The Theology of the Romance Novel

I confess that I have a fondness for reading the descriptions of romance novels and I occasionally submit myself to the sadomasochist act of reading the books themselves. What intrigues me about romance novels is that they function essentially as frum novels (fruvels) with a clear theology and theodicy that make them utterly predictable.

Consider some sample texts from books descriptions:

Together, they journey through everything Quinn's been too afraid to face, and along the way, Quinn finds the courage to be honest, to live in the moment, and to fall in love. (Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry by Joya Goffney.)

She's had enough of playing the good wife to a husband who thinks he's doing her a favor keeping her around. Now, she's going to take some time for herself ... she's going to reclaim the carefree girl who spent lazy summers sharing steamy kisses with her first love on Sullivan's Island. Daring to listen to her inner voice, she will realize what she wants ... and find the life of which she's always dreamed. (The Last Original Wife by Dorothea Benton Frank.)

She can only trust her heart…and hope it won't lead her astray. (The Bookstore on the Beach by Brenda Novak.)

If she can dare to let go of the life she thought she wanted, she might discover something even more beautiful waiting for her beneath a painted moon. (The Vineyard at Painted Moon by Susan Mallery.)

Violet is tempted to take the ultimate step to set herself free and seek a life of her own conviction with a man whose cause is as audacious as her own. ... Violet's story of determination and desire unfolds, shedding light on the darkness of her years abroad...and teaching Vivian to reach forward with grace for the ambitious future - and the love - she wants most. (The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams.)

These stories are all framed by a particular worldview. The goal of life is to gain self-fulfillment in the form of romantic love. As Nietzsche understood, in our modern world, God is dead (i.e. irrelevant). This leaves man as the only standard of moral value. Since we can no longer expect to find fulfillment in a relationship with God, the alternative is to find fulfillment in the self.

Romance novels, like much of what comes out mass media, takes this concept and gives it a populist twist. The average person cannot plausibly expect to be able to come into themselves by becoming a great artist, writer, or philosopher. That being said, the average person can imagine having sex with someone and that this will lead to a relationship that will lead to them feeling fulfilled. The fact that the sex may violate traditional communal norms, rooted in religion, helps make the sex an act of self-fulfillment. The protagonist is able to choose themselves over the demands of society, demonstrating that their personal happiness is more important than following the expectations of the community.

At the beginning of the story, the protagonist should be someone living under comfortable circumstances but lacking romantic self-fulfillment. This serves to demonstrate the all-importance of love. You can have everything but your life will still be worthless if you do not have romance. If the protagonist does find themselves in a difficult situation at the beginning of the novel that difficulty should clearly arise out of the fact that they were already living without romantic love. For example, the housewife finding out that her husband has been cheating on her and is going to divorce her, leaving her with nothing, has an economic problem that is really a romance problem.

Our protagonist, having lived their lives by the rules of society and now coming to recognize that this has not worked out for them as well as they might have hoped, is suddenly confronted with someone who presents some sort of challenge in the real world that should reflect the raw sexual desire they awaken in the protagonist. After an obligatory round of saying no (the equivalent of the Campbell hero initially turning down the quest), the sex should happen, leading to a heightening of the conflict, which will clearly be resolved by the protagonist deciding that choosing to "follow their heart" is more important than anything else in the world. At this point, the problem will melt away and a happy ending is to be presumed.

As a work of religious fiction, a romance novel will contain some form of theodicy where the believer confronts some challenge to their faith which they must overcome to emerge as stronger believers. For example, a person prays really hard that God should cure his mother's cancer and it does not work; how could God let this happen? The believer will eventually learn that God had a plan for him all along, allowing him to develop a deeper relationship with God as something more than a genie who grants wishes.

