John Updike and the waning of mainline Protestantism.

Webb, Stephen H.

John Updike is known more for the perfection of his prose than the pacing of his plots. At least, that is an observation one might infer from his critics, who commonly complain that his stories have a surplus of style over substance--although even the most ardent among them admit that his style is sufficient to sustain interest in the most minimal of narrative actions. This backhanded praise of Updike's literary achievement is heard so often that it is worth pausing to ponder. The power of his prose comes, at least in part, from the way he applies his expansively metaphorical imagination to the most tapered slices of perception. In Updike's verbal economy, a maximally exuberant splurge of language is required for the most efficient animation of matters that are seemingly insignificant. This paradox of a style that is as demonstrable as its subject matter is restrained leaves some readers cold, as if Updike generates a lot of heat without producing any goods.

Reading Updike in the context of contemporary popular culture highlights the virtues of his unapologetic literariness. The silver screen has cast its golden aura across the spectrum of media technologies, making movies the measure of our lives. We stare blankly at the speed by which movies flip through images like a pack of deftly dealt cards. Our eyes are so strained by the ocular imperative to lay reality bare that we almost forget how unknowable the world is when stripped of language's garment. From this perspective, the patience of Updike's focus on the delicacy of life's overlooked details constitutes a radical riposte to our image-soaked society. His signature sentences, which unwind slowly with a serpentine precision only to end, frequently, with surprising sharpness, taunt our dulled senses. Updike lights up the ordinary in order to discipline our desires for the immediacy of visual seduction.

Nonetheless, Updike's critics always want more--more message and less of the means by which it is delivered. Such criticisms date early in Updike's career, beginning, famously, with Saul Bellow's diagnosis of Updike's "stony heart" (6) and continuing with lames Wood's accusation that many of Updike's narrators and characters are imperturbable because they speak not from their own predicaments but with Updike's own languid and ultimately complacent prose.

The most perceptive of Updike's critics, perhaps following Updike's own frequent confessions to antinomian tendencies (the separation or even opposition of faith and common morality), have given this alleged imbalance between style and substance a theological significance. Thus Ralph Wood, intuiting the vice that virtue inevitably casts as its shadow, attributes Updike's descriptive generosity to a narratological sloth, arguing that Updike's polished aesthetic surfaces reflect a God that is none too deep. Frank G. Novak, Jr., in a brilliantly provocative reading of Roger's Version, pushes Woods' accusation of moral passivity to the point of suggesting that Updike has a proclivity, at least in this novel, for assigning his protagonist to the side of Satan. And Peter I. Bailey argues that the dialectic between faith and doubt that Updike deployed in his early work collapsed in the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), revealing Updike's journey as a voyage into increasing skepticism and even agnosticism regarding the consolations of belief.

For a writer so steeped in religion, the charge that he has become (or perhaps always was) unsuccessful in adequately transferring the drama of faith to the written page would certainly account for qualms about the superfluity of his prose. Nonetheless, I want to argue that Updike is too invested in reality to permit his readers simply to revel in his roguish verbosity, just as he is too fine a craftsman to let them think they can penetrate the thicket of his words to a level moral clearing. In other words, his prose is neither diverting nor moralizing. By not being diverting, I mean that the copious qualities of Updike's prose do not detract from his metaphysical commitment to honor the sheer restraint of matter on our imaginations. By not being moralizing, I mean to suggest that the dynamic economy of Updike's prose produces a verbal abundance that keeps its moral message in reserve.

There is some truth, then, in Ralph Wood's accusation that Updike is stingy with his moral recommendations. Unlike many contemporary writers, who are pessimistic about the state of the world but optimistic about their ability to shape what their readers think about the world, Updike is often content to let things in themselves have their say. He does not intrude into his stories with an authorial voice that ironically comments on his creation, nor does he use his characters to prove how wise he is by comparison. He responds to the world as if it deserves our deepest sympathies, because he treats it as a gift that, though damaged in the delivery, should be appreciatively repackaged rather than angrily returned. Yet it is just this authorial reticence that renders so many of his narrators and implied authors unreliable. Updike is a realist with regard to human nature, which gives his prose--the repackaging of reality--its dissembling features.

