Julia Scheeres was losing her religion

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000

When I first began to read literature seriously, in my early 20s, I was in thrall to the literary and intellectual tradition that Catholic and Jewish writers could draw upon and push against. I found that I had much in common with believers and apostates such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Andre Dubus, Cynthia Ozick, Nathan Englander and Philip Roth. They were Americans, but they were also somehow other, owing to childhoods that claimed allegiances that transcended the merely national. Like those writers, I had belonged as a child to a group that claimed a high otherness, but unlike those writers, I belonged to a group that so distrusted the culture itself that it had never bothered to cultivate much in the way of a literary tradition. I have waited until the fourth sentence to use the phrase "Evangelical Christianity," because the people from whom I came have been partially responsible, as a political power block, for so many of the abuses of the late 20th and early 21st century. Literature aims to complicate, or it ought to, and Evangelical Christianity too often aims to reduce, to say, "There are two ways of looking at every problem, the right way, and the wrong way," and there are consequently two kinds of people, the right people and the wrong people.

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Julia Scheeres was losing her religion