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Marsh's book warns against the "messianic" inclinations of evangelicals, but it has been a long time since I read a book so devoid of humor, of irony, of the ingredients that work against messianic delusions. From his setting—a tenured position at a great university in the cosmopolitan (and quite beautiful) city of Charlottesville—he invokes Pascal against evangelicals, who (Marsh claims) have forgotten to maintain "a certain suspicion of the world" and have fallen willy–nilly into its snares:
To be sure, it may embarrass us to read Pascal's fussy remarks on theater and popular entertainment, especially those of us in evangelical circles who have worked so hard to gain respectability from our cultured friends and associates, who have come to assume that the delights of the world can be easily enough baptized. But we might learn from our current political idolatries that it is time to hold up our amusements and judgments to the light of pure goodness.
Well, certainly, there is always a danger of going astray, but—at a time when a B&C piece by Alan Jacobs on the Harry Potter series prompts a reader to mournful indignation (we're having truck with witchcraft, you see), and when narrow legalism is by no means moribund—we need to have some clarity from Marsh, who has already stacked the deck with an imputation of bad faith. Alas, one waits in vain for him to flesh out his jeremiad with any specificity. What does he have in mind? Reading the poetry of Paul Celan? Listening to the Decemberists? Watching Spiderman 3? The Sopranos? And what a nice touch to describe the Jansenist Pascal as "fussy"!
Worse, though, is Marsh's call for a "season of silence." It takes a certain obliviousness to write a BOOK calling other evangelicals to be quiet "in a noisy nation." But to call as one's chief witness Thomas Merton raises that lack of self–awareness to the level of inadvertent high comedy. For books by Merton, who has been dead for almost forty years, continue to pour from the presses even now—a new one came just last week. Marsh asks, "How can we regain faith's authenticity?" Well, some of us don't think that it has been lost, except as it has been lost and found and lost and found again ever since Pentecost. But here is Marsh's answer to his own question: "I propose that we join the keepers of the mystery in a season of silence and together pray for deliverance and renewal." And my question is, Why didn't you start that season of silence before you got to page 154? Why didn't you start it instead of writing this book?
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
Copyright © 2007 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.
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