Updike's literary formalism, then, does not consist merely of conspicuous rhetorical overkill that keeps the surface of things undisturbed. His stylistic exuberance is mediated by a robustly Christian anthropology, so that he can describe the world intensely in a story without making those descriptions necessarily trustworthy or complete. Put another way, Updike has the skills (and the recklessness) to describe anything (and everything), but he often lets his moral and religious message arise from what he leaves unsaid. For a writer with such exhaustive descriptive powers this might seem paradoxical, but Updike's investment in the things of this world is so heavy precisely because he believes that they cannot carry all the meaning that most of us naturally seek. Updike is a performer not a preacher. He wants his readers to focus on what he is doing, but he also insists that the trick at hand works only if we have the capacity to miss the obvious. He sticks to the magician's code of secrecy by making the most out of what he hides.

I want to argue that it is this strategy of omission, carefully and artfully controlled, that leads his critics to surmise something of a hollow moral core at the heart of his writing. Updike's stories can be morally modest, but that does not mean that they are morally ineffectual. Far from being a writer whose imposing style generates a message deficit, Updike is a serious critic of American religious culture, but he typically mounts his criticisms cagily and indirectly, a strategy that can leave the appearance of antinomianism.

I will make the case that Updike keeps his moral message waiting in the wings but not out of sight by examining one of his stories called, with uncharacteristic provocation, "Killing." In particular, I will show how Updike's customary resistance to dramatic endings coupled with his reverential submission to the mundane can teach us a lot about the Christian view of the meaning of suffering. After a brief summary of the story, I will delineate three crucial areas where Updike's moral reserve, ranging from outright silence to subtle implication, adds up to a vigorous theological vision: his coy handling of mainline Protestantism, his intentional omission of any representation of the concept of spirituality, and his insinuated defense of the Augustinian privation theory of evil.

"Killing" is a deceptively delicate study of the limits to human aid in times of death and dying. A woman named Lynne is forced to come to terms with the emptiness of her marital bed while she is trying to comfort her father on his deathbed. The story begins with Lynne holding her father's warm and strong hand, as he lies unconscious in a nursing home. Updike's description of the dying man is merciless. "The smell from the parched hole that had been his mouth was like nothing else bodily she had ever smelled--foul but in no way fertile, an acid ultimate of carnality" (810). His mouth makes "an O like a baby's at the breast" (814). A corporate lawyer, he had been a distant father, yet Lynne remembers the insomnia that struck her when she was thirteen and her father's patience, sitting by her bed, holding her hand, and talking her to sleep. Now she is returning the favor, but he is, presumably, unaware of her daughterly devotion.

Lynne not only holds her father's hand but also decides to put him to sleep the only way that she can. "The decision is yours," says the doctor, whether to move him to a hospital where he can be fed intravenously and his life prolonged. There is no one to lift her burden or take her place. She alone must determine what to do with the cracked and broken shell that had once contained her vigorous and demanding dad. He cannot swallow or drink but might not survive the ambulance ride, so she decides to keep him where he is. The doctor, her minister, her estranged husband, and her absent siblings all tell her she made the right decision. She does not want the responsibility, of course, but Updike does not turn this decision into fodder for a theological debate over euthanasia--a temptation that a lesser writer, perhaps even a less Christian writer, might have been unable to resist.

Lynne needs something, or someone, to hold on to, not reasons or principles to uphold. After her minister tells her, over tea, that what she is doing is right and holy, she is left holding, "in her palms, votively, a teacup that had been her mother's" (812). When she holds her father's hand, she feels his reproach. "His hand would twitch, or her hand, wandering, would come upon his pulse, and the sign of life would horrify her, like the sight of roaches scuttling in the sink when, in the middle of the night, the kitchen light is suddenly turned on" (813). Her husband has left her, and in her helplessness, she at last loves her father, who had been so strong in "carving from the hard world" (814) a shelter for his family. He needs her like no one else does, but he dies unobserved, while Lynne is home raking leaves. The flurry of activity at the funeral convinces her that everyone is grateful for what she did, but she is convinced that she killed him.

Martin, her estranged husband, is happily oblivious to all the pain he has caused. He returns to his old home after the burial to assure her that Harriet, the woman he is living with, admires what she did. Lynne feels guilty, but he feels useful, giving her manly advice and running around the house changing light bulbs. Like Job's friends, he says what he thinks are all the right things for all the wrong reasons. She has death on her mind, but he has sex on his. She needs comfort and assurance and so welcomes his sexual advances, but in bed, his lively presence makes her feel protected and puts her to sleep. When she wakes up, he still has sex on his mind, and she puts her hand on his penis, which fails to rise. "It was warm and silky-small and like nothing else, softer than a breast, more fragile than a thumb, yet heavy" (819). She was not holding her father's hand when he died, but she is holding her husband's penis when they both recognize the irrevocable death of their marriage. She is spent, and wants most of all just to sleep, which is the only--but perhaps a sufficient--form of grace she is permitted.

