Displacing the Divine

Displacing the Divine is a splendid achievement. Douglas Alan Walrath has explored his territory with masterful thoroughness and presents his findings with a rare blend of clarity, patience, and vigor. He is entirely in control of fiction's subtle shifts between reflecting its times and making its times. He moves with unusual grace between works still widely known and those whose reputation has diminished over time. His readings are impressive for their tact and strong sense of the 'forgotten' work's continuing ability to tell us things we are glad to know. -- Henry Taylor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Displacing the Divine is a sweeping, impressively researched survey of religious fiction published in America between the 1790s and the 1920s, and Douglas Alan Walrath displays a masterful and comprehensive knowledge of religiously-inflected fiction. -- David S. Reynolds, author of Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religous Literature in America An impressive and nearly exhaustive work that chronicles the changing images of Protestant clergy in American literature. There is nothing else that approaches its comprehensiveness. -- Jackson W. Carroll, Duke Divinity School The beauty of this volume is that it shows the definition of the clergy role as changing with social, economic, and political times; and, to a somewhat lesser extent, how that role helps redefine religious and spiritual styles for people in general. -- Wade Clark Roof, University of California, Santa Barbara

As religious leaders, ministers are often assumed to embody the faith of the institution they represent. As cultural symbols, they reflect subtle changes in society and belief-specifically people's perception of God and the evolving role of the church. For more than forty years, Douglas Alan Walrath has tracked changing patterns of belief and church participation in American society, and his research has revealed a particularly fascinating trend: portrayals of ministers in American fiction mirror changing perceptions of the Protestant church and a Protestant God. From the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who portrays ministers as faithful Calvinists, to the works of Herman Melville, who challenges Calvinism to its very core, Walrath considers a variety of fictional ministers, including Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon Lutherans and Gail Godwin's women clergy. He identifies a range of types: religious misfits, harsh Puritans, incorrigible scoundrels, secular businessmen, perpetrators of oppression, victims of belief, prudent believers, phony preachers, reactionaries, and social activists. He concludes with the modern legacy of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century images of ministers, which highlights the ongoing challenges that skepticism, secularization, and science have brought to today's religious leaders and fictional counterparts. Displacing the Divine offers a novel encounter with social change, giving the reader access, through the intimacy and humanity of literature, to the evolving character of an American tradition.