A responsible reader will 1) grant that values always inform the act of reading, 2) attempt to put Christian values to work in his or her reading, 3) consider the purpose and point of view of the text, and 4) realize that texts may be immoral in other ways than by using profanity and sexual explicitness.
From Literature Through the Eyes of Faith
These are Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin’s guidelines for evaluating work in a Christian way that neither discourages reading something just because it has an immoral act in it nor dismisses ethical perspectives in favor of a work’s aesthetic achievement.
Two cases in point…
In my Intro to Lit course, I teach Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The former is an example of a work filled with explicit violence that never gives us a sense that the text supports what’s being represented. Macbeth is not completely irredeemable, though he tries to act like he is, and it would be a perverse reading indeed that says he’s supposed to be praised for killing Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff’s wife and children. John Cox’s article “Religion and Suffering in Macbeth” works out a pretty convincing Christian interpretation of the play.
Mother Night, on the other hand, wants to make a moral statement, but I don’t think it’s central insights can be completely reconciled with Christianity. Vonnegut wants to make the point that everyone can hate and that the worst kind of hate is to believe that God supports your hate. We get all of this filtered through the novel’s conflicted and unreliable Howard Campbell, however. By the novel’s end, he believes that evil is a more ultimate force in the world than good. It’s a grim view that Vonnegut’s authorial comments–“We are what we pretend to be”–cannot wholly ironize. The novel criticizes adroitly, but I don’t think it’s positive view matches anything like Christianity. Vonnegut was a virulent atheist who thought religion encouraged evil rather than stemming it.
Gallagher and Lundin call for me to make these evaluations much more overt as I teach and to model the four steps above that avoid simplistic aesthetic approval or dismissive moral disapproval.