Although this story is imbued with the faint aura of religious significance, Updike does not use his characters as a means to an explicit theological argument. Lynne, for example, makes no progress and experiences no resolution in her life as she deals with her father's suffering and her own. Religion is present in the nearly satirical but slyly realistic form of a minister who modestly and briefly affirms what Lynne has already decided to do, but there is no soul-making, no strength-building struggle against impossible odds. Lynne is alone in her struggle to comfort her father, and that struggle leaves her even more alone at the end of the story. Her father dies, her tenderness for her former husband dissipates, and she does not seem to have gained any wisdom that would be proportionate to these painful experiences. She is a helper who needs help, but she finds none. The suffering in this very brief story seems to be, in a word, pointless.

That pointlessness makes "Killing" a good test case for the charge that Updike's stories convey a weak or even perverse moral message. Although Updike coats Lynne's portrait with many layers of descriptive detail, he does not raise her situation to the level of tragedy, where it could be resolved in some dramatic way. It is almost as if he is using his seductive prose to hide--or at least soften--the sadness of her life. What his prose cannot conceal is the glaring issue of gender. With all the debates about why caregiving roles are traditionally associated with women and whether women are adequately rewarded for assuming these responsibilities, it is hard not to read "Killing" as a story that is in some sense about gender. Nonetheless, like his treatment of religion in this story, his approach to gender is indistinct. Updike clearly is asking us to sympathize with Lynne, but is he asking us to sympathize with the stereotypical gender role she inhabits? Perhaps it is indeterminable, as these things always are in great literature, whether the story is confirming or condemning the way women tend to endure suffering while men run from it or try to eliminate it. In either case, the suffering here is disturbingly futile, except that Updike is able to paint beautiful sentences with this material, and to conjure up the gracefulness of a good night's sleep amidst the bleakness of miscommunication and missed connections.

The aesthetic achievement of building up to a good night's sleep while keeping the reader alert and focused might be enough for most writers, but I want to argue that Updike is not raising the religious expectations of his readers for no good reason. What makes "Killing" a work born of theological vision and not moral sloth is the way that Updike melds a couched critique of mainline Protestantism with a subtle but critical retrieval of Augustine's privation theory of evil. Moreover, this combination of moves permits him to say something, by means of omission, about the emptiness of the concept of spirituality that is one of the aftermaths of the waning of mainline Protestantism.

To make my case for the theological importance of what Updike does not say, I must put this story in historical context. Updike is often praised as the cartographer of the American middle, mapping the trajectory of the tropes of masculinity and marriage in their steady deterioration. Frequently missed in these discussions is his exacting exploration of the vacuum left behind by the dwindling of the mainline Protestant denominations that once provided the social glue for the American experiment. One of the great religious facts of our day is the strange and apparently insurmountable eclipse of mainline Protestantism as a force for social change and a carrier of cultural standards. Throughout most of the twentieth century, mainline Protestantism was able to inspire and orchestrate American religious pluralism based on its ecumenism, its pragmatism, its wager on the progressive direction of history, and most of all its commitment to the hard work of keeping conservative forms of Christianity in check. This strategy had the unintended consequence of facilitating a fairly painless slide into secularism for many of the cultural elite. It also promoted, when American religious pluralism became radicalized in the sixties, the replacement of religious tradition with the vague claims of spirituality. Sixties-style spirituality was much analyzed even as it was first emerging, but the commanding heights of the liberal Protestant establishment prevented the cultural elite from foreseeing how evangelicals would soon come out of their slumbering withdrawal from history to reconfigure the religious landscape.

Observers of American religion cannot be blamed for their tardiness in analyzing the eruption of evangelical Christians into the thicket of American culture, but Updike can be congratulated for his sociological acumen. His playful disdain for pastors in stories like "Killing," which was published in 1975, seems prophetic. What critics lament as moral sloth in his stories can better be located as a careful demarcation of the empty space opened up by the decline of mainline Protestantism. Updike's stories from the sixties and seventies stake out the limit, if not the end, of the cultural hegemony of liberal Protestantism without giving any indication of the revival of more conservative forms of Christianity that will take its place.

