Unpatriotic Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson’s third collection of essays is her most political book since Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989). It is also her weakest to date. Absence of Mind, her last book, established Robinson as the most forceful critic of the New Atheism and a thrilling defender of the religious understanding of man. (My review is here.) When she continues to pursue this project, she continues to write brilliantly. Robinson singlehandedly demolishes the “neo-Darwinism” (as she calls it), which denies to human religion anything more than a proneness to error, violence, evil. In her new collection of ten essays, she adds the important biographical detail that she considers herself to be writing in the tradition of liberal 19th-century evangelists like Charles Finney and Theodore D. Weld. In one remarkable passage, she reveals that the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa — the setting of her brilliant novel Gilead and its sequel Home — was modeled upon a historical settlement founded by liberal evangelists “as a fallback for John Brown.” When she turns from defending religion, however (and criticizing its exclusion from the human picture) — when she turns to a practical political application of her thinking — Robinson falters badly.