Marilynne Robinson and Surprising Nonsense

It should be noted before I get into the body of this post that there is today no more beautiful novelist in the world than Marilynne Robinson. I have read Gilead four times and Home three times and I am anticipating Lila with great eagerness. I have read all of her books of nonfiction as well and have always found her to be an engaging thinker. A solid part of me is convinced that she couldn't possibly be as simplistic in her responses as it is conveyed in the interview she gave to Religion News Service. I hope she finds occasion to elaborate at some point in the near future. For now I am giving her the benefit of the doubt that she just may not interview very well or that her responses were injudiciously truncated. 

You can read the interview I will be referring to here. 

There are a few things I would take issue with in her responses, not least of which is her glib dismissal of any notion of historic Christian ethical teaching. The interviewer asks her two questions about gay marriage, the first asking if people with differing opinions can coexist on the issue with the second asking if the size of the population opposed to gay marriage will shrivel to insignificance in the near future. While her answer to the second question is maddening for its deliberate anachronism and lack of cultural awareness, the first is almost more frustrating for its arrogance. 

In answer to the first question, Robinson replies:

Sometimes I wonder about the authenticity of the controversies themselves. My own denomination (the United Church of Christ), has blessed same-sex relationships and married them as quickly as it became legal in my state. It has been a process that’s gone on for a long time. Nobody gives it a thought, so when you read in the newspaper that there are people calling down brimstone, it’s startling. In time it will become an old issue for the culture that simply will not bring out this kind of thing anymore.

My people are so awesome and progressive on this issue that it is difficult for me to even conceive that there are still knuckle-dragging troglodytes out there somewhere who might disagree. First of all, come on. Second of all, there are fewer than one million people in the United Church of Christ so I am not sure in what world the views of its membership are taken to be representative for Christendom in general. Thirdly, it is not like Iowa started blessing same sex marriages in the 1820s. The state Supreme Court ruled on that in two-thousand-freaking-nine. I have pairs of socks much older than same sex marriage in Iowa, yet Robinson acts as if she can conceive of the state in no other way. Fourthly, are we to believe that the church that dove headfirst into blessing gay marriages before the ink was dry on the Supreme Court decision really didn't "giv[e] it a thought"? The mix of arrogance and head-in-the-sandiveness of this comment is incommensurate with the best American novelist.

Her answer to the second question, about whether all of the knuckle-dragging troglodytes will eventually shut up and die, repeats the tired assertion that since we mix fabric in our clothing and for the most part refuse to stone witches and kill children who disobey their parents then the whole Levitical teaching on sexual ethics must be tossed aside as well. Again, I have written before how frustrating it is to have the Bible's teaching on the subject, as well as traditional marriage supporters knuckle-dragging troglodytes' arguments in favor of traditional marriage the ancient and oppressive tool of the patriarchy, reduced to the phantom contemporary preacher of Leviticus, but here we are yet again, with America's greatest living novelist. 

Robinson doubles down on pro-gay marriage boilerplate by saying that since Jesus never explicitly condemned homosexuals and dudes were into dudes back then that maybe we should just be like Jesus and never teach or say anything controversial. This is ridiculous, again, on any number of levels. First, Jesus also didn't say anything about the government's role in ending poverty, but Robinson seems to find a definite argument in favor of government assistance in his teachings. Second, Jesus was preaching to mostly Jews in Judea. In other words, he was speaking to people who from birth had imbibed the Old Testament sexual ethic. This is not to say that homosexuality did not exist in first century Judea, just to say that there was no question about where Yahweh stood on the issue. Paul, writing to different people in different contexts, has to be more explicit in dealing with the issue and for those who have spent any time reading Paul (like presumably Marilynne Robinson has) this should not be a controversial point to make.

In the very next question, one asking about Hobby Lobby and issues of religious freedom, Robinson continues to parrot the arguments of a commenter on The Daily Kos. Here is Robinson's response: 

That seems to me like an artificial problem. I wish I could go to the Supreme Court every time I saw somebody trying to cut food stamps, or pre-K, or any of these other things. These people that are so attentive to babies that don’t exist yet, and so negligent of babies that need help. It’s part of the narrowing of the culture, so that only certain things are considered to be religious controversies. It’s a religious controversy, to me, that we would think of cutting back on help for the poor. Especially after our financiers have crashed the economy.

Again, Robinson seems to be all over the place here. 1) The religious freedom of business owners is artificial; 2) Conservative Christians are somehow negligent of babies that need help; 3) Cutting back on aid to the poor is a religious controversy; 4) Financiers, who were all Republicans, right?, wrecked the economy, which is very relevant to a question about the HCA's contraceptive mandate. That is one busy paragraph. 

All of these statements are strange in their own way. What makes forcing someone to go against their conscience because Big Brother says so an artificial issue? Who in the world does more for impoverished children than Christian organizations? I hate the false antithesis between concern over state-sponsored baby-murdering and concern for babies once they are born. Maybe the same state that thinks it is within the moral pale to kill babies in utero is not the best judge of how to care for these children post utero? I don't know, just thinking and typing here. Finally, she knows the guy who owns Hobby Lobby was not a Wall Street financier, right?

I really don't know what else to say other than I am disappointed that this is the best we could get from Robinson. I already knew she would disagree with me on any number of things and that is fine. I don't expect to ideologically agree with all of the novelists I read, or any of them for that matter. I simply expected someone with Robinson's prodigious mind and research in historic Christianity to have a more nuanced view of these issues than some bastard child of a Paul Krugman and Maureen Down column. 

None of this changes the fact of Robinson's greatness as a novelist, but for someone who delights in being contrarian (rehabilitating Calvin for goodness' sake) it is unfortunate that she doesn't even seem to have considered both sides to important questions for our culture. In essay after essay in The Death of Adam she asks her reader to reconsider previously held notions about Darwin and Calvin and the Puritans, and it is this type of intellectual curiosity that drew me to Robinson as a thinker. Here, though, she is monochromatic, unoriginal, and seems to have closed off thought altogether.