Oates vs. O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates’s recent broadside on X against Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic faith is less interesting as a theological blunder than as a symptom of what Søren Kierkegaard called leveling: the envious refusal of a hollowed-out, mass-media age to tolerate the sight of anyone with integrity. Confronted with a woman whose words and life were of a piece, Oates could only conclude that O’Connor never meant a word she said. 

What set off Oates, an accomplished novelist turned online provocateuse, at first had nothing to do with Flannery O’Connor. It was a short clip from The Exorcist posted on All Hallows’ Eve that started Oates down the kind of erratic, nonlinear path that only makes sense in online discourse. She expressed admiration for the film, then bristled at someone’s suggestion that she might enjoy one of its sequels, citing her nonbelief in demons and exorcisms. Spinning on her heel, she conceded that, by that logic, it would be silly for anyone to read the Odyssey or the Iliad without first evincing sincerely held religious belief in the Greek gods. Spinning again, she ventured to list a series of compensatory strategies that she suspects readers throughout the ages have unconsciously employed to neutralize the problematic presence of religion in great works of art.

Still spinning, Oates took umbrage at someone’s suggestion that perhaps the gods are best understood as metaphors for fate, pointing out that an awful lot of blood was spilled in ancient sacrifices for the gods to have been just metaphors. Finally losing her balance, she offered up (as evidence of civilizational progress) her own wildly inaccurate conception of the unbloody sacrifice of the Holy Mass, which, according to Oates, is bloodless insofar as Catholics pay lip service to the Mass as a “literal” sacrifice while knowing deep down it’s really just “metaphorical.” 

One of the handful of people who chimed in on all this—each a flipper in a discursive pinball machine—referenced an anecdote Flannery O’Connor once recounted in a letter, about getting into a spat with her fellow novelist Mary McCarthy at a fancy dinner party in New York. In response to McCarthy’s debonair assertion that in adulthood she’d begun to think of the Eucharist as a symbol and a “pretty good one at that,” O’Connor famously replied: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” 

At that Oates was off and running again. She declared that O’Connor’s remark had been made purely for the shock value of being a contrarian, and that neither O’Connor nor anyone else has ever really believed in transubstantiation, because if we did believe it, we would never receive Communion. In a coup de grâce, Oates dismissed as a falsehood not only O’Connor’s belief in transubstantiation but every statement O’Connor ever made about her faith.

Here is the heart of the matter. Oates’s mistake is not finally about substance and accidents, though Michael Knowles and other Good Samaritans tried in vain to introduce the distinction. It is projection, the kind a leveling age encourages. Having seldom let her own words bind her, Oates assumes O’Connor couldn’t have either. 

One of the most radical things one can do today is listen carefully to other people and take them at their word. Make that your standard approach to human interaction in 2026, and it won’t be long before you find out, almost against your will, who is able to sustain and enjoy genuine communication and real friendship, and who has been shifting and swaying with the winds in a manner far more conducive to solipsism than to relationship. The latter take no pleasure in having their inconsistencies accidentally exposed by another’s consistency. Indeed, they seem to perceive another person’s very integrity as a kind of affront, perhaps as a persistent goad to their disquieted consciences. 

From where I stand, Oates’s shameful attempt to discredit the faith of a talented Catholic writer who was an unflagging champion of orthodoxy and who died of lupus six years before Oates won the National Book Award for Them in 1970 seems like a textbook case of what philosophers call ressentiment. Kierkegaard, in his remarkable essay The Present Age (1846), characterized ressentiment as a form of envy that persons without character are inclined to feel in the presence of those who possess what they lack. He argued that mass media—which in Kierkegaard’s day consisted of newspapers—tempt individuals to turn away from the “quiet and modest tasks of life, that are so pleasing to God,” in order to assume a new, and seemingly more important, identity as a member of the public. And when the public turns out to be an abstraction that consists of nothing at all, and those who sold their birthright for a mess of pottage are incensed, they seek revenge on people who have retained their individuality. That envy is the engine of what Kierkegaard called leveling. 

From where Oates stands, I suspect that my stubbornly literal close reading of her words makes me seem like some kind of plodding, pedantic, and extremely irritating fossil, a holdover from an earlier age of (equally irritating) faith—an age that, on some level, Oates can’t quite believe ever really existed. Thankfully, even as the leveling process continues, as surely it must (social media being a far more potent drug than newspapers), no amount of disparagement can unsettle the One whose consistency has been setting worldly teeth on edge for over two thousand years, or those who rest in his peace: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).