Portraits of the Preacher in American Fiction

The man of the cloth suffers from clerical schizophrenia. This seems to be the conclusion of American writers who bring the minister into their fiction. The clergyman is frequently portrayed as confused, frustrated, inept, inarticulate, and irrelevant.

Occasionally a fictional cleric does not run true to form. The ministers in a few novels such as Sheldon’s In His Steps and Richter’s A Simple Honorable Man are effective and dedicated servants of the Word. But many of the positive portraits are sentimental and literarily inferior and do not provide the needed challenge to the prevailing image.

American literature has more often shown us what a minister ought not to be rather than what he ought to be. The clerical image is created from a negative criticism of the profession rather than from an objective and thorough analysis. Most of the ministers who people the pages of fiction are types rather than realistic, three-dimensional characters.

Unfortunately, however, we cannot protest that the prevailing fictional image of the clergyman has no basis in fact. With an eye toward becoming more relevant to the society in which they work, the minister and the ministerial student might well examine their literary counterparts.

The problems of the clergy were presented early in the development of the American novel. The nineteenth-century novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harold Frederic introduced a problem that was to recur in fiction throughout the following century: the minister’s relation to his society.

Dimmesdale, the minister in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, struggles to bridge the chasm between the image the villagers expect and the image he desires. Despite the guilt from his weight of sin, he strives to live the life of a well-respected pastor in the Puritan community. But his attempts are futile. He acknowledges his frailty as a human being and his capacity to sin. Just before he publicly confesses, Chillingworth urges him to salvage his professional honor. “Madman, hold! what is your purpose? Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?” But Dimmesdale chooses to follow the urging of his conscience and accepts the role of confessed sinner rather than that of respected but hypocritical minister. His expiation is death.

Inability to cope with the demands and strictures of society is the problem of Frederic’s protagonist in The Damnation of Theron Ware. Ware, a young, naïve farm boy new to the ministry, struggles to retain his integrity in a small church financially and intellectualy impoverished and rife with “contumacious fundamentalism.” Through sophistication and rationalism the young pastor attempts to rise above the mediocrity of a minister constantly submissive to the whims and idiosyncrasies of his congregation. The clash between the image he desires and the image his congregation has held for years destroys him. Reconciliation is impossible: he cannot fit into their mold of a conventional pastor. Sadly conscious of his plight, his bishop’s wife concludes, “Whatever else he does, he will never want to come within gunshot of a pulpit again. It came too near murdering him for that.”

During the twenties and thirties, the periods of social reform, American fiction intensified its criticism of the clergy with incisive satires in reaction against churchmen who put the weight of their churches behind prohibition and other social-reform movements. The minister usually appears as a scheming, evil, selfish, ignorant character—as in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry. This garrulous Midwest minister is perhaps the most crass example of ignorance and hypocrisy in American fiction. He sweeps through the novel praying and playing in a devastating though humorous fashion. Lewis satirizes the minister who leads his congregation into social involvement; Christian motives, he suggests, are often directed by selfish interests. Of this novel John Killinger writes:

These are sweeping indictments, and if they are irritating it is probably because there is enough truth in them to blanch the cheeks of any Christian. All ministers, chaplains, religious teachers, and theological students should be required to read this book at least once a year; it could not but have a salutary effect upon the protestant ministry in future decades [The Failure of Theology in Modern Literature, p. 14].

Fiction of the post-World War II period emphasizes what is perhaps the most serious criticism of the clergy: ineffective ministry in a world of need. Unable or unwilling to act as a prophet to a sick society, the minister withdraws into an insular setting. He offers no relevant message. Society largely ignores him because he seems to be an ornament rather than a functional fixture. He is an accepted but unnecessary person except at weddings, funerals, and Kiwanis Club luncheons (where he offers the invocation).

This is the problem of the Reverend Andrew Mackeral in the novel The Mackeral Plaza by Peter DeVries. Mackeral is a liberal idealist who fights the fundamentalist activities in his town in order to convince himself and the community that his efforts are relevant and necessary. He wants to be accepted by the community—but on his own terms. He struggles to avoid the stereotyped clerical image that he associates with the overzealous preacher.

Mackeral so disliked the term preacher, and so abhorred the term brother, as designations for the clergy that he was always grateful for assurances of their inapplicability to himself. It was not merely the wish to elude prototype that lay at the bottom of this.… it was, more cardinally, a fear of quarantine, a desire to belong to his species that made him want ever so much to be known simply as Mister Mackeral.

The conclusion of the novel suggests Mackeral’s failure to become an effective, positive influence either in the church or in the community. He recuperates from his emotional stresses in a sanitarium while the People’s Liberal Church and the community continue on as they did before his departure.

Another contemporary novel of clerical futility and irrelevance is John Updike’s Rabbit Run. The contrast between old and new concepts of the ministry comes out in a confrontation between the young Reverend Jack Eccles and an old German Lutheran preacher, Fritz Kruppenbach. When Eccles asks Kruppenbach’s advice about his counseling endeavors, the old preacher fires back:

Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that.… You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that’s your job.

The old man continues with criticism of clergymen who become socially involved:

It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our human nature.… Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea.… I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith.

His final comments evoke feelings of shame and failure in young Eccles. The man of God is to be concerned not with external action but with internal conviction, says Kruppenbach:

When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ … with Christ, on fire; burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone else can do and say.… There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.

The novel ends in tragedy despite the young preacher’s noble, persistent efforts to resolve his problem. The reader is left with a feeling of despair, because of the tragic outcome and also because of the futility of the young minister’s efforts. Updike’s novel is a comment not only on the absurdity of our society but also on the irrelevance of the Churches and their leaders.

One of the few modern novels to present a refreshingly positive and convincing picture of the clergyman is Tell No Man by Adela Rogers St. Johns. In a modern parallel of the Saul/Paul account, protagonist Hank Gavin gives up a $50,000-a-year executive position to become a minister when he experiences a religious conversion and dedicates himself to follow Christ.

Because of his commitment to Christ and to the ministry, Gavin incurs the reproach of his socialite wife, his family, and his friends. His first major difficulty is the ensuing sense of isolation. But he finds in his new faith the courage to face the problems of his new profession. Because of his philosophy of the ministry he becomes more effective and less detached from society: “I can’t separate the Christian life from the everyday life—they’ve got to converge—convergence is our only hope.”

But Tell No Man is an exception. Common in fiction from the nineteenth century to the present is the portrait of the minister as one whose perplexity about his role makes him an ineffective prophet, without the dynamism to lead his people back to the altar. He appears as a member of a peripheral profession. Fiction sees him not as a shepherd leading the flock but as a hireling waiting at the gate; not as an indomitable military leader of an army but as a guard at the rear.

But the negative image of the minister in fiction can have a positive effect; out of it can arise an antidote to the schizophrenia among those who are part of the God-called profession. Writers of fiction then will sketch new images as they observe the changes.

Andrew Mackeral described to his psychiatrist the sort of change needed in the ministry: “Call it an island broken off the mainland and floating away by itself, or trying to if it isn’t fetched back. Or perhaps I can explain it to you in another way. Under these stresses and strains one part of the personality ‘separates’ from the other precisely like the cream in a bottle of milk. Your job—homogenize me.” Perhaps the most urgent prayer of the clerical profession is “God, homogenize us!”

Wilfred Martens is chairman of the English Department at Pacific College in Fresno, California. He received the M.A. from California State College at Los Angeles.

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