Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Page 13

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Our twelve bestsellers all feature religion in prominent ways, consistently critiquing orthodox religious practice and the dangers of zealotry.

  According to conventional wisdom, the bestseller of all bestsellers is the Holy Bible—though in fact the book appears only a few times on the annual bestseller lists. Once, in 1952, the revised standard version sold over two million copies and came in at number one. Tallulah, by Tallulah Bankhead (an actress known for her sexual exploits), was nipping at the Bible’s heels at number five. In 1953, the Holy Bible again finished in the number one position on the nonfiction list, followed closely by The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale’s classic how-to book, and coming in at number three was Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, by Alfred C. Kinsey and others.

  And again in 1954, the Bible was the largest seller, while Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book came in third, and fourth was Betty Crocker’s Good and Easy Cook Book.

  Religion, sex, and homemaking skills. It would be hard to find a more revealing American trifecta than that. More on sex and homemaking in a few pages, but for the moment our focus will be on God, religion, and belief.

  GOD SELLS

  Religious-themed novels have traditionally sold so well in the United States that most bestseller lists shunt them off into a separate category so the mainstream nonreligious books will have some slim chance of survival.

  Even with that rigging of the game, on any given week the fiction bestseller list includes one or two books with a prominent religious orientation. Obviously, the enormous success of books like The Da Vinci Code, or the Left Behind series, or books from long ago like Ben Hur, The Power and the Glory, or Lloyd Cassel Douglas’s The Robe (a number one bestseller in 1953), J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, or James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, is based in large measure on their spiritual themes.

  Then there are a host of other “inspirational” novels with quasi-religious overtones, such as William Paul Young’s hugely successful bestseller, The Shack, or Richard Bach’s novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which rode atop the bestseller list for two years straight, in 1972 and 1973. Bach claimed the novel was dictated to him by a voice that came from somewhere “behind and to the right.” Okay.

  The novel used flight as a metaphor and was variously interpreted to be a celebration of getting high or an ode to man’s miraculous engineering skills. Some saw it merely as a fictional reframing of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, the American Bible of optimism and self-advancement.

  Just as Mel Gibson’s 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ, made a huge splash by luring to the movie theaters millions of conservative Christians who were not frequent filmgoers, novels that place a heavy emphasis on religious themes certainly attract readers who might otherwise avoid novels altogether. Attracting this part of the reading population is crucial to the making of a megabestseller. For even if every habitual book buyer were to purchase the same individual title, the sales figures would still fall far short of the multimillion level. To swell the ranks of consumers and break into these rarefied zones, a novel needs to catch the attention of large numbers of infrequent book buyers, and the religiously inclined are a common target audience.

  SECULARISM

  It should come as no surprise that of the dozen books on my list, almost all of them share one ingredient, a strong religious content.

  What is surprising, however, is how heretical they are in interpreting what might be considered mainstream religious perspectives. For most of the bestseller authors under review here, skepticism is the shared religious stance. To one degree or another, each of the novels portrays characters afflicted with spiritual doubt. It would seem that the bestselling authors of all time are a collection of freethinkers and agnostics who share a tendency to ridicule religious hypocrisy and aggressively challenge standard orthodoxy.

  That’s not to say that the most popular books of all time are hostile to faith and organized religion. Rather, they seem to focus on the worldly consequences of religious practice rather than the spiritual aspects. In a word, the morality of bestsellers is rooted in a vision of culture that we know as secular.

  Part of this secularism derives from the history of the novel form itself. As Ian Watt described in The Rise of the Novel: “The relative impotence of religion in Defoe’s novels, then, suggests not insincerity but the profound secularization of his outlook, a secularization which was a marked feature of his age—the word itself in its modern sense dates from the first decades of the eighteenth century.”

  In addition to the tendency inherent in the earliest English novels to take a stand against orthodoxy, there is the particular American inclination to raise doubts about religious doctrine. Our forefathers, for all their religiosity, were the first great doubters. Take, for example, Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams concerning the Bible’s literary value:

  The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

  OUTING HYPOCRISY

  In American Gospel, Jon Meacham’s fine work on the role religion played in our nation’s development, he describes the unique American tension between the secular and the religious:

  A tolerant, pluralistic democracy in which religious and secular forces continually contend against one another may not be ideal, but it has proven to be the most practical and enduring arrangement of human affairs—and we must guard that arrangement well.

  Examples of this secular skepticism can be found in all the bestsellers on our list, but let’s start with an episode in To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Scout is sent to Aunt Alexandra’s missionary circle to further her moral education. The missionary ladies are financially supporting Reverend J. Grimes Everett in his attempts to bring Christianity to the Mrunas, a jungle tribe.

  Mrs. Merriweather, who was known as “the most devout lady in Maycomb,” gets all weepy when she describes to Scout the terrible plight of the Mrunas and the saintly heroism of J. Grimes Everett, who is the only “white person’ll go near ’em.”

