Messiah by Gore Vidal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Never Go to California Unprepared

Gore Vidal has it exactly right in Messiah: Religion, and therefore religious politics, are fundamentally literary matters. It is not so much that religion and its politics use literature inappropriately but that they are examples of a very specific genre which arises from time to time, the purpose of which is to create what are essentially tribal bonds. Messiah is a fictional case study of the literature of religion.

It has struck me for some time that the Deplorables phenomenon in the United States is not primarily a political event but a form of religious enthusiasm. Perhaps the two are indistinguishable in their core. Regardless, there seems to be an essential element of belief among Trumpists that carries the weight of religious conviction. This raises questions of what has been traditionally called divine revelation, the formation of certain, unshakeable faith in someone or something. Where does such faith come from? How does it spread among large populations? How is it maintained in some sort of coherence as it does spread?

These are typically considered as questions appropriate to the sociology of religion. But the categories of academic sociology are misleading. By presuming that religious impulses are a response to some pre-existing emotional need or spiritual lack, sociology puts the conceptual chart before the empirical horse. Religion, like modern retail capitalism, creates its own demand.

Not uncommonly religion starts with the experience of a small number of individuals in the presence of a charismatic - Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, or as in Messiah, the undertaker’s assistant, John Cave (the initials JC are not incidental of course; neither is the name of the PR man who launches the Cavite sect internationally - Paul). But that shared experience has a limited half-life, and an equally limited audience with the technology of only word-of-mouth advertising to rely on. In any case the shared revelatory experience is lost. Enter then what is called fundamental theology, the religious theory of revelation and how it spreads.

Ultimately all fundamental theology becomes fideistic, that is one claims belief because one believes. No proof, no evidence, no rational argument creates faith. Belief therefore becomes an undiscussable principle. Taken seriously, this implies not just complete subjectivity but also total incomparabilty of experience. Technically speaking therefore, even believers don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk with each other. To the extent they agree on a religious vocabulary, they have divorced themselves from whatever personal religious experience they claim.

This is not just my view but that of the most important fundamental theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth. Barth’s work is primarily directed toward re-establishing what he considers authentic religious experience of ‘The Word’ as distinct from the simulacrum of that experience produced by merely human words. The implication of course is that religious language doesn’t refer to anything at all - material or spiritual. Religious language, however, does create a certain form of community, namely that devoted to a certain religious language. For Barth this is an unfortunate tragedy for humanity. For the rest of us, it’s just how things are.

And this is what Vidal recognizes. Religion is dependent upon literature. It is a literary phenomenon. The protagonist of The Messiah is not John Cave, the founder of the cult, but Eugene Luther (Vidal's first names), the evangelistic author of the cult’s foundational texts - Cavesword. Of course no text can be charismatic in the manner of a human being, but this is irrelevant. The text has its own kind of charisma, appropriate not to the originary shared revelation but to its cult. The religious community which forms around a text is bound together by the text not by the shared experience of the original cult (it is relevant to point out that while writing this paragraph I was interrupted by my news feed which informs me that Trump is presently in Alabama signing bibles for tornado victims).

This priority of the text over mental or spiritual state would seem obvious to all except sociologists of religion (and many theologians) who appear to regard the content of the religious text as significant. It isn’t. Most Christians have no informed understanding of the Bible much less the doctrinal pronounments derived from it. Latter Day Saints and Muslims may quote passages from The Book of Mormon and the Quran as required to make a political point but have equally vague ideas about the historical source of these passages.

John Cave’s message is that death is preferable to life. The dying itself is the only awkward part. This is a message satisfying in terms of Freud’s Death Wish for the psychoanalytically minded. And it goes well with any combination of Gnostic, Orphic, and millennial Christian tendencies. A theology for all seasons perhaps. Strange bed-fellows one might think, but religion is after all a kind of political alliance.

Having been formed with the text, the community uses the text to continuously affirm and reinforce itself. Allegiance, faith, passes from a person to a text, then to the institution created through the text established by the relevant institution - the church, the mosque, the temple.* The sequence is universal regardless of the text itself. The text is deemed sacred, and must be protected from mis-interpretation. It also may need to be revised from time to time to meet changing dogmatic objectives. The essential role of religious authority is to control and correct the text, its valid interpretation and its public assertion. Faith is commitment to the authoritative institution. Modern totalitarian regimes regardless of ideology have largely modeled their systems of text-control on historic Christian practice over centuries.

Vidal’s Cavite system of textual revision and enforcement was proposed only a few years after Orwell’s version in his 1984.** But Vidal realized something Orwell didn’t, namely that whatever went on inside anyone’s head was irrelevant to the process of social control. The ‘Thought Police’ of Orwell is either a misnomer or a misdirection of resources. Controlling what was said does the job of promoting social discipline quite nicely all by itself in Messiah. Belief is actually inconsequential to religious or social cohesion. Truth is what is written or said by authority. Faith is not a psychological state or abstract commitment; it is an active and public affirmation of authority.

Vidal doesn’t entirely discount human need when it comes to religion. For him there is a very plausible emotion behind the religious impulse in modern life: Boredom, more specifically the boredom of power which is a self-willed condition. Religion, particularly religion spawned in someplace like California, has a frisson of adventurous novelty that has proved itself attractive to bored middle class Americans for decades - even during the 1950’s.

And I’d bet that boredom is the driving root-motivation behind the phenomenon of the Deplorables. Combine cultural ennui with lack of education and it’s a situation tailor-made for the cult of Trump - bored, stupid fanatics frightened of their diminishing power.

* A common misconception is that the Christian Scriptures created the Church. This is historically incorrect. The early Church in its various manifestations carefully chose which texts it would consider as canonical and which heretical. I think it’s therefore accurate to say that Church and text evolved together.
**1984 was first published in 1949; The Messiah in 1954.

View all my reviews