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The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields.Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right's strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
Christopher Douglas is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right and A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, both from Cornell.
"Christopher Douglas's If God Meant to Interfere is an eloquent, learned, and utterly engrossing study of American literature and culture in an era of resurgent religious conservatism."
J. Bilbro:
"In this volume Douglas (English, Univ. of Victoria, Canada) continues work on multiculturalism he began in A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (CH, Oct'09, 47-0711) by considering how American authors responded to the conservative Christian resurgence in the late 20th century. Douglas's literary analysis rests on firmer footings than his political commentary; in taking faith seriously, Douglas offers incisive literary readings, whether tracing Cormac McCarthy’s consideration of theodicy or exposing Philip Roth’s failure to confront the power of religious belief. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
Susan Harding, University of California, Santa Cruz:
"Christopher Douglas takes us on a most fantastic journey through a medley of recent American novels, tracing how they obliquely registered the politics of the conservative Christian resurgence and its surprising entanglements with multiculturalism and postmodernism, as all three movements forswore the insipid secular assimilationist consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s. If God Meant to Interfere powerfully subverts the mind-numbing secular/religious dichotomy that dominates most writing about the period—the so-called culture wars—and cultivates a more nuanced, generative attention to lively interstitial worlds in which nothing is either/or, and everything is both/and."
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