Marilynne Robinson has been, for at least a generation, the most widely read and highly celebrated Christian writer in the United States. In her fiction and essays, she has positioned herself as the leading representative of what she holds to be the central, but increasingly embattled or ignored, tradition within American Christianity: the strain of mainline Calvinism. She argues throughout her work that this form of Christianity, eschewing both the emotionally intense “personal relationship with Jesus” characterizing evangelical piety and the sacramental, incarnational theology of Catholicism and other liturgy-centered denominations, has been itself the foundation of American cultural and political history, and particularly of progressive liberalism. Her message appeals to figures of our largely secular (or at least non-Christian) liberal establishment (notably, to Barack Obama) with its promise that American history and Christian faith, for all their apparently wild, divisive, reactionary contents, are basically “good” according to the canons of goodness uncontroversial among regular listeners of National Public Radio.
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