A Good Preacher Is Hard to Find

If I were ten years younger, I’d have half a mind to sell everything, buy a digital video camera, and start making a film version of Post-Rapture Radio: Lost Writings from a Failed Revolution. Russell Rathbun’s novel about an “unknown-crazy-preacher” and his half-started revolution to upend evangelical Christianity has everything required to inspire such ambition: incisive social critique, a beautiful revelation of the good news, humor to spare, and, best of all, an enigmatic hero who is both pathetic enough to be plausible and insane enough to be right.

The book’s conceit is that Rathbun has discovered an anthology of writings by one Reverend Richard Lamblove—or, more precisely, that Lamblove’s writings were discovered by a character named “Russell Rathbun,” who may not be the same Russell Rathbun whose name appears on the cover. Sounds confusing, yes? But as postmodern stylistics go, Post-Rapture Radio is fairly tame. And the conceit works, not least because Author Rathbun wisely keeps Character Rathbun mainly in the margins. Save for sparse editorial comments and several hints that Lamblove is Rathbun, the “collection” of writings moves forward at its own pace.

And oh! what remarkable writings they are. Reusing without bothering to recycle, Lamblove records a series of “sermons, random notes, and other writings” on the detritus of consumer goods—backs of cereal boxes and pages ripped from best-selling books such as Left Behind and How to Win Friends and Influence People. In this way, he speaks truth directly (on)to power—he inscribes prophetic truths directly onto the valued materials of the powers that be.

In mini-essays on theology and culture, sermons that are really short stories, and revelatory diary entries, Lamblove emerges as an erratic, disturbed, but prophetic Christian voice. He is enraged by a Christianity that values sentimentality over theology and self-fulfillment over self-denial. It’s a Christianity many of us have worried over, but in Lamblove’s brave new evangelical world, it’s the only Christianity there is. He is trapped in a “Contemporary Christian Culture Conspiracy”—that is, an American evangelicalism that has, like American culture in general, become “shallow and overly individualistic and consumed with the kind of status measured by money and power and celebrity.” What can be done? Lamblove, suspecting that his fellow evangelical ministers are architects of the conspiracy, writes in order to inspire a revolution.

The Literature of Paranoia and Revolution

If this all sounds like something out of George Orwell, that’s because it is. Rathbun is consciously working in a well-trod tradition—the literature of paranoia and dread. Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Pynchon, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, and others linger between the lines of Post-Rapture Radio. Call it cultural megalomania or timely critique—either way, Rathbun’s decision to align himself with this tradition is a literary gauntlet thrown at the feet of evangelicalism’s rising social status.Â

The book’s best moments are a series of apocalyptic dreams that visit poor Lamblove. These nightmares detail a not-so-distant future where American culture has been completely subsumed by Christian culture, where no one can think or act outside of the well-oiled Christian superstructure:Â

Everyone had been working together on “the Commission.” (You know, the great commission, the one from the end of Matthew’s gospel.) Everyone just referred to it as the Commission. It was overseen by the Commission Commission. People would say to one another in the break room at work, “Have you heard how the Commission is going this week?” Or, “Did you see the Commission on Oprah yesterday?”

In these visions of a not-so-distant future, Christians have been duped by a commonplace and robotic Christianity. There’s nothing frightening, nothing disruptive, nothing hard about following Jesus. Christian faith is merely a project to be accomplished so that the world can end, not so it can be remade.

Past the clichés

Target practice is easy, and at times Post-Rapture Radio can seem to take potshots at a lineup of usual suspects: consumerism, “me”-centered Bible teaching, an individualized gospel, professional (i.e., “slick”) church structures, market-driven ministry—okay, really it’s all just consumerism.

As a reader who thinks we have much to gain from talking about the dangers of consumerism, I have ears to hear Rathbun’s concerns. But the novel has a hill to climb not only because its critiques are familiar, but also because they have been put front and center by the recent “emergence” of voices such as Brian McLaren, whose blurb appears on Post-Rapture‘s back cover along with other leaders in the emergent community. Rathbun risks being relegated to just another instance of that “conversation”—an entertainment for people who happen to be interested in talking about such things.

One of the dangers of the crystallization of the emergent movement is that its concerns can more easily be disregarded. Already, some people consider emergent thinkers cynical ex-fundamentalists, and such people could legitimately find fault with Rathbun. Indeed, I flinched at the novel’s more cynical sentiments, such as the description of a “professional sports guy who becomes a born-again Christian and then starts sucking at his professional sport.”

In the end, Post-Rapture Radio can withstand those faults, because what really counts in the book—what makes it work—is its call to a more biblical Christianity. Scattered among Lamblove/Rathbun’s ravings are inspired and challenging readings of Scripture. Pushing against our habitual, reflexive understanding of famous gospel passages and bits of Revelation, Post-Rapture Radio presents a series of scriptural reflections that remind us of the power of the first Christian revolution. Thus, the revolution Lamblove wants to ignite is not new, and its commands are nothing if not scriptural: Forget yourself. Follow Jesus. Do what he did. Upend the world and bring the new kingdom to earth. Do it now.

If Post-Rapture Radio is the literature of paranoia and revolution, it is also the literature of Christian proclamation. In this way, Rathbun pays his debt to the matron saint of American letters, Flannery O’Connor. The Christ-haunted Lamblove approximates O’Connor’s famous preacher figures, and Rathbun ends one of his novel’s sub-stories with a paraphrase of the ending of O’Connor’s best short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In that story, an escaped convict named the Misfit is the oddest kind of good man—to wit, a bad man God uses to extend a strange and awesome grace. Lamblove, an evangelical misfit who might be deemed harsh and antisocial by many of our contemporary standards, is also an odd good man. Even as he comes to a strange and violent end, and even as we recoil at some of his harsher criticisms, he has something good to proclaim and something to teach us about the always strange and awesome grace of God.

Patton Dodd is author of My Faith So Far and a Ph.D. candidate in religion and literature at Boston University.