narrator, however, knows, or seems to know, too many details about other characters—and posits too many theories about the world and beyond—to be identifiable strictly with Ruth. She speaks like an animated chrestomanthy of Anglo-American literature, not a sparsely educated itinerant from the rural Northwest, resembling in this respect the verbally effusive and unrealistic narrator of Moby Dick, which Robinson has named “the book I admire most in the world.”
The narrator of Housekeeping is neither omniscient nor a character with one point of view, but a continual motion between these two possibilities, floating above Ruth’s limited vantage and vocabulary. She can thus offer judgments of other characters that are at once pointed, like those of a catty Jane Austen heroine, and fantastically oneiric, such as: “my grandmother saw our black souls dancing in the moonless cold and offered us deep-dish apple pie as a gesture of well-meaning and despair.”
Many of the narrator’s funniest lines, however, come from a morbid sense of the grotesque, and skewering of conventional piety, clearly informed less by Melville than by Flannery O’Connor. It is difficult not to hear the influence of O’Connor in passages such as, “The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town’s history, and as such was prized. Those associated in any way with it were somewhat revered.” Here the reader’s own enjoyment of the grotesque bizarreries of the novel is at once doubled and satirized. The gossipy taking of pleasure in tragic bits of local color that we share with the folk of Fingerbone appears as something half-way religious, the unfinished draft of a desire for a miracle. If the similarities between ourselves and them, or the resemblances among trivial chatter, fiction, and spirituality, disturb us, they also point, perhaps, to the possibility of redemption, insofar as what is low and mockable turns out to be, as it were, a dim glimpse—a carnivalesque analogy—of deeper realities.
While writing both her dissertation and Housekeeping, Robinson shared her life with then-husband Fred Miller Robinson, a professor of English at the University of Washington, whose monograph on comedy in modern literature appeared in 1980, the same year as Housekeeping. While The Comedy of Language: Studies in Modern Comic Literature did not directly address his wife’s novel-in-process, in its discussions of such authors as Joyce, Faulkner, and Stevens it articulated a theory of comedy that accounted for (and perhaps was inspired by) Housekeeping’s power to provoke at once mirth and thought. The Comedy of Language argued that a particular form of verbal play, ironic and joyous, serves a double function of both preserving and transcending the categories, concepts, identities and ideologies by which we make sense of the world.
This sort of humor, Fred Miller Robinson insisted, is not deflationary (“making light” of what is mocked) but affirmative and expansive, opening readers’ minds to new horizons of meaning. Consider, for example, the final scene of Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart,” in which a pious and rather mentally limited Christian woman sees the Holy Spirit in the form of her beloved parrot. While Flaubert ridicules the woman’s (and by implication, the reader’s) poverty of religious concepts, the similarity, or indeed continuity, between love for a pet and love for God does not reveal either the one or the other merely absurd and mistaken, delusions of a benighted old fool, but hints rather at what Fred Miller Robinson calls the fundamentally “analogical” dimension of reality. Our everyday life and our spiritual aspirations are made in the image of each other; we have no extra-mundane means to express our extra-mundane desires and visions.
Humor of this sort pokes fun at the inadequacy of the forms by which we attempt to express our perceptions, intuitions and longings—and it pleasurably reconnects us to the ultimately inexpressible reality beyond language in which we are always fumblingly participating. Language neither accurately represents reality, nor can it be said to fail at doing so, but rather poses a changing sequence of imperfect analogies for the extra-linguistic Something Else that both surpasses and animates it.
Fred Miller Robinson points to authors whose work performs the sort of “metaphysical” comedy in which this slippage between language and reality appears hilarious and vivifying. He argues that it plays a vital function in both political and “theological” discourse, teaching readers how to endure, and even enjoy, the “clash” of apparently irreconcilable ideas and values—and, in particular, how to remain open to the call of new, perhaps spiritual truths without asserting them as final dogmas. Although he does not frame his theory of literature as either liberal or Christian, the humor he promotes is distinctly liberal insofar as it resists the closure of ideology—and the clash of rival views of the world—not through critique, or through a nihilistic denial of their meaning, but through the comic revelation of their relative inadequacy and analogical relation to a more complete, but inexpressible, transcendent source of meaning, not incompatible with faith.
