Abstract
It is hard to think of a writer better suited to editing an anthology on American religion than Jeff Sharlet. The Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College is also a talented journalist especially known for The Family and C Street, investigative works chronicling the ways in which Christian fundamentalism has permeated the political power structure in Washington, D.C. His latest offering is subtler—less exposé than meandering meditation. But it offers equally valuable insight into the role of religion in America’s politics, communities, and in the private lives of its citizens.
More precisely, Radiant Truths concerns itself with American belief, which Sharlet defines as a subset of religion. In practice, focusing on this supposed subset has produced a nonfiction collection that’s broader than what one might expect to find in a book about faith. Sharlet begins with Walt Whitman on a Civil War battlefield in 1863 and proceeds chronologically to end in 2011 with a fragment from Francine Prose in which she recounts bursting into tears on seeing the poet’s verses at an Occupy Wall Street camp. In between, there are stories that face religion head-on, such as John Jeremiah Sullivan’s hilarious and ultimately humane portrayal of Christian rock fans in “Upon This Rock” (2004) and Zora Neale Hurston’s mesmerizing immersion into the Voodoo traditions of New Orleans in “Hoodoo” (1935). In others, such as the selection from Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), readers could debate whether the fervor being explored is religious or something else—a manifestation of culture, say, or of a powerful but not necessarily divine political ideology.
Unsurprisingly, Sharlet’s fascination with the intersection between religion and politics holds. This is good for readers. Without it, he might not have included Garry Wills’s incisive “Whittier: First Day” (1970), which connects Nixon’s Quaker roots to a destructive, uniquely American myth of self-improvement. The piece manages to feel fresh despite the fact that Nixon is long gone. His reign may be over, but our national obsession with the self-made man persists to this day, affecting social and political progress in myriad ways. Likewise, Sharlet includes communist writer Meridel Le Sueur’s 1934 account of a labor strike, “I Was Marching.” The piece is another that is not strictly about religion, but the prose is sharp and surprisingly current, offering lines like this to readers fresh off a year of headlines about racism, inequality, and police brutality: Our life seems to be marked with a curious and muffled violence over America, but this action has always been in the dark, men and women dying obscurely, poor and poverty-marked lives, but now from city to city runs this violence, into the open, and colossal happenings stand bare before our eyes. . . .”
Aside from belief, Sharlet’s twin preoccupation in Radiant Truths is the nature of literary nonfiction itself. He is interested in the big questions about our craft, such as how to define a genre that attempts to marry fact to artistry. The discussion is articulate and useful. Perhaps most valuably, the book helps rescue us from the notion that literary nonfiction was invented—new and unlike any prose that came before—with the New Journalism of the 1960s. Sharlet convincingly argues in his introduction for the existence of an unconventional brand of journalism that is almost as old as the nation: “Whitman’s poetry, with its impious rejection of form, gestures towards literary journalism.” And he makes this argument through his anthology selections. After all, what is H. L. Mencken’s exaggerated, author-centric account of heartland fundamentalism—“Yearning Mountaineers’ Souls Need Reconversion Nightly” (1925)—if not a precursor to the stylistic swagger of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe?
Yet the academic questions about literary nonfiction can also leave the reader wanting. Sharlet writes a brief introduction preceding each piece, but they are mostly about genre; there is scant historical or sociological context to help readers make sense of the arc of American belief through time. We are left on our own to figure out what is particularly “American” about these beliefs and movements. (This fascination with form rather than subject is the only possible rationale for excluding Mormonism, arguably the most American of religions. Sharlet apologizes for the omission upfront, but in the end, the book felt incomplete without the Latter-day Saints.) If you are searching for a theory of religion in America, you will have to form your own. You will find nothing in Radiant Truths to explain the rise of Protestantism or the origins of witchcraft. I would have welcomed some guidance and interpretation from Sharlet, who after all has made a career of pondering faith, on what to make of these tales of critics, skeptics, and true believers.
Luckily, Sharlet’s literary taste is good enough that the best selections stand alone, transcending the social, political, and historical moments in which they were born. Abraham Cahan’s “Dead After Purim” (1898), for example, is as lucid an illustration of how compassion and dogma can co-exist as you are likely to find anywhere. These are memorable pieces, whether you care about religion or not. And although critics and satirists—Mencken, Mark Twain—make their appearance, the weight of entries points to Sharlet’s preference for literary nonfiction that is more interested in understanding and illumination than ego and intellectual conquest. And that is a journalistic aesthetic I am happy to worship.