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

Such words could just as easily have been penned by Flannery O’Connor. Ultimately, Frazier’s God, capable as He is of carrying out the kind of violence experienced on 9/11, is O’Connor’s God, too.

IV.

O’Connor’s fiction remains popular because of its strangeness and, of course, its aesthetic power. In the literary canon, O’Connor takes her place alongside Hemingway, Chekhov, Maupassant, D.H. Lawrence and Turgenev. It is her severe Roman Catholicism, though, that sets her apart; and yet, while she spoke often, both in her correspondences and her essays, of her unflinching loyalty to the Church, her fiction is populated by evangelical Protestant prophets, whom she nonetheless regarded as “natural Catholics.” As Harold Bloom writes, “O’Connor’s South is wildly Protestant, not the Protestantism of Europe, but of the indigenous American Religion, whether it calls itself Baptist, Pentecostal, or whatever. The prophets of that religion—‘snakehandlers, Free Thinking Christians, Independent Prophets, the swindlers, the mad, and sometimes the genuinely inspired’—O’Connor named as ‘natural Catholics’” (51). In her stories, these prophets play a key role in the “conversion” of the would-be damned, “a category,” Bloom writes, “in which Flannery O’Connor cheerfully included most of her readers” (51-2). Because the act of reading an O’Connor story is meant to be an experience-in-itself, not an abstraction, the violent conversion of the damned by one of the prophets in her stories would ideally result in a commensurate conversion outside of the story. When Bloom suggests O’Connor’s “tales […] enforce no moral except an awakened moral imagination,” he is attempting to aestheticize her fiction in order to soften her didactic impulse (51). However much I agree with Bloom’s desire to delimit O’Connor’s fictive world, to aestheticize rather than politicize her fiction, O’Connor had other ideas. She meant to convert her readers: “to shock us by violence into the need for traditional faith” (51). O’Connor would be pleased to know that a religious revival of some sort is indeed afoot in 21st century America. But for those of us who do not share O’Connor’s vision, there is reason to be concerned.
Outside of O’Connor’s fictional world, a militant minority of “natural Catholics,” in the form of Senators and Representatives, are gaining political power in contemporary America, and their constituency is mobilizing and growing rapidly. According to Hedges, there are

In a 2004 study, which Hedges cites, the political scientist John Green “identifies those he calls ‘traditional evangelicals’” (19). “Traditional evangelicals,” who are “overwhelmingly Republican,” come “closest to the ‘religious right’ widely discussed in the media,” he argues (19). This group is “openly hostile to democratic pluralism, and it champions totalitarian policies, such as denying homosexuals the same rights as other Americans and amending the Constitution to make America a ‘Christian nation’” (19). After 9/11, evangelical Christians in Washington used their power to begin enacting their “Christian” agenda. These Christians have no problem being “anti-anything.” Remember, for O’Connor to have “compassion” is to excuse sin, and for her there are no excuses. Sin is sin. So what would America look like if O’Connor’s “Christian nation” came to fruition? Hedges speculates:

Should another catastrophic attack [like 9/11] occur, what will prevent these preachers from calling for the punishment, detention and quarantining of gays and lesbians—as well as abortionists, Muslims and other believers—to safeguard the nation? What will staunch the hate crimes and physical attacks against those deemed immoral by fearful and angry Christians, those condemned by these preachers as responsible for the nation’s abandonment by God? How will the nation function rationally if homeland security depends on an elusive piety as interpreted by the Christian Right? And most ominously, the fringe groups of the Christian Right believe they have been mandated by God to carry out Christian terrorism, anointed to murder doctors who perform abortions and godless Muslims in Iraq. In a time of anxiety and chaos, of overwhelming fear and uncertainty, how many more will be prodded by this talk of divine vengeance to join the ranks of these Christian extremists? (106-07)

Through her fiction, O’Connor hoped to prod her readers by “this talk of divine vengeance” (107). We can only hope, though, that these readers—college students, certain old ladies in California, inmates of the Federal Penitentiary or insane asylum, etc.—are simply too tired to join the “ranks of these Christian extremists.”

Calling O’Connor herself a Christian extremist is not to overstate the case. As a writer, O’Connor “placed her considerable skills […] at the service of Christ, on whom she drew again and again to cauterize her audience with the saving truths of His Gospel” (Martin 38). Ostensibly, such a goal is harmless enough. We could say the same about C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh, or W.H. Auden, as well as other overtly Christian writers. But unlike these writers, O’Connor takes refuge in violence to “cauterize” not only her impious characters but her morally bankrupt readers. The Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton employed violence in Manalive, but Innocent Smith (Chesterton’s Misfit) shoots at his friends only to scare them. “He fires bullets at his best friends to bring him to life” (226). He means to give them a scare “so wholesome that the victim [will date] from it as from a new birth” (226). But whereas Innocent Smith shoots at his friends to awaken them to “the realization that life is worth living,” he never hurts them (Scheick 117). O’Connor’s prophets kill, and the killing is justified if it achieves the desired end, redemption. In O’Connor’s Machiavellian Christian perspective, a violent death is worth the price of restoration.