This is the Robinson of the latter essays: belligerent, isolated, condemnatory, fulminating, a warrior for the Good (which she presumes herself to know). But the Robinson of Housekeeping, which she began writing in the same period, is quite different—and suggests that not seriousness, but a certain kind of joyous, loving, comic disrespect, is the means by which we approach higher things and reconcile contending perspectives.
The sort of humor that her husband theorized and championed suffuses Robinson’s first novel, in a rare (and surprisingly little-commented-upon) case of criticism and practice shaping each other. This makes the studied seriousness of Robinson’s dissertation, and later essays—and indeed the relatively more mournful, joyless, unironic tone of her Gilead novels—all the more notable. Robinson has not commented on either how her relationship to her husband and his scholarship informed her work—she might persuasively say that it didn’t—or how her relationship to comedy has changed over years and genres. The closest, perhaps, she has come to such a reckoning is in a rejection of the influence of Flannery O’Connor, whom she condemns, precisely, for being too funny, saying in a 2005 interview: “For some reason it is not conventional for serious fiction to treat religious thought respectfully–the influence of Flannery O’Connor has been particularly destructive, I think, though she is considered a religious writer, and she considered herself one.”
Robinson herself does not, apparently, consider O’Connor a “religious,” much less a Christian, writer, because O’Connor’s humor—her clownish, monstrous characters and sharp, cruel asides—that so informed Robinson’s own early work lacks proper respect. In the interview, Robinson goes on to clarify that what should be respected are the “real thoughts” of religious people, which are “beautiful and deep.” Crucially, she does not say that respect is due to God, a thought that might lead her to appreciate how a certain apparent levity or even contempt for the things and people of this world—attitudes familiar from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, the ministry of Jesus, Christian moralists such as Pascal, and novelists like O’Connor—might be a technique for pleasurably surprising listeners into re-evaluating mundane attachments as inadequate adumbrations of a better life.
Even in Housekeeping, religious experience often arises not from comic shocks and absurdities—what Paul called the “scandal” and “foolishness” of the Gospel—but rather out of the rhythms of everyday feeling, as a kind of sanction and semi-satisfaction of our wishes. Toward the end of Housekeeping, for example, Robinson’s narrator gives her most sustained consideration of God, in which the earthy life of Jesus appears like the outcome of our species’ collective vision-boarding: “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while he was on earth He mended families…. And when He died it was so sad…. His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until he was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that His friends felt him beside him as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him.”
There are many remarkable aspects of this retelling of the Gospels, in which Jesus is never named or set apart from God as his son, a distinct person. He is said to have “mended families”—although much of his preaching warns that families will be torn apart by his divisive teachings. His incarnation is an oddly passive affair, not of God so loving the world that he sends his only begotten Son, as Scripture goes, but of God being as it were forced by human beings to become one of them—and then forced again into a resurrection, which seems to come about through the force of mortal longing. In a profoundly human-centered vision—eschewing reference to Jesus, the Trinity, and God’s own will—our sorrowful, backward-turned desires have the power to transform reality.
It is a melancholic sort of manifesting, giving a bleaker cast to the core premise of New Age “positive” thinking: that our mental images and the stories we tell are powerful forces creating and re-creating the world. For all its emphasis on narrative, on the power of stories to make reality, it evinces little interest in dialogue—in the way that the stories we tell are told to other people, who have their own stories, disagreeing and jangling with ours, clashing and comically undercutting each other, and needing to be reconciled in terms of some third term, something beyond our stories and their power.
We should indeed, by this logic, respect religious feelings, since they are what made God, made him come to earth, and made him live again. The stories we tell about God are more important than God, who is scarcely distinct from them. He does not appear as an agent in, and beyond, history—much less does it appear that history might be read, comically, in light of the ironic distance between our pretensions and his plans, our self-perceptions and his perfect (albeit loving) knowledge of our faults. This humanist faith is at odds with Housekeeping’s vein of humor indebted to O’Connor, and with much of the Christian tradition. It is, however, quite like the faith that Robinson brought to her reading of Shakespeare in the dissertation she finished in 1977, just before beginning Housekeeping—a religion in which great texts convey important stories that sanctify our sense of our collective self-importance, a cult of sincerity about how meaningful the human adventure must be.
