“Our Great Big American God, A Short History of Our Ever Growing Deity” succeeds for its author, Matthew Paul Turner, on a number of levels. It also lacks in quite a few areas, wherein it is a bit of a hot mess that could have been cooked up or thought through a lot better. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good hot mess, especially if it’s a rack of barbecued ribs with lots of sauce that it’s been marinating in. There’s an art to a good hot mess, like say, the way Kurt Vonnegut messes with the linearity of time in “Slaughterhouse Five,” but captures a little bit of how human memory makes it so when you were a kid seems like just yesterday and James Joyce messes with grammar expectations but captures how people actually speak and use language. Both the works of Vonnegut and Joyce have a penchant for critiquing the powers that be in frank, yet subtle and surprising ways. There are a lot of writers who have made a living out of writing things using satire that cause hot messes for the institutions and establishments they criticize — H.L. Mencken, for instance, or, say the way, Mark Twain was famous for his brand of satire which led to a lot of people getting in a huff and his books being banned over the years, with his a delicious roasting of social hierarchies, American Christianity and racism. Neil Gaiman as well, wrote a brilliantly funny novel “American Gods” built on fascinating premise that all of the immigrants to America, in bringing their mythologies and beliefs, also brought their gods with them, which then led to the messy creation of new gods.
Satire is certainly where I was hoping “Our Great Big American God” to invoke more of than it did, with its matte 50ish cover of a white family outside a church. It follows through on its promise some, with its opening prologue, a discussion between the author and someone named “Dave” who has viewpoints I find to be chilling considering the state of violence, war and upheaval in the world. Dave asks Turner where God would be without America. Turner asks Dave to tell him where he thinks God would be without America, he wants to hear it for himself. Dave’s answer is that America is responsible for God today, and without America, God would evidently be a “tourist attraction in London” or “buried in a secret basement in the Vatican’s library.”
This is the kind of American mentality, which leads, as Turner goes on to point out, to notions of American exceptionalism and that we are God’s chosen people. All the crusader, American is God’s holy anointed warrior nation notions which have gotten us into blood-curdling wars we didn’t need to be in over the years. Forget the fact that God is worshiped all over the world by billions of people. Only America is responsible for God now. How scary. How arrogant, to think we Americans have foisted the “American” version of God — which in this case, on the book, is pretty much a white God who excludes everyone else — on the populace of not only our own nation that is not white, but isn’t Christian, but also on the world the same way we have McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Because God is now part of our Gross National Product. God is an industry, a trade that makes a lot of money. God, is to Christian Zionists like Dave who aren’t taken seriously by liberal Christians and mainstream Americans, using faithful Christians to bring about the end of the world and usher in his holy new one. Part of that, according to Dave, is the war with Israel and Gaza.
Turner continues throughout the book his attempt to make jokes with insiders of the Christianity he criticizes and its leaders revealing its faults as not being entirely Christian or neighborly, and how it seems many have lost sight of the Golden Rule by getting caught up in American Christian religious trends. Turner also attempts the remarkable feat of clarifying to outsiders how God was supposed to be seen by parishioners over the years of various denominations. One of the best parts of the book is Turner’s unabashed critique of how God went from being a Calvinist, Puritan, “God” to the incorporated and trademarked brand GOD which Turner attributes the creation of to Billy Graham, who is the now the trademark, industry and trade, which then fathered numerous other profitable GOD enterprises, including the Christian book and television industries, as well as the so-called megachurches. Perhaps I missed it, but I was looking for Turner to mention Jesus kicking the money changers out of the temple, but he didn’t. Seemed sorely overdue, and I for one would have enjoyed that as much as I do in Jesus Christ Superstar when Jesus kicks the people turning God for a profit and making war out of the temple with some serious wrathful judgment.
As a history of God in America, the prose leaps around a bit in the chapters by a hundred years or so, with some lack of transition between the 1800s and our present day at times. I am also, the sort of reader, as I noted who enjoys things a little wibbly wobbly, but in this case, there was a bit too much jumping, as though the author was having a hard time leaving the pre-victorian America. It was enjoyable to trace the various movements in America and how they interacted and brought about change within each other in earlier American times when there was more of a transition. The trouble is, so much was left out it left me dizzy like I entered a vortex portal of the Supreme Being in Time Bandits.
What got left out is everyone who wasn’t part of white American protestant Christianity that was fundamentalist or evangelical and how Turner defined that via his sources and experience for the most part. There is a minimal nod to Martin Luther King Jr. It just wasn’t enough. I think the effort admirable, on Turner’s part, but it could have been so much more. If he really wants those with these views of Christianity which have caused a lot of harm and hypocrisy, even though he does apologies for them at one point or another, would deign to step outside their gilded lily comfort zones and the notion of god as plastic and malleable as the shallow and crass commercialism and yet as rigid and relentlessly judging without the wherewithal to judge because of the narrowness of their vision, maybe we could get somewhere.
God has been written about by writers and people in this country for sometime now. How about Turner and other writers when they write such books acknowledging all of that work that has changed the way we think about God that isn’t crass or plastic, but is heartfelt and makes people have faith in humanity, or understand it better? The questions the great American literary writers have penned our philosophers have written, that inspired our souls, need to be addressed when considering the American God. For instance, let’s talk Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. Because the God that is marketed and bought and sold is kind of a banal one, with all of the problems that suggests. But how can this be done, when, as Turner describes, part of the problematic view of American Christianity is the obsession with God is the word, as in the Bible, literally, and trying to use the Bible like it’s an irrefutable scientific equation one moment and the next invoking the right of mystics to say we can only understand what God wants us to. Also in need of acknowledgment from all of the so-called religious writers are the lived experiences of those who worship in all manner of different ways all over this land. Maybe there is a Great Big American God, but there are a lot of other gods here in America, not to mention more than few goddesses, agender divinities as well as a flying spaghetti monster. To me, reading this book, it seems that those who only follow the Great Big American God have been doing what they’ve been doing for so long, they seem not to understand there’s a vibrant world out there that is a gorgeous, delicious mess, that I like to partake of as my holy wafer.
In closing, I definitely recommend “Our Great Big American God” to everyone. It will give a lot of insight and a lot of cause for interesting conversation.