In romance novel theodicy, the protagonist will have been burned before in romance, a teenage romance the did not work out or a divorce. After given up hope of true love, an opportunity comes their way, if they are "bold" enough to "believe" once more and take it. As with conventional religion, the believer has been given real evidence that their faith does not work, yet they are supposed to believe anyway. It takes a truly genuine faith to ignore evidence and believe anyway.

This use of theodicy is really a smokescreen. Like most works of religious fiction, romance novels suffer from a lack of real conflict. The point of a Christian novel is presumably about the protagonist choosing Jesus, which needs to be something simple enough that the reader can expect to be able to imitate. An exception to this rule would someone like John Bunyan. As a Puritan, operating within the salvation through grace tradition, Bunyan wanted to make the opposite point that accepting Jesus was something so difficult that no person could ever hope to succeed through their own efforts without active divine assistance. Good religious fiction requires an author who can truly imagine following a different path and get the reader to take that alternative seriously. This makes for good fiction but is totally counter-productive as religious propaganda.

Similarly, there can be real conflict in a Jane Austen or a Bronte sister novel. An Austen or a Bronte heroine is not free to follow her heart. She has a navigate a world in which she has limited economic opportunities and, if she is cast out by her family and community, death by starvation or tuberculosis is a real possibility. By contrast, the conflict of a conventional romance novel needs to be solved by the protagonist deciding that romance is all they care about. The point of the romance novel is precisely the fantasy that life's problems can be solved so easily. A good romance novel would require readers to seriously grapple with the struggle between duty to society and personal fulfillment without taking it as a given that the latter should take precedence. This would make for a good novel but would fail as propaganda for the religion of self-fulfillment.   

It might be interesting to, following the logic of Pride Prejudice and Zombies, to take a conventional romance novel and make it about accepting Jesus. A highly successful career woman has her life overturned when her godless husband cheats on her and demands a divorce. Moving back home, she runs into the handsome former high school sports team captain that she lost her virginity to as a teenager. Desperate to feel valued, she flings herself at him. The guy confesses that he really wants to sleep with her but he cannot because he has accepted Jesus. The woman is so impressed by the guy's self-control that she decides to go to church to accept Jesus. The night before, the husband returns and apologies. Now we have "drama." Will the woman still accept Jesus and will she dump who no good husband for her "true love?" She tells her husband that she can forgive him because there is someone who died for her sins. The two of them go to church to accept Jesus together and run into the other guy. Will our male hero fight for the woman he loves? No, the two men shake hands as brothers in Christ and the woman drives off with her husband, having turned down the really hot guy.  

 

 

 

 

The Hitchhiking Pilgrim's Guide to Progressing through the Multiverse

 

I recently finished reading an advanced copy of the Postmodern Pilgrim's Progress by Kyle Mann and Joel Berry of the satire site Babylon Bee. As satirists, I take them very seriously. Whether or not conservatism has a future is going to come down to whether the next generation of conservative activists have properly internalized what the Bee offers. As a reviewer, I come to this newest offering of theirs from a fairly unique perspective. I am a Jew who has read John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, C. S. Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress as well as Douglas Adams. 

In essence, what Mann and Berry have given us is the Bunyan classic if it has been written by a Christianized Adams. In the role of the pilgrim Christian, we have the unbeliever Ryan Fleming, who agrees to attend a church service because of a last request from his teenage younger brother who died of cancer. Ryan then finds himself transported into another world called the Dying Lands where he is given a quest to wake the king and save the world. As Bunyan's original has a companion named Faithful, who helps keep him on the right path, Ryan is joined by a woman named Faith. All of this is told by an angelic narrator who is essentially the Book from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ryan is modeled after Arthur Dent. He is a perfectly normal unexceptional person who finds himself in an insane world and insists on being his reasonable self. For example, he tries to point out to the people in the City of Destruction that, if they bothered to look up into the sky, they would see a storm of meteorites coming to destroy them and is frustrated when everyone continues eating their bread and cheese. (Granted, Ryan does find the bread and cheese to be quite marvelous and almost fails to escape himself.)  

