Flannery O’Connor’s Machiavellian Christianity, 9/11, and the “Price of Restoration”, by Benjamin D Carson

In a moment that puts Mrs. May in touch with mystery, she receives grace. Her discovery, we can assume, is the Truth of God’s existence, and His willingness to bestow grace upon even the most undeserving. As Meeks argues, “self-sufficient and self-satisfied, [Mrs. May] will not seek God, so she must be brought to the point where she can no longer avoid him. The scrub bull removes the scales from her eyes, but only at the moment of her death” (21). According to O’Connor’s God, Mrs. May, unbeliever extraordinaire, must die, because she does not “believe any of it is true” (O’Connor, “Greenleaf” 31).

It is here that O’Connor comes closest to Falwell and Robertson. The God they share, when mocked, responds with violence. The God they share must not be privatized but given center stage in the public sphere. A liberal, pluralistic culture must be replaced by a Christian nation, one in which the kind of fiction O’Connor writes would not be necessary. While O’Connor believes individuals possess free will and are, therefore, responsible for the choices they make, the America she, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson envision has a theocractic ring to it: it is both sectarian and undemocratic. Religious dogma—Truth—is not up for debate. When Robert Drake argues that “there was nothing narrow or sectarian” about O’Connor, he is mistaken (1201). She may have seen “both branches of Western Christianity,” Protestantism and Catholicism, “locked in an urgent battle” against secular humanism, as Kim Paffenroth argues, but O’Connor did not believe that both denominations had access to the Truth. (No doubt strict fundamentalists direct the same kind of skepticism toward the Church. Some simply label the Catholic Church “a cult.”) The Truth is the sole property of the Catholic Church. O’Connor was certainly worried that the “new spirit of ecumenism that we see everywhere” (in the 1950s) might lead to religious pluralism (O’Connor, MM 166). It might, she conceded, “herald a new religious age,” but it could just as easily lead to a watered down religion, one that’s fashionable but has no teeth (166). The most serious consequence of religious pluralism, though, was that O’Connor “and her fellow Catholics were required to think of themselves no longer as belonging to the one true church but rather as one denomination among others” (Wood 80). For O’Connor, this, finally, is unacceptable. The road to redemption passes through Rome.

In August 2000, the Vatican issued “Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church,” a document that O’Connor would have found heartening. “Dominus Iesus” explicitly rejects the theology of religious pluralism, or ecumenism:

With the coming of the Savior Jesus Christ, God has willed that the church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity. This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect the church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism ‘characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’ If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.

Catholicism is not only the sole road to salvation, the “Catholic block,” for O’Connor, is the singular means by which “the tide of Democratic progress which [is] sweeping from the land all its traditional and spiritual values” can be stemmed (Marks 84). Democracy precludes hegemonic control by a single political party or religion. This, of course, is a problem for those hoping to create a Christian nation. A Democratic nation could just as easily give way to secular liberalism as to Christian orthodoxy (depending on how the vote goes), and secular liberalism is the key ingredient, O’Connor imagines, in a godless civilization. While not anathema to the Church or religious freedom more generally, Democracy is necessarily antithetical to dogma. As Chris Hedges writes, in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, “Democracy keeps religious faith in the private sphere, ensuring that all believers have an equal measure of protection and practice mutual tolerance. Democracy sets no religious ideal. It simply ensures coexistence” (196). But as we’ve seen, O’Connor and the Church oppose religious pluralism. One religion is not as good as another. For O’Connor, the one True religion is Catholicism; it is “the only credible instrument of salvation around” (Martin 39). Gary Frazier, an evangelical Christian and founder of the Texas-based Discovery Ministries, is more forgiving when it comes to other Christian denominations, but “Islam,” he asserts, “is a satanic religion” (qtd. in Hedges 190). If Christians like Frazier, Falwell and Robertson are guilty of intolerance—for non-Christians, gays and lesbians, secular humanists, etc.—O’Connor is equally open to such a charge. She derides the use of the word “compassion” because it is employed to excuse “all human weakness because human weakness is human” (O’Connor, MM 43). Having compassion, she writes, makes “it difficult […] to be anti-anything” (43).

Not to be anti-anything is to be for everything, and America, in the eyes of Frazier, Falwell, Robertson, and O’Connor (in her day), is drowning in her own moral laxity. Hedges, in American Fascists, recounts a speech by Gary Frazier in which Frazier articulates with apocalyptic fervor this nation’s sins and the action she must take if she hopes to avoid God’s wrath: