Many of us raised in the church grew up idolizing Christian authors like C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Flannery O’Conner. And you didn’t have to grow up in the church to learn to love J.R.R. Tolkien. But looking back, these authors can be problematic. Rereading them, it’s easy to spot sexism, racism, classism that we either internalized or brushed off before.
In Rebecca Bretten Weiss’s new book The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics, Weiss revisits nine classic Christian authors while taking us through her own exodus from conservative Catholicism.
About so much of the literature that young adults like Rebecca and I grew up reading and idolizing, she writes, “Maybe we weren’t all gung-ho for xenophobia, antisemitism, and white supremacy from the start, but we just didn’t take them seriously enough.”
In this podcast episode, we discuss the impacts of these authors on our younger selves, how to read them now, how this literature fits into someone’s deconstruction process, and the difference between propaganda and protest literature.
When we love writers, we want to forgive them. We want to come up with a good explanation for why they did that thing. It couldn’t possibly have been racist … And I think we have to be really much more willing to make tentative statements versus dogmatic ones and then be willing to retract them if we realize we’re wrong. That’s kind of part of what’s involved if we’re going to be good readers who are engaging with the literate works that are happening around us right now.
Rebecca Bratten Weiss during the Radical Soul Podcast
About the Guest
Rebecca Bratten Weiss is a writer, editor, and scholar who studies the intersection of religion and culture, with an emphasis on the dynamics of far-right ideology. She is digital editor at U.S. Catholic magazine, co-host of the Glad You Asked podcast, and a regular contributor to the National Catholic Reporter. She is the author of The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics (Orbis Books).
