King’s Theology

Stephen King, that is. Ross Douthat has an interesting article on King in the current issue of First Things . He places King’s novels in the context of modern fiction, which has ignored supernatural events and beings: “King has effectively expanded the definition of realism to include a set of human experiences that have been systematically excluded from the novel’s purview for two centuries or more. At their best, his works aren’t just a wide-open window into the bedlam of recent American life. They’re the first significant attempts at literature for a post-secular age.”

Which is not to say that King’s novels are animated by Christianity per se.

For King, “God isn’t a well-meaning weakling, holding our hands and hoping things turn out OK; rather, he’s so far above the various adversaries . . . that the possibility of their winning passing victories concerns him not at all. The demons are a means to chastise and test a struggling humanity, not a threat to God himself; they are the potter’s wheel on which King’s characters can be broken without placing God’s providence in doubt.” King’s God is like Melville’s – all-powerful but not obviously beneficent. He takes John Coffey, a Christlike inmate unjustly condemned to death, but without offering hope of resurrection. As the Green Mile ‘s narrator says, “If it happens, God lets is happen, and when we say ‘I don’t understand,’ God replies, ‘I don’t care.’”

As a result, King depicts “America as a spiritual realm that is out of joint and up for grabs, thick with competing forces and washed over by an Almight whose goals are inscrutable, whose demands are peremptory, and whose methods are sometimes cruel.” King’s characters reconcile themselves to death not out of hope but because the alternative is worse than death. King’s novels, then, are a mark that the “age of reason is over” but equally a sign that “the age of faith has not yet returned.”