Jordan Peterson argues that true art requires that the artist has an idea but one that they cannot directly put into words. If the artist understands the message they wish to convey then they should come outright and say it. If the artist consciously tries to smuggle a message into a story then what they have is propaganda and the inherent dishonesty of the process undermines its artistic value. What makes the original Pilgrim's Progress work, despite the fact that it is a Puritan sermon crammed into story form, is that it is so blatant and earnest as to be above the charge of guile. 

Bunyan's message that he makes no attempt to dress up is the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. To understand it is to recognize that it is a horrific doctrine that no one would willingly accept unless they were forced to through divine revelation or the reading of scripture. You are a totally depraved sinner and there is no action that you can perform that can make you less deserving of eternal damnation. That being the case, Jesus still died to save you despite your fundamental unworthiness of salvation. To be justified through faith means to walk that tightrope and simultaneously believe both of these things at the same time. 

Christian's primary struggle in the early stage of his journey is with this balancing act. He comes to know that he is a sinner living in the City of Destruction by reading a book written by the creator of the world that tells him this fact. Christian, therefore, abandons his wife and children even to the point of covering his ears and shouting "eternal life" as he runs away from them. Evangelist tells him to stay on the road to the Celestial City as that is the only way he will eventually be able to be relieved of his burden of sin. What repeatably gets Christian off of the path is the temptation to believe that there might be an alternative way to escape his burden, such as following the Law, or despairing of ever being redeemed. 

The purpose of Bunyan is not to convince us to accept justification by faith by making it sound attractive or reasonable. On the contrary, Bunyan wants us to recognize that we need to accept this belief no matter how much it violates our every moral intuition simply because it is true. It also should be noted that Christian's struggle is not over his belief in God. The king's existence is an assumed fact. The only question is whether he can internalize the logic of justification by faith so that it carries him all the way to the end.  

This can be contrasted with Lewis, whose John utterly rejects the Landlord. It is not so much that John does not believe in the Landlord, though he is relieved when Mr. Enlightenment informs him that the Landlord was invented by the stewards, but that John rejects the sort of relationship the Landlord offers where, if you follow his rules, and you can live in his house with him forever but if you violate the rules you will be sent to his scorpion pit. John does his best to keep away from anything connected to the Landlord. His primary companion is Virtue (Kant) who insists on not caring whether the Landlord with his bribes and threats might exist. Instead, John seeks to find his island (joy). What John slowly is forced to accept is that, if he wants to cross the canyon of Peccatum Adae and reach his island, he is going to need the Landlord in the form of Mother Kirk.

In essence, Lewis was a 19th-century style romantic who came to accept that, in order to salvage this romanticism, he needed to ground it within a Christian worldview. Jesus, for Lewis, was all the best of mythology made real in human history. Lewis was not interested in the question of salvation let alone whether one could be saved through faith or works.

The big question for Lewis was whether one could maintain the enchanted worldview in the face of modernity that would allow someone to relate to God as a real individual as opposed to a mere theoretical proposition. Part of the appeal of Lewis, unlike Bunyan, is that his writing was designed to not antagonize readers. Anyone, even a Jew like me, could embrace Lewis as an exercise in attempting to maintain, with a straight face, that there is more to the universe than simple materialism. 

Lewis was a fundamentalist, not in the modern sense of holding particularly conservative theological views but in the sense of the early twentieth-century Christian Fundamentals pamphlets. Lewis was not interested in rehashing the early modern debates within Protestantism and ultimately with Catholicism, but in offering a few basic principles for a wide spectrum of Christians to rally around, what Lewis referred to as "mere Christianity." For Lewis, this primarily meant accepting that the God-Man had entered history in the person of Jesus in a completely factual and literal sense.  

 

With this in mind, we can begin to explore a major challenge of using Adams to make Bunyan work for a modern audience. The key to translating Bunyan is that there is no way that you can make him acceptable to most modern readers. Considering the amount of time that he spent in prison, it is not as if his message was all that acceptable to seventeenth-century ears.  

