Homiletic fiction

Gregory S. Jackson's "'What Would Jesus Do?': Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel" raises some intriguing questions about how late-nineteenth century trends in literary realism and Protestant religious practice managed to intersect [1].  While much of the article's content depends on its American context--especially the rise of the Social Gospel movement--it makes an interesting case for "literary realism"'s dependence on what Jackson calls "homiletic realism": "The 'veracious narratives' of realism and naturalism jettisoned the homiletic's religious teleogy while retaining its discursive strategies" (645).  Jackson argues that novels like Charles Sheldon's unbelievably popular In His Steps (1896) do not reject realism but, in fact, exemplify a literary realism returned to its theological underpinnings.  Novels like In His Steps draw on the Social Gospel's "assertion of human capacity to alter social reality" (648): their narratives lead not to contemplation but to action, through the process of "identification" (648).  As one might expect from the term "homiletic realism," Jackson links this narrative strategy to older traditions of sermon-writing and listening:

Each section, from invention to application, laid out the argument in progressive stages that congregants were to examine, try, and test.  The sermon's forensic divison engaged auditors in a step-by-step rhetorical equation whose sum was greater than its parts, allowing them to transcend the materiality of facts and figures and achieve a higher, spiritual knowledge.  In this way, the steps of the equation initiated a supervised progress of active engagement with spiritual truths, accruing knowledge and applying learning.

According to Jackson, homiletic fictions translate this model (originally developed for oral delivery) into narrative form: one reads homiletic fiction in order both to know and to act.  Homiletic fiction does not distance the reader from the narrative's characters and situations; instead, it sends the reader out into the world to reenact the fiction (or, indeed, make the fiction turn out very differently). 

While I was reading this article, I kept asking myself what distinguishes Jackson's homiletic realism from earlier nineteenth-century religious fictions--especially those written on the British side of the pond.  To begin with, I'd say that British evangelical fiction rarely encourages the kind of wholesale identification with the suffering other that Jackson identifies as crucial.  In Jackson's examples, characters don't just sympathize with the suffering; they become one of the suffering (living as they do, for example).  As Jackson notes more than once, this is clearly an example of the imitatio Christi in action.  I'd tentatively suggest that, by contrast, earlier British evangelical fiction encourages the reader to sympathize with those in pain, the better to reflect on how Christians ought to act.  Christians need not become Jews in order to convert them, say, but they need to understand that some Jews might have reason not to trust them.  Here, for example, is the popular novelist A.L.O.E.:

“I was in straits for money once, for a time; it was in the depth of winter—snow two feet deep on the ground—my wife ill—dying—Benoni a three-days’ old babe beside her! I owed rent to Peter Claymore, a Christian,”—Isaacs gnashed his teeth as he uttered the word—“I’m not likely to forget his name. I repeat it every night—not in a prayer! I’ve made a vow, but not to forgive!” The strange smile on those white lips was more horrible to Franks to behold than the fiercest expression of anger. “He would not wait, he turned us out in the winter in the deep snow! In a few days I buried my Miriam, her death lies at the door of that man! And shall I forgive him? can I love him? must I bless him? Go!” cried Isaacs, pointing to the door, “go, preach the Gospel of Peace to those that have known no wrongs, deep, deadly as mine!” [2]

Like many conversion narratives, A Son of Israel criticizes the unchristian (not to mention counter-productive) nature of anti-Jewish prejudice.  Although this passage has some noticeably Shylockian overtones, it is nevertheless the case that the bad guy is the money-hungry Christian, so devoted to financial gain that he destroys a family rather than granting them charity.  And earlier in the novel, the Christian protagonist instructs a child that taunting and threatening Jews is immoral.  Evangelicals regularly warned readers that a Christian who behaved in such a manner as to cast discredit on Christianity was committing one of the worst sins of all, for he or she drove potential believers away from the truth, and that is clearly the point we are meant to carry away.  The protagonist, however, does not need to learn these lessons, because he already knows them.  He models, that is, the end-point of Christian enlightenment, not its process.  Moreover, despite the potentially "revelatory" quality of the Jew's lived experience, it exists for the reader only through dialogue--not through representations of someone's attempt to experience life as a Jew [3]. A.L.O.E. thus insists that the participants in her scenes remain essentially separate, even as she offers Christian evangelism as a sure route to social reconciliation.

A.L.O.E.'s strategy here seems to me to be representative.  It's also small-c conservative, in the sense that it proposes a very gradualist, limited reform (eliminating anti-Jewish sentiment, but also converting the Jews) through local acts of kindness and evangelism.  Anything unjust in the British social order as it stands will be improved, not radically altered--no revolution here.  In fact, the Victorian novel most explicitly about the possibility of imitating Christ, Eliza Lynn Linton's The True History of Joshua Davidson, comes down decisively on the "no" side of the equation: Joshua winds up murdered by a Christian mob. 

[1]  Gregory S. Jackson, "'What Would Jesus Do?': Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel," PMLA 121.3 (May 2006): 641-62.
[2] A.L.O.E. [Charlotte Maria Tucker], A Son of Israel; Or, the Sword of the Spirit (Edinburgh & London: Gall & Inglis, n.d. [1875?]), 38. 
[3] Similarly, "Condition of England" novels--Charles Kingsley's quite explicit Alton Locke comes to mind--may represent scenes of horrific poverty, but the reader is hardly expected to go out and live in those scenes.