  A page later, when Mrs. Merriweather has recovered herself and moved on to other topics, she complains to Mrs. Farrow about some “sulky darky” in her employ, then describes chastising the petulant household worker for not being more like Jesus Christ, who never went around moaning and griping about his plight. This reprimand puts the servant in her place, and Mrs. Merriweather takes satisfaction in having “witnessed for the Lord” in this small moment of racial humiliation.

  The juxtaposition of the pious moment with the bigoted remark is no accident. Clearly, Harper Lee has a view of religious authenticity that’s based on core humanistic values rather than hypocritical lip service. Scout is highly sensitive to these contradictions and in her quiet way scorns them.

  Even when Scout visits the First Purchase African M.E. Church in the black quarter, she finds the preacher’s message to be sadly flawed. After denouncing sin, he goes on to rail against the “impurity of women,” which Scout observes is a preoccupation of all the preachers she’s encountered.

  Despite the misogynist message, Scout is impressed by other aspects of this passionate congregation. Without the means to buy hymnals, they still manage to sing the old songs from memory. They know every word by heart.

  Digging deep i
nto their pockets and handbags, this destitute group manages to scratch together ten dollars in dimes and pennies to contribute to the defense fund of the falsely accused Tom Robinson. The sacrifice involved in this tithing is in stark contrast with the sanctimonious blather of Mrs. Merriweather and her missionary ladies. While Harper Lee’s method is indirect, it is nonetheless absolutely clear. Bigotry and false piety often march hand in hand under the banner of Christianity. But mouthing platitudes doesn’t cut it. Even a young girl can spot that old con.

  FAITH AND DOUBT

  Grace Metalious was every bit as intent on calling out hypocrites as Harper Lee. While Peyton Place is one long castigation of pretenses and false pieties of every sort, religion comes in for more than its share of scolding.

  When one of the town’s fine citizens, Marion Partridge, marries into Peyton Place money, she promptly bails out of one church to join another, but not for reasons one might consider religious. Marion abandoned the Baptists for the Congregational Church because the Congregationalists were considered an upscale denomination. The church’s only flaw, as far as Marion was concerned, was that it sometimes admitted “undesirables” into the fold and therefore diminished its snob appeal.

  The heroine of the novel, Allison MacKenzie, sounds a highly skeptical note when considering the religious explanations of her pastor, who claims that the Lord hears every word of every prayer. She wants to know, if that’s true, then why does He so rarely answer? Well, the preacher responds, sometimes God just has to turn down our pleas for our own good. Okay, then, Allison wonders, why bother praying at all?

  And a few lines later, she takes the same religious stance that in one way or another all these bestsellers do—falling somewhere in a narrow range between doubter and agnostic.

  When Allison was younger, she’d prayed day after day for her father to return to the family, but he never showed. Which makes her confront a terrible realization. How could a God capable of miracles not do something so easy? How could He allow a little girl to suffer so? It was this seeming injustice that destroyed Allison’s faith.

  SUPERNATURAL CALCULUS

  After hearing a plot summary of The Exorcist (a priest exorcises a sadistic satanic force from the soul of a tormented child), most book buyers might reasonably assume they are in for a rip-roaring tale in which religious belief wins out over devilry. But it’s not that simple.

  In The Exorcist, Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit priest, is experiencing an agonizing loss of religious faith not unlike Allison MacKenzie’s. He cannot confide in any of his colleagues, for he fears that they’ll consider his reasons for doubt to be signs of insanity. And in various interior monologues, the priest does sound as though he’s teetering on the existential edge. He’s driven to the brink by considering such quotidian horrors as thalidomide babies and young altar boys attacked without provocation and set ablaze. How could a just God allow such vile suffering?

  And to make matters worse, God’s silence is driving him even more nuts. Why won’t He reveal Himself? Why won’t God speak to this man of faith, who has pledged his life to God and now is crying out in the most orthodox ways? His faith is in tatters. He’s lost all hope in God’s power.

  The fact that Chris MacNeil is an avowed atheist doesn’t keep her from summoning Father Karras to minister to her daughter, Regan, whom she believes is possessed by Satan. Karras, by now a skeptic to the core, tries for most of the novel to find a reasonable, secular explanation for Regan’s behavior. He engages in an ongoing verbal joust with the being inhabiting Regan’s body, a tête-à-tête that is part psychoanalysis and part Jesuit debate. However skillful Father Karras is at explaining away Regan’s extreme behaviors, finally his psychological rationalizations crumble until he is left with only one conclusion: The devil has taken control of the girl.

  Well into the novel, the bishop of the diocese consents to an exorcism. The great bulk of the story, however, is devoted to dramatizing Damien’s attempts to use nonreligious explanations to come to grips with what is plainly a satanic possession. When all the scientific, logical approaches fail to help the poor child, Father Karras is forced to fall back on his wavering belief. While the head-spinning horrors and the guttural obscenities coming from the mouth of the girl might be the spice that accelerates the pulse of an average reader, the thematic backbone of the novel is the story of a priest who rediscovers God when he is forced to confront the devil.