Bunyan was too earnest to do satire. I do not read Pilgrim's Progress as any kind of absurdist comedy. The book needs to be read with full salvation or damnation seriousness. The only thing absurd is why would a sinner like Christian be given so many chances to get back on the road when he did not even deserve to make it out of the City of Destruction? By contrast, Lewis can be seen in a comic light as he wished to mock his own highly roundabout path to Christianity and he offers a romp through modern philosophy. 

Absurdity was something essential to Adams and it connected to his atheism. His point was not the conventional Dawkins-style atheist polemic to render religion as absurd and atheism rational. Rather, he embraced a world that was absurd. The question then becomes, if the world is absurd no matter which way you turn, might it make more sense to accept a world that is absurd in its lacking of meaning than one where there are beings in charge who are ridiculous? 

Mann and Berry struggle with striking the right tone in their writing and ultimately in finding the purpose of their book. The book could have been a self-acknowledging satire of themselves as the kinds of people who read Adams and yet have somehow remained religious Christians. Alternatively, it could have served as a vehicle for the authors to explore something about their worldview that defies straightforward exposition. Much of the strength of the Babylon Bee is that it captures certain truths that could only be expressed by satire. If readers take nothing else from the Bee it should be the simple question of how is it that a satire site consistently offers a more thoughtful analysis of the world than CNN.  

The Postmodern Pilgrim offers some genuinely excellent moments with ideas that are best expressed through the surreal allegory of Pilgrim's Progress. The random people getting killed by falling meteorites in the City of Destruction offer a powerful response to Ryan's struggle with theodicy. We are tempted to turn the unfairness of children dying against God when it should cause us to contemplate the fact that we may randomly die at any time. People living in the time of Bunyan had a certain spiritual advantage over us as they were constantly confronted with dead children. There could be no pretense that life on Earth could be perfected as an end in itself. 

We have one of the best versions of the Devil since Screwtape. There is this delightful ambiguity to him because he tempts Ryan with what Ryan honestly wants, mainly to escape his miserable situation and get back home to his life. Ryan's Arthur Dent personality works well in these scenes. He knows better than to make an agreement with the Devil yet also sees nothing wrong with just talking to the Devil and struggles to say no when the Devil turns out to be so unfathomably reasonable. 

Similarly, there is Ryan and Faith's visit to Urbina. Readers of the original will be familiar with Faithful's martyrdom in the city of Vanity Fair, which is modeled after Jesus' passion. As such, the narrator offers the spoiler that Faith is going to die. Even though I was expecting Faith's death, how it is done still managed to be poignant. 

What I loved is how the authors make use of the issue of abortion with Humanist demanding that the travelers murder a child as the price of staying in the city. The scene captures why abortion is so important for religious conservatives. Living in a secular society that offers ever greater material comfort and seems to also make moral progress all without religion, where does one find the moral grounding to resist? If a person can truly see a fetus as a living being then the moral authority of modern secularism simply collapses. At the center of secular society is the mass murder of children. Without this murder of children, secular society, with women being able to pursue careers and sexual fulfillment as opposed to family and children, would not be practical. If people on the left demand that conservatives deny that abortion is murder and instead celebrate abortion as a constitutional right and as the liberating act of a woman freeing her body from the control of patriarchal society as the price of being accepted into secular society, then conservatives need to accept that they cannot be part of that society.  

This is a good book that makes for a fun read whatever your religious beliefs. I think it could have been a better book if the authors had been willing to spend the time giving it a more consistent narrative. The angel fails as a character because he does not advance the narrative and ends up as a distraction. One should not confuse making references to popular culture with actually being funny. The final meeting with the king certainly suffers as a McGuffin. Perhaps, instead of writing The Postmodern Pilgrim as a book, the authors could have used the travels of Ryan and Faith as a regular feature of the Babylon Bee where the Devil could offer us updates on their travails and progress. 