Robinson has since often recast Christianity as a humanistic religion, a faith fundamentally concerned not with God—and particularly not with Jesus—but with the unity and dignity of humanity, and the power of its stories. Her collection of essays What are We Doing Here? (2018), for example, claims that “[b]ecause God has created the universe, humankind is at the center of it all,” as her most recent book, Reading Genesis (2024) argues that the Hebrew Bible propounds a uniquely “exalted conception of humanity,” to which we are, at our best, heirs. Alex Engebretson, author of the most comprehensive study of Robinson’s fiction and essays, observes that she “has never written anything substantial on Jesus,” and sees the Incarnation as “a statement about the sanctity of humanity.”
For Robinson the Bible, along with such canonical secular texts as the plays of Shakespeare (“my theologian” she calls him in The Givenness of Things), speak of the infinite worth of the humanity to which they are addressed. Through such sacred texts, or Great Books, we tell each other stories about the precious significance of our lives—and without such telling, we risk falling deeper into the chasm of meaninglessness Robinson identifies with modernity. Her dissertation, her essays, and important moments of her fictions are exhortations that we believe in humanity, believe in narrative, and try very hard to think proper thoughts (which will include sad and angry ones, where appropriate).
The trouble—one trouble—with such pious injunctions is that by seeming to grant so much to humanity, and to our stories about ourselves, they risk closing us within those very stories, and closing us off from the realities beyond our language that The Comedy of Language had found so crucial to authentic metaphysical thinking. If we take ourselves—our species and our stories—with perfect seriousness, we risk losing our ability to communicate either with each other (anything less than proper respect for my story is a grave offense) or with whatever there may be beyond humanity, showing itself in the endless, funny failures of our seriousness.
To call for something like “Live–Laugh–Liberalism” may seem, well, laughable, absurdly inadequate in comparison to the dignity of a humanity set by the hand of God at the center of a universe and an unfolding story. But the contradictions of Robinson’s life and work warn us against trying to resolve the tensions between liberalism and Christianity (and, mutatis mutandis, between liberalism and any of the illiberal faiths–whether religious or political–with which it must live) by melting both down into a gooey humanism. The latter, however appealing to such liberal luminaries as Obama, risks (and perhaps cannot avoid) becoming an illiberal dogma in its own right, something that unsuits its adherents for the give-and-take, the frustrating compromises of American politics, in which people refuse, however much hectored, to discover that their common membership in a dignified humanity transcends their national, ethnic, economic, religious, and other divisions, and demand, however outrageously, to be cajoled, pandered to, bought off, or fought, rather than be enrolled in the universal good. If the gap between the sense of human worth expressed in both liberalism and Christianity–according to which all human beings are bearers of rights or images of God–and the sordid, enraging, unavoidable difficulties of politics conducted for and by actual people is not to drive our politicians and pundits into madness or ineffectual moral sputtering, they (we) must be able to laugh, not least at themselves.
Liberalism, amid illiberal rival perspectives, may depend on the exercise and propagation of modes of levity, from small talk to academic discourse to comedy. Christianity, too, may need the comic, at least the particular sort of comedy Fred Miller Robinson identified at work in the authors he studied (and might have identified in the author to whom he was married). This would be true not only because Christians may wish to persist in a secular modernity without either evacuating their religion’s most essential claims (such as, pace Robinson, the divinity and propitiatory self-sacrifice of Jesus) or stoking unending conflict with their non-Christian neighbors, but also because, even to be properly Christian, to remain rightly open to the foolishness and scandal—the profound, stupid silliness of God, who sends us, as if with a wink, His messages via talking asses, stuttering prophets, and contradictory texts—believers must be ready to recognize, again and again, their most cherished ideas and commitments as parodic, analogic, hilarious half-truths glimpsed in the mirror dimly.