By the time he wrote Roger's Version in 1986, Updike was fully engaged with the resurgence of evangelicalism in the character of Dale Kohler, who enthusiastically affirms that "Christ is my savior." He also caught the reactionary retreat of mainline Protestantism in the condescending and cynical figure of Roger Lambert, who loathes Dale's fervency. With Roger, Updike's adventure in antinomianism becomes a treacherous expedition in resentful nihilism, as Frank Novak has persuasively argued. In its losing battle with evangelicalism and fundamentalism, Updike seems to be saying, mainline Protestantism has lost its soul.

In "Killing," Updike has not yet reached this stage of despair over the devilish dead end of mainline Protestantism. The minister in this story still has a role to play in the drama of human suffering, but it is a minor role, with no direct speaking lines. He is "hard-boiled and unctuous both" (812), a man who knows his own insignificance. Like any good salesman, this minister knows how to flatter a customer discretely, and since his product is moral good will, he puts Lynne at ease by insisting that she is better than she knows herself to be. By blessing our good intentions and assuring us that we are worthy of being blessed, mainline Protestantism, Updike is saying, has lost sight of the holy and is thus on its way toward rendering itself redundant.

In an economical and indirect fashion, then, Updike packs a prescient sociology of American religion into a very few words. Just as important as what he says about Protestantism is what he does not say about suffering. What comes after mainline Protestantism is not only a revival of evangelicalism but also the rise of a pervasive and dominant religious attitude that can be called spirituality. The concept of spirituality has a long and complex history, and there is much debate about the role the Protestant Reformation played in inaugurating, whether inadvertently or not, a long, inward turn of religion by emphasizing the individual's immediate relationship to God. There is more agreement about the contributions of the Enlightenment, which challenged the public rationality of religion, and Romanticism, which celebrated the infinite value of individual experience, to the trend in Western culture of disconnecting spirituality from institutional religion. While Roman Catholicism emphasized specific spiritual practices, today spirituality is a matter of the heart rather than the consequence of particular beliefs or rituals. Thus isolated, spirituality is easily co-opted by market forces that turn it into a measure of how individuals covet, in the midst of the stress and busyness of modern life, moments of solitary repose. From this perspective, it is easy to see how spirituality can be defined as an innate capacity that can be exercised by anyone at any time, regardless of their church-going habits or their religious affiliation.

Of course, when spirituality is defined in contrast to or even in opposition to religious dogma, ritual, and tradition, let alone the hierarchy of church authority, it is hard to know what distinguishes it from the worlds of entertainment and commerce. Perhaps, however, that is just the point. As a free-floating signifier, spirituality can mean anything from love to lust, from a peaceful state of mind to any activity that makes for a peaceful world. Its very vagueness is surely the key to its popular use today. Because spirituality can mean anything for everyone, it can be attached to any consumer good that gives pleasure. If the passion for modern technology, which has been driven by the dream of relieving human suffering, has deprived us of much of our passion, spirituality is the attempt, we could say, to draw pleasure from boredom. Spirituality gives capitalism what little depth it pretends to possess. This development would not be so disturbing if it were not for the fact that some studies suggest that spirituality is replacing traditional forms of religion in America, even though it is not clear that the concept of spirituality can have any kind of coherence apart from the specific religious traditions that have given it birth.

Updike in the 1970s did not anticipate the rise of evangelicalism, but he did recognize that spirituality is all that remains amid the ruins of mainline Protestantism. Long before most academic theologians took up the challenge of spirituality as a substitute religion, Updike was already examining its inherent limitations. He did so in "Killing" by omitting it just where the reader would most expect it.

Updike was able to avoid the temptation of spiritualizing the suffering of his protagonist because he uses as the backdrop for his narrative the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation or deprivation of being. The privation theory of evil was first fully developed by St. Augustine, but Updike probably imbibed it from Karl Barth's great discussion of evil as das Nichtige in Church Dogmatics III/3 (1960). For both Barth and Augustine, all that is is good, because all that is was created and is sustained by God, who is goodness itself. God did not create evil. If God created evil, then either evil would be good or God would be evil. And since everything that is has been created by God--only God is the creator of the world; there is no lesser creator, no competitor in the business of creation--everything that is is good. Of course, we know that evil is that which opposes the good, but the privation theory teaches that evil can never triumph over the good. God permits evil to come into being as the depletion of the good, but evil cannot destroy the good.