Don't Worry If You Are Saved, Just Do a Mitzvah: A Thought for the High Holidays

 

The following should be read less as an attack on Christianity than as a defense of prax-based religions. Much of what I say could be used by Muslims or even Catholics. It should be taken as a given that those better read in the intricacies of Christian theology should feel free to correct my explanations of how different Christians understand justification. 

One of the big surprises for me, when I began to seriously study Christianity, was the discovery that Christianity is actually a much more difficult and demanding religion than Judaism. Obviously, it is very easy to be a casual Christian. It is not a challenge to go to church for an hour a week and mumble platitudes about loving your neighbor. The picture changes once we start dealing with committed Christians. Catholicism does place serious demands upon the minority of its practitioners who take the Church's teachings as obligatory as opposed to mere suggestions. Where things get really interesting is when you turn to various branches of Protestantism, which is premised on the rejection of any demand for works and instead relies on faith. (The Arminian tradition can be seen as an attempt to smuggle works back into Protestantism.)  

Eliminating works for faith does not make it easy to be an intellectually serious Protestant. On the contrary, not being able to point to ritual practices to demonstrate that you are a good Christian means that you are completely reliant on your ability to gain the precisely correct frame of mind in order to be saved. It seems simple to claim that all you need is to have faith. The problem is that faith, within Protestantism, does not only mean that you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and part of the Trinity. Having faith means that you believe that Jesus dying on the cross and nothing else is the only way you are saved. You cannot even believe that your good deeds play a role in salvation. Jesus is not going to say: that person performed a few meritorious actions and so I will save him as opposed to the really bad people in the world like the thieves crucified next to me. Everyone is completely depraved and unable to perform even the smallest act of righteousness by themselves. 

This sets up Martin Luther's contrast between faith and works. If you are going to believe that doing the right actions can save you, there is no end. No matter how much a person minimizes their pleasure, there is always a more extreme form of asceticism. What is really devious about this is that the more one practices asceticism the less one is thinking about God. The logical end of asceticism is for a person to turn themselves into an idol. Can you believe how righteous I am? For Luther, faith and works contradict each other. If you believe in works, even a little bit, then you do not have genuine faith. 

Keep in mind that Luther started off as a highly ascetic Augustinian friar before he left Catholicism for marriage, kids, and beer. More important than possibly nailing 95 theses to a church door was Luther's spiritual crisis as a friar. Did being a friar really save him? Did the fact that he had doubts about whether he was saved prove that he did not really believe and was therefore not saved? The human mind has a particular talent for turning in on itself. Do I really love God or am I just using him to get into heaven? Am I subconsciously trying to convince myself that I love God because I know that I could never fool God into believing that I am sincere? Luther may offer an effective counter to asceticism by eliminating works from the process of salvation but he only makes the problem of internal mind games worse.  

Luther's position is only going to drive believers into moderate levels of insanity. According to Luther, faith in Jesus requires that you hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. You must believe that you really are a totally depraved sinner incapable of doing any good deed and, at the same time, that it does not matter because Jesus is willing to save you as long as you have faith. You must simultaneously feel guilty for your sins and serenity for your salvation. Of course, how does a person stop himself from thinking, even subconsciously, that if Jesus is so willing to save him perhaps his sins are not so terrible and he can be saved through his own merits? On the other hand, if his sins really are so terrible, perhaps Jesus will not save him unless he earns his forgiveness with good deeds. If you ever step out of this Lutheran box, you lose your salvation and need to start over. The terrifying reality for Lutheranism is that even if you are saved now, you can lose everything in a few minutes with just the wrong thought. Lutheran religious practice is an ongoing exercise of using humility to constantly get back to that proper balance necessary for salvation and hope that you die at the right moment before you lose your faith again. 

