The Neo-Puritanical Novelist

The fascinating J.L. Wall at THE LEAGUE OF ORDINARY GENTLEMEN notices that I invented the right term for the wonderful Marilynne Robinson. He adds that means that she’s neither a liberal nor a conservative. It does mean that she thinks everyone should work and everyone should be educated for leisure. She’s for equality without condescension based on the Christian insight, confirmed by what we know through science, that we all have inward lives and were made for more than mere survival. She’s more about education for civilization than education for freedom. She’s not so different from our other neo-Puritanical friend, the late and great Wilson Carey McWilliams.

When it comes to politics, both Marilynne and Carey are, well, too Puritanical. But the Puritanical heresy provides the balance that allows real personal content to seep into our other big Founding heresy of Lockean Deism.

From the perspective of the Midwestern Abolitionist educated at neo-Puritanical, antebellum Oberlin, Mr. Jefferson was sure soft of slavery, and even on the education of blacks and women for civilized freedom.

Carey, of course, begin his brilliant teaching career at Oberlin, which has gone downhill since it ceased to be genuinely Christian.