The privation theory of evil gives some very specific directions for how we should describe moral agency. Augustine himself talks about sin more than any other theologian in Christian history. We commit sins, he argues, out of our free will, but what is it we choose when we choose to sin? We do not choose something evil, because, remember, everything that is is good. We choose, instead, a lesser good, or we choose to abuse the good in some way. Our action exhausts or weakens the good, but we do not have the power to annihilate what God has created. Thus, when we choose to commit adultery, as Lynne's husband does in "Killing," we choose the goodness of sex but we choose it in a way that makes that goodness much less than it should be. The adulterer takes away from sex's goodness by treating it in a way that God did not intend for us. Sex is good within marriage, but we treat it as if it were not a gift from God in adultery. We choose against what it really is. We act as if we can determine sex's ultimate value, and thus we act as if we were god. We treat sex, in a way, as if it were nothing but our own creation.

A writer shaped by this Augustinian tradition will portray all human action as ambiguous, not because we are caught in the middle between evil and goodness, but because we try so hard to be good and always fall so pathetically short. That is, we are ordinarily never so far from the good that we choose to do something because it is evil. We are prompted to act by what we think is good, even when we distort the good by taking it out of its proper context. Sexual desire, as Updike constantly reminds us, is powerful because it is so good, not because it is evil. Consequently, descriptions of evil must be indirect and perhaps even ironic. Evil appears to us when we realize the goods we pursue are but flickering shadows of a greater reality.

Even though we always aim at the good in our moral actions, we usually let our self-interest obstruct our view, and thus we rarely hit the target with any degree of accuracy. Our vision of the good is distorted when we give in to the temptation to put it under our control. Significantly, this temptation also impacts how we handle the suffering in our lives. We flee the ambiguity of the human condition when we treat suffering as something that we can use to make ourselves stronger and better. Indeed, part of the appeal of spirituality, with its therapeutic techniques and soothing promises, is that it encourages us to master suffering as a source of instruction or inspiration. A more robust theology of suffering would look to the cross of Jesus to learn how we can accept even the most unplanned suffering as part of God's providential plan. From the perspective of the privation theory of evil, suffering is a gift, like everything else in life, especially in the way that it teaches us to rely on others for comfort and aid, but that does not mean that we should treat it sentimentally or romantically. It goes without saying that we should do everything we can to alleviate the suffering of others. Nevertheless, we know that human beings cannot change their nature, so we also know that we cannot eliminate suffering altogether. The most we can do, in the end, is to abide with those who suffer without blaming them or giving them false consolations. Suffering demands a patience that resembles the utter passivity of doing nothing. Such passivity, it could be said, is precisely how Updike treats Lynne.

That Lynne is not able to make much sense of her suffering is due both to the failure of her loosely held liberal piety and the nature of suffering itself. Whether this makes Lynne herself a victim of moral sloth or a reflection of basic human limits is ambiguous, but that ambiguity, even as it is left unstated by Updike, is nonetheless under his skillful control. Updike portrays Lynne as unhappy but definitely not heroic. She is religious but not spiritual, which, paradoxically, but typically for Updike, makes her more secular than the characters that populate the writings of many secular writers because Updike does not allow her to use spirituality as a substitute for religion. She muddles through, and nothing overpowering about her situation is revealed. This is a story about suffering, and it is written by a religious author who writes about religious characters, but it is remarkably void of spirituality. Lynne's suffering is not meaningful, but the story is nonetheless not meaningless.

Wabash College

WORKS CITED

Bailey, Peter J. Rabbit (un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2006.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Vol. III.3: The Doctrine of Creation. Ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Trans. G. W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1960.

Bellow, Saul. Recent American Fiction. Washington: Library of Congress, 1963.

Novak, Frank G., Jr. "The Satanic Personality in Updike's Roger's Version." Christianity and Literature 55.1 (Fall 2005): 3-26.

Updike, John. The Early Stories, 1953-1975. New York: Ballantine, 2003.

Wood, Ralph. "Into the Void: Updike's Sloth and America's Religion." Christian Century 113 (April 24, 1996): 452-55, 457.

Woods, James. "John Updike's Complacent God." The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief New York: Random House, 1999. 195-202.