...here in Christianity Today:
Updike is literary heir to Nathaniel Hawthorne, that grim fabulist of the Civil War era. Hawthorne asks what happens when a people try to establish theocracy, enforcing Old Testament law in Old Testament ways. Would such faith transform the community and its members, or deform it and them? Hawthorne critiques the Puritans on the grounds of their own theology: those who condemn never fully recognize their own fallen condition. We always sabotage our own best intentions, Hawthorne implies, and never so much as when those intentions are rooted in dogmatism driven by fanaticism.
What does this have to do with Updike, born three generations after Hawthorne, and exploring themes that on the surface seem a thousand generations removed from him? Simply this: Updike answers the flip side of Hawthorne's questions. Updike sets most of his novels in a contemporary American culture that has thrown off its Puritanism with a vengeance (though a residue remains). His characters inhabit a world with at most a saccharine coating of Christian faith and deeply eroded ethics.
If Hawthorne portrayed a world in which Christianity had become rigid and tyrannical, Updike portrays one in which it has shriveled to slogans and sentimentality. And do people in his world fare better?
No.
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