All of this makes Calvinism look downright healthy by comparison. If you are willing to accept supralapsarian double predestination that God decided before creation who was going to be saved and who was going to be damned, the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints logically follows. This means that, if you are one of the lucky few elect, you cannot possibly lose your salvation and, therefore, do not have to worry. If you are not one of the elect, you also do not need to worry because it will not help. God decided even before you had a chance to sin to send you to Hell for all eternity.

I have recently learned how to descend to new levels of insanity with Protestantism. In his work Fear of God, John Bunyan (of Pilgrim's Progress fame) argues for the existence of two kinds of "ungodly fear of God." The first is that one believes that he is such a terrible sinner that Jesus would never agree to save him. In this, Bunyan's choice of emphasis differs from Luther's. With Luther, the primary concern is that a person might believe that they are righteous enough that they do not really need Jesus. It is probably not a coincidence that Luther started off as a friar while Bunyan started off as a lay Christian who liked to have a good time on Sunday. 

So far so good. Bunyan's second kind of ungodly fear, though, is that, once you have accepted Jesus and have been saved, you might go back and question if your conversion was sincere and really valid. According to Bunyan, before a person is saved, he certainly needs to believe that he is not saved but after being saved one is not allowed to doubt their salvation. To do so commits the ultimate Protestant crime of not having faith. 

Imagine Bunyan's Christian. He realizes that he is a terrible sinner, who needs to accept Jesus as his savior. Christian prays to Jesus to save him, acknowledging that he has no other means of salvation, not even a lifetime of good deeds. Christian realizes that he is saved and rejoices in this knowledge. Five minutes later, though, Christian begins to think to himself: did I really accept Jesus as my only possible savior or, miserable sinner that I am, simply pretend to accept him? 

If Christian was not sincere the first time then he is obligated to question his salvation as he is not yet saved. But if he was sincere the first time, he is not allowed to question his salvation and, by doing so, has thrown himself back into the category of being unsaved. This would mean that Christian needs to accept Jesus a third time unless he was right the second time that this first time was not sincere. Clearly, a doctrine designed to stop people from obsessing too much about whether or not they are saved actually makes the problem even worse.   

From this perspective, Judaism is remarkably reasonable in that it avoids this agonizing over whether one is saved with the inevitable question of "Are you really truly saved?" Judaism can do this precisely because it embraces a doctrine of works wholeheartedly. Judaism does not ask "Are you saved?" Instead, Judaism asks what mitzvah can you do right now. It does not matter if you are righteous or wicked; there are always mitzvot to be performed. From this perspective, asking whether or not you are saved is a question that one has no business asking. It has nothing to do with fulfilling your purpose in this world so it wastes time better spent doing mitzvot. Since Protestantism does not have an endless stream of mitzvot to perform every minute of the day, committed Protestants have no choice but to spend their time thinking about their salvation until they drive themselves up a wall going in circles wondering if they really have faith.  

Belief is still important to Judaism but you come to faith by performing mitzvot. They teach you what to believe and grace you with the ability to persevere in your belief. Furthermore, the very nature of mitzvot precludes radical asceticism. For example, you are obligated to eat a good meal on Shabbat and are not allowed to fast. You must get married and have children. You are not allowed to practice celibacy. You are not allowed to give more than 20% of your wealth to charity so apostolic poverty is forbidden. Anyone who says otherwise is a heretic and can be ignored

It is Judaism's emphasis on ritual as opposed to theology that allows it to avoid the pitfalls that will send Christians, if they take their religion seriously, into either the insanities of asceticism or of trying to think their way to salvation. Jewish practice both protects it from trying to earn salvation through asceticism or from trying to simply gain the right beliefs ungrounded in deeds. As much as I find Chabad's theology objectionable, they do get one thing right. They do not care what kind of Jew you are. However religious or not religious you are Chabad will tell you that Hashem loves you so why not thank him by doing a mitzvah right now?