  It is Merrin, the elderly exorcist, who speaks the lines that are the takeaway religious stance the novel promotes:

  Yet I think that the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us … the observers … every person in this house. And I think—I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity … to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent.… For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us.…

  Merrin dies before the exorcism is complete, and Father Karras must step in to battle on. In a scene that is withheld from us, Karras is ultimately victorious, the devil is purged, and the girl is saved, though Karras sacrifices his own life to the cause. As he lies dying on the sidewalk outside the MacNeil house, Karras receives final absolution. Since he is unable to speak to the priest administering the last rites, it is debatable whether Karras accepts this formal blessing willingly or not.

  In any case, it is Chris MacNeil who has the last words on faith and religion in this novel that has been fixated on both. She says to Karras that despite everything she’s witnessed, she’s still a nonbeliever. But on the other hand, she has come to believe that the devil is very real. Very, very real.

  Is it Karras’s final acceptance of God’s mercy and power or Chris’s rejection of the same that stands as the novel’s coda? Whichever view appears overriding in a reader’s mind probably depends on the predispositions that reader brought to the novel. The remarkable fact is, however, that the secular position is given the last word, and in the supernatural bookkeeping of The Exorcist, it costs two priests to take down a single manifestation of the devil. That is what is known these days as an unsustainable economy.

  UNCOMMON SENSE

  When Kay Adams Corleone at last learns the true nature of her husband’s criminal enterprise, her first reaction is to seek out a priest for instruction to become a Catholic. In the final lines of this bloody novel full of brutal revenge killings and murderous power plays, Kay goes to church.

  She kneels in supplication, bows her head, folds her hands over the rail, and “with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe,” she says prayers for the eternal soul of Michael Corleone.

  That her deeply willed desire to believe is actual belief is dubious. Certainly Mario Puzo’s muted skepticism pervades this moment. After Michael Corleone has piled up four hundred pages of mortal sins, it seems unlikely that his soul can be saved by his wife, a new and wavering convert. Michael is, after all, the Godfather—a secular God if there ever was one.

  In Jaws, the shark is considered by many in the town to be “an act of God,” and its eventual destruction requires the deaths of several sacrificial lambs. Hooper, the shark expert called in to aid the seaside community, is awestruck by the fish, while Quint, the old salt who has been hired to kill it, begs to differ. Hooper believes the shark is a thing of beauty that shows the awesome power of nature and therefore confirms the existence of God.

  Horseshit, is Quint’s reply.

  Later, Quint and Sheriff Brody discuss the religious implications of the shark’s appearance, Brody mentioning the woman back in town who believes the shark is some kind of divine retribution.

  But Quint, who puts no stock in religion, replies that the shark’s appearance is simply “bad luck.”

  In the last lines of the novel, Brody survives the great white’s final assault and watches as Quint is yanked overboard and drawn down into the sea in a posture that evokes the crucifixion, “arms out to th
e sides, head thrown back.…” A secular version of Jesus Christ, dying for the secular sins of others.

  If the shark is truly God’s way of reminding the townsfolk of His awesome power, then it damn well worked. But for Quint, who stands as the larger-than-life voice of the common man, the alternative vision is one of randomness and accident—an existential universe in which God’s will plays no part whatsoever. It is Quint, like Scout and Chris MacNeil, who voices the commonsense skepticism that undergirds the moral position of each of these books.

  A COMMONER’S COMMON SENSE

  Common sense, not religious conviction, is also a major tenet of Scarlett O’Hara’s worldview. At the graveside ceremony when her father, Gerald, is laid to rest, the religiously formal Ashley Wilkes intones a few solemn clichés, then is followed by Will, a simple farmer who speaks off-the-cuff about the death of Mr. O’Hara.

  Scarlett … did feel comforted. Will was talking common sense instead of a lot of tootle about reunions in another and better world and submitting her will to God’s.

  Throughout the novel, Scarlett’s religious beliefs are childish and shallow, characterized less by faith and devotion than by a ruthless pragmatism. For Scarlett, religion is nothing more than a bargaining chip. She has always made promises to God in exchange for some return on her investment. Since God had been such an unreliable business partner, “to her way of thinking, she felt that she owed Him nothing at all.…”

  Indeed, for a character so deeply loved by so many readers, Scarlett O’Hara is surprisingly blasphemous. Like Allison MacKenzie and Father Karras, she’s lost faith. Scarlett refuses to believe in a God who won’t respond to the million other prayers sent to Him daily on behalf of the Confederacy.

  She’s forsaken church and no longer prays. Her spiritual outlook is secularist, pure and simple. A humanistic view that is rooted in a commoner’s common sense rather than in the rituals and liturgical ceremonies of the ecumenical elite.