Marilynne Robinson on an Occupied USA

"That is not a theology. That's an excuse. That's a delusion. That's a blasphemy."

This week: a conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson about rethinking notions of a polarized America. Find it at our site or wherever you go for podcasts.

Marilynne Robinson’s celebrated Gilead novels cover American crises across generations, and this week we talk with Robinson about the crises of the Trump II era. The novels draw from theological considerations, and this conversation does something similar.

You’ll hear Robinson on our show critiquing J.D. Vance’s idea of, as he put it, a “Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.” Says Robinson:

There are kind of do-it-yourself theologies, many of them floating around now, where everything has been re-jiggered so that it flatters certain people and it numbs consciences and that sort of thing. And that brings us back to the old standard again. We're dealing with images of God. You don't have the right to be slovenly in your ethical posture. That is not a theology. That's an excuse. That’s a delusion. That's a blasphemy.

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